The Education Gadfly Weekly

Krista Kafer, Heritage Foundation, December 13, 2001

Have you been wondering what to make of the soon-to-be-signed "No Child Left Behind" act? Heritage Foundation education analyst Krista Kafer has written a worthy overview of its strengths and weaknesses. Her conclusion:  "Although the Elementary and Secondary Education Act reauthorization contains the major themes of the Bush No Child Left Behind plan - accountability, opportunity, flexibility, structural change, and quality improvement - it is only a modest representation of those key elements. The bill perpetuates ineffective and wasteful programs and is authorized at twice the funding level of the 1994 reauthorization in the first year alone." For the full text, surf to http://www.heritage.org/shorts/20011213education.html.

Anne Lewis, Poverty & Race Research Action Council, 2001

This sixty-page report sets forth numerous practical strategies for bettering the education of disadvantaged youngsters, including, for example, "5 steps to a good start," "6 ways to tell if your school is serious about teaching reading and math," "4 ways to make reform stick," etc. The recommendations are pretty obvious, even banal, but they sit atop a trove of valuable research summaries, cases in point, and lots and lots of references. You can obtain hard copies for $5 apiece from Poverty & Race Research Action Council, 3000 Connecticut Avenue NW, #200, Washington, DC 20008. You can phone (202) 387-9887, fax (202) 387-0764, e-mail [email protected] or download the whole thing (in PDF form) from http://www.prrac.org/additup.html.

Edward E. Gordon, Imperial Consulting Corporation, November 2001

Edward E. Gordon, president of Imperial Consulting Corporation, recently presented this "white paper" to the Education, Employment and Training Committee of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. Unlike most reports that we bring to the attention of Gadfly readers, which deal with the academic preparation of American school children, this one looks at the skills possessed (and, more importantly, not possessed) by the American workforce. The author contends that "about four-fifths of all the people currently employed in our economy...are in danger of turning into the 'new techno-peasants of the information age' because they lack essential educational and/or technical skills." He finds the solution in "workforce education," which he defines broadly - including the humanities, for example - and for which he assigns responsibility to communities, also broadly defined to include schools, employers and a variety of new entities and delivery systems. He ranges far and wide in these 55 pages and, while much of it is hortatory, it comes across as a reasonably coherent presentation of what it will take to produce a well-prepared workforce for the new American economy. You can most readily access this paper by e-mailing Dr. Gordon at [email protected]. 

Educational Issues Policy Brief, American Federation of Teachers, 2001

This Policy Brief outlines the AFT's position on teacher induction programs, which the union views as a critical response to high attrition rates among new teachers. The AFT proposes a year-long, state-mandated and -funded induction program in which all new teachers would have to participate. They would bear reduced course loads and be assigned qualified mentors, who would also have reduced loads (and receive additional compensation). At year's end, a "summative review" would determine whether or not the new teachers would proceed to full licensure.  The AFT reviewed teacher induction programs in all 50 states to determine whether any met their standards. Although the number of induction programs has doubled since the 1980s, only 33 states currently have statewide programs in place. Of these, only 22 states actually mandate and fund the programs.  To remedy these inadequacies, says the AFT, states should develop (and partially fund) comprehensive policies that reflect the importance of induction for new teachers. To view this issue brief - which includes tables summarizing state induction policies - as a PDF, surf to http://www.aft.org/edissues/downloads/NEW_TEACH_INDUCT.pdf.

Douglas A. Archbald, Education Policy Analysis Archives, November 2001

Standards-based reform is simple in theory but can be surprisingly difficult in practice, at least without technology's help. Most states now have academic standards and tests, but assessment data is often available only in reports and databases that are distant from teachers who could benefit from them.  Curriculum guides may be only in the hands of administrators, making it tough for teachers to access them frequently.  This paper by Douglas Archbald explores how improvements in information technology help make state, district, local, and - most importantly - classroom-level implementation of standards-based reform significantly easier.  Some state agencies now publish standards and sample assessments online, and many states also permit individual student achievement information to be posted on the web for access by authorized users.  A wide range of software packages is now available to align lesson plans with standards and track student performance in relation to the same. But while much is possible, it isn't necessarily happening yet.  Archbald identifies obstacles: leaders who fail to cultivate the necessary values and practices (such as frequent meetings to evaluate staff performance and student achievement); hesitation by teachers and principals who fear that information may be used against them if it is publicly reported; and a lack of computer proficiency by school staff.  There are technical obstacles, too: databases must be kept up-to-date, cross-referenced and easy to navigate, and must contain information from standards-based assessments, state/district achievement tests, and tests on curricula. But there's hope.  Archbald concludes that, as teachers, administrators and policymakers begin to embrace standards-based reform with the aid of the "next generation" of technology, student achievement will benefit.  For more, see http://www.epaa.asu.edu/epaa/v9n48.

In Chicago, 55 percent of public high school students attend schools outside their neighborhoods.  The mobile students are often the better students, who can today apply to a growing array of magnet schools and programs throughout the school district.  A series of articles in last month's Catalyst take a close look at the schools left behind.  The 12 least popular neighborhood high schools in Chicago are losing 62 to 77 percent of the students in their attendance boundaries and find themselves facing a high concentration of hard-to-teach students. "There are more discipline problems, less support from parents, students are less prepared," explains once principal, and this takes a toll on teachers.  From 18 to 28 percent of the students are in special education in these 12 schools and all 12 are on academic probation. In interviews with parents and teenagers, the top 3 reasons for leaving neighborhood schools were: 1) the schools are perceived as gang-infested and dangerous, 2) they lack special vocational programs that will help kids land jobs, and 3) they have poor academic reputations. How to turn neighborhood schools around? Some think the answer is to spend money to recruit better teachers for the neighborhood schools, some say the schools should be shut down and reopened with new staff, and some think that dividing them into smaller, semi-autonomous schools within the same building will do the trick. Others believe that the solution is to add more choices or to impose open admission policies on the city's elite magnet schools. For more, see articles under "High School Choice: The Impact of Student Flight on Schools of Last Resort" in Catalyst: Voices of Chicago School Reform, December 2001.

Welcome to 2002. Allow me to open it by recalling nine great obstacles to serious education reform in America - and the (mostly obvious) changes we must make to break through them. You may, if you like, regard the latter as New Year's resolutions.

1. We know more about the quality of our dishwashers than the quality of our children's schools.  Most Americans have little understanding of the effectiveness of their children's education or don't think the achievement gap has much to do with their own schools. Despite lots of testing, we face an astonishing dearth of accurate information about school results vis-??-vis academic standards. Reliable outside audits are scarce. For the most part, the system controls - and vigorously spins - the data about its own performance. Poor and minority families sense that their kids' schools are failing to educate them, sometimes even to keep them safe. But much of America's vast middle class is smug about its suburban schools. Complacency is a potent reform retardant.
    
   Remedy: Make schools transparent institutions that pump out clear, reliable, prompt, comparable information about what they're doing and how well they and their students are performing.
    
2. More emphasis is placed on what goes into education than what comes out. Despite much talk about standards and results, the bulk of our reform efforts have focused on school inputs: more this or that poured into the system, more dollars, more teachers, more technology, more staff development, more homework - all this despite a conspicuous lack of evidence that pumping billions more into schools has yielded stronger results and notwithstanding plentiful research showing no clear link between a school's resources and its outcomes.
    
   Remedy: Schools should be strictly accountable for their results - whether their students are learning what they should - but not for complying with a thousand rules or running a hundred programs or spending their budgets in fifty prescribed ways.
    
3. Adult feet don't get held to the accountability fire. Even when we focus on results, there are few consequences for not producing them, at least not for the grown-ups in the education system. In the name of "accountability," many states and districts now come down hard on youngsters who don't meet standards or pass tests, but teachers and principals (and superintendents, board members and state officials) generally keep their jobs and suffer no great embarrassment, hardship or inconvenience. Indeed, it is still true in America that the likeliest policy response to a failing school is to send it more money.
    
   Remedy: A proper accountability system doesn't just crack down on non-performing kids (and reward those who meet standards). It confers suitable rewards and sanctions on everyone involved, especially the adults who work in schools.
    
4. Consumers lack clout. In the eternal struggle for control of key decisions, education's producers - the system's employees, managers and suppliers - hold far more power than do parents and students. Only well-to-do consumers, armed with the power of their own checkbooks, can navigate around bad schools and cartel-like arrangements for teacher training, curriculum and textbooks. Members of that cartel are superbly organized to cling to power and repel reform. Education's consumers, by contrast, are poorly represented in policy councils. School children employ no lobbyists.
    
   Remedy: Along with school competition on the "supply side" must come consumer choice on the "demand side." That will shift power from those who run schools to those who decide which schools to attend.
    
5. Weak competition encourages weak performance. Few public schools face competition - and few families have meaningful choices about where to educate their children. American K-12 education operates as a quasi-monopoly. We know that monopolies do badly at efficiency, productivity, and customer service. Though cracks in this one can be glimpsed - e.g. charter schools, the outsourcing of some troubled public schools to private managers - these are, as yet, tiny openings through which few can escape.
    
   Would-be teachers face a monopoly, too. The system's fear of competition and innovation leads it to deny entry into teaching by people without state certification (even as private schools hire whomever they like). Some states have "alternative" paths for teachers but the cartel is doing its best to give them the same hairpin turns as the regular path.
    
   Remedy: Encourage educators and policy makers to differentiate schools from one another, to cherish institutional diversity, to make schools compete for students (and resources) and to enable all sorts of well-educated people to enter the classroom without needless hurdles.
    
6. Too few of the best and brightest come work in schools. For a host of reasons, public education does not attract enough of our ablest people, much less our keenest entrepreneurs and innovators. Mediocre pay is one factor, but red tape and monopoly are at least as important - and they intersect with pay through such absurd practices as uniform salary schedules that don't distinguish between highly effective and terminally mediocre educators. Working for the school system more closely resembles a civil service job than one in the private sector. Not surprisingly, it tends to attract people with the drive and imagination of civil servants - and then gives them lifetime tenure at the age of twenty-five so that actual performance never again affects their job security. It's a wonder that we have as many dedicated, energized teachers and principals as we do.
    
   Remedy: Reconstruct the personnel system around different rewards and incentives, different assumptions about compensation and tenure, different arrangements for making decisions. Educators should be paid - and retained - according to the scarcity of their skills, the value they add to their pupils and the difficulty of the challenges they face in school. 
    
7. The education profession is awash in fads and bad ideas. It favors curricular and instructional strategies grounded in ideology and wishful thinking over those based on scientific proof. In the crucial area of reading instruction, for example, colleges of education continue to induct new teachers into "whole language" methods despite decades of evidence that phonics-based methods work better with most youngsters. Diane Ravitch and E.D. Hirsch have brilliantly traced the profession's abiding affinity for "progressive," "child-centered" methods that accord with its beliefs even though they don't work very well for children. If physicians behaved similarly, hospitals would still feature leeches, incantations and mustard plasters.
     Remedy: Out with the snake oil. Only research-based practices should be tolerated in our classrooms - and only bona-fide scientific research should be tolerated by the leaders of this profession and those who run our schools.
    
8. Even Houdini couldn't escape the red tape. Public education's governance structures are uncommonly hard to alter, even to penetrate. Five levels of decision-making - federal and state governments, the local district, the individual school, and the teacher with her door closed - shape what happens in the classroom. Each can effectively block changes launched from another level. This system's innate response to any problem is to devise more regulations, impose more procedures and demand more resources. The only change it welcomes is more dollars.
    
   Remedy: Rethink public education's governance arrangements, with fewer layers of decision makers and clearer alignment of authority with responsibility. The federal government should trust states (while verifying their results); states should work directly with schools - which should also be accountable to their customers. The "local school system" as we know it is an anachronism.
    
9. Schools are expected to solve all of society's problems.  School occupies just nine percent of most children's lives. The other 91% is spent under the sway of family, peers, neighborhood, television, etc. Lots of academic skills and knowledge can be imparted during the schools' 9% if the 91% cooperates. But when the 91% pushes in other directions, 9% offers too little leverage to counteract it. And when society decides that the failings of the 91% must also be solved within the schools' jurisdiction - thus adding character education, drug education, sex education, tolerance education and whatnot to their curriculum - there is simply no way that this relatively weak system can produce all the desired results.
    
   Remedy: For kids who need it, expand the school's 9% to confer greater leverage in their lives, whether through pre-school, extended days, reconfigured years, or cyber-education that breaks through the school-home barrier. An education system that is expected to do more for its young charges needs more scope in which to do so.

It's no wonder our recent education reform efforts have accomplished so little. They're not nearly as powerful as the forces that resist them. Breaking through that resistance is the main work of serious education reformers in 2002 and over the next decade. While the needed breakthroughs are easily described, they're politically arduous to put into place. Some will say they're pipe dreams. Yet so long as these (or kindred) changes remain unmade, the education status quo will continue to prevail, our schools will remain unfixed and our children will continue to be poorly educated.

Will the new feeling of national unity in the aftermath of terrorist attacks set the stage for a turn away from multicultural education, which de-emphasizes the common American culture and teaches children to take pride in their own racial ethnic and national origins instead? In a short essay in the Brookings Review, Diane Ravitch describes how schools eschewed their traditional role of assimilating newcomers into the national melting pot and embraced multiculturalism in the 1960s and 1970s. She identifies some practical problems with teaching children to appreciate their racial and ethnic heritage in the public schools, including 1) it means that what is taught in school depends on who attends the school (and it's unclear what students in a mixed school will learn), and 2) public schools lose a sense of a distinctive American culture forged by people from different backgrounds. She concludes that neither assimilationism or multiculturalism is sufficient, and urges schools to avoid dividing children along racial and ethnic lines and instead give all children access to the best of America's heritage while honoring the strong and positive values that immigrants bring to America. "Diversity, Tragedy, and the Schools," by Diane Ravitch, Brookings Review, Winter 2002.

While the costs and benefits of annual tests were debated at great length last year, analysts of the new "No Child Left Behind" education legislation are getting more excited about an opportunity created by those tests: the ability to identify effective schools and teachers using annual test scores.  In a 9-page paper for the Lexington Institute, Robert Holland explains how statistical analysis of annual testing data can determine how much value teachers add to the learning of individual students.  In the paper, Holland traces the development of the value-added assessment system developed by Bill Sanders in Tennessee, provides an example of a teacher report from this assessment system for an individual teacher, and compares the Tennessee model with a different statistical model used in other districts. Once these techniques are honed, we will have a fair and objective system for identifying the most effective teachers and schools, which will bring much-needed praise to teachers and schools that do a superior job helping low achieving students, Holland writes.  "Indispensable Tests: How a Value-Added Approach to School Testing Cold Identify and Bolster Exceptional Teaching," by Robert Holland, Lexington Institute, December 2001. William J. Bennett and Chester E. Finn, Jr., make many of the same points in "Adding Value to Education," an op-ed that appeared in The Washington Times on December 20, 2001. (available for a fee at www.washingtontimes.com)

Anne Lewis, Poverty & Race Research Action Council, 2001

This sixty-page report sets forth numerous practical strategies for bettering the education of disadvantaged youngsters, including, for example, "5 steps to a good start," "6 ways to tell if your school is serious about teaching reading and math," "4 ways to make reform stick," etc. The recommendations are pretty obvious, even banal, but they sit atop a trove of valuable research summaries, cases in point, and lots and lots of references. You can obtain hard copies for $5 apiece from Poverty & Race Research Action Council, 3000 Connecticut Avenue NW, #200, Washington, DC 20008. You can phone (202) 387-9887, fax (202) 387-0764, e-mail [email protected] or download the whole thing (in PDF form) from http://www.prrac.org/additup.html.

Douglas A. Archbald, Education Policy Analysis Archives, November 2001

Standards-based reform is simple in theory but can be surprisingly difficult in practice, at least without technology's help. Most states now have academic standards and tests, but assessment data is often available only in reports and databases that are distant from teachers who could benefit from them.  Curriculum guides may be only in the hands of administrators, making it tough for teachers to access them frequently.  This paper by Douglas Archbald explores how improvements in information technology help make state, district, local, and - most importantly - classroom-level implementation of standards-based reform significantly easier.  Some state agencies now publish standards and sample assessments online, and many states also permit individual student achievement information to be posted on the web for access by authorized users.  A wide range of software packages is now available to align lesson plans with standards and track student performance in relation to the same. But while much is possible, it isn't necessarily happening yet.  Archbald identifies obstacles: leaders who fail to cultivate the necessary values and practices (such as frequent meetings to evaluate staff performance and student achievement); hesitation by teachers and principals who fear that information may be used against them if it is publicly reported; and a lack of computer proficiency by school staff.  There are technical obstacles, too: databases must be kept up-to-date, cross-referenced and easy to navigate, and must contain information from standards-based assessments, state/district achievement tests, and tests on curricula. But there's hope.  Archbald concludes that, as teachers, administrators and policymakers begin to embrace standards-based reform with the aid of the "next generation" of technology, student achievement will benefit.  For more, see http://www.epaa.asu.edu/epaa/v9n48.

Educational Issues Policy Brief, American Federation of Teachers, 2001

This Policy Brief outlines the AFT's position on teacher induction programs, which the union views as a critical response to high attrition rates among new teachers. The AFT proposes a year-long, state-mandated and -funded induction program in which all new teachers would have to participate. They would bear reduced course loads and be assigned qualified mentors, who would also have reduced loads (and receive additional compensation). At year's end, a "summative review" would determine whether or not the new teachers would proceed to full licensure.  The AFT reviewed teacher induction programs in all 50 states to determine whether any met their standards. Although the number of induction programs has doubled since the 1980s, only 33 states currently have statewide programs in place. Of these, only 22 states actually mandate and fund the programs.  To remedy these inadequacies, says the AFT, states should develop (and partially fund) comprehensive policies that reflect the importance of induction for new teachers. To view this issue brief - which includes tables summarizing state induction policies - as a PDF, surf to http://www.aft.org/edissues/downloads/NEW_TEACH_INDUCT.pdf.

Edward E. Gordon, Imperial Consulting Corporation, November 2001

Edward E. Gordon, president of Imperial Consulting Corporation, recently presented this "white paper" to the Education, Employment and Training Committee of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. Unlike most reports that we bring to the attention of Gadfly readers, which deal with the academic preparation of American school children, this one looks at the skills possessed (and, more importantly, not possessed) by the American workforce. The author contends that "about four-fifths of all the people currently employed in our economy...are in danger of turning into the 'new techno-peasants of the information age' because they lack essential educational and/or technical skills." He finds the solution in "workforce education," which he defines broadly - including the humanities, for example - and for which he assigns responsibility to communities, also broadly defined to include schools, employers and a variety of new entities and delivery systems. He ranges far and wide in these 55 pages and, while much of it is hortatory, it comes across as a reasonably coherent presentation of what it will take to produce a well-prepared workforce for the new American economy. You can most readily access this paper by e-mailing Dr. Gordon at [email protected]. 

Krista Kafer, Heritage Foundation, December 13, 2001

Have you been wondering what to make of the soon-to-be-signed "No Child Left Behind" act? Heritage Foundation education analyst Krista Kafer has written a worthy overview of its strengths and weaknesses. Her conclusion:  "Although the Elementary and Secondary Education Act reauthorization contains the major themes of the Bush No Child Left Behind plan - accountability, opportunity, flexibility, structural change, and quality improvement - it is only a modest representation of those key elements. The bill perpetuates ineffective and wasteful programs and is authorized at twice the funding level of the 1994 reauthorization in the first year alone." For the full text, surf to http://www.heritage.org/shorts/20011213education.html.