The Education Gadfly Weekly

David Jason Fischer
Center for an Urban Future
May 2008

David Jason Fischer
Center for an Urban Future
May 2008

Like Paul Tough's New York Times Magazine article on the success of KIPP and its ilk, "Schools That Work" gives wonks, parents, and educators alike an accessible and hopeful picture of the schools that innovative educators can build when given enough flexibility. The focus is New York City's career and technical education (CTE) schools, of which twenty-one currently exist, teaching vocations like nursing and automotive maintenance. Although CTE students are poorer, older, less academically accomplished, and more likely to be black or Hispanic than their traditional high school counterparts, they attend class more often and are four times less likely to drop out. That's because, the author hypothesizes, the classes are actually interesting and practical. The schools are also more responsive to the city's labor market, giving students concrete paths to stable careers. Graduates from Automotive High School, one of the city's top CTE schools, for instance, leave with an industry-recognized certification that gives them easy entrée to potential employers. Some schools have struggled, however, to forge similar ties with leaders in their respective industries, in large part because of barriers imposed by the district bureaucracy. Companies that want to award scholarships, for example, have had to set up special pathways to comply with archaic regulations. The schools also have great difficulty recruiting qualified teaching candidates, many of whom are turned off by certification requirements that are completely irrelevant to what and how they're teaching. There's a golden egg waiting to hatch if the fat mother bird would just give it a bit of room. Read more here.

Gilbert T. Sewall
The American Textbook Council
May 2008

This new study appraises the ten widely used world history textbooks for U.S. middle and high school students. It concludes that they offer an idealized, often glamorized (and inaccurate) depiction of Islam; they are also brimming with misinformation and biases that misrepresent Islam's theological principles. The author emphasizes that Islamic activists and lobby groups are using American educators' multiculturalism fetish to manipulate the curriculum. Their goal is to extirpate any critical assessments of Islam, especially how the religion has been warped by extremists, from U.S. textbooks. Publishers are taken to task for bowing to pressure from groups like the Council on Islamic Education. Anyone interested in how Islam is treated in major textbooks will find this report useful. Read it here.

American Federation of Teachers
2008

The AFT is well known and much praised for its firm insistence on "coherent content standards" and since 1995 has periodically appraised state standards for clarity, specificity, classroom utility, etc. This year's review of state standards--spanning elementary, middle, and high school standards in English, math, science and social studies--found that only Virginia "meets the AFT criteria for strong standards in all levels and subjects." Colorado, Illinois, Iowa, Montana, Nebraska, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin had no strong standards. Other states were, of course, somewhere in between.  The report offers recommendations, useful if sometimes obvious, such as the need for states to "bring specific United States and world history into their early elementary standards" and to "describe what high school students should know and be able to do by course." The full document is available here.

The connection between rhetoric and reality in discussions about reforming America's high schools wears thin.

That erosion was on display Saturday in Bob Herbert's column in the New York Times. Herbert talked to Bob Wise--former governor of West Virginia, knowledgeable president of the Alliance for Excellent Education, and author of the new and estimable book Raising the Grade--and emerged from the conversation rankled by what he heard about the nation's high schools.

"We can't even keep the kids in schools," a flustered Herbert wrote. "Half of those who remain go on to graduate without the skills for college or a decent job." He's right, of course, in suggesting that America has not one but two problems with its high schools: too many young people drop out of them sans diplomas--and too many of those who earn diplomas are ill-prepared for what follows. But can both problems be solved at the same time or does the solution to each exacerbate the other?  What happens when those tougher standards lead to real live kids actually being denied diplomas and threaten to discourage some kids from remaining in school?

Two weeks ago, Gadfly addressed the dilemma faced by Massachusetts in setting the "cut score" for its MCAS test. Today, Gadfly is perplexed by other states' ambivalence regarding their own graduation requirements--and by the backsliding we observe as the day arrives when young people expect to walk across that stage and be handed that diploma.

Our attention was seized by Arizona Governor Janet Napolitano, who days ago signed into law a bill that weakens her state's exit exam requirement by allowing high school students who don't pass the AIMS test (thousands don't) to supplement their meager scores with good grades. The legislation's justification resides in the statements of students such as Maria Cami, an 18-year-old who maintains a 3.2 GPA but does not, by her own admission, understand math. "I feel like I'm being penalized for something I'm not good at," said Cami.

Cami believes a high school diploma is an entitlement. Arizona's governor and legislature are abetting that belief (Arizona has also repeatedly delayed implementation of its exit exam).

So, too, the Alabama legislature. Several weeks ago, that body passed an emergency measure allowing the class of 2008 to graduate without passing all five sections of the state exit exam. To its credit, though, Alabama also reformed its graduation regulations such that, in the future, students who can pass only three of five exit exam sections--two of which must be reading and math--may receive a "credit-based" diploma, which is not the same as a conventional diploma. Alabama, in other words, is heading toward a two-tiered diploma system.

As these states ease their exit exam requirements, others simply refuse to enact any. Pennsylvania Governor Ed Rendell has been pushing to establish graduation tests but is opposed by Keystone State school boards, almost a third of which have condemned his proposal. Timothy Allwein, spokesman for the Pennsylvania School Boards Association, said, "Graduation has always been a matter of local control." Also, according to the Philadelphia Inquirer, "many school boards...are fearful that the tests will lead discouraged students to drop out." 

There's plenty of precedent for this sort of thing. Washington State watered down its exit exam requirements in 2006, as did Maryland. That year, a Center for Education Policy report found that exit exam growth had leveled off, especially after California faced repeated and acrimonious legal challenges to its test policies. And as greater and greater attention (some of it leveraged by NCLB) focuses on graduating more kids and cutting the dropout rate, it's fair to predict that many jurisdictions will find themselves asking: can we truly have higher standards and higher completion rates at the same time?  

Here are some possible resolutions:

• Forget the "college or bust" mindset. Being prepared for some form of postsecondary education as well as gainful employment is a valid--perhaps the most valid--outcome of a sound high school education. But it's nuts to picture everybody attending Swarthmore. Kids bored beyond belief by the prospect of years and years and years of Macbeth, Lord of the Flies, and equations with two unknowns may well drop out, especially if they would rather be working and making money. A productive remedy is to offer career and technical education classes that provide a definite, practical pay-off. Students have an opportunity to engage their interests and talents, and they can feel satisfied that they are spending their time productively. They also stay in school. Some districts are expending significant effort to expand such programs. Some high schools are teaming up with community colleges to deliver high-quality "tech prep" programs and the like.
  
• Create alternative routes to graduation. By high school, it's apparent that different students possess different levels of academic ability and interest. Why not offer choices among diplomas as well as choices among schools, much as colleges themselves do when they assist students to choose between, for example, associate's and bachelor's degrees?
  
• Co-op and distance-learning schools. Allow high school kids to work during the day and learn at night or weekends. Or work at a paying job one day a week and go to school on other days. Let them take courses and earn credits without sitting in buildings called schools. There are plenty of examples, from the Florida Virtual School to the Cristo Rey schools.  
  
• Like Massachusetts, develop separate requirements for college-bound young people on top of passing the state exit exam that yields a simple diploma. Yes, that means admitting that the high school diploma per se is not equivalent to readiness for "college-level" academic work (see here). But it may cause more young people to stick around for diplomas that would still mean something.
  
• Don't make promises or threats that you don't intend to keep. It's really squalid to see states set "tough" requirements and then back off, defer, or punch holes in them. Our kids deserve to grow up in a country where policy makers do what they say. That's what Bob Herbert should write next.
  

The ed reform crowd genuflects before the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), the holy grail of testing. And in most cases, its deification is appropriate. But when comparing charter schools to traditional public schools, the holy grail becomes a Dixie Cup. The latest round of NAEP scores shows that charter students probably are performing at a slightly lower level than their non-charter peers, though, when one controls for race and income, the differences are negligible. More troublesome, NAEP only provides a snapshot in time, so it's impossible to know from these data whether charter schools students are gaining or lagging  their district school peers. (Most rigorous studies show that they are making gains.) Fordham President Checker Finn summed up yet another problem with NAEP charter-school data: "I'm not very interested in the average performance of charters.... The word 'charter' signals so little about them, and the diversity within that universe is at least as great as the diversity outside it." In short, it's incorrect to treat "charter schools" as a unique entity or homogeneous mass. It makes about as much sense as trying to form a single impression of pastry shops or pizza parlors.

"NAEP Gap Continues for Charters," by Erik W. Robelen, Education Week, May 19, 2008

Advanced Placement enrollment has exploded, and several schools in the Washington, D.C., area have gone so far as to eliminate conventional honors courses altogether because, they claim, AP provides students more academic rigor and holds them to higher expectations. But sixteen-year-old Lucie Blauvelt, a junior at Maryland's Rockville High School, remains unconvinced that throwing everyone into AP classes is such a great idea: "There's some students who are just honor students. They don't have the ability to push themselves into AP." The teenager speaks the truth. AP was designed for heavy-hitters, high school students who thirst for challenging, college-level material. Some honors pupils are doubtless capable of meeting AP's standards, but other students are either going to drag down the discourse in their AP classes or become frustrated with the rapid teaching pace and revert to less-challenging regular courses. Despite what our good friend Jay Mathews tells you, AP is not for everyone.

"Honors Courses Give Way to AP Rigor," by Daniel de Vise, Washington Post, May 19, 2008

Baltimore schools chief Andres Alonso, taking a page from Fordham's playbook, is remaking the city's funding system to push dollars and decisions down to the school level. Several principals (and their union bosses) are displeased, however. Some protest their smaller budgets under the new system-the plight of just 21 of 192 Baltimore City schools. But Tisha Edwards, a special assistant to Alonso, believes cuts will cause more political pain than educational harm. "What I'm finding is that principals oftentimes shy away from what are obvious cuts they should make because of connections to people. In some cases, the staff we gave to schools [under the previous funding system] was not appropriate, but it was the district's money so nobody cared," she said. One school of 300 students, for instance, employed four assistant principals; the district recommends one assistant principal per 300 students. More than a few principals, it appears, would rather central office make the tough decisions. Is that school leadership?

"Schools complain of money shortage," by Sara Neufeld, Baltimore Sun, May 19, 2008

The genesis of Fizzy Fruit's success arguably comes from Genesis, in which we learn that fruit is one temptation from which mankind simply cannot abstain. For kids, however, fruit holds less allure--but soda is a Godsend. Thus, the makers of Fizzy Fruit, which is on school lunch menus in 20 Connecticut school districts, have combined the fizziness of soda with the fruitiness of fruit and students cannot get enough of the stuff. Fizzy Fruit is created when carbonation is pumped, via mechanisms called "Fruit Fizzolators," into apples, grapes, etc., all of which retain their original nutritional content. (Bananas, however, lack sufficient water content, and therefore cannot be fizzolated.) Kids and district leaders love the new, healthy snack, but others see Fizzy Fruit as a pernicious gateway drug for youngsters. Parent Holly Fydenkevez said, "They'll try a piece of the orange and think, 'Oh, now I know how orange soda tastes.' And then you've turned a kid on to soda when he never knew soda before." She might be right. After seven-year-old Axel Ortiz was refused by a cafeteria worker his fourth serving of Fizzy Fruit, he said he needed it because "it tastes like soda." Oritz told the worker, "I'll pay you. How much?"

"Carbonated Fruit a Hit in School," by Lynn Doan, The Hartford Courant, May 19, 2008

American Federation of Teachers
2008

The AFT is well known and much praised for its firm insistence on "coherent content standards" and since 1995 has periodically appraised state standards for clarity, specificity, classroom utility, etc. This year's review of state standards--spanning elementary, middle, and high school standards in English, math, science and social studies--found that only Virginia "meets the AFT criteria for strong standards in all levels and subjects." Colorado, Illinois, Iowa, Montana, Nebraska, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin had no strong standards. Other states were, of course, somewhere in between.  The report offers recommendations, useful if sometimes obvious, such as the need for states to "bring specific United States and world history into their early elementary standards" and to "describe what high school students should know and be able to do by course." The full document is available here.

David Jason Fischer
Center for an Urban Future
May 2008

David Jason Fischer
Center for an Urban Future
May 2008

Like Paul Tough's New York Times Magazine article on the success of KIPP and its ilk, "Schools That Work" gives wonks, parents, and educators alike an accessible and hopeful picture of the schools that innovative educators can build when given enough flexibility. The focus is New York City's career and technical education (CTE) schools, of which twenty-one currently exist, teaching vocations like nursing and automotive maintenance. Although CTE students are poorer, older, less academically accomplished, and more likely to be black or Hispanic than their traditional high school counterparts, they attend class more often and are four times less likely to drop out. That's because, the author hypothesizes, the classes are actually interesting and practical. The schools are also more responsive to the city's labor market, giving students concrete paths to stable careers. Graduates from Automotive High School, one of the city's top CTE schools, for instance, leave with an industry-recognized certification that gives them easy entrée to potential employers. Some schools have struggled, however, to forge similar ties with leaders in their respective industries, in large part because of barriers imposed by the district bureaucracy. Companies that want to award scholarships, for example, have had to set up special pathways to comply with archaic regulations. The schools also have great difficulty recruiting qualified teaching candidates, many of whom are turned off by certification requirements that are completely irrelevant to what and how they're teaching. There's a golden egg waiting to hatch if the fat mother bird would just give it a bit of room. Read more here.

Gilbert T. Sewall
The American Textbook Council
May 2008

This new study appraises the ten widely used world history textbooks for U.S. middle and high school students. It concludes that they offer an idealized, often glamorized (and inaccurate) depiction of Islam; they are also brimming with misinformation and biases that misrepresent Islam's theological principles. The author emphasizes that Islamic activists and lobby groups are using American educators' multiculturalism fetish to manipulate the curriculum. Their goal is to extirpate any critical assessments of Islam, especially how the religion has been warped by extremists, from U.S. textbooks. Publishers are taken to task for bowing to pressure from groups like the Council on Islamic Education. Anyone interested in how Islam is treated in major textbooks will find this report useful. Read it here.