The Education Gadfly Weekly

The Education Trust
October 2004

This short report presents achievement data from 24 states in order to track progress toward the goal of 100 percent proficiency in math and reading, as NCLB expects states to achieve by 2014. The title sums it up: scores are moving in the right direction, but not quickly enough. Since 2002, math scores have risen in 23 of the 24 states with three years of data. In reading, 15 of 23 improved. And the achievement gaps, both for minorities and for poor students, narrowed in most states. Florida showed the greatest gains in both math and reading, while California, Delaware, Mississippi, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, and Virginia also demonstrated noteworthy improvements in both subjects. The report covers only the elementary years (typically fourth grade scores), so it only tells part of the story. Future EdTrust studies will report on middle and high school scores. And like many others, this report presents only one aspect of the data: the percentage of "proficient" and "advanced" students. Doing so ignores overall averages, which could be slipping even while the percentage of students classified as proficient is increasing - if, for example, teachers focus on helping students closest to proficiency clear that hurdle while the scores falter at the bottom (or top) of the class. This potential problem will become increasingly important over time, because in order to continue making AYP, even the worst students will eventually need to make it over that hump. Only by tracking that group's scores now will we know how far we really have to go. Still, this report offers good news, important data, and a welcome counter to recent claims that achievement levels are falling (read more here). You can access a summary and the full report online here.

ACT, Inc.
October 2004

A new report from ACT finds that 78 percent of students taking its college entry test were not prepared for college-level classes in English, biology, or algebra and that students who took courses above and beyond those required for high school graduation are more likely to succeed in postsecondary education. This adds volume to the chorus of voices (e.g. American Diploma Project) calling for tougher requirements at the high school level - requirements that will actually prepare kids for success in college and the workforce. For the past 20 years, echoing the recommendations of the National Commission on Excellence in Education, ACT has urged that a general core curriculum (four years of unspecified English, three years of unspecified math and science) would adequately prepare students for college level coursework. These new data, however, have forced the testing service to change its tune and call for schools to include advanced mathematics (above Algebra II) and advanced sciences (i.e. chemistry and physics) in their core requirements, and to recommend that students take more advanced courses prior to graduation. To read the complete report and recommendations, click here.

Kalman R. Hettleman, The Abell Foundation
October 2004

This report provides a sweeping critique of problems with special education in Baltimore's public schools. Hettleman gives a ground-up account of these problems, describing both underlying causes and administrative glitches. The instruction and funding provided for special ed students are often insufficient to help students make adequate progress, Hettleman writes, and schools conceal this failure by exaggerating student achievement and practicing social promotion. The report gives a good overall sense of how such practices occur on the administrative level and how damaging they are. Hettleman does an admirable job of analyzing recent federal court rulings on special education and explaining how NCLB is violated by Baltimore's failure to implement research-driven instructional practices. He also makes clear that Baltimore's problems are mirrored across much of the nation. Overall, the analysis is well-researched and the author's prose passionate and convincing. Check it out here.

In this month's American School Board Journal, Kathleen Vail articulates the need for a dramatic transformation of the American high school. "Fifty years ago," she explains, "the American high school was doing fine." Today, it's on life support, as evidenced by high dropout rates among poor and minority youths, the number of college students (58 percent) who need to take remedial courses in college, and the dwindling faith that employers have in the value of a high school diploma. This issue is being raised in many circles - see our review of a recent ACT report below and the American Diploma Project for more - but, as we see in so many education reform domains, defining the problem is a lot easier than forging a consensus on its solutions. The usual suspects will no doubt call for more money in exchange for little accountability. Reform-minded organizations like the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation will continue to tie grants to the creation of smaller learning communities and charter high schools. There is mounting demand for reform models that seek to overhaul high schools by transforming their curriculum and instruction. And President Bush has signaled a desire to extend NCLB's accountability and testing provisions through high school. While there is no agreement on the best way forward, clearly there is gathering urgency for bigger and more rapid changes. As San Diego's chief of secondary reform notes, "we can't put Band-Aids on sucking chest wounds."

"Transforming a faltering American icon: Remaking high school," by Kathleen Vail, American School Board Journal, November 2004

On October 16, the New York Daily News reported that "Parents of students in failing city schools filed a class action lawsuit against the Education Department yesterday, arguing the city plans to illegally deny transfers." The suit "seeks to stop the city from denying transfers under the federal No Child Left Behind law." Said one mother (of five-year-old twins) who is party to the class action, "My kids deserve an education and they aren't getting one where they are."

She's not alone. On September 12, the Daily News published excerpts from letters and emails with which parents reportedly "bombarded" school chancellor Joel Klein in late summer, begging for their children to be given exit visas from bad schools: "The conditions that my son has to face every day are deplorable," wrote a Harlem mother. "I am very concerned for my son. I think he wasted a whole year at this school," said a Bedford-Stuyvesant mom (in a handwritten seven page letter). "My son have not [sic] had a science teacher since November." "In the schoolyard there is no control and according to my son it is the same in the lunchroom. His class barely gets through a lesson because of the lawlessness allowed."

It's well known that New York lacks sufficient space in good schools for everyone who has the NCLB-conferred right to exit bad schools: some 234,000 youngsters in elementary/middle schools alone, more than a quarter of the Big Apple's total enrollment.

About 5000 of them actually applied for transfers this fall. Last year, 33,000 applied and 7000 were able to move. School system officials would have you believe that the decline in transfer requests is because parents are seeing improvement and don't feel the need to change schools.

Hah. What's really going on is that the district is doing everything in its power to discourage families from exercising choice. Obviously, last year's record of many seeking but few getting transfers would dishearten any parent contemplating a move. But that's not the whole story.

This year, New York won't allow any high-school students even to request a transfer. (In 2003-4, some 1600 did.) Astonishingly, a deputy chancellor told city council members that it's the kids' own fault if they're in bad high schools because they should have made wiser choices in the first place! "They had an opportunity to choose not to go to one of those [failing] schools," she said.

It's good that the city now lets entering high-school students apply to multiple schools. (How many get their top choices, I do not know.) But to deny subsequent transfers is un-American—and callously blind to the changing lives and priorities of teenagers.

As for elementary and middle schoolers, the city sought to "cap" NCLB choices this year at 1000—in a system of a million. The Daily News says Klein "backtracked after being hit with widespread criticism and claims from state and federal officials that they never approved a cap." (Nowhere in NCLB can I find language suggesting that such a thing would be kosher.)

To make matters worse, the city waited until August to notify parents that their children had the legal right to change schools—while warning that "Not every student who applies will be offered a transfer."

And not until a month after the school year opened did the city get around to processing the transfer applications. (New York is not alone. Cleveland students didn't learn about their right to transfer until late August, and will have spent at least a month of the new year in their old schools before the city acts on their applications.)

All this came out at a mid-October City Council hearing in New York, where one witness was U.S. deputy education secretary Eugene Hickok. Shamefully (if the New York Times can be believed), "Dr. Hickok did not criticize New York City's plan to limit how many students could transfer out of failing schools." Instead, he praised Messrs. Bloomberg and Klein for trying to create more choices via their charter-school and small-school initiatives.

To be sure, New York, like most cities, needs more supply in order to satisfy more of the demand for sound education options. Klein & Co. deserve plaudits for recognizing that. It's true, too, that NCLB created a right that American public education today lacks the capacity to fulfill, which is why national estimates suggest that only about two percent of those eligible to move last year under NCLB's public-school choice provision actually did so. It's even true that lots of unfilled demand, while frustrating to parents and hurtful to children in the short run, puts needed pressure on the system to change over the long run.

Still, at a time when upper middle class parents are completing their kids' applications to private schools for autumn '05, one wonders how poor and working class youngsters will ever "close the gap" if they have no decent alternatives to the failing schools they're now stuck in. One notes, too, that, for their own political reasons, states are keeping limits, caps, and constraints on the charter schools that might function as viable options. (See "More charter news" below.)

Though we're familiar with evidence of massive pent-up demand for school choices among urban poor and minority families, that's not the whole story. Seven new charters opened this year in the Minneapolis-St. Paul suburbs. "I'm not anti-public schools" says a Wyoming Township mom whose kindergartner enrolled in a Spanish immersion charter school. "But I knew what I wanted for my child and the district couldn't offer it."

A few smart districts are making creative use of charter opportunities to add their own school options. Klein is trying to do that in New York as are Arne Duncan in Chicago and Paul Vallas in Philadelphia. The school board in suburban Decatur Township, Indiana, has asked Indianapolis Mayor Bart Peterson to sponsor a charter high school for youngsters who have difficulty in traditional settings.

Shouldn't state and federal policies, programs, and funding schemes be making this sort of innovation and supply-creation easier instead of harder? Wouldn't that have been a swell topic for this fall's political candidates to address?

"Sue Ed. Dept on transfer ban," New York Daily News, October 16, 2004 (no longer available online)

"No escape from worst schools," by Joe Williams, New York Daily News, October 15, 2004

"The schools at a crossroads," New York Sun, October 15, 2004

"Fewer city students seek transfers to better schools," by Elissa Gootman, New York Times, October 15, 2004

"NE Ohio schools must offer transfers," by Janet Okoben, Cleveland Plain Dealer, September 14, 2004

"Let kids go, parents beg," by Joe Williams, New York Daily News, September 12, 2004 (no longer available online)

"Charter demand rising in suburbs," by Megan Boldt, Pioneer Press, August 31, 2004 (registration required)

"District asks mayor to charter school," by Michael Dabney, Indianapolis Star, August 11, 2004 (subscription required)

With the President re-elected and the Senate and the House still firmly in Republican hands, it seems unlikely that No Child Left Behind will be subjected to substantial revision through legislation, as many opponents and critics (and some friends and admirers) had hoped. So send in the lawyers! Observers now expect a flood of legal challenges to NCLB, organized and funded by teachers' unions and cheered on by interest groups such as the National Conference of State Legislatures. California's Coachella Valley Unified school district may be the first to sue, on grounds that English language learners are being held to unreasonable expectations. Expect similar suits from states alleging that NCLB is an under-funded mandate. So, after an election in which education was basically a non-issue, stay tuned for heavy action on the education front in the coming months.

"Educators predict lawsuits challenging No Child Left Behind," by Andrea Almond, Associated Press, November 3, 2004

"Education law due to draw lawsuits," by Andrea Almond, Associated Press, October 31, 2004

Despite an upbeat Education Week story highlighting the support of big-city mayors - including D.C.'s Anthony Williams - for charter schools as a way of transforming urban education, the charter movement continues to hit road blocks in the form of moratoria, caps, budget restrictions, and referendum defeats (see "Education wrap re-wrap" above.) This week, the Buffalo board of education approved a one-year moratorium on district-sponsored charters and established a task force to study the fiscal impact of such schools upon the district. Further east, the Albany Common Council is going to ask the state legislature to approve a temporary moratorium on charter schools in that city. Council member Shawn Morris, who supports the moratorium, argues that Albany has "a disproportionate share of charter schools compared to other cities in the state, without any form of evaluation of their impact on the community." And, as an article in the Miami Herald this week notes, the four-fold increase in charter schools in Miami-Dade County in the last three years has the district's chief school auditor warning "about the district's increased financial exposure." As we noted last week (read it here), this is more proof that "the message from the system is, yes, let's have charters, so long as they don't represent real competition to us or threaten our chokehold on education."

"1-year moratorium on charter schools OK'd," by Peter Simon, Buffalo News, October 28, 2004

"City Mayors turn to charter schools," by Caroline Hendrie, Education Week, October 27, 2004 (registration required)

"Dade schools feel pinch of competitors," by Daniel A. Ricker, Miami Herald, November 1, 2004 (registration required)

Last week, we highlighted three races with education implications (click here). Here's what happened. In Florida, former state superintendent and university president Betty Castor was narrowly defeated by former Cabinet Secretary Mel Martinez. (So was current South Carolina state superintendent Inez Tenenbaum.)  In Washington state, moderately pro-reform superintendent Terry Bergeson held onto her job in a race that turned on the state's graduation exam. But R-55, that state's referendum on whether to allow a few charter schools to launch, went down in flames, 58 to 42 percent. That's the third time voters have rejected charter schools in Washington, and the third win for the state teachers' union, which put hundreds of thousands of dollars and thousands of volunteers into this fight. No doubt about it, this disappointment will embolden charter opponents nationwide. Perhaps it will also have a catalytic effect on charter supporters!

"Charter schools, education tax defeated," by Jake Ellison and Gregory Roberts, Seattle Post-Intelligencer, November 3, 2004

"Bergeson gets a vote of confidence," by Heather Woodward, The Olympian, November 3, 2004

ACT, Inc.
October 2004

A new report from ACT finds that 78 percent of students taking its college entry test were not prepared for college-level classes in English, biology, or algebra and that students who took courses above and beyond those required for high school graduation are more likely to succeed in postsecondary education. This adds volume to the chorus of voices (e.g. American Diploma Project) calling for tougher requirements at the high school level - requirements that will actually prepare kids for success in college and the workforce. For the past 20 years, echoing the recommendations of the National Commission on Excellence in Education, ACT has urged that a general core curriculum (four years of unspecified English, three years of unspecified math and science) would adequately prepare students for college level coursework. These new data, however, have forced the testing service to change its tune and call for schools to include advanced mathematics (above Algebra II) and advanced sciences (i.e. chemistry and physics) in their core requirements, and to recommend that students take more advanced courses prior to graduation. To read the complete report and recommendations, click here.

Kalman R. Hettleman, The Abell Foundation
October 2004

This report provides a sweeping critique of problems with special education in Baltimore's public schools. Hettleman gives a ground-up account of these problems, describing both underlying causes and administrative glitches. The instruction and funding provided for special ed students are often insufficient to help students make adequate progress, Hettleman writes, and schools conceal this failure by exaggerating student achievement and practicing social promotion. The report gives a good overall sense of how such practices occur on the administrative level and how damaging they are. Hettleman does an admirable job of analyzing recent federal court rulings on special education and explaining how NCLB is violated by Baltimore's failure to implement research-driven instructional practices. He also makes clear that Baltimore's problems are mirrored across much of the nation. Overall, the analysis is well-researched and the author's prose passionate and convincing. Check it out here.

The Education Trust
October 2004

This short report presents achievement data from 24 states in order to track progress toward the goal of 100 percent proficiency in math and reading, as NCLB expects states to achieve by 2014. The title sums it up: scores are moving in the right direction, but not quickly enough. Since 2002, math scores have risen in 23 of the 24 states with three years of data. In reading, 15 of 23 improved. And the achievement gaps, both for minorities and for poor students, narrowed in most states. Florida showed the greatest gains in both math and reading, while California, Delaware, Mississippi, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, and Virginia also demonstrated noteworthy improvements in both subjects. The report covers only the elementary years (typically fourth grade scores), so it only tells part of the story. Future EdTrust studies will report on middle and high school scores. And like many others, this report presents only one aspect of the data: the percentage of "proficient" and "advanced" students. Doing so ignores overall averages, which could be slipping even while the percentage of students classified as proficient is increasing - if, for example, teachers focus on helping students closest to proficiency clear that hurdle while the scores falter at the bottom (or top) of the class. This potential problem will become increasingly important over time, because in order to continue making AYP, even the worst students will eventually need to make it over that hump. Only by tracking that group's scores now will we know how far we really have to go. Still, this report offers good news, important data, and a welcome counter to recent claims that achievement levels are falling (read more here). You can access a summary and the full report online here.