WSJ: Blackboard Bungle

Four books on education and testing -- "Tested" from Linda Pearlstein (WaPo), 2 teacher memoirs, and "EdSpeak" from Diane Ravitch.

September 29, 2007


BOOKS

The Blackboard Bungle
Glimpses into the unhappy state of American education
By ROGER KAPLAN
September 29, 2007; Page W8

Principal Tina McKnight and third-grade teacher Alia Johnson at Tyler Elementary, in Annapolis, Md., made a strenuous effort to bring their public-school students up to state and national standards in reading and math, according to Linda Perlstein in "Tested" (Holt, 302 pages, $25). The former Washington Post reporter, who spent a year as an observer at the school, reports that Ms. McKnight and Ms. Johnson succeeded -- in the sense that their kids passed the tests designed to measure grade-level proficiency.

But "Tested" suggests that the sound and fury of the testing process may signify, if not nothing, a lot less than one might hope. She offers affecting portraits of Ms. McKnight and Ms. Johnson, showing them to be devoted to their students and anything but soft educationists who care about "self-esteem" more than real learning. But they are not happy with the test-driven world they work in. "Tested" raises a now familiar question: Does the testing mania that is the direct result of the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) -- passed in 2002 and expected to be renewed this year -- have a positive effect on the public schools?

The bipartisan NCLB legislation was an attempt to reverse decades of declining proficiency in literacy and math while injecting some basic measure of accountability into the schools. It was the heir to the Great Society's Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965, whose famous Title One requires "equity for poor schoolchildren by infusing significant funds into the schools that they attend." Under NCLB, the funds for Title One ($13 billion in 2005) and other aid can be withheld from schools that do not reach defined levels of proficiency. Schools responded by urging instructors to "teach to the test."

At Tyler Elementary, panicked administrators turned their school into reading and mathematics cram boxes. One might think: At least the kids are learning something under such conditions. But Ms. Perlstein suggests that cram-learning is frenetically acquired and soon forgotten. It destroys whatever enchantment a classroom might possess for a richer sort of instruction.

As I know from my own teaching experience, it is still possible to make "Othello" and "Macbeth" come alive in the broken-down classrooms of our inner-city schools. Quick fixes will not make that happen; only teachers who are left alone can do it. And the quick-fix aims of the testing craze tend to push away many good teachers -- an ironic effect, given that the school-reform movement, which advocates testing, also champions the hiring and retaining of talented teachers.

Then again, the quest to find and keep exceptional educators is often a struggle, for reasons that go well beyond testing. For a troubling sense of what it is like to face a contemporary classroom for the first time, we can turn to two memoirs, Dan Brown's "The Great Expectations School" (Arcade, 267 pages, $25.95) and Christina Asquith's "The Emergency Teacher" (Skyhorse, 210 pages, $24.95).

Both teacher-authors seem ready to try classroom work for the first time, in the sense that they are eager to teach and seem open to learning new skills. At the beginning of their stories, Ms. Asquith is a young Philadelphia Inquirer reporter and Mr. Brown a budding filmmaker and rock musician. Because school districts are legally required to put "qualified" teachers into every classroom, they often skirt the rule by coming up with lamentably makeshift programs to put people who don't have education degrees in front of blackboards. In Philadelphia, there is something called "emergency certification" (Ms. Asquith's route) and in New York a "Teaching Fellows" program (Mr. Brown's). In each case, the training is mind-numbing, vacuous, centering on make-work assignments for children rather than the transmission of real knowledge. Maybe we would have better teachers if they themselves were taught better.

By both authors' own admission, teaching played a minor role in their year on the job. Neither Ms. Asquith's sixth-graders nor Mr. Brown's fourth-graders learned much. The students did not read and write and calculate much better in June than they did in September. Some of them benefited emotionally from their young teachers' care, and this is surely an important part of schooling. But when we remember teachers who changed our lives, we usually recall individuals who worked on our gray matter as well as our heartstrings.

Alia Johnson did just that with her kids at Tyler Elementary despite the dispiriting regimen imposed on her by business-model administrators. By contrast, the kids at Ms. Asquith's Julia de Burgos School, in north Philadelphia, and Mr. Brown's PS 85, in the Bronx, N.Y., watch their young teachers try and fail to manage the classroom while struggling with corrupt administrators, uncaring school districts and -- this being America -- their own personal "issues."

Mr. Brown seems the more befuddled of the two, repeatedly letting himself be fooled by childish manipulation -- when not obsessing over his own experience playing "Mr. Brown." (He is, after all, a filmmaker.) Ms. Asquith, more keenly observant, discovers a few excellent teachers in her school. But next to these are uncaring -- and sometimes alarmingly unbalanced -- individuals who seem taken from a Charles Dickens novel.

Then there is Ms. Asquith's principal, who faked test results to improve the school's standing. Although the principal's case was egregious (she was eventually fired from another school), the dispiriting truth is that gimmicks to "improve" student performance are not uncommon. Lamentably, the message is passed along to students that whatever works, including cheating, works.

By the end of Mr. Brown's story, it has achieved a Hollywood-worthy arc. He marries his gal, escapes the public-school ordeal by moving to a rich-kids private school in Manhattan and enrolls in Columbia University's Teachers College -- plus he keeps up with his film and rock 'n' roll careers. Ms. Asquith breaks up with her boyfriend, does some graduate work and returns to journalism, eventually covering education in Iraq.

Individuals like Ms. Asquith and Mr. Brown are unlikely to succeed as teachers if they are put directly into classrooms where they inherit all the social problems of the inner cities and, at the same time, must confront petrified bureaucracies that view them as baby sitters. Such teachers are driven from the field before they can acquire the informed experience that educrats and politicians claim they want for their education money.

Part of the problem is the "educationist" mindset. In "EdSpeak" (ASCD, 245 pages, $29.95), Diane Ravitch offers a lexicon that captures, alongside many worthy ideas and theories, the pseudo-scientific jargon and "progressive" ideology that does so much to form the education establishment and harm the schools. Service learning: "Community service by students in a nonschool setting, [which] aims to deepen students' learning and promote problem solving by having them engage in socially useful activities." Constructivism: "A philosophy of teaching based on the belief that students learn by constructing their own knowledge. [Its] methods center on exploration, hands-on experience, inquiry, self-paced learning, peer teaching, and discussion." Ms. Ravitch's book is an admirable attempt to bring clarity to pedagogese.

But even if "edspeak" were abolished tomorrow, the problems besetting modern education would persist. No Child Left Behind will not make public education thrive again, either, even if the policy is a well-intentioned improvement on decades of failure in federalized education. But finding solutions is crucial if we are going to meet, as the Greeks did long ago, the core challenge of maintaining a vibrant society: forming the young.

Mr. Kaplan taught English in high schools in the Bronx, N.Y., for several years.

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City's worries start and end with its schools

Whenever D.C. lawmakers talk of instituting this or that program to help the have-nots, it is essentially an admission that they have failed to meet one of their principal responsibilities, which is to have a well-functioning public-school system.

The social pathologies that haunt the city all start with a school system that is found to be derelict in its duties year after year. Oh, there is always plenty of get-tough talk. There is always another vow to reform what is broken. And there is always another new face promising to lead the system out of its eternal dysfunction. But in the end, incompetence trumps good ideas

A random smattering of articles from this week

EdWeek: Parents Less Worried Than Experts Over Math, Science
Though education experts, business leaders, and government officials have largely embraced the drive to raise the level of math and science courses, students and parents may be satisfied with a less rigorous level of instruction in those subjects.

Overall, only 25 percent of parents think their children should be studying more math and science, and 70 percent say things “are fine as they are now,” the study found.

Sherman Dorn:On communicating math standards
Florida's Board of Education has recently approved new state standards in math, and I think it's the most constructive long-term decision the board has made in years. My judgment isn't based on the fact that I'm a friend and colleague of one member of the group that drafted the new standards. I looked at the standards before the FBOE approved them, and from my lay perspective, I just breathed a sigh of relief. The emphasis is on a few "big ideas" for each grade up through eighth (with plenty of connections to other areas of math), and while the "big ideas" are in line with current grade-level expectations, it should provide focus.

EdWeek: No Child Gets Ahead
In spite of all the political rhetoric about serving the needs of working families, we continue to squander the talents of their children. Grade school data from the federal Early Childhood Longitudinal Study suggest that there are more than a million grade school students from families making less than $85,000 a year who start out in the top half of their class but fall off the college track on the way to high school.

What’s to be done? Raising standards would help, but efforts to raise state standards are an uphill struggle. Already, the most ambitious statewide performance standards are foundering on the shoals of Algebra 2, the early marker for students who are most likely to go on to college and have the best shot at middle-class jobs.

Why We Need National Testing

Education Week has been running a great ongoing blog between Diane Ravitch and Debbie Meier, two education folks from opposite sides of the spectrum. In the most recent post, Ravitch talked a lot about NAEP and its importance as a national benchmark. I'm really interested in Meier's response.

You describe these determinations about what students should know and be able to do as “politically” determined, because they are based on expert judgment, including the judgment of teachers of students in a particular grade. The NAEP standards are based on expert judgments, and when last I participated as a member of the National Assessment Governing Board, the process of setting standards was managed by the American Institutes of Research in a very professional manner.

Follow link for full article.

EdWeek: Varied Strategies Sought for Native American Students

Educators working to improve the performance of Native American students are struggling to find the right balance between core academics and attention to native culture as a way to help engage and motivate children, according to those at a multistate gathering on the topic here last week.

Full story: http://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2007/09/26/05indian.h27.html?print=1

School options urged for parents
By Amy Fagan
September 24, 2007

Top federal education officials have released a new handbook urging state and local administrators to explain more effectively to parents that they can transfer their children among schools or access free tutoring services if their child's school is consistently subpar.

The officials worry such parental options established in the No Child Left Behind law will be eroded as the Democratic-led Congress tries to renew the law this fall. The options will be one of several topics that promise to stir up debate as House leaders begin to advance renewal legislation, perhaps as soon as this week.

Parents of students in consistently subpar schools that fail to make the adequate yearly progress required by NCLB have the right to send their children to another public school or to free tutoring services, including tutoring by private providers or faith-based groups.

Bush administration officials want to expand these services but are worried that the services will be watered down as the law is renewed. The provisions have met some criticism since a relatively small percentage of eligible parents have taken advantage of them.

The officials compiled a guide — available on the Department of Education Web site this week — to provide school administrators strategies and tips on how to ensure more eligible parents are aware of and participate in the options.

"Thanks to No Child Left Behind, schools are now required to provide parents with the information and options they need to ensure their children receive the high-quality education they deserve," Education Secretary Margaret Spellings said last week when the handbook was made public.

The handbook, written by U.S. Assistant Deputy Secretary of Education Morgan Brown, includes a range of ideas, such as ensuring that notices to parents explain their rights in a clear, concise manner and determining the most effective method of delivering notices to eligible parents, either through a mailing, a Web site posting or sending it home with the student.
It also suggests schools make application forms more widely available, expand signup periods, coordinate public school choice under NCLB with other choice programs and coordinate busing systems to make transportation easier.

The House is expected to begin debating legislation to renew NCLB this week. A rough draft of proposed changes, crafted by education panel Chairman George Miller, California Democrat, and the panel's top Republican, Howard P. "Buck" McKeon, also of California, has been circulating for a few weeks.

In a letter to Mr. Miller earlier this month, Mrs. Spellings said she is worried that he is trying to curtail these services in his draft proposal, not strengthen them. She said she is "likewise concerned" that his draft "restricts public school choice options and does not include additional private school options for low-income students as proposed by the Administration."

Rachel Racusen, a spokeswoman for Mr. Miller, said that under the draft proposal, tutoring services "would still be available (either as an option or as a requirement) to all schools deemed in need of improvement."

"Under the Miller-McKeon discussion draft, it would be optional for priority schools and required for high-priority schools," she said.

Miss Racusen said while there are "scattered examples" of tutoring services actually improving student performance, "on a national scale, we have little data to help determine how well tutoring is working to raise student achievement."

She added, "Given that we spend over $2 billion each year on [supplemental educational services], Mr. Miller feels strongly that we should have comprehensive information on how well it's working and what we could do to make it work better."

According to the DOE, almost 50,000 students participated in the school-transfer program in the 2004-05 school year, and nearly 450,000 students accessed free tutoring that year.

It's Back to School for Secretary 'Starbuck'

It's Back to School for Secretary 'Starbuck'
September 16, 2007 12:09 PM ET Bedard, Paul Permanent Link
Now this is the way to go back to school: Wrap a supercomfy executive motor coach in yellow to make it look like a real school bus, grab a Starbucks tall Soy Misto, and take two field trips, one to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum for some karaoke and a second to shoot rockets at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base. A dream? Not for Education Secretary Margaret Spellings. The Bush hipster says that's exactly what she's doing this week in a bid to promote math and science and the reauthorization of the administration's teetering No Child Left Behind Act. She calls her tour "Empowering Parents, Empowering Children," a slogan that'll be painted on the bus.
The science part takes place in Cleveland, where Spellings—President Bush's American Idol fan—will steer her bus to the rock center to have her vocal vibrations measured while crooning a tune by her fave, Stevie Wonder. " 'Sign, Sealed, Delivered' may be the name of a song, but it's also the action Congress needs to take to reauthorize No Child Left Behind so all kids can be at grade-level reading and math by 2014," she says. Then it's on to Wright-Pat for a math and science lesson in its Starbase program, where kids launch water-propelled rockets. Just like real pilots, participants get handles, and the coffee-loving Spellings is to be dubbed "Starbuck."
JOE

On Senate Panel, a Different Dynamic for NCLB Renewal

A lot of talks been done on Miller and the House, with talk of the Senate, who of course also needs to pass whatever bill will become NCLB 2.0, being more quiet. Sen. Kennedy has floated a bunch of bills around, one of them bolstering the prominence and support of NAEP.

----

Senator Edward M. Kennedy is hoping to get a bill reauthorizing the No Child Left Behind Act through Congress before the end of this year. But if that’s going to happen, he has some big stumbling blocks to overcome.

The chairman of the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee must navigate a complicated political landscape, characterized by the contentious reception to a draft bill put forth by House education leaders recently and a desire by some key members of his committee to hold firm on keeping the law’s central accountability tenets.

Also, Sen. Kennedy, D-Mass., must contend with having three Democratic presidential candidates on the panel: Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York, Sen. Christopher J. Dodd of Connecticut, and Sen. Barack Obama of Illinois.

“You can already tell it’s pretty tricky over there,” said Amy Wilkins, a vice president of the Education Trust, a Washington-based research and advocacy group that promotes policies to serve disadvantaged students. Negotiating the bill, she said, is like going “whitewater kayaking. There’s a stone under every wave.”

As any civics teacher knows, the Founding Fathers intended for the Senate to serve as a check on the House of Representatives, which was viewed as likely to be more susceptible to shifting public sentiments. Thus, senators may be less apt than House members to back major changes to the nearly 5½- year-old NCLB law.

“My general feeling is that the Senate would be more likely to support the current law than the House,” said Jack Jennings, the president of the Center on Education Policy, a Washington research and advocacy organization, and a former longtime aide to House Democrats. “House members will react to complaints in their home district, complaints from teachers and school superintendents and parents. Senators tend to take the broader view, and the broader view is that the country does need to improve the public schools and [NCLB] is a national strategy to do so.”

Still, Mary Kusler, the assistant director of government relations for the American Association of School Administrators, said senators will likely be watching the debate in the House closely to get a sense of what rank-and-file members are willing to support.

Sen. Kennedy has not unveiled a comprehensive NCLB-reauthorization plan along the lines of the draft bill put forth by Rep. George Miller, D-Calif., and other key members of the House Education and Labor Committee. ("Draft Bill Heats Up NCLB-Renewal Debate," Sept. 5, 2007 and "Draft Retains Quality Rules for Teachers," Sept. 12, 2007.)

But Mr. Kennedy has introduced a number of K-12 education bills, and he is hoping to incorporate major components of those proposals into the reauthorization, said Melissa Wagoner, his spokeswoman.

One bill would update the National Assessment of Educational Progress to ensure that the federally sponsored tests set internationally competitive benchmarks. It would offer assistance to states that wanted to examine how their standards and exams compared with NAEP. But the legislation would stop short of establishing national subject-matter standards.

Sen. Kennedy has also introduced a bill that would help train teachers, and a measure that would assist schools in reaching out to parents. Another bill would provide grants to school districts to expand learning time, and offer opportunities for recent college graduates to work in after-school programs in Title I schools.

Presidential Politics

While the presidential aspirants on the Senate education committee have been largely critical of the NCLB law on the campaign trail, it’s too soon to say what kinds of changes most will seek to the law. So far, most in the Democratic field have been relatively short on specifics for NCLB, said Craig D. Jerald, the policy director of Ed in ’08, a Washington-based nonpartisan campaign to make education a top issue in the race.

Some observers say that the contenders on the committee may seek to take a significant role in shaping the legislation, particularly after getting an earful of complaints about the law from educators out on the campaign trail.

“All three candidates will probably want to be able to say that they brought some significant change to the current law so that they can tell teachers that the law is different and less burdensome,” Mr. Jennings said. “They could be vying among themselves over how to do that.”

The Democratic contenders on the committee may seek changes to the bill that give schools some relief from NCLB’s testing regime, Mr. Jennings said. Under the law, schools must assess students in reading and mathematics every year in grades 3-8 and once in high school, which some educators say leads schools to focus too heavily on test preparation.

Michael J. Petrilli, a vice president of the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation in Washington, who served in the Department of Education during President Bush’s first term, said the Democratic presidential contenders on the committee appear to be treading carefully, to avoid taking a position on NCLB that could come back to haunt them in the general election.

“I think if you’re a Democratic candidate, you want this thing behind you,” he said, referring to the reauthorization. “Any [candidates] that are looking past the primary have to be careful. … I think they’re proceeding very cautiously.”

Mr. Petrilli said the candidates on the education panel are more likely to focus on narrower issues that are important to them, while shying away from some of the major sticking points in the renewal debate, such as to what extent schools should be able to gauge student achievement using measures other than state tests.

Bills already introduced by the presidential contenders on the education committee may offer clues as to which issues they might champion during reauthorization. Sen. Clinton is sponsoring a bill that would help states expand prekindergarten options, while Sen. Obama has introduced a measure that would provide substantial federal resources to districts willing to try innovative methods of raising student achievement. Sen. Dodd has put forth legislation that would provide incentives for states to adopt national standards in math and science, and a more comprehensive reauthorization measure that would permit states to get credit under the law for improving individual student progress.

Bipartisan Process

But the presidential candidates are not the only members of the education panel who may have a significant impact on the reauthorization process.

“Everybody on the [Senate panel] has a pretty substantial interest in education,” Andrew J. Rotherham, the co-director of the Washington-based think tank Education Sector, and a former White House domestic-policy adviser under President Clinton. “It’s a pretty knowledgeable committee, and in some ways that makes it harder.”

He noted that Sen. Lamar Alexander, R-Tenn., was a secretary of education under President George H.W. Bush, and Sen. Judd Gregg, R-N.H., was the education committee’s top Republican for the passage of the NCLB law in 2001, and later served as chairman.

Sen. Gregg, along with Sen. Richard M. Burr, R-N.C., another education committee member, introduced a bill this summer that would implement many of the Bush administration’s suggestions for revamping the NCLB law. Their bill would largely retain the current law, while allowing for new flexibility for states, including in measuring the progress of English-language learners and students in special education.

While both the House and Senate education committees are aiming for bipartisan reauthorization proposals, Republican support may be especially important in the Senate, since most measures in that chamber need backing from members of both parties to overcome procedural hurdles.

And, unlike in the House, where the leadership has more control over the number and content of amendments offered when the full chamber considers a bill, senators will generally have much more leeway to propose changes—or comprehensive alternatives—to Sen. Kennedy’s eventual bill.

Mr. Rotherham said that Sen. Kennedy may well be up to the task of getting a bill through the chamber, though, he said, “it’s still going to be a real challenge.”

WSJ: Mass. Testing

Gov's proposed changes to the state testing program. Piece points out Mass' previous high ranking on NAEP. Tuesday's release should add to this debate.

September 22, 2007

CROSS COUNTRY

Mass. Testing
By GUY DARST
September 22, 2007

BOSTON -- Massachusetts Gov. Deval Patrick has produced one surprise after another since taking office nine months ago. He stunned people by spending $12,000 on office curtains, by suggesting that union construction workers be asked to find illegal immigrants at job sites, and by saying that the 9/11 terrorist attacks were partly about "the failure of human beings to understand each other and to learn to love each other."

But his biggest surprise is the scope of a planned overhaul of what is probably the nation's best public school system -- a reform effort he calls his "Readiness Project." He has asked for reports on 66 proposals ranging from making school days longer to dropping tuition in community colleges. The fear is that he's about to emasculate testing requirements put in place more than a decade ago.

It's not an irrational fear. The governor is strongly supported by labor unions that oppose the tests, has appointed a testing critic to the Board of Education, and aims to kill school-district performance audits.

Back in the 1992-93 school year, the Bay State instituted rigorous testing requirements, including exams 10th-graders must pass in order to graduate from high school. Massachusetts students usually do well on the exams of the National Assessment of Educational Progress. But fourth-graders and eighth-graders in the past two years came in first, or statistically tied for first, in both English and mathematics on the NAEP. No state had ever done that.

Many credit the success to the state's testing regime, the Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System (MCAS), and the reforms that came with it, including money (inflation-adjusted state aid to local education has doubled since 1993). Unlike the dumbed-down standards of some states, the MCAS "proficiency" award tracks well with the same NAEP designation.

A writer for the liberal Washington Monthly said in 2001, when the tests were given for the first time, "The MCAS, and the reforms that have come with it, may be the best thing to happen to poor students in a generation in terms of improving the quality of their education."

Each student gets five chances to pass English and math exams and may continue to try after leaving school. Eighty-seven percent of the class of 2009 passed both on the first try, an increase from 84% last year and 68% for the class of 2003. More than two-thirds achieved a "proficiency" rating. After five tries, 97% pass. Even a majority of dropouts have passed. The tests are sophisticated: English requires a brief essay; math requires a showing of the work on some questions for which partial credit is possible.

The anti-testers, however, aren't happy. "In states throughout the country, student assessment is done with multiple measures including course work, projects, in-depth study and grades, along with standardized test scores," two of them wrote earlier this year. Gov. Patrick insists he supports MCAS as one measure of achievement. In announcing his "Readiness Project" in June, he said, "Being ready means public education that is about the whole child, not just success on a single standardized test." That's the kind of language that can be code for junking standardized tests.

Former State Senate President Tom Birmingham, a Democrat and Rhodes Scholar, is from Chelsea, Mass., a gritty Boston suburb with schools so bad that they were given to Boston University to run in the 1980s. He worked with three Republican governors to strengthen education. He found the governor's appointment of Ruth Kaplan, an activist and founder of the Alliance for the Education of the Whole Child, to the Board of Education "troubling." And he has said that his "understanding of Ruth is that she's Janey one-note" against MCAS.

James Peyser, chairman of the Board of Education until last year, also says he "worries" about Ms. Kaplan's appointment. As does former Board of Education member Roberta Schaefer. She fears the governor "is about to gut" the testing requirement by making it just one of several measuring sticks schools use.

Gov. Patrick has already demonstrated a willingness to bend to union desires. In January, the state Labor Relations Commission ordered the Boston Teachers Union to back off of a threat to call a strike. Gov. Patrick's response was to propose a budget that would zero out the commission. The legislature funded it anyway.

The legislature, however, went along with his proposal to get rid of another union bugbear, the Office of Educational Quality and Assessment. The EQA examines the performance of dozens of school districts across the state each year. And according to an analysis of 76 EQA reports by the Boston-based Pioneer Institute, 44 of those 76 districts had curricula that did not meet state standards -- their students could have been facing MCAS without having been taught some of the material on the tests. The governor this year recommended defunding the agency and the legislature agreed, giving it just enough funding to wind up its work. Ms. Schaefer, calls the move "a mistake." Instead, she says, the agency "should have been strengthened."

So far, many of the people the governor has turned to help him institute reforms dispute the idea that the governor will water down standards. One of whom is Paul Reville. He's a lecturer at Harvard and in the early 1990s was instrumental in helping to create MCAS. This year the governor tapped him to be the new chairman of the state Board of Education. If the governor did want to dilute MCAS, he said recently, "I hardly think he would have chosen me [to be chairman]."

Chris Anderson, executive director of the Massachusetts High Technology Council and a member of the Board of Education, says the state needs to do better and not view "the 49 [other] states as competitors." Instead, Massachusetts educators need to worry about India and China.

But the fact that debates over education center on whether the state will backslide is a bad sign. Massachusetts should be pressing ahead -- closing the achievement gap between white and minority students, for one thing -- not resting on its laurels. The governor wants reform. But if he wants better schools, he'll need good testing.

Mr. Darst is a retired deputy editorial page editor of the Boston Herald.

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Washington Times - "Re-opening the American mind"

Re-opening the American mind
Suzanne Fields
September 20, 2007

The first hint of autumn, a sudden cool night making a sweater feel right and a bright day without the stifling humidity of summer, fills us with the remembrance of the ambivalent emotions about "back to school." We remember the pleasure of seeing old friends, but we remember as well the hard chairs that overnight replaced the sensuous luxury of beach towels on sand. We wax nostalgic about the delight in discovering new ideas in books but few of us miss the adolescent pressures of high school.

This "semester" we're getting a white-hot debate over how to prepare the rising generation for life in the 21st century. It's about time.

No public school program generates more controversy than the No Child Left Behind legislation of 2001, or as one cynic describes it, "No Child Left Alone." The motives behind the legislation were mostly good — to get all children proficient in reading and math — but teachers have often been required to "teach to the test," and critical thinking is limited to figuring out how to answer questions so that test scores are high enough that school districts don't lose federal money. The goals perpetuate the notion that children and teachers are like Xeroxed copies of each other.

An emphasis on reading and math, however laudable, has had the unintended consequence of converting the humanities into a second-class muse. This pervades higher education, too. On many college campuses there's a solemn dirge sung softly over the decline of the humanities as multiculturalism and political correctness continue to poison the wellsprings of critical thinking.

But finally other voices in other rooms are rising above stale thinking, examining what we've lost since the great books were reduced to relevant and trendy treatises. Allan Bloom, who wrote a bestseller in 1988 called "The Closing of the American Mind," railed against the dumbing down of the university, of how the idioms of rock and rap had infiltrated the Academy and diluted an appreciation for great writing. He won the argument, but lost the war. Identity politics trumped all. But the traditionalists who were routed haven't been idle and reinforcements are cantering, if not yet galloping, to the rescue. There's a revival of the idea of free inquiry, an alien doctrine little understood and fiercely resented in many faculty lounges.

As the costs and casualties in the culture wars are being calculated, common sense is coming out of a coma. "However polarizing Bloom may have been, many of the issues he raised still resonate — especially in the humanities on campus and in the culture," writes Rachel Donadio in the New York Times. The subtitle of Mr. Bloom's book still gives a jolt: "How Higher Education Has Failed Democracy and Impoverished the Souls of Today's Students." Anthony Kronman, a law professor at Yale, shows how colleges, in abandoning the profound questions that have perplexed philosophers and writers throughout human history, have betrayed their students, depriving them of disciplined rumination before they're caught up in the urgent business of adult life. "In Education's End: Why Our Colleges and Universities Have Given Up on the Meaning of Life," he writes that in emphasizing the secular, professors offer no recognition of the spirit and spiritual values.

It's impossible to read King Lear or Hamlet without questioning the deepest human values. Because John Milton is a dead white man the erudition of his poetry is discounted (or ignored). The political and religious issues Milton raises in "Paradise Lost" would animate any discussion of democracy, terrorism and war, but raising questions is not the aim of much that passes for higher education. Milton's debate of the devils over how to perpetuate the war against God, "which if not Victory is yet Revenge," has much to tell us about our own times.

Students arrive on campus yearning to think big thoughts and often get political polemics from little professors with small minds. Tenure depends on publishing articles in arcane critical language in scholarly journals nobody reads. Many teachers are unable and unwilling to teach outside their constricted disciplines.

When I taught English literature to college sophomores in the '60s, attitudes were quite different. We studied the grand sweep of history from Chaucer's "Canterbury Tales," with all of its human diversity in the pilgrimage to Canterbury Cathedral, to T.S. Eliot's "The Wasteland," with its instructive aridity and spiritual emptiness. Such surveys fell out of fashion; more's the pity. It was a wonderful way to spark curiosity, enabling students to choose whether to probe deeper. Many did. The Bard, dead white man though he was, would understand: Let us not to the education of true minds admit impediments.

The Weekly Standard: No Child Left Alone

Cover story of this week's The Weekly Standard (yes, Weekly Standard comes to my house...)
no NAEP mention, just NCLB


No Child Left Alone
An education reform run amok.
by Andrew Ferguson
09/24/2007, Volume 013, Issue 02


There used to be a lot of school kids crowding the Surratt House Museum in Clinton, Maryland, a few miles south of Washington. Their teachers would haul them in by the busload--more than a thousand a year. The museum is housed in the homestead of one of the conspirators who was hanged for the murder of Abraham Lincoln. It's small, but it offers an unexpectedly comprehensive review of the Civil War, with a special emphasis on the assassination, and for years grade-school teachers in southern Maryland have used a field trip there as a convenient way to keep their students awake long enough to introduce them to an important episode in their nation's history.

In the last couple years, though, attendance has dried up--cut by more than half, according to Laurie Verge, the museum's director. Laurie is a former history teacher herself. From talks with old colleagues, she's pretty sure how to account for the undesired quiet that has fallen over her museum most weekdays: "The schools just don't have as much room for history or social studies in their curriculums any more," she says. "Ever since No Child Left Behind."

That would be the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001, or NCLB as it has come to be known, the totem of national education reform and bipartisan bonhomie that for six years has stood as the signal domestic achievement of the Bush administration--and the exemplar of the Big Government Conservatism with which George W. Bush's reformers hoped to remake the way Republicans govern. Among many other things, the bill authorized the federal Department of Education to subject every student in every public school in the country to an elaborate regime of testing in reading and math. How well the students do on those tests determines how much money their schools and school districts receive from the federal government, and determines also, in remarkable detail, how the federal government will allow that money to be spent.

Reformers are busy people, tireless people, whose displeasure with the world as it is inspires them to improve the lives of their fellow human beings no matter what, and they get cranky when you bring up the law of unintended consequences. They dislike the implication that the benefits they confer in one field might lead to a shrinking of benefits in another. Yet the decline in attendance at Laurie Verge's wonderful little museum is, indeed, an unintended consequence of NCLB--just one of many, and a small one at that. Though no one thought of it in the long, sweaty hours while the bill was being written, or mentioned it in the self-congratulatory giddiness surrounding its final passage, NCLB's exclusive emphasis on reading and math has led a high percentage of schools (around 40 percent, according to one recent survey) to cut back on the teaching of history, civics, and government to the country's schoolchildren.

The irony here is hard to avoid: Republicans, who used to lament the rising tide of "historical illiteracy," have now reformed the nation's schools in such a way that can only swell the tide. But there are lots of ironies in Big Government Conservatism. Luckily for us, a handful of new books provides an opportunity to think about NCLB and its many consequences--and, by extension, to ask the question: So how's this Big Government Conservatism thing working out for us?

Michael Tanner, of the libertarian Cato Institute, devotes only a single chapter to NCLB in his manifesto against BGC (as he doesn't call it but I will, to save my fingers the typing). His critique of both the education reform and the philosophy it grew from is unrelenting, absolute, and refreshingly dyspeptic. With the authors of the other books here, liberal and conservative alike, he shares the near-universal diagnosis of the country's education troubles:


No one can deny the need to reform our education system. Our society is becoming increasingly divided between those with the skills and education needed to function in the increasingly competitive global economy and those without such skills and education . At the same time that education is becoming increasingly crucial, government schools are doing an increasingly poor job of educating children.

("Government schools," by the way, is Libertarian for "public schools.")

Evidence for the failure of the schools, as Tanner says, is longstanding and everywhere. It's found in a generation's worth of falling test scores and in the poor performance of American schoolchildren in international rankings (21st in math, 16th in science). More to the point, the creators of the nation's wealth have expressed their displeasure with America's primary and secondary schools. Sixty percent of businessmen in a poll last year rated the reading and math abilities of their recent hires as "fair" or "poor."

Among federal officeholders, including some Republicans, feeble education has been a public concern for a long time. The decline in schools, from the conservative point of view, has had many causes: poorly trained teachers, undemanding curriculums suffused with political correctness and multiculturalism, the abandonment of drill and memorization and other traditional tools of learning, and a general refusal on the part of a new generation of administrators to impose, and live up to, high standards of achievement. And one way to reverse these trends, it was thought, was to hold schools accountable for the education of their students: Test the kids, publish the scores, and let parents, armed with the results, decide whether the teachers and administrators were doing the job they were hired to do.

It's certainly a sound idea--which is not, of course, the same thing as saying it's an idea that should be imposed nationwide by the employees of the Department of Education. The distinction is usually lost on the practitioners of BGC, however. Their premise, as Tanner puts it, is this: "If something is a good idea, it needs to be a federal program." In the past, of course, this eagerness to nationalize good intentions has been more commonly associated with Democrats than Republicans. But that was before the onset of BGC.

The seeds were sown in the 1990s, when the most powerful and successful officeholders in the Republican party were governors. With the executive branch in Washington in the hands of Democrats, Republicans were ardent believers in the principles of federalism and subsidiarity. Subsidiarity--the idea, if not the word--had long been considered essential to the American scheme of dispersed power: There are spheres of action appropriate to state governments, and to local governments, that are not appropriate to the federal government. Some things are controlled by only one level of government, in other words, so that no one level of government controls everything. Subsidiarity acts as a stay. It requires, on the part of the governing class, a restraint and humility unique to self-government--a willingness not to exert power over -others, no matter how tempting the thought might be or how admirable the cause.

"As I would not be a slave," said the founder of modern American conservatism, "so I would not be a master."

But in the 1990s, federalism and subsidiarity had political benefits, too, as the governors discovered. States, Republicans said (borrowing a phrase from the socialist Louis Brandeis), were "the laboratories of democracy," hothouses of the hinterland. It was there that new ideas in welfare policy, education, taxation, and environmental regulation could be put into practice and their results tested and measured, while keeping the (Democratic) busybodies of Washington at bay. Even better, or so it seemed, the passion for state and local activism allowed Republicans to overcome their reputation for being antagonistic to government. It wasn't just Democrats who embraced, as the phrase went, "proactive solutions to today's problems."

One of those can-do Republican governors of the 1990s was George W. Bush. When he gained the White House, no one should have been surprised that he transferred his taste for "conservative activism" to the biggest laboratory of them all, the federal government.

"I care about results," he said often during the 2000 campaign. "I'm passionate about getting things done." His passion for federalism, however, was less ardent, and it terminated with his governorship. For Big Government Conservatives, as Tanner shows, subsidiarity is an indulgence that people serious about governing can't afford.

"At a fundamental level," he writes, "Big Government Conservatives are much more concerned with ends than means. Something as process-oriented as federalism can't be allowed to get in the way of doing things that big-government conservatives believe need to be done." This was true even in the treatment of public schools, where the tradition of local control is as old as the institutions themselves. In putting together NCLB, all the BGCs of the Bush administration had to ask themselves was: Will this work? Given the national calamity of failing schools, self-restraint seemed almost irresponsible. The desire to do good, joined to a plausible forecast of success, was enough to override such philosophical or procedural objections as subsidiarity, federalism, or the decentralization of power.

In this Bismarckian approach to "getting things done," modern liberalism and BGC are essentially indistinguishable. "Big government conservatives," writes Tanner, with his usual acerbity, "share a common arrogance with contemporary liberalism." Nowhere is the impertinence better displayed than in the NCLB--so much so that Tanner, a rightward-leaning libertarian, wonders whether the act can even be considered "conservative" in any identifiable sense at all.

Scott Franklin Abernathy, a political scientist at the University of Minnesota, wonders the same thing, and arrives at the same conclusion, from the opposite direction. On the evidence of his new book, No Child Left Behind and the Public Schools, Abernathy is no Republican. Indeed, he seems actively hostile to the Bush administration. But he is a great booster of NCLB, which he sees more clearly than many Republicans do. The overriding goal of NCLB, as he notes, is to close the "achievement gap" between students who perform well in school and those who perform poorly. (Confusingly--in a mistake common among education reformers--Abernathy calls the former "advantaged" students and the latter "disadvantaged" students, though of course many students from wealthy families do horribly in school while many poor students excel.)

"If properly implemented and sufficiently funded," writes Franklin, "NCLB holds the promise of being one of the great liberal reforms in the history of U.S. education." Earlier reforms, such as mandated busing or the Americans with Disabilities Act, were "about equality of opportunity; NCLB aims to provide equality of outcomes. This is a very radical and ambitious goal."

In their indispensable primer on NCLB, Frederick Hess and Michael Petrilli make the same point, quoting the education adviser to John Kerry: "At its heart, this is the sort of law liberals once dreamed about. .  .  . The law requires a form of affirmative action: States must show that minority and poor students are achieving proficiency like every one else, or else provide remedies targeted to the schools those students attend."

The goal of forcing equality in performance would have been beyond the wildest dreams of the most starry-eyed reformers back in 1965, when the federal bureaucracy made its first great lunge at local schools. The Elementary and Secondary Education Act was a cornerstone of Lyndon Johnson's Great Society and the forerunner of NCLB. The motive behind the 1965 act was, as reformers' motives always are, beyond criticism: A desire to improve schools in poor neighborhoods.

"Our society will not rest until every young mind is set free to scan the farther reaches of thought and imagination," said LBJ, and American schools have been declining ever since. Johnson's overwrought rhetoric might sound familiar, too: The same extravagance and grandiosity would reappear in Bush's education speeches 40 years later. The difference is that Bush tried to write his into law.

To close the achievement gap, NCLB requires that every teacher in America will be "highly qualified" and that every student will be "proficient" in reading and math by the 2013-14 school year--a 100 percent success rate that no government program has ever reached. Johnson's bill mostly left good schools alone, while showering poor schools with money in hopes they might become good schools. NCLB ropes all schools together, entangling successful schools in the same bureaucratic regime designed for schools where most students aren't succeeding.

Schools whose principals and teachers have set high expectations and standards will face a federal funding formula that requires much less of them. In its practical application, as Abernathy notes, NCLB is a classic exercise in leveling--a way of slowing the caravan, so to speak, to keep the slowest wagons from falling further behind.

That's the intent, anyway, though how effective it will be is uncertain--and at the moment unknowable. The statistics generated by the law are impenetrable to all but the bureaucrats themselves. NCLB, for example, makes a fetish of racial classification; it is, indeed, the most explicitly racialist piece of legislation since the fall of Jim Crow. (The principle of colorblindness is another nicety that Big Government Conservatives have no patience for.) Students in every school are zippered-up into eight different categories, five having to do with race and ethnicity, three with income and the ability to speak English. If students in any one of these categories fail to perform to the Department of Education's demands, the entire school faces sanction. Over time the sanctions grow increasingly severe. After a few years, the Education Department nationalizes the school, dictating budgets, personnel policies, and hiring decisions.

By Abernathy's reckoning, there are 36 possible ways in which an individual school or district can earn failing marks and thus find itself an object of special attention from Washington. What happens to well-performing students in those schools, who will see resources diverted or dry up altogether, is apparently a matter of indifference--another unintended consequence.

The problem of leveling doesn't trouble Abernathy too much. He dwells, instead, on the more conventional objections made by reformers who think NCLB doesn't go far enough in nationalizing local schools. In a nod to federalism that seems quaint in retrospect, NCLB allowed the states to define "proficiency" and "highly qualified." Abernathy worries that the lack of a single standard makes cross-state comparisons, and even school-to-school comparisons, difficult and sometimes impossible. It also opens statistical loopholes that allow individual schools, school districts, and entire states to create the impression that they're meeting NCLB goals when they're not.

To satisfy these objections, federal policymakers would have to make NCLB even more intrusive than it is. And sure enough, some BGCs have begun calling for the Education Department to impose national standardized tests fitted to a national curriculum in reading and math. The step is already implicit in the logic of NCLB. In fact, this final sweeping-away of the vestiges of local control would probably be inevitable, except that some supporters of NCLB have come to dislike the very idea of standardized tests--the primary means of establishing the "accountability" that Big Government Conservatives say lies at the heart of the law.

Standardized tests are one-size-fits-all, say the critics; clumsy and crude, tests can never adequately measure student achievement. The worry, says Abernathy, is that teachers, hamstrung by NCLB, are smothering their marvelous creativity and resigning themselves to "teaching to the test." This is another way of saying that standardized tests, at least in theory, require teachers in the classroom to forgo therapeutic exercises in self-expression and to transmit concrete information that a child can absorb, entertain, manipulate, and repeat. In an earlier age, the word for this process was "teaching." Now it is a threat to our educators' self-image--indeed, their way of life.

"In their single-minded desire to improve test scores," Abernathy writes, "schools and teachers [may] damage the breadth and quality of their curriculum." Which assumes, of course, that their curriculum actually had breadth and quality.

Abernathy's anti-testing bias is widely shared, even, as he shows, among supporters of NCLB. As a philosophical proposition, the bias leads sooner or later to a kind of cul de sac of postmodern relativism: Who's to say, really, what a good education is? "So many factors," Abernathy writes, "contribute to and confound what ultimately happens at the interface between a student's mind and the school's products that policymakers should think very carefully about how to measure 'educational quality.'"

Note the ironical quotation marks around those last two words, as though the idea of educational quality was some sort of fuddy-duddyism, like "motorcar," that no up-to-date person would use. "Can we ever really know if a child's education is good?" he asks.

Leave aside whether education can really be reformed by people who invent phrases like "the interface between a student's mind and the school's product." Abernathy's question represents a potentially fatal objection to NCLB, coming as it does from a vigorous supporter of the law. It strikes directly at the case that BGCs have made for their education reform, which, after all, aims over the next seven years to ensure that the education that every student receives is good--provably and objectively good, without ironical quote marks.

But Abernathy does give us a sense of how the vast new powers that NCLB has handed to functionaries in Washington will be used, and will not be used, when the Republican functionaries are replaced by Democratic functionaries--when supervision of the Department of Education is given over, as it will be inevitably, to those who dislike the BGC emphasis on standardized tests and "accountability."

Meet, for instance, Howard Good, an education activist, former president of his local school board, journalism professor with the State University of New York, and a frequent contributor to American School Board Journal, Education Week, and Teacher Magazine. I have no idea whether Good would ever make the trek to Washington to serve as a political appointee in President Obama's Department of Education, but people who think just like him will, and his Mis-Education in Schools: Beyond the Slogans and Double-Talk (his fifth book on education) exquisitely displays the turn of mind that we can expect soon to see in the upper reaches of the federal educational establishment.

Like Abernathy, Good defines education loosely. Education means pretty much whatever anybody wants it to mean--and who are you, or anybody else, to disagree? He writes:

My mom was my first teacher. The stuff she taught me--how to tie my shoes, cook an omelet, read for pleasure, speak my mind--has proved more useful and durable than most of what I learned in school. .  .  . Schools today wouldn't dare adopt this as their educational agenda, even if it meant happier kids and a better world. Why? Student tests might suffer.

His reference to tests is meant to be witheringly ironic. About NCLB itself Good is ambivalent--like the BGCs, he doesn't object in principle to federal interference with local schools, as long as people like him are doing the interfering, and the more money spent, the better--but he's outraged at all this talk of tests. He calls NCLB the "Leave No Child Untested Act." Already, he writes, "the stratified society that exists outside schools has been replicated within our schools."

Testing can only make the inequality worse. This, he says, is an offense against the egalitarian impulse that should animate the public schools. He approvingly quotes a professional educator: "Let's put all our children in the same boat, then work together to raise the level of the river." Good seems not to understand how deeply this egalitarianism is built into NCLB; it is, in fact, the bill's premise and object. But Good wants to go a step further, toward the obliteration of any classroom distinctions at all.

"At the very least," he writes, "let's abandon the notion that children who learn on a different schedule are 'Special' or 'Regular'--edspeak for 'inferior.' They aren't; no child who's loved by someone else ever is."

This last sentence--so precious, so heartwarming, so thoroughly beside the point--gives you a sense of Good's command of logic. As you read his thoughts about schools teaching "what truly counts in life," in contrast to those Neanderthals who insist on teaching facts and conveying information, you can easily imagine his manuscript as it arrived at his publisher's office, with the little doodles of unicorns and rainbows up and down the margins in purple ink. What's interesting is that so many of his objections to modern schooling are made by right-wingers, too. Good is correct that social studies curriculums are often timid and wandering. Many schools are overformalized and overregulated, requiring (for example) student athletes to sign "contracts" not to smoke or use drugs rather than just insisting they not smoke or use drugs. Administrators are often petty and overweening. The emphasis on elite sports teams is, as he says, an expensive distraction from a school's primary purpose.

His fixes, however, are another matter. He thinks schools should more or less abandon efforts to discourage drug use. He worries that the dissatisfaction with mushy social studies might lead to a return of "teachers who emphasize rote memorization of facts and textbooks that contain dry outlines of procedures (how a bill becomes law and so forth)." Instead, he longs for teachers who teach "tolerance for ambiguity and an aversion to either/or solutions." Perhaps, he says, schoolkids could learn about democracy by voting on which books to read during storytime as a way of "modeling" the responsibilities of citizenship. It sure beats learning how some boring old bill becomes some stupid law.

Every school district has a kibitzing parent like Howard Good; some school districts are overrun with Howard Goods. I don't envy the traditionalist parent who has to face him at the PTO meeting. But that doesn't mean that such culture war disputes will be any more tolerable, or resolvable, when they are nationalized, as NCLB aims to do. Scott Franklin Abernathy notes that among the act's secondary provisions are a host of desirables inserted by big-government Republicans during their season of triumph, back in 2001-02: With federal funds as a cudgel, NCLB forces local schools to ensure "constitutionally protected prayer," open their classrooms to Boy Scout meetings, and provide student data to military recruiters upon request. One BGC-sponsored "sense of the Senate" resolution even mandated "intellectual diversity" among the teachers of any school receiving federal aid.

With such busybody precedents enshrined in the NCLB, Howard Good and his allies will be unstoppable when they at last regain power in Washington. Mandatory omelet-making, maybe? (My friends, we can no longer afford to send this nation's most precious asset--our children--into the global economy ignorant of how to make a nice, fluffy, three-egg .  .  . ) In the hands of Democrats, no less than in the hands of the BGCs, the tangle of restrictions on local schools will only grow thicker and tighter--at once more frivolous and more burdensome.

How to disentangle the Gordian knot tied by NCLB and its reformers? This, lucky for us, is the question that Myron Lieberman addresses in The Educational Morass: Overcoming the Stalemate in American Education. A former public school teacher and for many years an official with the American Federation of Teachers, Lieberman has written the bravest, most bracing book about education in years. He strips NCLB and the accumulated daydreams of education reform down to their bare premises and, with discomfiting logic, tips them over, one by one. His book will almost certainly be ignored.

Lieberman reminds us of truths that have been repeatedly demonstrated, statistically and otherwise, since 1965: There is no correlation between how much the government spends on schools and how much students learn; meanwhile, of course, the Bush administration boasts that it has increased federal education spending by more than 40 percent and Democratic critics complain that NCLB hasn't been "fully funded."

As for the achievement gap, the principal target of NCLB: No research has ever established that the quality of individual schools is a cause of the gap in test scores among groups of students--especially compared with the other facts in a student's life, such as the safety of his neighborhood, the income of his family, the presence of books in his home, the amount of television he's allowed to watch, or whether he's being raised by a mother and a father: facts, every one of them, beyond the manipulation of any education reformer.

"The evidence that the formal school is not likely to compensate for negative nonschool factors is quite strong," Lieberman writes in his (unfortunately backwards) prose. "A major finding from the research literature is that schools and school quality contribute little to the emergence of test score gaps among children."

Lieberman asks reformers in Washington, sometimes politely, to consider the practical consequences of the reforms they hope to impose on schools. How, precisely, would each reform work? Every good Big Government Conservative, of course, wants schools to hire better teachers, for example--and bravely, unflinchingly, the BGC will acknowledge that this will require paying the teachers more. At the same time, also of course, every BGC wants smaller class sizes, too.

Well, says Lieberman, let's think this through. If we make classes smaller, we'll have to hire more teachers. If we have to hire more teachers, we'll have to expand the pool from which new teachers are hired. If we expand the pool, we're likely to see a drop in the quality of applicants and hires, which will defeat our goal of hiring better teachers. And if we do enlarge the teacher workforce, we'll make any hoped-for increase in teacher pay much less affordable and, hence, less likely--especially when the pay is matched with an increase in benefits, which routinely account for 20 percent of a teacher's compensation. And better teachers are unlikely to materialize without an increase in pay.

Lieberman dares to run the numbers, and they are daunting. The Teaching Commission, yet another blue-ribbon panel led by businessmen dedicated to improving public education, has proposed a salary increase for teachers nationwide of 10 percent--as much as 30 percent for teachers who are identified (in some unnamed fashion) as the most effective in the classroom. The cost, Lieberman reckons, would be $33.6 billion annually. With school districts funneling an additional $5,600 to $16,800 to individual teachers, the pay raise would have several effects. It would increase pressure to enlarge class size--even though the reformers who demand higher teacher pay also demand smaller classes. And because the unions who represent teachers also represent support personnel, pressure would intensify for a 10 to 30 percent raise in their salaries as well, doubling or tripling the expense of an increase in teacher pay.

Then, too, the highest paid teachers would soon enough find themselves better compensated than low-level management--principals and department chairs--making it less likely that the most talented teachers will take these demanding jobs. And because the base pensions of most teachers is computed on the salaries of the final three years of their careers, a large but incremental boost in pay would lead to fewer retirements, thus slowing the infusion of new talent that the reformers say is so desperately needed. And so on and so on and so on.

To their credit, some BGCs understand some of the practical difficulties in an across-the-board increase in teacher pay. They advocate "merit pay" instead--rewarding teachers for how well they teach. Merit pay especially flutters the hearts of BGCs who don't consider how their ideas might work when they collide with the real world. Leave aside the fact that, in many countries whose students outperform the United States, merit pay for teachers is not only discouraged but outlawed. Lieberman asks the practical questions about how merit pay would work here.

Who, for example, will choose which teachers receive merit pay increases? "The majority of principals," he says, in a voice heavy with experience, "will not want the assignment." Teachers who are passed over will challenge the assessments, to put it mildly, subjecting whoever made the decisions to a degree of scrutiny that few professionals, in whatever field, would welcome. Fair and accurate assessments of how well a teacher does his job would require considerable hours spent watching him in action, in the classroom--a distraction for principals and administrators, who oversee dozens and sometimes hundreds of teachers, that would be prohibitively expensive, both in time and money.

None of this is to say that such reforms are worthless or even necessarily unworkable: Lieberman himself endorses higher pay scales and school vouchers, as well as other ideas he's come up with himself. It's merely an acknowledgment that the reforms are endlessly complicated, and that the vast majority of their consequences are likely to be unintended. In the end, Lieberman says, how to close the "achievement gap" with merit pay, or charter schools, or smaller class size, or more testing, or any other reform encouraged by NCLB, remains an "unresolved quandary." And if the quandary is to be resolved, it will be done according to that hoary idea of subsidiarity: at the local level, where reforms can be enacted, monitored, and overseen--and rejected, too, if that's the wish of the parents and teachers themselves.

This idea of an "unresolved quandary" may be the most radical notion in all the current crop of education books. Imagine an education reformer admitting ignorance! The sentiment is utterly alien to the spirit of Big Government Conservatism, where faith in the power of reformers to alter institutions however they desire, with the ultimate goal of altering human behavior in pleasing ways, is almost limitless. Unresolved quandaries aren't acknowledged because they slow the march of progress.

Not long ago I mentioned to Laurie Verge, at the Surratt House Museum in Maryland, that Congress had discovered that some schools had cut back on teaching history, as an unintended consequence of NCLB. So two senators, Lamar Alexander and Edward Kennedy, have proposed expanding the bill to require testing in American history, too--just as it now requires testing in reading and math, which of course led some schools to cut back on teaching history. True to the spirit of Big Government, whether embodied by liberals or conservatives, the senators will solve the problems created by NCLB's intrusiveness by making NCLB more intrusive. And then, I told her, maybe the busloads of kids will come pouring back to the Surratt House. Laurie sounded skeptical. "You'd think they'd just let people down here decide for themselves," she said.

Andrew Ferguson, a senior editor at THE WEEKLY STANDARD, is the author, most recently, of Land of Lincoln: Adventures in Abe's America.



© Copyright 2007, News Corporation, Weekly Standard, All Rights Reserved.

LA Times: Schools can't be colorblind

Schools can't be colorblind

Narrowing the achievement gap in schools requires acknowledging race, not ignoring it.

The achievement gap between African American and Latino students and their white peers is stark and persistent. It has existed for decades, and it's growing more pronounced. The data refute what would be reassuring explanations. The gaps in reading and math test scores are not due to income disparities, nor are they attributable to parents' educational levels. The simple fact is that most black and brown children do not do as well in school as most whites.

Full story: http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/la-ed-gap16sep16,0,3799936.story?coll=la-opinion-leftrail

Washington Post article on merit pay

Following Christine's lead, WaPo runs a front page article on the increasing support for merit pay and some DC school's already using it. Merit pay's been a growing issue for a while, and could play a big role in NCLB re-authorization.

A movement gaining momentum in Congress and some school systems in the Washington region and beyond would boost pay for exceptional teachers in high-poverty schools, a departure from salary schedules based on seniority and professional degrees that have kept pay in lockstep for decades.

Lawmakers are debating this month whether to authorize federal grants through a revision of the No Child Left Behind law for bonuses of as much as $12,500 a year for outstanding teachers in schools that serve low-income areas.

National teachers unions denounce the proposal for "performance pay," saying it would undermine their ability to negotiate contracts and would be based in part on what they consider an unfair and unreliable measure: student test scores.

Debate over the proposal has exposed unusual fissures between the influential unions and longtime Democratic allies. Some education experts say the unions are out of step with parents and voters who support the business-oriented idea of providing financial incentives for excellent work.

Opinion pieces in USA Today on merit pay

Our view on education: Merit pay for teachers begins to earn high grades
Experiments prove it works, as long as it’s lucrative and fair.

Three years ago, teachers and other employees at Meadowcliff Elementary in southwest Little Rock were offered pay bonuses for boosting test scores. Shortly after that, principal Karen Carter noticed some unusual events.

Increasingly, cafeteria workers sat with students to chat about school work. Even more startling, the janitor began taking his breaks in the cafeteria reading a book, just to serve as a role model.

And when test scores arrived at the end of the year showing improvement, Carter heard whoops of joy from teachers whose bonuses would help pay off their college bills. The better each of their students did, the bigger their bonuses. The janitor and other support staff were rewarded for the school's overall gains.

Such is the power of "merit pay," a concept long opposed by teachers and their unions.

In many ways, their concern is understandable. Who wants a merit-pay system if principals prone to playing favorites hand out the bonuses? Moreover, how do you separate what Mrs. Jones does in one classroom with what Mr. Smith does next door?

But times have changed. Testing is more sophisticated, and most states have learning standards to complement the testing.

What has changed most are public attitudes. That was heard clearly in 2005, when Denver voters approved a $25 million-a-year tax hike to pay teachers. Voters agreed to raise their own taxes. The catch: Pay boosts were to be based on merit.

The voter sentiment in Denver has proved contagious; other merit pay experiments have broken out in Tennessee, Florida and elsewhere. Many teachers embrace the idea, aware that this is the only way to push teachers' salaries back into the respectable range.

Oddly, there's one group dragging its heels here, the National Education Association, the nation's largest teachers' union. Earlier this week, NEA President Reg Weaver clashed loudly with Rep. George Miller, D-Calif., the chairman of the House education committee, about Miller's federally sponsored merit-pay proposal.

Objecting to merit pay today amounts to opposing a proven tool for making teachers more effective.

Some of the best research on this movement is likely to emerge from Vanderbilt University's new federally sponsored National Center on Performance Incentives. There, researchers set up medical-style control groups of teachers to answer the question: Does merit pay boost student performance?

The center's director, Matthew Springer, offers good advice to schools setting up merit pay programs, such as making the incentives lucrative. (At Meadowcliff, where a private funder backed the experiment, teachers received bonuses ranging from $1,100 to $5,100 this year, depending on individual test score gains. Support staffers got from $500 to $2,000.)

Another key element is that teachers believe that the system is fair. In Denver, the program gave teachers several pathways to winning bonuses.

Can it work?

At Meadowcliff, a poor urban school, tests scores rose about seven percentage points compared with similar schools lacking merit pay, says University of Arkansas professor Gary Ritter. Though it's too soon to tell whether the gains can be sustained over time, it's not too soon to declare that merit pay has earned a chance to succeed.

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Opposing view: Reject federal pay mandates
All teachers deserve competitive salaries, better working conditions.
By Reg Weaver

The No Child Left Behind Act expires this year, and the National Education Association has proposed positive changes in the law. These include expanding early childhood education, smaller classes and extra help for children who need it. But these priorities have been overshadowed by a proposed federal mandate that would base teacher pay on student test scores.

Districts in dozens of states are experimenting with plans that compensate teachers partly based on test results. Local teachers unions have helped create such programs in Denver, Minneapolis and Columbus, Ohio.

What sets these plans apart from the draft language released from the House Education and Labor Committee is that each of them was negotiated and agreed to at the local level. At a time when parents, state legislatures and many others are questioning the No Child Left Behind Act's obsessive focus on high-stakes testing, it would be a mistake to raise the stakes on standardized tests even higher and discourage good teachers from working in schools with high numbers of struggling students.

If we truly want to improve the quality of teachers in the classroom through compensation, let's pay teachers for the knowledge and skills they gain, provide incentives to teach in hard-to-staff schools, and offer salaries competitive with other professions that require a college degree.

In a 2006 MetLife survey, one in four teachers who plan to leave their jobs within the next five years cited low salaries and a lack of control over their own work for their decision. They also reported being frustrated by principals who did not ask for their suggestions and did not treat them with respect.

Federal mandates that tie compensation to test scores can't substitute for a working environment high on trust and meaningful work. And it can't replace a perverse pay scale where teacher wages have fallen 12% since 1993 compared with workers with similar education and skills.

We should invest precious federal dollars in giving all teachers competitive salaries, quality professional development and better working conditions. Too often, it is simpler to tinker with bonuses than to exercise the political will necessary to reform teacher quality at its core.

Reg Weaver is president of the National Education Association.

Washington Times editorial - "The good and bad of NCLB"

Editorial
The good and bad of NCLB

As Congress debates the complexities of reauthorizing the No Child Left Behind Act, a proposal from Rep. George Miller, California Democrat, runs the risk of watering down the intent and spirit of the program, which both Republicans and Democrats agree should be renewed before its expiration Sept. 30.

While certainly not without serious shortcomings, NCLB maintains an admirable goal of bringing all K-12 students to proficiency in math and reading by 2014. Unfortunately, a proposal from Mr. Miller and his fellow Democrats would muddy the waters of these standardized measures of student progress by throwing non-academic factors into the mix.

Including such non-academic factors as graduation rates and the availability of Advanced Placement courses, while undoubtedly important elements of a child's education, convolutes the program's premise: ensuring our children are literate and can perform basic math computations.

The proposal from Mr. Miller, chairman of the House education panel, would also result in many failing schools escaping needed overhaul and monitoring. Instead of forcing them to address academic failings, it gives them the option of garnishing their lack of substance with extracurricular window dressings to eke past federal standards.

Press reports indicate Rep. Carol McCarthy, New York Democrat, hopes to insert into NCLB a laughable proposal — though a somber waste of taxpayer money if enacted — that would divert taxpayer dollars for state grants to schools that try to stop bullying on their campuses. Not only is this idea an absurd expansion of the nanny state that Democrats love to peddle, it also takes responsibility away from parents, not government bureaucrats, who should be the ones instilling the values of cooperation and civility in their children.

Members on both sides of the aisle considering the revamping of NCLB would do well to look at the success of D.C., where a voucher program has allowed thousands of students to escape failing public schools for private or charter schools under grants and laws authorized by Congress. Studies have indicated parents are happy with the program, their children are performing better and student bodies are more diverse and integrated because of it.

A bill introduced by Rep. Buck McKeon of California, the ranking Republican on the House education panel, would give children in low-performing schools up to $4,000 to leave a failing school and enroll in a private school of their choice. The measure rightfully has been endorsed by Education Secretary Margaret Spellings.

Amid all the din surrounding NCLB, we urge lawmakers to select the best of the proposals and shun the frivolous and superfluous. Our children deserve it.

WaPo: Leaving No Child Behind

Leaving No Child Behind
Monday, September 10, 2007; A15
With House hearings on the reauthorization of the No Child Left Behind Act beginning today, The Post asked educators, lawmakers and others for their views of the legislation and what might improve it.
Includes letters from:
Spellings
Reg Weaver
Kat Haycock
Fairfax Super
Mayor Bloomberg
George Miller
2005 Teacher of the Year
2007 Teacher of the Year
KIPP Board Member

EdWee: Shortcomings Noted for State Exit Exams

Though more than half the nation’s public high school students must pass exit exams to graduate, high scores on the tests don’t necessarily translate into adequate preparation for college or work, concludes a report by the Center on Education Policy.

Full Story: http://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2007/09/12/03report-1.h27.html

EdWeek: High-Achieving Students From Lower-Income Families Fall Behind, Study Finds

The educational accountability movement’s keen focus on bringing all students to academic proficiency risks leaving behind a group of particularly promising students: high-achieving children from lower-income families, a report released today contends.

The study analyzes national data to track the school performance of about 3.4 million K-12 children who come from households with incomes below the national median but score in the top quartile on nationally normed tests. It finds that they start school with weaker academic skills and are less likely to flourish over the years in school than their peers from better-off families.

Full story: http://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2007/09/10/03poor_web.h27.html

EdWeek: Experts Eye Solutions to ‘4th Grade Slump’

For the first few years of school, struggling readers can usually get by. The material is simple, the lessons are repeated often, and intensive remedial help is common.

But for some of those pupils, reading ability starts a dramatic downhill slide right around 4th grade. While good readers are sponges for new words and grammar rules, slower readers are left further and further behind. Some never catch up.

Researchers have called the phenomenon the “4th grade slump,” because it tends to occur when reading instruction shifts from basic decoding and word recognition to development of fluency and comprehension.

But questions remain. If there is a slump, what is causing it? And can children at risk of “slumping” be identified much earlier than they typically are, and their problems eased or eliminated?

The National Institutes of Health has awarded $30 million over the next five years to research centers devoted to studying the issue, along with other questions related to reading disabilities. The four centers will delve into the learning process in children and adolescents to find out what goes wrong for some young readers, and determine ways to address the problems when they develop.

Full Story: http://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2007/09/12/03slump.h27.html

Washington Times - "Teachers unions rip changes to education act"

Teachers unions rip changes to education act
By Amy Fagan
September 11, 2007

Leaders of the nation's teachers unions yesterday told lawmakers that Congress is not doing enough to loosen the tough requirements set by the No Child Left Behind Act.

The leaders of the National Education Association (NEA) and the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) were among representatives from more than 40 civil rights, business and education groups who testified before the House Education and Labor Committee about a bipartisan draft proposal of changes to the law.

Committee Chairman George Miller, California Democrat, and Rep. Howard P. "Buck" McKeon of California, the top Republican on the panel, created the draft. The law is up for renewal this year.

NEA President Reg Weaver said the draft "makes only minor tweaks in the divisive and dysfunctional law" and that his 3.2-million-member group opposes the proposals.
AFT Executive Vice President Antonia Cortese said the draft does not give enough flexibility to teachers.

"We have a long way to go," she said.

Mr. Miller is trying to strike a middle ground between teachers unions and education groups that want to relax the testing and tracking requirements and the business groups and the administration that generally hope to keep in place much of the same level of accountability.

Mr. Miller and Mr. Weaver had a testy exchange yesterday over a provision in the draft that encourages merit pay for teachers, which the NEA opposes. Mr. Miller said the NEA supported the same language in past legislation, but Mr. Weaver said his group did not, according to the Associated Press.

"You can dance around all you want. You approved the language," the AP reported Mr. Miller as saying.

The 2002 law requires states to test students in reading and math and track their annual progress. It holds schools accountable if their students don't make adequate yearly progress. Mr. Miller's draft would relax the requirements, but not enough to suit the NEA.

Education Secretary Margaret Spellings is skeptical of a draft provision that would give states more time to test students who are learning English in their native language.

The law allows states to test English language learners in their native language for three years, with the possibility of an additional two years on a case-by-case basis. The draft proposal would extend that to five years, with the possibility of the two-year extension.

"That's simply too long," Mrs. Spellings wrote last week in a letter to Mr. Miller. "This would allow a third-grade student to reach the tenth grade before ever being tested in English."

The draft proposal also would require states with 10 percent of English language learners who share the same language to develop native language tests for that group and provide extra funding for it.

Peter A. Zamora, attorney for the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund, supports the provisions.

He said "bad politics" surround the English-language debate but that if children are learning English, there is no harm if they are tested in their native language to accurately determine their understanding of subject matter.

"Native-language assessments are not a threat to English-language acquisition," he said.
He said only a small percentage of English language learners would fall under the extension, mostly recently arrived immigrants or those in dual-language programs. He said most English language learners are U.S. citizens.

WaPo: Area Schools' Success Obscures Lingering Racial SAT Gap

WaPo had a front page Monday article on racial differences being obscured in overall results particularly related to SAT scores. We see the same thing in NAEP. Oh Simpson't Paradox... :-)

Area Schools' Success Obscures Lingering Racial SAT Gap
By Daniel de ViseWashington Post Staff WriterMonday, September 10, 2007; A01

SAT scores at the Washington region's top high schools show an achievement gap between blacks and the rest of the student population -- a gap that is often masked by the overall performance of the schools.

White students in the spring graduating class of Walt Whitman High School in Bethesda -- the top performer in Montgomery County -- averaged 1893 out of a possible 2400 points on the SAT. The 13 black students tested averaged 1578, more than 300 points lower.

At Yorktown, Arlington County's leader, white students averaged 1804 on the SAT; black students averaged 1470. Black students at Severna Park High, the top performer in Anne Arundel County, averaged 1336, while white students' average was 1646.


full story...

USA Today - "Opposing view: NCLB fails our schools"

Opposing view: NCLB fails our schools
Get rid of the law; improve teacher pay, preschool programs.
By Bill Richardson

I have a one-point plan for No Child Left Behind: Scrap it.

NCLB has failed. It has failed our schools, it has failed our teachers and it has failed our children.
The Bush administration claims victories, but upon closer scrutiny it becomes clear that the White House is simply dressing up ugly data with fancy political spin. Far from leaving no child behind, President Bush seems to have left reality behind.

Just look at the facts. The National Assessment of Educational Progress shows a slight narrowing of the racial achievement gap over the past three years. This narrowing, however, is due to a decline in overall reading scores, not to improvements in minority student performance.

This is not progress.

Review the figures, and you will see that our schools are not failing NCLB; the program is failing our schools. In some grades, reading and math scores have actually declined for Hispanics, African-Americans and others. The current pass-fail rating system is worse than meaningless — it's counter-productive. If a school needs help, we should help that school. We shouldn't punish it, as NCLB mandates.

We need to move beyond the empty rhetoric of No Child Left Behind. We must provide our public schools with what the National Education Association refers to as the three R's — Responsibility, Respect and Resources.

The key to this improvement is respecting teachers. I signed a law in New Mexico that pays teachers a professional salary. As president, I will fight for national average starting pay for teachers of at least $40,000 a year.

Teacher salaries are just the beginning. Quality pre-K programs allow children to show up in first grade ready to learn. These programs must be available to all children.

Finally, we need strong academic standards aligned with the needs of today's workforce. America's schools were designed for the 20th century economy — this is no longer sufficient. Our children need to graduate ready to engage with the New Economy, not the old one.

True education reform requires more than a set of unfunded mandates and a list of failing schools. It requires a vision for success, the state and federal funding to match, and the experience to bring real reform to America's failing schools.

Bill Richardson is the governor of New Mexico. He is seeking the Democratic Party's nomination for president.

USA Today - "Our view on education: Five ways to improve No Child Left Behind"

Our view on education: Five ways to improve No Child Left Behind
Accountability law has flaws, but it should be mended, not ended.

The 5-year-old No Child Left Behind law is up for renewal this month, and its fate is uncertain despite notable success.

President Bush's signature domestic achievement has brought accountability to school districts that for decades shamefully buried their failures in grossly understated dropout rates and vastly overstated academic achievement. Scores of inner-city schools have improved dramatically.

But the law is under fire from the left (teachers' unions dislike its rigidity), from the right (conservatives dislike federal meddling in local education) and from critics across the spectrum who dislike the annual testing designed to ensure that all students are learning.

The law does have flaws. Too many schools, for instance, are ensnared in its needs-improvement lists. The appropriate response, however, isn't to scrap the whole act or to water down its emphasis on reading and math. Here are five ways to improve NCLB without undermining its promise:

* Provide new options for students in failing schools. The current choices for children trapped in faltering schools — free tutoring and the opportunity to transfer — are nearly useless. The quality of free tutoring has proven to be erratic. And in cities such as Cleveland or Washington, what good is a transfer option if no high-performing schools are available nearby? What would work is the opportunity to transfer across school district lines from a persistently failing school to a successful school in a neighboring district.

* Make sure good teachers stay in schools that need help. Many districts allow their toughest schools to be staffed by the newest, lowest paid teachers and let more experienced teachers transfer to better schools. One way to reverse that would be to demand that federal dollars set aside for poor children actually get spent on those children. That means offering substantial bonuses to teach in struggling schools and exposing the fatter payrolls in better-off schools.

* Get serious about turning around failing schools. Schools that fail to make adequate progress for more than five straight years — there are about 1,300 of them nationally — are allowed to spin their wheels while making only cosmetic changes. Fixing those schools requires states (with federal help) to develop school turnaround teams of administrators and teachers that move into troubled schools until they are fixed.

* Allow schools to trade time for quality. The law says all students need to be at grade level by 2014. That's an admirable goal, but it has all the reality of Lake Wobegon, Garrison Keillor's fictional town where all the children are above average. Since pushing back the goal is inevitable, it should be possible to win some trade-offs in the process. States such as Mississippi, which set embarrassingly low standards, could be given extra time in return for raising them.

* Narrow the hit list. By naming thousands of schools to need-improvement lists rather than hundreds, the law has been more righteous than popular. To survive, it needs broader support. Schools that are generally OK deserve flexibility. They especially need to stay off any list that allows them to be carelessly labeled as failing schools.

By testing everyone, and breaking out the scores by race and income levels, No Child Left Behind has revealed unacceptable gaps in the ways children in the USA are educated. Whether it can close those gaps is yet to be determined. This much is sure: The answer will never be known if the law is snuffed out before the age of 6.