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Mitch Daniels’ Ambitious Education Reforms
Is the school voucher plan just signed into law by Indiana Gov. Mitch Daniels going to improve education in his state? It’s an ambitious experiment:
The plan is based on a sliding income scale, with families of four making more than $60,000 qualifying for some level of scholarship if they switch from public to private schools… Other voucher systems across the country are limited to lower-income households, children with special needs or those in failing schools. Indiana’s program would be open to a much larger pool of students, including those already in excellent schools… within three years, there will be no limit on the number of children who could enroll.
I have no idea whether or not this is going to work. But I am thrilled that Indiana is trying it. Nationwide, 40 percent of registered voters and almost half of parents with school-aged children favor this policy, and it is one of the few education reform ideas consistently advanced by one of our two political parties. More importantly, two-thirds of Hoosiers supported the idea in a January poll.
This is as good as it gets if you believe that states should sometimes function as laboratories of democracy. Indiana voters get what they want, and the rest of us benefit from seeing how it works out on a larger scale than has ever been tried before. It’s also heartening that Gov. Daniels is hedging his bets by trying to improve the public school system. His broader education agenda is outlined in this presentation, given at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington, D.C., on Wednesday.
SPECIAL NEEDS SCHOLARSHIPS: Myths and Facts about Wisconsin’s AB 110
Disability Rights Wisconsin (78K PDF), via a kind reader’s email:
Special interests in Washington DC have hired expensive lobbyists who also represent large corporate interests including, General Motors and Proctor & Gamble to try to pull the wool over the eyes ofparents ofchildren with disabilities. They allege that their interest is, “To advocate for parental options in education that empowers low and middle-income families to make choices in where they send their children to school.” (1) These high powered special interests have never approached Disability Rights Wisconsin or any other major Wisconsin disability group to learn from those of us who have been advocating for Wisconsin children with disabilities for over 30 years, to find out what really needs improvement Wisconsin’s special education system. Instead, they have set up a Facebook site which fails to tell the whole truth about the bill they promote.
This fact sheet tells the whole truth about AB 110 and its effort to dismantle special education as we know it and subsidize middle and upper income families who want to send their kids to private school ai taxpayer expense.
Myth# l-AB 110 allows parents the option to choose any other school they want their child to attend if they are unsatisfied with the special education being provided in their public school.
Fact-AB 110 has no requirement in it that forces any school to accept a child who has a special needs voucher.
Myth# 2-Since only children with Individualized Education Programs (IEPs) can receive a special needs scholarship, private schools who accept them must provide them with special education and implement the child’s IEP.
Facts-AB 110 makes no requirement that private schools which accept a special needs scholarship provide any special education or implement any IEP. In fact, AB II 0 does not even require that private schools which accept special needs scholarships have a single special education teacher or therapist on their staff!
Related: Wisconsin Public Hearing on Special Needs Scholarship.
Ravitch: Standardized Testing Undermines Teaching
Former Assistant Secretary of Education Diane Ravitch was once an early advocate of No Child Left Behind, school vouchers and charter schools.
In 2005, she wrote, “We should thank President George W. Bush and Congress for passing the No Child Left Behind Act. … All this attention and focus is paying off for younger students, who are reading and solving mathematics problems better than their parents’ generation.”
But four years later, Ravitch changed her mind.
“I came to the conclusion … that No Child Left Behind has turned into a timetable for the destruction of American public education,” she tells Fresh Air’s Terry Gross. “I had never imagined that the test would someday be turned into a blunt instrument to close schools — or to say whether teachers are good teachers or not — because I always knew children’s test scores are far more complicated than the way they’re being received today.”
Keep intact the mission of choice program
It was not easy for me to stand before the state Legislature’s Joint Finance Committee and threaten to withdraw my support from the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program, which I have supported for more than 20 years. But if lawmakers approve Gov. Scott Walker’s proposal to lift the income requirement that has maintained the program for children from low-income families, that is exactly what I will do.
The governor’s plan would dramatically change the program’s social justice mission and destroy its trailblazing legacy as the first and still one of the few in the nation that uses public dollars to help equalize the academic options for children from low-income and working-class families. I did not join this movement to subsidize families like mine, which may not be rich but have resources and, thus, options.
When I got into this battle in 1989, standardized test scores showed Milwaukee was failing to educate poor black children. That’s when state Rep. Annette Polly Williams courageously stepped forth to make sure that poor families were afforded some opportunity to choose schools in the private sector for their children. She shepherded the pioneering voucher program through the Legislature.
State tests give parents information
The recent release of two comprehensive data sets marked a milestone in the 21-year-old Milwaukee Parental Choice Program. With the availability of school-by-school test score data for the first time, as well as the fourth year of results from a longitudinal study comparing voucher students to Milwaukee Public Schools students, citizens now have access to more information about the choice program’s performance than ever before.
As has often been the case with this controversial program, however, the release of new information may only create additional grounds for debate on whether the program truly works. For example, while voucher opponents will point to test score data showing the program’s achievement average is less than that of MPS, supporters will cite new data from the longitudinal study indicating that students who stayed in the choice program throughout their four years of high school had a 94% graduation rate and were more likely to enroll in four-year college than MPS graduates.
Indeed, the release of these seemingly contradictory results is likely to spur a new battleground in Milwaukee’s long-running war over school choice: Do we need to be concerned about low test scores and low achievement growth if, in the end, the students enroll in college?
‘Insanity,’ ‘stupidity’ drive education reform efforts
A big crowd packed into the University of Wisconsin’s Memorial Union Theater on Tuesday night to hear education historian Diane Ravitch, considered one of the most influential scholars in the nation on schools.
In her talk, she ripped into Gov. Scott Walker’s budget, U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan’s Race to the Top, the obsession with measuring student progress through high stakes testing, privatization of education through charters and vouchers and No Child Left Behind legislation that is closing schools and punishing teachers.
Her gloomy assessment of the current passion for “fixing” education and vilifying teachers is particularly striking because Ravitch herself is a former proponent of school testing and accountability and an early supporter of the No Child Left Behind legislation.
Madison Teachers, Inc. 2011 Candidate Questionnaire
1MB PDF, via a kind reader’s email:. Mayoral Candidate Paul Soglin participated and I found this question and response interesting:
What strategies will you introduce to reduce the 6000+ families who move in and out of Madison Public School classrooms each year?
In the last three years more children opted out of the district than all previous years in the history of the district. That contributed to the increase of children from households below the poverty line rising to over 48% of the kids enrolled.
To stabilize our enrollment we need stable families and stable neighborhoods. This will require a collaborate effort between governments, like the city, the county and the school district, as well as the private sector and the non-profits. It means opening Madison’s economy to all families, providing stable housing, and building on the assets of our neighborhoods.
One decades old problem is the significant poverty in the Town of Madison. I would work with town officials, and city of Fitchburg officials to see if we could accelerate the annexation of the town so we could provide better services to area residents.
Ed Hughes and Marj Passman, both running unopposed responded to MTI’s questions via this pdf document.
MTIVOTERS 2011 School Board Election Questionnaire
Please respond to each ofthe following questions. If you wish to add/clarifY your response, please attach a separate sheet and designate your responses with the same number which appears in the questionnaire. Please deliver your responses to MTI Headquarters (821 Williamson Street) by, February 17, 2011.
General:
If the School Board finds it necessary to change school boundaries due to enrollment, what criteria would you, as a Board member, use to make such a judgement?
Ifthe School Board finds it necessary to close a school/schools due to economic reasons, what criteria would you, as a Board member, use to make such a judgement?
If the School Board finds it necessary, due to the State-imposed revenue controls, to make further budget cuts to the 2011-12 budget, what criteria would you, as a Board member, use to make such a judgement?
IdentifY specific MMSD programs and/or policies which you believe should to be modified, re-prioritized, or eliminated, and explain why.
What should the District do to reduce violence/assure that proper discipline and safety (of the learning and working environment) is maintained in our schools?
Do you agree that the health insurance provided to District employees should be mutually selected through collective bargaining?
_ _ YES _ _ NO Explain your concerns/proposed solutions relative to the District’s efforts to reduce the “achievement gap”.
Should planning time for teachers be increased? If yes, how could this be accomplished?
Given that the Wisconsin Association of School Boards rarely supports the interests of the Madison Metropolitan School District, do you support the District withdrawing from the W ASB? Please explain your rationale.
From what sources do you believe that public schools should be funded?
a. Do you support further increasing student fees? _ _ YES _ _ _ NO
Do you support the Wisconsin Alliance for Excellent Schools’ (WAES) initiative to raise sales tax by 1% to help fund schools?
_ _ YES _ _ NO
Do you support class sizes of 15 or less for all primary grades? _ _ YES _ _ NO
Do you support:
a. The use of public funds (vouchers) to enable parents to pay tuition with tax payers’ money for religious and private schools?
_ _ YES _ _ NO
b. The expansion of Charter schools within the Madison Metropolitan School District? _ _ YES _ _ NO
c. The Urban League’s proposed “Madison Preparatory Academy for Young Men” as a charter school which would not be an instrumentality of the District?
_ _ YES _ _ _ NO
Do you agree that the usual and customary work ofteachers, i.e. work ofthose in MTI’s teacher bargaining unit, should not be performed by others (sub-contracted)?
_ _ YES _ _ NO List MMSD staff and Board member(s) from whom you do or would seek advice.
Is your candidacy being promoted by any organization? _ _ YES _ _ NO
If yes, please name such organization(s). Have you ever been employed as a teacher? If yes, please describe why you left the teaching profession.
Do you support the inclusion model for including Title 1, EEN and ESL students in the regular education classroom? Why/why not?
What grouping practices do you advocate for talented and gifted (TAG) students?
Aside from limitations from lack ofadequate financial resources, what problems to you feel exist in meeting TAG students’ needs at present, and how would you propose to solve these problems?
The Board ofEducation has moved from the development ofpolicy to becoming involved in implementation of policy; i.e. matters usually reserved to administration. Some examples are when it:
a. Decided to hear parents’ complaints about a teacher’s tests and grading. b. Decided to modifY the administration’s decision about how a State Statute should be implemented.
Do you believe that the Board should delegate to administrators the implementation of policy which the Board has created?
_ _ YES _ _ NO
Do you believe that the Board should delegate to administrators the implementation of State Statutes? _ _ YES _ _ NO
Do you support the Board exploring further means to make their meetings more efficient? _ _ YES _ _ _ NO
Do you support a merit pay scheme being added to the Collective Bargaining Agreement _ _ YES _ _ _ NO
If yes, based on which performance indicators?
Do/did/will your children attend private or parochial schools during their K-12 years? Ifno, and ifyou have children, what schools have/will they attend(ed)?
_ _ YES _ _ NO If you responded “yes”, please explain why your child/children attended private parochial schools.
Legislation
Will you introduce and vote for a motion which would direct the Wisconsin Association of School Boards to request the introduction and promote the passage oflegislation to eliminate the revenue controls on public schools and return full budgeting authority to the School Board?
_ _ YES _ _ _ NO
Will you introduce and vote for a motion to direct the Wisconsin Association of School Boards to request the introduction and promote the passage oflegislation to prohibit the privatization ofpublic schools via the use oftuition tax credits (vouchers) to pay tuition with taxpayers’ money to private or religious schools?
_ _ YES _ _ NO
Will you introduce and vote for a motion to direct the Wisconsin Association of School Boards to request the introduction and promote the passage of legislation which will maintain or expand the benefit level of the Wisconsin Family and Medical Leave Act?
_ _ YES _ _ _ NO
Will you introduce and vote for a motion to direct the Wisconsin Association of School Boards to request the introduction and promote the passage oflegislation which will increase the retirement formula multiplier from 1.6% to 2% for teachers and general employees, i.e. equal that of protective employees?
_ _ YES _ _ NO
Will you introduce and vote for a motion to direct the Wisconsin Association of School Boards to request the introduction and promote the passage of legislation which will forbid restrictions to free and open collective bargaining for the selection ofinsurance for public employees (under Wis. Stat. 111.70), including the naming ofthe insurance carrier?
_ _ YES
_ _ NO
Will you introduce and vote for a motion to direct the Wisconsin Association of School Boards to request the introduction and promote the passage of legislation which will guarantee free and open collective bargaining regarding the establishment of the school calendar/school year, including when the school year begins?
_ _ YES _ _ NO
Will you introduce and vote for a motion to direct the Wisconsiu Association of School Boards to request the introduction and promote the passage of legislation to forbid the work of employees organized under Wis. Stat. 111.70 (collective bargaining statute) to be subcontracted?
_ _ YES _ _ NO
Will you introduce and vote for a motion to direct the Wisconsin Association of School Boards to seek passage of legislation which will require full State funding of any State-mandated program?
_ _ YES _ _ NO
Will you introduce and vote for a motion to direct the Wisconsin Association of School Boards to seek passage oflegislation which will provide adequate State funding of public education?
_ _ YES _ _ NO
Do you support a specific school finance reform plan (e.g., School Finance Network (SFN), Wisconsin Alliance for Excellent Schools (WAES), Andrews/Matthews Plan)?
Why/why not? Your Campaign:
Are you, or any of your campaign committee members, active in or supportive (past or present) of the “Get Real”, “ACE”, “Vote No for Change” or similar organizations?
Name ofCampaign Committee/Address/Phone #/Treasurer. List the members ofyour campaign committee.
Can parents effectively reclaim duties after funding cuts?
This is a boom time for parental choice in education. Frankly, that’s pretty scary to me.
I’m not talking about the school voucher program or charter schools, or other things like that.
I’m talking about the choices parents make in how they raise their children – how they can do (or not do) things that maximize the chances of their children becoming well-educated, well-balanced, constructive adults.
Since, say, the 1960s, expectations have grown for schools to take care of an increasing range of children’s needs. That goes for academics, of course, but also for social development, recreation, mentoring and, in many cases, providing nutrition, clothing and some basics of health care. That’s especially true for schools serving low-income kids, but you’d be surprised how often it is true in all schools.
I believe that one of the things we are seeing in the continuing chaos in Madison is that the tide is cresting for schools to play such roles. Teachers and staff members are simply going to be unable to do some of the things they’ve done to make up for what parents aren’t doing.
Rhee to lawmakers: Put kids first
Michelle Rhee, a national voice on education reform, told state lawmakers Thursday that charter schools and vouchers for low-income students have a place in public education, but in a blend with strong traditional schools.
“Vouchers in and of themselves are not the answer. Charters in and of themselves are not the answer,” said Rhee, who last fall stepped down as chancellor of Washington, D.C., schools after three years in which she was both lauded and derided for her overhaul of the school system.
“The answer in my mind is a really strong traditional public school system. That has very specific strategies to turn around failing schools [and incorporates both vouchers and charters].”
Rhee is on a national tour talking about education reform, particularly teacher evaluations and performance.
Governor Thrusts New Jersey to Fore on Education
Gov. Chris Christie’s tough-on-schools approach in a state that has zealously protected its public schools — and its teachers — has already put him at loggerheads with legislative leaders, unions and some parents in New Jersey.
And on Tuesday, the governor, a Republican, used his State of the State address to push his education agenda further by calling for an end to teacher tenure, on top of his support for merit pay for teachers based partly on student achievement and adoption of a voucherlike system that would give students in low-performing schools other options.
The proposals are not new; many have been suggested and tried in other school districts and other states. But with Mr. Christie’s growing national stature and his ability to attract news media and political attention through his blunt — and very public — persona, his latest salvo has placed New Jersey center stage in the increasingly rancorous national debate over education.
Rhee’s New Group Calls for Changes in Education
Michelle Rhee, who gained national attention as the chancellor of schools in Washington, D.C., called Monday for giving students government-funded vouchers to attend private schools, rating principals based on student achievement and getting rid of teacher tenure.
The release of the blueprint was the first formal action of Ms. Rhee’s new advocacy group, StudentsFirst, which she launched in December, after leaving her job heading D.C. schools in October. Ms. Rhee said she was in discussions with the governors of Florida, New Mexico, New Jersey, Tennessee, Nevada and Indiana to adopt part, if not all, of the agenda.
In an interview Monday, Ms. Rhee said she recognized her platform would be controversial and tough to implement but that her group could help push through the changes.
StudentsFirst has attracted 140,000 members, including nearly 20,000 teachers, and collected $1.4 million in contributions, Ms. Rhee said. She has said her group would donate to political campaigns and help school districts fund chosen strategies.
Florida Education Reforms
As Florida’s governor, Jeb Bush shepherded a series of bold yet divisive school proposals into law.
A-plus Accountability Plan • Requires that students be tested annually, sets A-F letter grades for the state’s schools and allows students in persistently low-performing schools to transfer to higher-performing public schools.
The law — approved about three years before the enactment of the federal No Child Left Behind Act — also originally allowed families of students in persistently struggling schools to obtain vouchers to attend private schools.
Private School Option: Offered students average payments of about $4,200. The option ended when it was deemed unconstitutional by the Florida Supreme Court in 2006. But other voucher-type programs adopted during Bush’s tenure remain, including one that provides vouchers to students with disabilities to attend private schools. Another program, which offers corporations tax credits to cover private school tuition for low-income students, was expanded last year by Florida lawmakers.
NEA’s View of the Near Future
NEA sent out its first post-mortem to its members, staff and activists. It is pretty straightforward.
Education policy/ESEA Reauthorization:
The new Speaker of the House is expected to be Representative John Boehner (R-OH) and Representative John Kline (R-MN) is expected to serve as the Chair of the House Education and Labor Committee. Under their leadership, Republicans are likely to be more focused on local control of school systems and local decision making. This week, Representative Kline outlined broad-based priorities for education and employment policy, including “pursuing education reform that restores local control, empowers parents, lets teachers teach, and protects taxpayers.” Representative Kline has also been a supporter of full funding for special education. Areas that NEA will be watching closely will include proposals for private school vouchers and increased support for charter schools.
Education Funding:
Representative Paul Ryan (R-WI), a rising star in GOP who has burnished his credentials as a fiscal hawk is likely to serve as Chair of the House Budget Committee, while either Representative Hal Rogers (R-KY) or Representative Jerry Lewis (R-CA), past chairman of the Appropriations Committee, could serve as Appropriations Chair. Republicans are expected to push hard on spending and are likely to propose dramatic cuts to education and other domestic priorities. Already, would-be Speaker of the House John Boehner has proposed cutting all non-defense federal spending to FY2008 levels.
A Crack in the Wall
When the Supreme Court took up a case about a school choice program in Arizona this week, Justice Elena Kagan said she had been “puzzling and puzzling” over it. Why, she asked the state’s lawyer, instead of providing families with vouchers, is Arizona’s program “so much more complicated and complex and unusual”?
The short answer is that the state’s Constitution prohibits direct aid to private schools. A more important one is that the convolutions hide a problem we’re not supposed to see. The program appears to be unconstitutional. As the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit ruled, it appears to violate the First Amendment’s establishment clause by disbursing state funds on the basis of religion.
Last year in Arizona, $52.1 million in scholarships helped support more than 27,500 students at private and parochial schools. The money came from letting people who owe state income taxes take a credit, up to $500. They can contribute the amount to 50 or so nonprofit tuition organizations that give money to parents who want to send their children to schools they serve.
EDUPUNDIT MYOPIA
The consensus among Edupundits is that teacher quality is the most important variable in student academic achievement.
I argue that the most important variable in student academic achievement is student academic work.
Edupundits have chosen very complex subject matter for their investigations and reports. They study and write about dropouts, vouchers, textbooks, teacher selection and training, school governance, budgets, curricula in all subjects, union contracts, school management issues, and many many more.
Meanwhile, practically all of them fail to give any attention to the basic purpose of schools, which is to have students do academic work. Almost none of them seems inclined to look past the teacher to see if the students are, for instance, reading any nonfiction books or writing any term papers.
Of course all of the things they do pay attention to are vitally important, but without student academic work they mean very little. Now, I realize there are state standards in math and reading, and some states test for writing after a fashion, but no state standards ask if students have read a history book while they were in school or written a substantial research paper, and neither do the SAT, ACT, or NAEP tests.
Education Reform Goes Mainstream
I have no idea why a bunch of ed reformers are so gloomy. Matt has already observed how Rick Hess and Mike Petrilli can’t seem to enjoy the moment when ed reform ideas go mainstream. Now Liam Julian is joining the poopy parade, lamenting that the new crop of naive reformers are doomed to fail just as past ones have, and “it never works out.” And continuing the gloomy theme, Rick is worrying that school choice (in the form of vouchers) over-promised and under-delivered, losing the support of people like Sol Stern. That may be, but as a graduate student observed to me today, choice (in the form of vouchers) may have lost Sol Stern, but choice (in the form of charters) just gained Oprah, the Today Show, and the Democratic Party platform. Overall, he thought that was a pretty good trade, especially since he had to look up who Sol Stern was.
Let’s review. It is now commonly accepted among mainstream elites — from Oprah to Matt Lauer to Arne Duncan — that simply pouring more money into the public school system will not produce the results we want. It is now commonly accepted that the teacher unions have been a significant barrier to school improvement by protecting ineffective teachers and opposing meaningful reforms. It is now commonly accepted that parents should have a say in where their children go to school and this choice will push traditional public schools to improve. It is now commonly accepted that we have to address the incentives in the school system to recruit, retain, and motivate the best educators.
Wisconsin Education: Sounding the Alarm: A Wakeup Call With Directions
There was a time when Wisconsin was a leader in school reform, and it wasn’t that long ago. All you have to do is go two decades back, and the state’s performance on reading and math assessments put its students in the nation’s upper tier. The 1990 Milwaukee Parental Choice Program was heralded as a watershed for school choice, and today, it is the nation’s largest school voucher program. Wisconsin was also an early adopter of charter schooling, and its SAGE class-size-reduction program gained national attention in the 1990s.
In the current education landscape, those days of innovation seem a long way off.
Wisconsin is no longer mentioned as an education innovator in the same breath as states like Louisiana, Tennessee, or Colorado. Wisconsin has also seen a tremendous erosion of its once-impressive math and reading performance. In 1990, Wisconsin outperformed 76% of the states in eighth-grade math scores. Today, Wisconsin has fallen to the middle of the pack. In reading, the decline has been even more precipitous.1 And all of this has happened in spite of the fact that statewide per-pupil spending has risen from $7,749 per student in 1990 to $10,041 in 2007 (in constant 2007 dollars), proving that just throwing money at a problem will not solve it.2
Perhaps the most vexing statistic is the racial divide – 93% of white students graduated high school in 2009 statewide, compared to only 66% of African-American students.3 This is a divide that no state or country can tolerate if it intends to remain functioning, let alone successful. The situation is most grim in Milwaukee, where only one-third of African-American tenth-graders–34%–are proficient in reading compared to 67% among their white classmates; in math, 19% of African-American students are proficient compared to 56% of white students.4
An interview with Diane Ravitch
Columbus Education Association:
Dr. Diane Ravitch is a polarizing figure in the education world. From 1991-1993, Ravitch served as Assistant Secretary of Education in President George H.W. Bush’s administration. Originally a strong proponent of school choice, vouchers and high-stakes testing, her views have changed considerably. She argues for her change of heart and in her new book, The Death and Life of the Great American School System.
It was recently announced that Dr. Ravitch will receive NEA’s 2010 Friend of Education Award. CEA recently interviewed Dr. Ravitch about the role of teaching and learning in the age of accountability.
Let’s say you were to walk into an elementary classroom in any school district ten years from now. If we stay on the present course set by NCLB, how will teaching and learning be different?
I think that there will be a great deal of drilling and teaching to the test. Most of the day will be spent on reading and mathematics. Kids will be encouraged to take lots and lots of test prep. This is happening now and I don’t see any change in the foreseeable future. The secretary has said that 100 percent of all kids should be proficient. There doesn’t seem to be an end date where this regime will conclude in victory. Now that so many states are tying teacher evaluation to test scores, it is predictable that we will have a system in which testing of basic skills is the basic purpose of education.
Wisconsin’s Mind is on Education
Kenneth M. Goldstein and William G. Howell
Over half of Wisconsinites (51 percent) told us that they were paying either “a great deal” or “quite a bit” of attention to issues involving education. In national surveys, 38 percent of the American public as a whole. When asked about specific education reforms, moreover, Wisconsinites are as much as five times more likely to stake out a clear position either in support or opposition than is the American public. Assuming such differences aren’t strictly an artifact of survey methodology, a possibility we will discuss, Wisconsinites seem to pay more attention to educational issues and revealed a greater willingness to offer their opinions on education and potential reforms. In other words, when it comes to education, the people of Wisconsin have strong views and that makes them different from the rest of the country.
Wisconsin residents reported higher levels of support for a variety of reforms–in particular vouchers, charter schools, online education, and merit pay–than does the nation as a whole. That said, opposition levels to these reforms were also as high or higher than the nation as a whole. Though they give their local schools slightly lower grades than does the American public, Wisconsin residents also claimed (correctly) that their students perform as well as or better than students in other states on standardized tests. And Wisconsin residents are just as enthusiastic about student accountability requirements as is the American public. And Wisconsinites have another thing in common with their fellow Americans: they vastly underestimate the actual amount of money that is spent each year on students in public schools.
There is another important element that can be taken from this poll. The divide between residents of Milwaukee and the rest of the state is deep. When asked about the quality of education in the state, Milwaukee residents offered significantly lower assessments than do residents statewide. In addition, city of Milwaukee residents distinguish themselves from other Wisconsinites for their higher levels of support for various education policy reforms.
Everyone Wins in the Postcode Lottery
Life expectancy at birth ranges from 80 years in Hawaii to 72 in Washington, DC; and from 83 in Japan to 40 in Swaziland. In vitro fertilisation is available in some regions of the UK within months; in others it takes years. Fill in your own example here, because it is now a commonplace that the price, availability and quality of anything from a nursing home to a good education will vary depending on where you live.
I am not sure whether the British complain more about this than anyone else, but we have developed our own term to describe it: the “postcode lottery”. For community-minded gamblers there is actually a real postcode lottery, in which prizes are shared between winning ticket-holders and those fortunate enough to have homes on the same street. But for most Britons, the term is a lazy shorthand for the fact that where you live affects what you get.
There is a glaring problem with this phrase: while the ticket that gets pulled out of the tombola is chosen at random, the postcodes where you and I live are not. We aren’t serfs. If we want to move and we can afford to move, we can move.
I live in Hackney, a London borough where crime is high and the schools are poor. If I had a few spare million, perhaps I would move to Hampstead or Chelsea. I do not. People who shop at Harrods expect better food than those who shop at Tesco. Ferraris are faster and sexier than Fords. There are many words to describe this state of affairs, but “lottery” is not the one I would choose.
Harford makes an excellent point. It is clearly futile to impose one size fits all approaches, particularly in education. We, as a society are far better off with a diverse governance (many smaller schools/districts/charters/vouchers) and curricular environment.
Teachers Are Fair Game
I started covering education reform in 1983, with the release of the “Nation at Risk” report. In those days everybody had some idea for how we should reorganize the schools or change the curriculum–cut school size, cut class size, create vouchers, create charters, get back to basics, do less basics, increase local control, increase the federal role.
Some of the reforms seemed promising, but the results were disappointing, and tangential to the core issue: the relationship between teacher and student. It is mushy to say so, but people learn from people they love.
Today, aided by the realization that teacher quality is what matters most, a new cadre of reformers have come on the scene, many of them bred within the ranks of Teach for America. These are stubborn, data-driven types with a low tolerance for bullshit. The reform environment they find themselves in is both softhearted and hardheaded. They put big emphasis on the teaching relationship, but are absolutely Patton-esque when it comes to dismantling anything that interferes with that relationship. This includes union rules that protect bad and mediocre teachers, teacher contracts that prevent us from determining which educators are good and which need help, and state and federal laws that either impede reform or dump money into the ancien régime.
No magic bullet for education America keeps looking for one simple solution for its education shortcomings. There isn’t one.
The “unschooling” movement of the 1970s featured open classrooms, in which children studied what they were most interested in, when they felt ready. That was followed by today’s back-to-basics, early-start model, in which students complete math worksheets in kindergarten and are supposed to take algebra by eighth grade at the latest. Under the “whole language” philosophy of the 1980s, children were expected to learn to read by having books read to them. By the late 1990s, reading lessons were dominated by phonics, with little time spent on the joys of what reading is all about — unlocking the world of stories and information.
A little more than a decade ago, educators bore no responsibility for their students’ failure; it was considered the fault of the students, their parents and unequal social circumstances. Now schools are held liable for whether students learn, regardless of the students’ lack of effort or previous preparation, and are held solely accountable for reaching unrealistic goals of achievement.
No wonder schools have a chronic case of educational whiplash. If there’s a single aspect of schooling that ought to end, it’s the decades of abrupt and destructive swings from one extreme to another. There is no magic in the magic-bullet approach to learning. Charters are neither evil nor saviors; they can be a useful complement to public schools, but they have not blazed a sure-fire path to student achievement. Decreeing that all students will be proficient in math and reading by 2014 hasn’t moved us dramatically closer to the mark.
Diffused governance, is, in my view, the best way forward. This means that communities should offer a combination of public, private, virtual, charter and voucher options. A diversity of K-12 approaches insures that a one size fits all race to the bottom does not prevail. I was very disappointed to recently learn that Wisconsin’s Democrat Senator Russ Feingold voted to kill the Washington, DC voucher program. No K-12 approach is perfect, but eliminating that option for the poorest members of our society is simply unpalatable.
Somewhat related Lee Bergquist and Erin Richards: Wisconsin Governor Candidate Mark Neumann taps public funds for private schools
Republican businessman Mark Neumann started his first taxpayer-funded school with 49 students, and in eight years enrollment has mushroomed to nearly 1,000 students in four schools.
Neumann, a candidate for governor who preaches smaller government and fiscal conservatism, has used his entrepreneurial skills to tap private and public funds – including federal stimulus dollars – to start schools in poor neighborhoods.
The former member of the U.S. House operates three religious-based schools in Milwaukee, a fourth nonreligious school in Phoenix and has plans to build clusters of schools across the country.
The Nashotah businessman is part of a growing national movement from the private sector that is providing poor neighborhoods an alternative to traditional public schools.
There are signs the schools are achieving one of their primary goals of getting students into post-secondary schools.
Ravitch is Wrong Week, Day #1
Diane Ravitch’s new book “The Death and Life of the Great American School System: How Testing and Choice Are Undermining Education” has been burning up the charts. Ravitch has been ubiquitous, writing op-eds in support of her book, doing lectures and interviews all over the place, and being reviewed in all sorts of high-profile venues.
As an overall matter, the book says little, if anything, that is actually new on the subjects of testing and choice. What Ravitch is really selling with this book is the story of her personal and ideological conversion. Not so long ago, she was writing articles like “In Defense of Testing,” or “The Right Thing: Why Liberals Should Be Pro-Choice,” a lengthy article in The New Republic that remains one of the most passionate and eloquent defenses of school choice and vouchers in particular. Now she seems to be a diehard opponent of these things. But she’s not saying anything that other diehard opponents haven’t already said countless times.
A Setback for Educational Civil Rights
I cannot believe that a Democratic administration will let this injustice of killing D.C. vouchers stand.
When President Dwight D. Eisenhower asked me to become one of the founding members of the newly formed U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, African-Americans drank at separate water fountains and our schools were segregated. A decade later, when people came together to march against these injustices, the idea that a black man could ever be elected president of the United States was still something for dreamers. My experience with that great movement gives me a particular appreciation for the historic importance of the presidency of Barack Obama–and the new dreams that his example will inspire in our young.
If Martin Luther King Jr. told me once, he told me a hundred times that the key to solving our country’s race problem is plain as day: Find decent schools for our kids. So I was especially heartened to hear Education Secretary Arne Duncan repeatedly call education the “civil rights issue of our generation.” Millions of our children–disproportionately poor and minority–remain trapped in failing public schools that condemn them to lives on the fringe of the American Dream.
Our Stand on Standards
Seems our report and the release of the common core standards draft have set off a lot of interest in Massachusetts’ view, and especially in Pioneer’s take on the national standards effort. See Jay Greene’s blog for a long string of comments. Here is a bit of a longish overview of some of the issues we see in this from the Massachusetts and the national perspective. First, the Mass perspective:
1. Standards are the lifeblood of student achievement in public schools; and that includes even those site-based managed schools that are based on parental choice. You all know the stories of charters and voucher programs that don’t deliver the kind of transformational improvement we all want. In MA, our charters for the most part are of a higher quality than elsewhere and far outperform their district counterparts. In part that is because of the great upfront business planning/vetting and accountability/closure processes (yes, regulation), but it is even more because MA has set really high academic standards, assessments, and teacher testing. Charters are effective at attaining goals but you have to set high academic goals for them to be good schools with high-achieving students. Arizona, with its numerous but too often lower quality charter schools, take note.
A Decent Education
When state Sen. James Meeks asks fellow Democrats to give education vouchers to kids who attend some of the worst schools in Chicago, the legislators often tell him they don’t want to divert dollars from public education.
Meeks’ response: “If the public schools are not doing their job, why do you want to continue to reward them with money?”
Good question.
We have yet to hear a good answer.
Meeks is trying valiantly to shake up the status quo in public education, and we stand with him in that effort. He is pushing a solid plan to create a voucher program for Chicago. The Senate’s executive subcommittee on education is set to discuss the bill on Wednesday.
Education: Too Important for a Government Monopoly
The government-school establishment has said the same thing for decades: Education is too important to leave to the competitive market. If we really want to help our kids, we must focus more resources on the government schools.
But despite this mantra, the focus is on something other than the kids. When The Washington Post asked George Parker, head of the Washington, D.C., teachers union, about the voucher program there, he said: “Parents are voting with their feet. … As kids continue leaving the system, we will lose teachers. Our very survival depends on having kids in D.C. schools so we’ll have teachers to represent.”
How revealing is that?
Since 1980, government spending on education, adjusted for inflation, has nearly doubled. But test scores have been flat for decades.
Today we spend a stunning $11,000 a year per student — more than $200,000 per classroom. It’s not working. So when will we permit competition and choice, which works great with everything else? I’ll explore those questions on my Fox Business program tomorrow night at 8 and 11 p.m. Eastern time (and again Friday at 10 p.m.).
The people who test students internationally told us that two factors predict a country’s educational success: Do the schools have the autonomy to experiment, and do parents have a choice?
Locally, the Madison School District has 24,295 students and a 2009/2010 budget of $418,415,780. $17,222 per student.
Two New Governors Pick Reform Oriented Education Chiefs
Kudos to the country’s two newest governors, Republicans Bob McDonnell of Virginia and Chris Christie of New Jersey, who have tapped strong school choice advocates to head their state education departments.
Last week, Mr. McDonnell chose Gerald Robinson to become Virginia’s next Secretary of Education. Mr. Robinson currently heads the Black Alliance for Educational Options, a national nonprofit that backs charter schools and performance pay for teachers. Meanwhile, Mr. Christie has picked former Jersey City Mayor Bret Schundler to serve as his state’s next education commissioner. Mr. Schundler is an unabashed supporter of using education vouchers and charter schools to improve the plight of urban school districts.
This is good news for all school children in both states, but it’s especially auspicious for low-income kids stuck in failing schools who have the most to gain from a state education official who is unafraid to shake up the establishment. Virginia has a grand total of three charter schools, one of the lowest numbers in the nation. New Jersey spends more money per pupil than all but two states, yet test scores in Newark and Jersey City are among the worst in the country.
Our Opinion: If only wishing could pay the education bills
Perhaps with business organizations behind it, a significant increase in the state’s investment in education from kindergarten through college could gain some traction in the Florida Legislature.
Certainly without it, there is virtually no likelihood that lawmakers in an election year will find the courage to search for ways — not all of them monetary — to improve public education, and therefore our state’s chances for the future.
An educated population and an accomplished work force are the underpinnings of a state where, as the Florida Council of 100 and Florida Chamber of Commerce expressed in a report last week, the American dream can be successfully carried out. Where better, asked Council of 100 Chair Susan Story “than in the state of Florida?”
Both Gov. Charlie Crist and former Gov. Jeb Bush put their stamp of approval on what was described at its unveiling Thursday as the “education wish list” of these two significant Florida business groups. Last year, the two joined with education leaders to get more money for higher education, even though the Legislature went in the opposite direction, cutting $150 million from our universities. Again this year budget committees are asking universities to be prepared for across-the-board cuts as high as 10 percent, in keeping with a budget shortfall of as much as $3 billion.
The recommendations from these groups, which are coincidentally against most tax or fee increases and lifting sales-tax exemptions, include tougher graduation standards at the pre-K-12 level, virtual elimination of teacher tenure and a constitutional amendment legalizing vouchers.
Closing the Talent Gap: A Business Perspective (January 2010) 3MB PDF.
Updates, via a Steven M. Birnholz email:
Press Release.
“Political, Business Leaders: Overhaul Education in Fla.” Lakeland Ledger
“Business groups propose major changes to education,” Daytona Beach News Journal.
Focus on raising well-rounded children
South China Morning Post Editorial:
The voucher subsidy scheme for non-profit kindergartens triggered an uproar when it was announced three years ago, amid fears that an exodus of students would force profit-making schools to close and claims of discrimination against middle-class families. But critics failed to reckon with parents who believe it is never too soon to imbue the work ethic. As we reported yesterday, the voucher scheme is subsidising a new class of preschoolers, aged from three to six, who spend the entire day in two separate kindergartens – one for profit and one not.
Their parents claim the vouchers for half the cost of a half day at a local non-profit kindergarten, and can also afford to enrol them in international classes at profit-making private kindergartens for the other half day. One father concerned argues that twice the time spent interacting with other children and teachers is better than half a day watching television. Moreover, these children are exposed at an early age to two languages – English and either Cantonese or Putonghua – in a school environment. Thus the obsession with grades now extends almost from the nursery door to young adulthood.
New Jersey teachers’ union’s ‘Electile Dysfunction’ for Corzine explained
An interesting document found its way to my inbox over the weekend. It was a PowerPoint presentation of an analysis done by the New Jersey Education Association, regarding its efforts to re-elect Democratic Gov. Jon Corzine.
The document can be found at NEAexposed.com.
Citing “Electile Dysfunction,” meaning the polls were telling them that voters, including teachers, weren’t as enthusiastic about Corzine as they would like, the union’s Director of Government Relations, Ginger Gold Schnitzer, proposed a double-dose remedy: “A robust member-to-member campaign,” followed by “an independent communications campaign to inoculate the public.”
The first dose of the union’s plan was to appeal to its members. The radical community organizer Saul Alinsky taught the NEA that the trick to “organizing people is to appeal to their self-interest.” Thus, the union promoted Corzine’s pro-union “accomplishments,” like investing $3 billion into public pensions, increasing school funding, increasing school construction, expanded pre-kindergarten programs, opposition to vouchers, and free medical benefits for teacher for life.
Oddly, the union didn’t cite any accomplishment that actually helped students.
A pdf of the powerpoint presentation can be viewed here.
The Edsel of Education Reform: The Ford Foundation finds a needy cause: teachers unions.
Wall Street Journal Editorial:
We hate to say it, but don’t be misled by headlines. The biggest headline in education circles last week was that the Ford Foundation is making a whopping $100 million grant “to transform secondary education in the nation’s most disadvantaged schools.”
Our eyes raced to see which piece of the vibrant school-reform movement Ford was going to support. Would it be America’s 4,600 charters schools, many outperforming their traditional school peers and some even closing the race gap? Maybe it would be Teach for America, busting at the seams and turning down Ivy League applicants by the hundreds. Or, who knows, maybe Ford’s really on the leading edge, and would want to support voucher programs in cities like Washington.
Would you believe the recipients of Ford’s largesse are the teachers unions? Yup. The folks at Ford are giving new meaning to the word “retro.”
Ballyhooing the $100 million, the foundation’s president Luis Ubinas said, “Improving our schools, and giving the most vulnerable young people real educational opportunities, benefits all of us. With this initiative we want to shake up the conversations surrounding school reform and help spur some truly imaginative thinking and partnerships.”
Will reforming teacher salaries bring mile high results?
Denver is to reform in the way teachers are paid what Milwaukee is to private school vouchers: It’s the place that’s broken a lot of new ground and been a magnet for national attention.
With the likelihood that the Wisconsin Legislature will take important steps in the next few weeks that will substantially increase the prospects for changing the classic system for teacher salaries, here’s some advice for Wisconsin from Brad Jupp, a central architect of the Denver system:
“The most important thing to do is not to be so cautious that you don’t move forward,” Jupp said. “Breaking the barrier doesn’t kill you.”
Nationwide for almost a century, salaries of teachers have been set almost entirely by how many years a person has taught and whether the person has a master’s degree or certain amounts of college credits beyond a bachelor’s degree. Research has pretty firmly established that there is little, if any, correlation between teaching quality and those traditional measurements.
The political appeal of changing the way teachers are paid is huge now. The idea of paying good teachers more than bad teachers or using pay as an incentive to improve educational results has become popular across the political spectrum. President Barack Obama is scheduled to visit Madison this week to speak on education, and you can bet he will hit on this point.
The value of education: Obama’s message good for any classroom
Tuesday I went to Bluefield Intermediate School and watched as fourth-grade students did something that just didn’t happen when I was their age — listen to the president of the United States.
President Obama urged them and other students across the country to stay in school and strive to succeed despite any adversity fate threw their way. He recounted his own struggles to acquire an education, and spoke about how education was a vital part of finding success.
He stayed off controversial topics such as health care and bills like cap and trade, and kept driving home the fact that students needed to take advantage of their opportunities to get an education.
The sight of those children getting to see a live broadcast of the president’s speech brought to mind that time so many years ago when I first heard the word “president.” Things have really changed.
Obama to kids: ‘You can’t drop out of school and into a good job’
President Obama delivered a pointed message to U.S. students Tuesday, telling high-schoolers in a packed Washington-area school gymnasium, “I expect you to get serious this year.”
Ignoring a simmering controversy among political opponents over the planned speech, which was broadcast live coast-to-coast, Obama exhorted students at Wakefield High School to stay in school, ask for help when they need it and resist giving up when school gets difficult. “You can’t drop out of school and into a good job. You’ve got to work for it and train for it and learn for it.”
A Real Education Outrage
President Obama’s speech to students this week got plenty of attention, and many conservatives looked foolish by fretting about “indoctrination.” They would have done far more good joining those who protested on Tuesday against the President’s decision to shut down a school voucher program for 1,700 low-income kids in Washington, D.C.
“It’s fundamentally wrong for this Administration not to listen to the voices of citizens in this city,” said Kevin Chavous, the former D.C. Council member who organized the protest of parents and kids ignored by most media. Mr. Chavous, a Democrat, is upset that the White House and Democrats in Congress have conspired to shut down the program even though the government’s own evaluation demonstrates improved test scores.
How Kennedy Took Politics Out of Education
It is startling to realize, as we consider the legacy of Massachusetts Sen. Edward M. Kennedy, that this very liberal, very partisan Democrat was key to the consensus that has unified the two parties on education policy for the last two decades.
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I was slow to pick up on this. It wasn’t until I looked carefully at the presidential candidate positions in 2000 that I understood how much the two parties agreed on how to make public schools better. George W. Bush and Al Gore were very different people, but their education platforms, once you got past their favorite wedge issue, vouchers, were nearly identical. Both wanted to use test scores to make schools accountable for improving achievement. If Gore had gotten to the White House, he would have produced a law similar to No Child Left Behind.
For some time I have attributed this to the good sense of education experts on both sides of the aisle. The people guiding the candidates on this issue have seen what works in schools, particularly in low income neighborhoods, and have rescued their parties from the kind of anti-testing rhetoric that was so popular with teacher union leaders.
Is Barack Obama’s education secretary too good to be true?
IT IS hard to find anybody with a bad word to say about Arne Duncan, Barack Obama’s young education secretary. Margaret Spellings, his predecessor in the Bush administration, calls him “a visionary leader and fellow reformer”. During his confirmation hearings Lamar Alexander, a senator from Tennessee and himself a former education secretary, sounded more like a lovesick schoolgirl than a member of the opposition party: “I think you’re the best.” Enthusiastic without being over-the-top, pragmatic without being a pushover, he is also the perfect embodiment of mens sana in corpore sano–tall and lean, clean-cut and athletic, a Thomas Arnold for the digital age.
Since moving to the Education Department a couple of months ago he has been a tireless preacher of the reform gospel. He supports charter schools and merit pay, accountability and transparency, but also litters his speeches with more unfamiliar ideas. He argues that one of the biggest problems in education is how to attract and use talent. All too often the education system allocates the best teachers to the cushiest schools rather than the toughest. Mr Duncan also stresses the importance of “replicating” success. His department, he says, should promote winning ideas (such as “Teach for America”, a programme that sends high-flying university graduates to teach in underserved schools) rather than merely enforcing the status quo.
Nor is this just talk. Mr Duncan did much to consolidate his reputation as a reformer on May 6th, when the White House announced that it will try to extend Washington, DC’s voucher programme until all 1,716 children taking part have graduated from high school. The Democrat-controlled Congress has been trying to smother the programme by removing funding. But Mr Duncan has vigorously argued that it does not make sense “to take kids out of a school where they’re happy and safe and satisfied and learning”. He and Mr Obama will now try to persuade Congress not to kill the programme.
Arne Duncan’s Choice
Wall Street Journal Editorial:
Washington, D.C.’s school voucher program for low-income kids isn’t dead yet. But the Obama Administration seems awfully eager to expedite its demise.
About 1,700 kids currently receive $7,500 vouchers to attend private schools under the Opportunity Scholarship Program, and 99% of them are black or Hispanic. The program is a huge hit with parents — there are four applicants for every available scholarship — and the latest Department of Education evaluation showed significant academic gains.
Nevertheless, Congress voted in March to phase out the program after the 2009-10 school year unless it is reauthorized by Congress and the D.C. City Council. The Senate is scheduled to hold hearings on the program this month, and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid has promised proponents floor time to make their case. So why is Education Secretary Arne Duncan proceeding as if the program’s demise is a fait accompli?
Mr. Duncan is not only preventing new scholarships from being awarded but also rescinding scholarship offers that were made to children admitted for next year. In effect, he wants to end a successful program before Congress has an opportunity to consider reauthorizing it. This is not what you’d expect from an education reformer, and several Democrats in Congress have written him to protest.
Democrats and Poor Kids
Wall Street Journal Editorial:
Education Secretary Arne Duncan did a public service last week when he visited New York City and spoke up for charter schools and mayoral control of education. That was the reformer talking. The status quo Mr. Duncan was on display last month when he let Congress kill a District of Columbia voucher program even as he was sitting on evidence of its success.
U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, left, and Maryland Gov. Martin O’Malley, read to first graders at Doswell Brooks Elementary School in Capitol Heights, Md. on Wednesday, April 1, 2009.
In New York City with its 1.1 million students, mayoral control has resulted in better test scores and graduation rates, while expanding charter schools, which means more and better education choices for low-income families. But mayoral control expires in June unless state lawmakers renew it, and the United Federation of Teachers is working with Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver to weaken or kill it.
President Obama’s stimulus is sending some $100 billion to the nation’s school districts. What will he demand in return? The state budget passed by the New York legislature last week freezes funding for charters but increases it by more that $400 million for other public schools. Perhaps a visit to a charter school in Harlem would help Mr. Obama honor his reform pledge. “I’m looking at the data here in front of me,” Mr. Duncan told the New York Post. “Graduation rates are up. Test scores are up. Teacher salaries are up. Social promotion was eliminated. Dramatically increasing parental choice. That’s real progress.”
Teacher Unions vs. Poor Kids
The “education president” remained silent when his congressional Democrats essentially killed the Opportunity Scholarship Program (OSP) in the city where he now lives and works.
Of the 1,700 students, starting in kindergarten, in this private-school voucher program, 90 percent are black and 9 percent are Hispanic.
First the House and then the Senate inserted into the $410-billion omnibus spending bill language to eliminate the $7,500 annual scholarships for these poor children after the next school year.
A key executioner in the Senate of the OSP was Sen. Dick Durbin, Illinois Democrat. I have written admiringly of Durbin’s concern for human rights abroad. But what about education rights for minority children in the nation’s capital?
Andrew J. Coulson, director of the Cato Institute (where I am a senior fellow) supplied the answer when he wrote: “Because they saw it as a threat to their political power, Democrats in Washington appear willing to extinguish the dreams of a few thousand poor kids to protect their political base.”
Congress vs. Washington DC Kids
Congressional Democrats succeeded this week in crippling a school choice program operating in the nation’s capital. For the last five years, the D.C. Opportunity Scholarships have made private schooling affordable to 1,700 poor children. Rather than reauthorizing the program for another five-year term, Democrats have all but ensured it will die after next year.
House Appropriations Committee Chairman David R. Obey, Wisconsin Democrat, has asked D.C. Public Schools Chancellor Michelle Rhee to prepare for the return of voucher students to the city’s broken public schools.
Sen. Ted Kennedy’s office claims the senator opposed the voucher program from the start because it “takes funds from very needy public schools to send students to unaccountable private schools.” (The House Budget Committee holds hearings today on the U.S. Education Department budget).
But just how needy are D.C. public schools? To find out, I added up all the K-12-related expenditures in the current D.C. budget, excluding preschool, higher-education and charter school items. The total comes to $1.29 billion. Divide that by the official enrollment count of 48,646 students, and it yields a total per-pupil spending figure of $26,555.
The Early-Ed Big Lie
In a speech on education this morning at the U.S. Hispanic Chamber of Commerce, President Obama repeats questionable statistics in support of his bid to expand the government’s monopoly on education back to the womb, asserting that “$1 of early education leads to $10 in saved social services.”
Unfortunately he’s referring to small-scale programs that involved extensive and often intensive total-family intervention rather than simple “early education.”
In contrast to the- real-world school choice programs have been tested extensively with solid, random-assignment studies. Nine out of ten of these studies find statistically significant improvement in academic achievement for at least one subgroup.
Fernandez & Evers Advance in the Wisconsin DPI Superintendent Race
Evers won the endorsement of the 98,000-member state teachers union, the Wisconsin Education Association Council, which paid for TV ads on his behalf. Evers was the only one of the five to pay for his own ads.
“I believe that my message of experience has played well so far,” Evers said. “I won the primary and I anticipate that we’ll just work hard to get the message out. I believe that people do believe experience matters.”
Fernandez, who has often been at odds with the state education department over virtual schools, reveled in the fact that she didn’t get the WEAC endorsement, touting it as another sign of her being outside the state education bureaucracy.
Fernandez was the only one of the five candidates without any professional education experience. A former nurse, she recently stepped down as president of the Wisconsin Coalition of Virtual School Families.
“Some people have dismissed me as just a mom on a mission, but that’s a label I’ll be wearing as a badge of honor,” Fernandez said. She pledged to overcome WEAC’s financial backing of Evers with a broad base of support that taps into teachers, parents and students across the state.
“We’re hearing that there’s a great hunger out there for our message that higher standards without higher taxes is what they want,” she said.
Her campaign called for reforming the state education department, enacting changes to allow for teacher merit pay and protecting alternative education options such as virtual schools, home schooling and Milwaukee’s school choice voucher program.
Evers, the deputy under retiring Superintendent Libby Burmaster for the past eight years, emphasized his 34 years of education experience during the campaign. Opponents criticized him as a status-quo insider candidate, while Evers countered he was the best-grounded to initiate reforms, particularly in the Milwaukee schools.
Equal Time: Parents want more choices in education
Poor test scores. High dropout rates. Enormous schools. Large class sizes. These are the words that come to Milena Skollar’s mind when you ask the transplant about sending her children to school in Georgia.
“It’s not fun to be 50th in the nation in SAT scores — plus the size of the schools is very disturbing,” the mother of three said. “I believe in public education. I just wish the schools were better for my children.”
Eric Johnson is a Republican state senator from Savannah. Skollar, a New Jersey native, is also a school social worker employed by a metro Atlanta school system. She is among the 68 percent of Georgia voters in a recent poll who support offering parents the option to transfer their children to a private school with a voucher.
As we commence another session of the General Assembly, it’s time to start thinking about parents such as Skollar and stop offering a one-size-fits-all education model to Georgia students. It’s time to offer a school voucher program for parents who want it for their children who need it.
Because both of her daughters excel in the classroom, Skollar believes her Fulton County public schools cannot challenge them enough as they get older and that a private school with smaller classes may be more appropriate. She would like more options.
Obama’s Education Choice:
Wall Street Journal Editorial:
Barack Obama has chosen Chicago schools chief Arne Duncan to be his Secretary of Education. As scarred veterans of the school-reform wars, we applaud the choice with great caution.
We’ve long said there is no more urgent domestic issue than the collapsed state of inner-city education. Going back to the Clinton Presidency, we have argued on behalf of vouchers that would let parents of students in the poorest public schools have the same shot at a sound education as do more affluent children, such as those of Mr. Obama. The opposition from public teachers’ unions to this or almost any significant reform is legendary. Thus, we listened closely when Senator Obama said nearly nothing during the campaign that would offend the unions, mostly urging more spending on preschool and after-school programs.
We now read that Mr. Duncan is an ardent proponent of public charter schools, though probably not of vouchers for private schools. Chester E. Finn Jr., the president of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute and a frequent contributor to this page on school reform, likes Mr. Duncan. “He’s a proven and committed and inventive education reformer,” Mr. Finn wrote yesterday on the Institute’s blog, “not tethered to the public-school establishment and its infinite interest groups.”
Obama’s Big Test on Education
Interestingly, though Rhee is a Democrat, she almost voted for Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz.
“It was a very hard decision,” Rhee says. “I’m somewhat terrified of what the Democrats are going to do on education.”
What does President-elect Obama think? Tough to say. He has supported merit pay for teachers, which teachers’ unions oppose, and heralded Rhee. He has been a strong advocate of charter schools and in 2002 said he was “not closed minded” on the subject of vouchers, though since then he has come out against vouchers. Over the Summer, I asked him why.
“The problem is, is that, you know, although it might benefit some kids at the top, what you’re going to do is leave a lot of kids at the bottom,” he said. “We don’t have enough slots for every child to go into a parochial school or a private school. And what you would see is a huge drain of resources out of the public schools. So what I’ve said is let’s foster competition within the public school system. Let’s make sure that charter schools are up and running. Let’s make sure that kids who are in failing schools, in local school districts, have an option to go to schools that are doing well.
“But what I don’t want to do is to see a diminished commitment to the public schools to the point where all we have are the hardest-to-teach kids with the least involved parents with the most disabilities in the public schools,” Obama continued. “That’s going to make things worse, and we’re going to lose the commitment to public schools that I think have been so important to building this country.”
In March, Josh Patashnik of The New Republic took a closer look at PEBO and education, writing that Obama “has long advocated a reformist agenda that looks favorably upon things like competition between schools, test-based accountability, and performance pay for teachers. But the Obama campaign has hesitated to trumpet its candidate’s maverick credentials. As an increasingly influential chorus of donors and policy wonks pushes an agenda within the Democratic Party that frightens teachers’ unions and their traditional liberal allies, Obama seems unsure how far he can go in reassuring the former group that he’s one of them without alienating the latter. And this is a shame, because Obama may represent the best hope for real reform in decades.”
Head of Teachers’ Union Offers to Talk on Tenure and Merit Pay
Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, said Monday that given the economic crisis, her union would be willing to discuss new approaches to issues like teacher tenure and merit pay.
“Faced with declining tax revenues, state and local governments are cutting” education budgets nationwide, Ms. Weingarten said in a speech to education policy makers in Washington.
“In the spirit of this extraordinary moment, and as a pledge of shared responsibility, I’ll take the first step,” she said. “With the exception of vouchers, which siphon scarce resources from public schools, no issue should be off the table, provided it is good for children and fair to teachers.”
It is unclear how much practical effect Ms. Weingarten’s speech will have on the stance her 1.4-million-member union and its locals take in negotiations with school districts or in lobbying state legislatures.
Teachers union talks of big goals in Washington
The head of the American Federation of Teachers signaled the union’s willingness Monday to work broadly on education reform with the incoming Obama administration. It said that, with the exception of school vouchers, “no issue should be off the table.”
AFT president Randi Weingarten cautioned lawmakers nationwide against a “disinvestment in education” in the face of the economic meltdown. She warned that cutting aid to schools “places our economy in a race to the bottom for years to come.”
Weingarten already has told Congress that schools must be included in economic stimulus plans. She testified last month that lawmakers should add $20 billion to a social-services block grant to help state and local governments balance budgets without cutting education. She also said schools need $286 billion for buildings improvements.
Education Issues for the Republicans in the Obama Era
Decentralization must be accompanied by transparency so the public easily understands how tax dollars are being used or misused. One way to make education financing more transparent is to simplify the way Washington doles out money. Federal dollars could be attached to the individual child — so-called backpacking — and that money would be portable, meaning it would follow the child to whichever school he or she attends.
Dan Lips, an education analyst at the Heritage Foundation, notes that federal Title I dollars, which are supposed to go to disadvantaged students but because of complicated financing formulas result in wide per-student funding differences from school to school, “could be delivered through a simple formula based on the number of low-income students in a state” and “states could be allowed to use Title I funds in ways that make it follow the child.” The result would be a “simple and transparent system of school funding.”
Furthermore, Republicans should advocate for widespread state-based parental empowerment, specifically through school-choice options, to ensure that the state and local affiliates of Mr. Obama’s friends at the National Education Association and the American Federation of Teachers do not hijack decision-making power. Only if all children, not just those who are poor or have special needs, have an exit ticket out of the public school system through, say, a voucher or a tuition tax credit will state and local officials have the incentive to use their greater powers for the benefit of students rather than special interests.
When Learning Has a Limit
Since the release of “A Nation at Risk” 25 years ago, we have seen the introduction of top-down standards (including the No Child Behind Act), the spread of a bottom-up school-choice movement (including vouchers and charter schools), and the advent of entrepreneurial programs, like Teach for America, that combine a market-oriented approach with a focus on academic results.
Meanwhile, record numbers of students aspire to higher education, not least because the economic returns to a college degree are, despite a recent leveling off, indisputable. Thus all sorts of people are busy trying to make sure that more high-school grads get a shot not only at enrolling in college but at finishing it.
None of this much impresses Charles Murray. In “Real Education,” he suggests that teachers, students and reformers are all suffering from a case of false consciousness. “The education system,” he says, “is living a lie.”
The problem with American education, according to Mr. Murray, is not what President Bush termed the “soft bigotry of low expectations” but rather the opposite: Far too many young people with inherent intellectual limitations are being pushed to advance academically when, Mr. Murray says, they are “just not smart enough” to improve much at all. It is “a triumph of hope over experience,” he says, to believe that school reform can make meaningful improvements in the academic performance of below-average students. (He might have noted, but doesn’t, that such students are disproportionately black and Hispanic.)
Real Education by Charles Murray.
Parents must have choices on their children’s education
Although it is the first week of school, my husband and I refused to send our twins, Aaron and Abigail, to our local Fulton County high school.
With its low test scores and dangerous incidents on campus, we have been hoping and praying for a miracle to find the money to return them to private school. Over the years, we have depleted our savings, our retirement funds, used our home equity, taken extra jobs and received gifts to send our four older children to private school to escape failing public schools.
But as our two youngest enter ninth grade, we have hit the end of our financial road.
To read the resistance to school vouchers editorialized at The Atlanta Journal-Constitution makes us want to ask opponents if they would like to spend a day in our family’s shoes.
As Program Moves Poor to Suburbs, Tensions Follow
rom the tough streets of Oakland, where so many of Alice Payne’s relatives and friends had been shot to death, the newspaper advertisement for a federally assisted rental property in this Northern California suburb was like a bridge across the River Jordan.
Ms. Payne, a 42-year-old African-American mother of five, moved to Antioch in 2006. With the local real estate market slowing and a housing voucher covering two-thirds of the rent, she found she could afford a large, new home, with a pool, for $2,200 a month.
But old problems persisted. When her estranged husband was arrested, the local housing authority tried to cut off her subsidy, citing disturbances at her house. Then the police threatened to prosecute her landlord for any criminal activity or public nuisances caused by the family. The landlord forced the Paynes to leave when their lease was up.
Under the Section 8 federal housing voucher program, thousands of poor, urban and often African-American residents have left hardscrabble neighborhoods in the nation’s largest cities and resettled in the suburbs.
Law enforcement experts and housing researchers argue that rising crime rates follow Section 8 recipients to their new homes, while other experts discount any direct link. But there is little doubt that cultural shock waves have followed the migration. Social and racial tensions between newcomers and their neighbors have increased, forcing suburban communities like Antioch to re-evaluate their civic identities along with their methods of dealing with the new residents.
Why is crime rising in so many American cities? The answer implicates one of the most celebrated antipoverty programs of recent decades by Hanna Rosin @ the Atlantic Monthly:
Lately, though, a new and unexpected pattern has emerged, taking criminologists by surprise. While crime rates in large cities stayed flat, homicide rates in many midsize cities (with populations of between 500,000 and 1 million) began increasing, sometimes by as much as 20percent a year. In 2006, the Police Executive Research Forum, a national police group surveying cities from coast to coast, concluded in a report called “A Gathering Storm” that this might represent “the front end … of an epidemic of violence not seen for years.” The leaders of the group, which is made up of police chiefs and sheriffs, theorized about what might be spurring the latest crime wave: the spread of gangs, the masses of offenders coming out of prison, methamphetamines. But mostly they puzzled over the bleak new landscape. According to FBI data, America’s most dangerous spots are now places where Martin Scorsese would never think of staging a shoot-out–Florence, South Carolina; Charlotte-Mecklenburg, North Carolina; Kansas City, Missouri; Reading, Pennsylvania; Orlando, Florida; Memphis, Tennessee.
Memphis has always been associated with some amount of violence. But why has Elvis’s hometown turned into America’s new South Bronx? Barnes thinks he knows one big part of the answer, as does the city’s chief of police. A handful of local criminologists and social scientists think they can explain it, too. But it’s a dismal answer, one that city leaders have made clear they don’t want to hear. It’s an answer that offers up racial stereotypes to fearful whites in a city trying to move beyond racial tensions. Ultimately, it reaches beyond crime and implicates one of the most ambitious antipoverty programs of recent decades.
Related:
- Madison Mayor Proposes Expansion of Low Income Housing Throughout Dane County in an Effort to Reduce the MMSD’s Low Income Population
- Police Calls Near Madison High Schools: 1996-2006
Texas Teachers group sues to stop plan to help dropouts
A teachers group asked the courts Tuesday to stop Texas Education Commissioner Robert Scott from giving tax dollars to private groups to educate school dropouts.
The Texas Education Agency proposal resembles a school voucher program, which state lawmakers expressly prohibited last year, the Texas State Teachers Association said in its motion for an injunction.
Scott has approved a preliminary plan that would award up to $6 million to 22 school districts, community colleges and private organizations chosen to participate in an experiment to help 1,000 school dropouts achieve a high school diploma.
The Harris County Department of Education and school districts in Pasadena and San Antonio were among 19 school systems, charter schools and community colleges selected to participate.
The inclusion, however, of Community Action Inc. of Hays, Caldwell and Blanco Counties, the Christian Fellowship of San Antonio and the San Antonio-based Healy-Murphy Center triggered the lawsuit.
McCain on Education at the Urban League
Nowhere are the limitations of conventional thinking any more apparent than in education policy. After decades of hearing the same big promises from the public education establishment, and seeing the same poor results, it is surely time to shake off old ways and to demand new reforms. That isn’t just my opinion; it is the conviction of parents in poor neighborhoods across this nation who want better lives for their children.
Just ask the families in New Orleans who will soon have the chance to remove their sons and daughters from failing schools, and enroll them instead in a school-choice scholarship program. That program in Louisiana was proposed by Democratic state legislators and signed into law by Governor Bobby Jindal. Just three years after Katrina, they are bringing real hope to poor neighborhoods, and showing how much can be achieved when both parties work together for real reform. Or ask parents in the disadvantaged neighborhoods of Washington, D.C. whether they want more choices in education. The District’s Opportunity Scholarship program serves more than 1,900 boys and girls from families with an average income of 23,000 dollars a year. And more than 7,000 more families have applied for that program. What they all have in common is the desire to get their kids into a better school.
Democrats in Congress, including my opponent, oppose the D.C. Opportunity Scholarship program. In remarks to the American Federation of Teachers last month, Senator Obama dismissed public support for private school vouchers for low-income Americans as, “tired rhetoric about vouchers and school choice.” All of that went over well with the teachers union, but where does it leave families and their children who are stuck in failing schools?
John McCain, the father of private school students, criticized Democratic rival Barack Obama on Friday for choosing private over public school for his kids.
The difference, according to the Arizona Republican, is that he — not Obama — favors vouchers that give parents more school choices.
“Everybody should have the same choice Cindy and I and Sen. Obama did,” McCain told the National Urban League, an influential black organization that Obama will address on Saturday.
Where’s Education, Part III
Yesterday, for the first time during the 2008 presidential campaign, John McCain issued a set of specific policy proposals for improving the country’s failing education system. Speaking at the NAACP’s annual meeting in Cincinnati, the presumptive GOP nominee promoted vouchers for parochial, private, and charter schools; alternative certification programs that would lower the barriers to teaching; school-level funding of merit pay for teachers; the continuation of federal funding for tutoring services; and federal funding for virtual schools and online learning.
You’d think all this would be worth some attention. Not only has McCain been basically mum about his education platform since he declared his candidacy, but his 2008 plans mark a significant, move-to-the-middle departure from the relatively bold positions he advocated in 2000. But no. Many of the major print outlets’ write-ups of McCain’s speech were relegated to those outlets’ blogs. And the ones that gave column inches to the speech often focused either on the kind words McCain had for Obama at the outset of his speech (breaking: McCain said something nice about the competition!) or about the tepid reception that met McCain’s appearance at Cincinnati’s Duke Energy Center:
Meanwhile, ed in 08 is spending $60 (from the Gates Foundation, among others) running TV, radio and print ads….
Unthinkable Futures
While hunting in my archives for something else I dug up this exercise in scenarios. It was a small game Brian Eno and I played to loosen up our expectations of what might happen in the near future. We were both struck at how improbable current events would be to anyone in the past, and how incapable we are at expecting the improbable in the future.
This list of unthinkable futures — probabilities we tend to dismiss without thinking — was published 15 years ago in the Summer, 1993 issue of Whole Earth Review. Our intent was less to correctly predict the future (thus the silliness) and more to predict how unpredictable the actual future would be.
* American education works. Revived by vouchers, a longer school year, private schools and for-profit schools, the majority of Americans (though not the most disadvantaged) get the best education in the world.
Statistics Made Happily Real
A new report says students in Milwaukee’s private choice high schools are much more likely to graduate: Such schools had a graduation rate of 85% last year, compared to 58% in the Milwaukee Public Schools.
In flesh-and-blood terms, that means Babatunde Saaka unexpectedly has a future.
The figures are the latest from what is now a five-year report by University of Minnesota sociologist John Robert Warren. Milwaukee students using vouchers are pulling farther ahead. If 2003’s MPS freshmen had done as well in 2007 as students in choice schools, there’d be 1,517 more high school graduates in Milwaukee.
That’s a theoretical number. In life, graduation is more concrete – do or don’t, succeed or fail.
Saaka once expected to fail. When the Milwaukee teen graduates from the Hope School this weekend as part of its first graduating class, he will be the first in his family merely to make it through high school. A young man who grew up in fatherless poverty, he’s going on to Wisconsin Lutheran College, planning to become a youth counselor, to make a difference for other poor children.
On education, McCain & Obama may not be far apart
Jeanne Century, director of Science Education, Research and Evaluation at the University of Chicago’s Center for Elementary Mathematics and Science Education (CEMSE), is an adviser to Obama. Lisa Graham Keegan, the former superintendent of public instruction in Arizona and a two-term member of the Arizona House of Representatives, has McCain’s ear on educational issues.
To anyone casually observing the two in an effort to divine differences between the candidates, the disagreements seemed small.
- Both Obama and McCain believe in rigorous standards and rich curricula to help students compete in a global economy. Century even suggested that American kids should be “trilingual,” not just bilingual, to compete with the rest of the world.
- Both candidates support publicly funded, but privately run, charter schools.
- For now at least, both oppose using taxpayer dollars for large-scale voucher programs. (In a later session with reporters, though, Keegan pointed out that McCain actually supported the push in 2003 for a small-scale voucher that now operates in Washington, D.C., public schools. She added that if a state asked McCain to support a voucher program, “he might be supportive.” But she said he doesn’t currently support changing the provisions of No Child Left Behind to allow for private school vouchers. Currently, students in under-performing schools can get taxpayer dollars for free tutoring or transfer to a better-performing public school.)
- Speaking of No Child Left Behind, both candidates would tweak it in ways that, for the most part, only education wonks can appreciate. They’d both fund it differently. Keegan says McCain would figure out more efficient, focused ways to spend what she says is NCLB’s “unprecedented” increase in funding to schools. Century says Obama believes NCLB “was insufficiently funded and poorly implemented.”
They both bemoan the law’s inability to ensure that low-income children get high-quality teachers and they’d both push for so-called “value added” provisions that would give schools credit for test score gains that children make each year, even if all children don’t meet a pre-set proficiency goal in reading or math.
Education in Sweden
I SPEND my second day in Sweden with representatives of Kunskapsskolan, Sweden’s biggest chain of independent schools (it has 21 secondaries and 9 gymnasiums). It has recently been awarded a contract to open two “academies”—independent state schools—in London, and I have been intrigued by what I’ve heard about its highly personalised teaching methods.
At Kunskapsskolan Enskede, a few kilometres from the centre of Stockholm, I am met by Christian Wetell, its head teacher, and Kenneth Nyman, the company’s regional chief. They explain the “voucher system” from which they make their money. For each pupil the school teaches, it receives from the local government what it would have spent educating the pupil in one of its own schools; in return, independent schools cannot charge anything extra, and must accept all students who apply. Provided schools follow Sweden’s national curriculum, they have wide latitude in their methods and pacing.
Kenneth sheds an interesting light on the thorny comparison with Finland. You have to look, he says, at what sort of students each country’s system wants. Sweden aims to produce socially conscious generalists. The Finnish system, by contrast, drives rather narrowly at academic success.
Madison Mayor Proposes Expansion of Low Income Housing Throughout Dane County in an Effort to Reduce the MMSD’s Low Income Population
Mayor Dave Cieslewicz is proposing a regional approach to affordable housing to help ease high concentrations of poor students in Madison schools.
Cieslewicz is proposing to merge the city and Dane County public housing authorities into a single entity that would take a more regional view.
The authorities handle federal vouchers that offset rent payments, public housing and support first-time buyers.
Cieslewicz also wants to make communities outside Madison eligible for money from the city’s Affordable Housing Trust Fund, which now stands at $4 million.
Over time, the proposals might spread low-income housing more evenly through the region, which would help all schools, Cieslewicz said.
Madison Demographics: 82.2% white (Dane County = 87.5%) with 15% of the population living below poverty (2000 census; Dane County = 9.4%). 43% of the Madison School District’s students were classified as “low income” for the 2007-2008 school year.
Breaking the Education Truce
Quite a debate among advocates of school choice has been ignited by Sol Stern’s article on school choice in the current number of City Journal.
Mr. Stern is a longtime advocate of school choice, whose book “Breaking Free: Public School Lessons and the Imperative of School Choice” is a bible to many in the voucher movement.
Now Mr. Stern, in “School Choice Isn’t Enough,” suggests that for choice to work, close attention must be paid to how and what children are taught in the classroom. Without such attention, Mr. Stern argues, the choice movement is doomed and may already be failing, as evidenced by results in Milwaukee, the largest venue where a voucher system exists, and in New York City where a grab-bag of incentivist proposals has been put in place by Mayor Bloomberg.
Mr. Stern contrasts these results with those in Massachusetts, where choice has not taken hold but where a tough curriculum, a testing regimen for both students and teachers, and rigorous academic standards have been put into place.
On the recently released NAEP tests, Massachusetts topped the list on fourth and eighth grade math and fourth and eighth grade reading. This has been peripherally touched on in the presidential campaign, as Mitt Romney raises these impressive results on the campaign trail. Pitted against Mr. Stern and his fellow “instructionists” is another Manhattan Institute heavyweight, Senior Fellow Jay Greene of the University of Arkansas. Mr. Greene, the pure incentivist, has lashed out at Mr. Stern in a reply just posted on the City Journal Web site.
“PROXIMITY is not destiny, educationally speaking”
A generation of experience with racial integration has taught a clear lesson: Sitting black kids next to white kids in school is not a silver bullet that zaps unequal achievement.
However, the faith that proximity leads to equal achievement remains the cargo cult of education. In June, the U.S. Supreme Court barred school assignments based on race to increase racial diversity. So school leaders immediately began considering economic integration plans instead.
Sit poor kids next to middle-class kids. That should work!
Presidential candidate John Edwards – Mr. Two Americas – has made this the core of his education proposals. He promises “a million housing vouchers” over five years to move poor kids to better schools in the `burbs plus $200 million to create magnet schools that will lure affluent kids to inner-city schools.
The magnet school scheme was tried from 1985 to 1997 in Kansas City, Mo., at a cost of $2billion. To lure suburban white students, Kansas City’s inner-city schools were equipped with lavish facilities: Indoor pools, gymnasia, high-tech science labs, computers, etc. But programs designed for the needs and interests of middle-class white suburbanites did not serve inner-city blacks. And few suburban students were willing to commute to city schools for a luxury athletic complex or a classics magnet. Test scores remained dreadful. By 1997, the district actually had a smaller percentage of white students than when the plan started.
Well, what about moving poor kids to better schools?
Much more on Kansas City here.
An elite education should be open to all who can benefit, not just those who can pay
NO exam question is as perplexing as how to organise schools to suit the huge variety of pupils they serve: rich and poor, clever and dim, early developers and late starters. Every country does it differently. Some try to spot talent early. Others winnow out the academic-minded only at 18. Some believe in parent-power. Others trust the state. Finland has state-run uniform comprehensives; Sweden, another good performer, has vouchers and lots of private schools.
The British system produces some world-class high-flyers, mainly in its private schools and the 164 selective state “grammar” schools that survived the cull in the 1960s and 1970s when the country moved to a non-selective system. But it serves neither its poor children nor its most troublesome ones well. The best state schools, especially the grammar schools, are colonised by the middle classes, and the whole system is disfigured by a long straggling tail of non-achievers.
Free to choose, and learn
New research shows that parental choice raises standards—including for those who stay in public schools
The Economist:
FEW ideas in education are more controversial than vouchers—letting parents choose to educate their children wherever they wish at the taxpayer’s expense. First suggested by Milton Friedman, an economist, in 1955, the principle is compellingly simple. The state pays; parents choose; schools compete; standards rise; everybody gains.
Simple, perhaps, but it has aroused predictable—and often fatal—opposition from the educational establishment. Letting parents choose where to educate their children is a silly idea; professionals know best. Co-operation, not competition, is the way to improve education for all. Vouchers would increase inequality because children who are hardest to teach would be left behind.
But these arguments are now succumbing to sheer weight of evidence. Voucher schemes are running in several different countries without ill-effects for social cohesion; those that use a lottery to hand out vouchers offer proof that recipients get a better education than those that do not.
Harry Patrinos, an education economist at the World Bank, cites a Colombian programme to broaden access to secondary schooling, known as PACES, a 1990s initiative that provided over 125,000 poor children with vouchers worth around half the cost of private secondary school. Crucially, there were more applicants than vouchers. The programme, which selected children by lottery, provided researchers with an almost perfect experiment, akin to the “pill-placebo” studies used to judge the efficacy of new medicines. The subsequent results show that the children who received vouchers were 15-20% more likely to finish secondary education, five percentage points less likely to repeat a grade, scored a bit better on scholastic tests and were much more likely to take college entrance exams.
Let the Money Follow the Student
Only by empowering parents to choose their children’s schools can Mayor-elect Fenty achieve his goal of a quality education for every child. He should increase public school choices, lift the arbitrary cap on the number of charter schools allowed in DC, and expand the district’s nascent but promising school voucher program.
Poor teaching quality, one of the District’s worst problems, is exacerbated by public school administrators who prefer to hire education majors instead math and science majors, even though the latter make better teachers in their subjects. Giving parents the ability to choose which public schools get their money discourages these and other counterproductive practices, as Harvard economist Caroline Hoxby has found.
Does Closing the Minority Achievement Gap Require a Downward Rush to the Middle
The prime motivator for taking MMSD’s high schools from an academically rich curriculum to the one-room schoolhouse model has been to close the minority achievement gap. Thus, I read with interest the following NYTimes letters:
A Racial Gap, or an Income Gap? (7 Letters)
Published: November 24, 2006
To the Editor:
In emphasizing race-based achievement gaps, “Schools Slow in Closing Gaps Between Races” (front page, Nov. 20) pays insufficient attention to the significant role of socioeconomic inequalities in explaining these gaps.
For social scientists studying the No Child Left Behind law, the slow progress comes as no surprise. The education researcher David Berliner has noted that “poverty is the 600-pound guerilla in the classroom.”
As long as proponents of No Child Left Behind continue to dismiss the examination of the economic backgrounds of students as an example of what President Bush has called the “soft bigotry of low expectations” or as an excuse for low achievement by low-income students, standards-based reforms like No Child Left Behind will have limited effects.
It is time for policy makers to place as much emphasis on reducing poverty as they do on improving the schools attended by poor children. Both are necessary, but are alone insufficient to reduce the achievement gap.
Alan R. Sadovnik
New York, Nov. 20, 2006
The writer is a professor of education, sociology and public affairs at Rutgers University in Newark.
•
To the Editor:
Yes, the achievement gaps remain persistent. But perplexing? Come on.
Having 10 years’ experience teaching in low-income, largely black districts, and also having raised three middle-class white children, I consider it a no-brainer why my children achieve well in school while many of my students do not: I am one mother to three kids, but a teacher to 25.
Aside from the socioeconomic differences between my kids and my students (a separate, undoubtedly more important perspective on achievement disparities), my children get more of my attention, period.
I want to give all of my students the same advantages I’ve given my own kids, but how can I possibly meet 25 individual needs with as much sensitivity and precision?
Why does this discussion always ignore class size as a contributing factor?
Why not lower the teacher-student ratio to 1 to 10 for a few years and then study the outcomes? The obvious answer is cost. But perhaps over the years this would be offset by the savings built from a better-educated and more productive group of graduates.
Mary Scheffler
Ocean, N.J., Nov. 20, 2006
•
To the Editor:
No Child Left Behind, signed into law by President Bush in January 2002, has not closed the achievement gap between minority and white students, but it has had a major effect on education in America.
The law has had a major impact on the privatization of education. With financing now available from school vouchers, increasing numbers of both minority and white families are placing their children in private and religious schools.
In addition, American schools are increasingly becoming racially segregated as white parents remove their children from public education.
Martin Gittelman
New York, Nov. 20, 2006
•
To the Editor:
All the tests in the world will not close the achievement gap. When politicians and business leaders stop blaming the schools and start focusing on the real reasons for the achievement gap — the economic gap, the health care gap and the racial gap — poor and minority students may have a fighting chance.
Until then, the more than $2 billion testing industry will continue to reap a bonanza as our nation falls further and further into the educational abyss.
Judy Rabinowitz
Ocean, N.J., Nov. 20, 2006
•
To the Editor:
How can you discuss the test-score gaps between minority and white students without attributing some of the problem to the child poverty rate of almost 18 percent, the child hunger rate of 17 percent and the 19 percent uninsured rate for poor children, when African-Americans and Hispanics bear the brunt of those disadvantages?
Yet the education experts quoted in your article speak as if poverty and hunger, and the illnesses associated with them, had no effect on children’s school attendance and capacity to learn.
That’s not the way the principal of a school that narrowed the gap between black and white students saw it. You write that he “credited a prekindergarten program and a school health clinic that helped keep poor students from missing class.”
No Child Left Behind is big on testing and promises. But it does far too little to address the social and economic needs of black, Hispanic and poor white children — needs that are inextricably linked to school achievement.
Milton Schwebel
New Brunswick, N.J., Nov. 20, 2006
The writer is the emeritus dean of the Graduate School of Education, Rutgers University.
•
To the Editor:
Standardized tests may be relatively efficient to administer, but they do not provide the information educators need to understand and work to close the achievement gap. Teachers need detailed information about their students’ strengths and areas of need. All they get from a standardized test is a number.
If we want to make greater progress toward the goal of leaving no child behind, let’s shelve those standardized tests and work together to truly understand the nature of the achievement gap and the academic, social and economic factors that contribute to it.
Howard Miller
Dobbs Ferry, N.Y., Nov. 20, 2006
The writer is an associate professor of literacy education at Mercy College.
•
To the Editor:
A new approach to closing the education gaps between races is needed.
Instead of looking at the performance of unsuccessful schools, unsuccessful teachers and poorly performing minority students, why not look for the factors that underlie success?
A study of the successful Asian students who outperform whites and other minority students might yield some interesting insights that could be effectively applied to solving the problem of those “left behind.”
Lynn Garon
New York, Nov. 20, 2006
Milwaukee Superintendent’s “Mission Impossible”
The new episode, starring William Andrekopoulos and debuting in many schools near you on Sept. 5, will feature:
- Increased pressure on teachers, students and schools, as well as on the mission leader, to get better results from kids.
- More competition from schools outside MPS, including voucher and charter schools.
- Smaller staffs in many MPS schools, and a lot of nervousness at schools about how things are really going.
- A group of schools bearing the new label “SMAART” (and that’s not a compliment).
Can the model designed for a farm economy be fixed?
School reform matters especially in Atlanta. The city may or may not be in the midst of a return-to-the-city movement. Certainly, condos and apartments are going up everywhere. But until the problem of a laggardly school system is cured, people with children won’t return, unless they have alternatives. Atlanta’s revival will be limited to the childless and to retiring baby boomers. I think that means, of course, some program of vouchers or tax credits that encourages new schools to be created by the private sector or by groups of educators starting their own.
It’s always necessary to try to improve the existing school system for parents who will always prefer to let government do it, who will choose to be uninvolved and are perfectly happy to hand Jimmy over at age 5 and check him back out at age 18, hoping he’s educated enough to get out of the house. The question for conservatives, though, is whether that’s enough. Can the model designed for a farm economy be fixed so that it serves most everybody? And if you’re open to reform, what’s the boldest reform you’d support?
Moving Away from Uniformity
Frederick Hess & Andrew Rotherham:
Perhaps the most encouraging trend in public education today is the growing willingness of educators and policymakers to embrace choices and customization, while turning away from the notion of one-size-fits-all corporatism that dominated 20th century school reform. In education, though, no good deed long goes unpunished. In a barely coherent 5-2 decision, Florida’s Supreme Court used recklessly broad language to overturn the state’s private school voucher program. In doing so, it set an unfortunate precedent that stretches far beyond the question of school choice.
Florida’s Opportunity Scholarship program is the oldest, and smallest, of three private-school choice plans in Florida and has been the focal point of the legal and political battle between school choice proponents and opponents in Florida. In deciding to declare the program unconstitutional, the court read the constitutional requirement that the state provide a “uniform, efficient, safe, secure, and high quality system of free public schools that allows students to obtain a high quality education” as decreeing a constitutional “uniformity” in operations. The decision was greeted with great fanfare by the National School Boards Association, the NAACP, and the teachers unions.
Rotherham has more.
Marshmallows and Public Policy
A longtime reader emailed David Brooks most recent column:
Around 1970, Walter Mischel launched a classic experiment. He left a succession of 4-year-olds in a room with a bell and a marshmallow. If they rang the bell, he would come back and they could eat the marshmallow. If, however, they didn’t ring the bell and waited for him to come back on his own, they could then have two marshmallows.
In videos of the experiment, you can see the children squirming, kicking, hiding their eyes — desperately trying to exercise self-control so they can wait and get two marshmallows. Their performance varied widely. Some broke down and rang the bell within a minute. Others lasted 15 minutes.
The children who waited longer went on to get higher SAT scores. They got into better colleges and had, on average, better adult outcomes. The children who rang the bell quickest were more likely to become bullies. They received worse teacher and parental evaluations 10 years on and were more likely to have drug problems at age 32.
Lots of Mischel test links here. Sara has more on this at the Quick and the Ed.
“I have private preference but a public purse”
My 5-year-old daughter, Elizabeth Virginia, now attends a private school that teaches foreign language and arts and offers after-school music and dance classes. But tuition is forcing me to look at Atlanta Public Schools next year for kindergarten.
When I first started researching where to send Elizabeth next year, I was looking for private schools that offered tuition assistance. I also sent an e-mail, however, to my Atlanta Board of Education representative asking him to sell me on taking my child out of private school and placing her into public school. His energetic reply made me look at Atlanta schools.
Children Before Special Interests
Oprah Winfrey recently used two days of her program to highlight the crisis in American public schools, focusing attention on our appalling dropout problem. The visuals were quite stunning.
In one segment, a group of inner-city Chicago students traded places with a group of suburban students to compare facilities and curriculums. In another, a valedictorian from a rural high school told of needing remedial classes in college. Perhaps most striking of all, CNN’s Andersen Cooper toured a high school near the White House that was in a shameful state of disrepair. Pieces of the ceiling had fallen on the ground, holes in the roof let rain pour into the school, restrooms were inoperable and unlit.
Oprah deserves a good deal of credit for putting a spotlight on these problems. Public schools face a dropout problem of stunning scale. Estimates from the Manhattan Institute put the nation’s dropout rate near 30 percent, with rates much higher among low-income and minority students. Many who do graduate do so without mastering high-school level material, as evidenced not only by the need for remediation among college students, but also in the stunningly poor literacy skills of the public.
National reading tests show that 38 percent of our fourth-graders score “below basic” in reading, meaning that they have failed to gain the basic literacy skills necessary to function academically. These students will drift into middle school, and literally be unable to make heads or tails of their textbooks.
via Andrew Rotherham:
Matthew Ladner, of steak dinner fame, weighs-in in the Philly Inquirer about what the Oprah hype all means. You can disagree with Ladner’s advocacy of vouchers but he nails the macro-problem here:
Wisconsin SAGE Class Size Discussion
If his school couldn’t exceed the SAGE ratios, Burdick K-8 School Principal Robert Schleck said his school probably would have dumped the program.
“There’s different models that are being used throughout the city,” he said, noting that in some SAGE classrooms, groups of students are pulled into the hallway or other locations during the day to maintain the teacher-to-student ratio.
Particularly in schools with fewer low-income students, which receive less SAGE funding, the state Department of Public Instruction has been willing to allow classrooms to exceed the law’s 15-student cap, although it often requires that they have extra personnel for reading and mathematics.
State DPI data show that at least 40% of SAGE schools employed half-time teachers to meet the program’s requirements in 2004-’05.
Marjorie Passman wrote:
Help me out here. I don’t quite understand your point in quoting Amy Hetzner’s article. Why not include the following web article as well: which concludes: Compared head-to-head against school vouchers, SAGE is far more effective in improving student achievement.
NPR’s OnPoint: The Cost of a Good Education
Parents in Milwaukee want school vouchers and the governor’s signing up. Hear about one city’s big experiment with vouchers.
Debating the Future of Education Reform
Fifty years after Milton Friedman first proposed the idea of education vouchers, school choice proposals come in all shapes and sizes. We asked a dozen experts what reforms they think are most necessary and promising to improve American education. We also asked them to identify the biggest obstacles to positive change. Here are their answers. Comments should be sent to letters@reason.com.
Via Joanne Jacobs who has more on Math Curriculum in China.
NCLB & Privatization
Maya Portulaca Cole posted the following thoughts on the listserve of MAFAAC:
Reading through a recent article about the Portland, OR school system from In These Times, titled, “All for One, None for All: Schoolchoice policies sacrifice universal education in favor of personal freedom,” I’m reminded of our own city and worry for its future.
On one hand, I think of Asa Hilliard’s words that remind us that, The relative ‘wealth’ of the relatively small numbers of Africans in the middle-income level obscures the gross poverty of the masses of low and no income Africans. Satisfied personally, the higher income Africans may even become a buffer, silencing the voice of the masses by being in a broker position to cool out the masses, and earning money for that containment of their brothers and sisters. These brothers and sisters are usually not clear at all. Many seem not even to seek clarity. They seek entertainment.”
High Quality Teaching make the difference
Young, Gifted and Black, by Perry, Steele and Hilliard is a little gem of a book. (Hereafter, YGB). The subtitle is “Promoting High Achievement Among African-American Students”. Though specifically addressing African-American kids, the descriptions and proscriptions proposed can be applied to all – important, given the continual poor showing of U.S. students generally on international tests (OECD PISA, TIMSS).
It is the section written by Asa Hilliard, Professor of Urban Education at Georgia State University, that addresses the real “gap” and real “reform”. The following attempts to summarize his positions and arguments:
The real gap for all students, not just Black, is the gap between student performance and excellence. Where does one start to close the gap? – by relying on the experiences of teachers who do not fail to achieve excellence in all their students, regardless of background – these experiences have always been around, but few educators want to acknowledge. It is in this protected environment of excellence in education that the theories of curriculum, and excuses of deprivation, of language, of failure can be unmasked.
Maryland’s Education Reform Guidelines
Maryland Lt. Gov. Michael S. Steele released his blueprint for education reform yesterday, a series of 30 recommendations that call for schools to be graded and teachers to be paid for performance.
Members of the 30-person Governor’s Commission on Quality Education in Maryland recommended efforts to promote charter schools but rejected school vouchers, a far more divisive topic
Full Report (PDF)
Two Nations
The Economist, in a pre-election series, takes a look at our education system:
Some schools are thriving; others have been left behind
AMERICA’S system of education ranges from the superb to the awful. Its universities, especially at the graduate level, are the best in the world, gaining some 60% of all Nobel prizes awarded since the second world war. Its public-school system, however, is often marked by poor teaching, dilapidated buildings and violence (although the rate of violent incidents is falling, more than 5% of schoolchildren played truant last year to avoid violence at school). Official figures say that 85% of students finish high school, but the Urban Institute and other groups estimate that nearly a third of them drop out.
The result is a popular assumption that American education from kindergarten to 12th-grade high-school graduation (K-12) is in crisis. President Bush’s main remedy, passed in 2001 with bipartisan support, is the No Child Left Behind Act, a programme promising lots of federal money ($13 billion next year) to school systems that test their students and improve their performance�and sanctions for those that do not. All in all, claims the Bush team, federal spending on K-12 education will have risen by the 2005 budget by 65%, the biggest increase since the Johnson presidency in the late 1960s.
The Democrats retort that �Every Child Left Behind� would be a better name. Echoing criticisms by the teachers’ unions and many states, John Kerry calculates that the programme has been underfunded by more than $26 billion over the past four years. He would establish a National Education Trust Fund �to ensure that schools always get the funding they need�; put a �great� (and better paid) teacher in every classroom; expand after-school activities for some 3.5m children; and offer college students a fully refundable tax credit for up to $4,000 a year of college tuition (Mr Kerry says that Mr Bush reneged on a promise to increase Pell grants, which help the poor to pay for college).
Copenhagen Consensus Project on The Learning Deficit
Harvard’s Lant Pritchett writes in a new paper for the Copenhagen Consensus Project:
There are many ways to press forward this kind of systemic reform, Mr Pritchett argues. Vouchers and a �market� for education might work well in some circumstances, but other approaches could achieve good results too in some cases: school autonomy (as granted to �charter schools� in the United States, for instance), decentralisation of control, community management, and the use of non-government providers, could all, Mr Pritchett argues, serve the goal of structural reform that he regards as necessary if the application of extra resources is to succeed.
One striking indication of how easy it is to spend money fruitlessly in education comes from the rich countries. According to one study cited by Mr Pritchett, Britain increased its real spending per pupil by 77% between 1970 and 1994; over the same period, the assessment score for learning in maths and science fell by 8%. Australia increased its real spending per pupil by 270%; its pupils� scores fell by 2%. Extra spending by itself is likely to be no more successful in the poor countries than it has been in the rich.
