Someone once wrote, “You can’t trust Alexander Russo to report on a school bake sale and give an accurate account of the price of brownies,” so one hesitates to put much stock in this post. It is nonetheless peculiar that a gaggle of bloggers would criticize other bloggers for blogging, or that they would inveigh against time-wasting while sitting on a panel, discussing blogging. Certainly Flypaper’s frequent posting is a benefit to our readers, who desire timely analysis and opinion on the day’s education issues. And for those who would rather imbibe an occasional off-the-cuff observation or two, perhaps about baseball or Howard Stern, other outlets exist.
School Funding’s Tragic Flaw, a new paper from Education Sector’s Kevin Carey and Marguerite Roza of the Center on Reinventing Public Education is a nice, quick introduction to the reasons that school funding is often inequitable and unfair and under-funds the neediest schools. Carey and Roza contrast two schools (one in Virginia and the other in North Carolina) that serve similar kids but have drastically different budgets to show why inequity persists.
They point to a number of problems. Federal Title I funding is skewed toward the wealthiest states, and at the district level, its sneaky “comparability” provision effectively erases differences in teacher salaries between schools, giving schools with more experienced teachers more than their fair share of dollars. (District budgeting practices are to blame for that, too.) And some states are far better than others at making up for local property wealth differences.
Carey and Roza call for some sensible solutions, including changes to Title I and for districts to let money follow the child—that is, to “allocate a standard amount of money per student to each school.” These ideas may not be new to Flypaper regulars, but this paper is worth checking out because it plainly explains some complicated problems.
It’s tough to capture a summer internship at Fordham. Expectant mothers often email us tabula rasa resumes on behalf of promising blastocysts, in fact, to be updated as Embryonic Emmy and Zygote Zach grow and garner accomplishments over the impending score. This summer, however, we have an unexpected internship opening! Click here (quickly) for more information.
To further illustrate the point that contamination may have occurred among Reading First and presumably “non” Reading First schools, a point I made in my piece in today’s Gadfly, Connie Choate, the director of Arkansas Reading First, writes:
I believe the design of the Impact Study is flawed. The study compared funded Reading First schools with non-funded RF schools within the same district. However in their RF proposals districts were required to include a plan for spreading the RF methodology to non-funded schools. States were also required to do the same. For example, all teachers across the state were invited to participate in ELLA, Effective Literacy, Summer Reading Camp, and several other professional development opportunities that are part of Reading First. We aligned all of this professional development to SBRR. So, even non-funded schools have benefited from RF. One example is the revision of the State English Language Arts Frameworks. The knowledge gained from the National Reading Panel Report and Reading First enabled the state to revise the English Language Arts Framework to align with SBRR. All professional development offered by the state is now aligned to SBRR. This should align curriculum and instruction in all schools to SBRR, not just our RF funded schools. We have created many materials in Reading First and have made them available to all schools.
Ms. Choate got me thinking that it would be a good idea to take a look at the feds’ application for state RF grants. And sure enough, what she says rings true. Consider this from page 1:
Each SEA may reserve up to 20 percent of the Reading First funds it receives for State use. These funds will assist States in building and maintaining statewide capacity to effectively teach all children to read by third grade. States may expend up to 65 percent of these reserved funds for activities related to professional development... This unprecedented and significant funding will provide States with the resources and opportunity to extend this reading initiative and to improve reading instruction beyond the specific schools and districts that receive Reading First subgrants (emphasis added).
And should there be any confusion, page five includes the selection criteria for awarding grants. Potential state grantees, in a section called the State Professional Development Plan, are to answer this question: “How will teachers statewide receive professional development in the essential components of reading instruction, using scientifically based instructional strategies, programs and materials, and using screening, diagnostic, and classroom based instructional assessments?”
Again, it’s a great idea to spread the instructional reading wealth among state schools, but it sure makes it all the more difficult to assess what is really happening in this evaluation, which sought to draw a line in the sand between treatment and comparison schools.
It’s not quite as bad as Marion Barry embracing vouchers, but is it necessarily a positive development that the United Way has selected dropout prevention as one of its three key initiatives? As the Washington Post reports,
The United Way of America, alarmed at the nation’s fraying safety net, will announce today that it will direct its giving toward ambitious 10-year goals that would cut in half the high school dropout rate and the number of working families struggling financially.
Curbing the dropout rate certainly deserves attention from the nation’s charitable donors, but the chances don’t appear high that a mainstream, let’s-all-get-along group like the United Way will tackle the underlying problems that lead to massive educational failure. Will the charity push for rigorous state standards or even national standards? Will it work to put pressure on failing school districts by supporting charter schools and other forms of parental choice? Will it tangle with recalcitrant teachers’ unions? Such actions are hard to imagine, which is why savvy observers should get ready to watch a whole lot more private money go down the tubes.
Check out this New York Daily News column about career and technical education (formerly vocational education).
Not only is career and technical education nothing to laugh at, it’s a way to replace the unrealistic “college for all” bias of public schooling with a greater degree of practical preparation for lucrative and rewarding careers in fields like nursing, desktop publishing, computer networking and the building trades.
This is encouraging:
And here’s the kicker: Two-thirds of CTE students go on to college, and when they do, there’s research suggesting they outperform other students. Those that go straight into the world of work are generally getting jobs in fields where the pay is good and demand is strong.
This week’s Gadfly is now available for public consumption. Fordham’s nascent research director, Amber Winkler, makes her Gadfly debut with a smart editorial about Reading First (she says it’s not yet dead). And former Massachusetts Commissioner of Education David P. Driscoll and the former chairman of the Massachusetts Board of Education, Jim Peyser, write in to talk MCAS and standards and college readiness.
The American Enterprise Institute’s education scholar, Rick Hess, has a new piece out about mayoral control of district schools. Basically, Hess concludes that mayoral control is no panacea for a city’s educational problems... so cross it off your “Educational Panacea” list.
Back when the controversy over unrepentant terrorist Bill Ayers exploded (no pun intended) in the middle of the 2008 Democratic primary, Senator Barack Obama used an unfortunate analogy to defend his association with the bomb-thrower:
The notion that somehow as a consequence of me knowing somebody who engaged in detestable acts 40 years ago when I was 8 years old, somehow reflects on me and my values, doesn’t make much sense, George. The fact is, is that I’m also friendly with Tom Coburn, one of the most conservative Republicans in the United States Senate, who during his campaign once said that it might be appropriate to apply the death penalty to those who carried out abortions. Do I need to apologize for Mr. Coburn’s statements? Because I certainly don’t agree with those either.
Umm, as about a million commentators said at the time, this is hardly moral equivalency. Ayers tried to blow stuff up and then refused to apologize for it. Coburn is making a public policy proposal. (One I’m not crazy about, by the way.)
But that hasn’t deterred Eduwonkette, the anonymous blogger and proud member of the American Educational Research Association. I wondered if she might want the governing council of that group to strip Ayers’s membership, before he takes office as one of its vice presidents. (See my post about that here.) Her response:
Mike believes that Ayers’ presence reflects badly on the whole association, but guilt by association is a shaky principle. I don’t judge Mike Petrilli, whose colleagues at the Hoover Institution include upstanding guys like Ed Meese and Donald Rumsfeld, based on his association with them, nor do I believe that AERA is tainted by having Ayers among its leadership. Mike might argue that Meese and Rumsfeld have records of accomplishment that justify their affiliation with Hoover. The same is true regarding Ayers and AERA.
The loony left’s “war criminals” charge against Rumsfeld aside, this is hardly moral equivalency, either. If Hoover puts a former terrorist on its board, I promise you, I won’t stand by idly and cheer.
Google announced yesterday that it will launch Friend Connect, a free service that will allow any website to operate as a so-called “social website,” in the mold of Facebook and MySpace.
Friend Connect is aimed at the millions of Web sites that could benefit from having members interact but can’t enable such connections because of a lack of technical expertise or hardware.
If anyone struggles from a “lack of technical expertise,” it’s district and state education agencies, whose websites often recreate for those seeking meaningful information the experience of a drugged mouse struggling frantically and usually in vain to find the cheese at the end of a maze.
Wouldn’t it be great if, say, the Cleveland Metropolitan School District pasted a bit of Google code into its trainwreck of a website and allowed users to build a community that either a) collaborated to make sense of the content for everyone or b) bypassed the content altogether and built a kind of parallel knowledge base that became much more useful for the average visitor to the website?
To paraphrase Mark Twain: There are lies, damned lies, and the latest Reading First report. The report is methodologically flawed, statistically glamorous, and ultimately meaningless in terms of its conclusions. It’s caused the usual sharks to roil the waters as if chum were being served. And in the end, it says nothing about the positive impact of Reading First in Ohio.
- Students in Ohio have gained more than a year’s reading achievement for each year that they are in the program....If students stay within the program, they are able to catch up to benchmark scores in fluency, even though they start significantly behind.
- Students have closed the gap on state performance on the third grade Ohio Achievement Test (OAT) over the past four years.
- Teachers have helped students close the achievement gap for students of color.
- Equally importantly, Westat’s (2008) independent evaluation of Reading First Ohio has documented that the more time that students spend in Reading First schools the more they outperformed their peers in comparison schools across the state.
A message to my friend Russ Whitehurst (Institute for Educational Sciences director): Whenever you’d like to post a response to these critiques, this blog’s all yours.
Mushy Mike knows it’s not news that college graduates live longer than high-school graduates. The article to which he refers is a comment on the lousy healthcare that many poor Americans receive, and it really doesn’t have much to do with getting a college education. To assume (as Mike seems to) that if we directed more academically unprepared pupils onto ivied campuses we’d see a marked drop in healthcare disparities is, for sundry reasons too numerous to expound upon here, an incredible oversimplification. College attendance, of course, does not cause disparities in health, wealth, happiness, etc. as much as it reflects the disparities that already exist. And I do not believe universities have the redemptive powers to magically reshape anyone who attends their classes.
K-12 schools are supposed to be places where students, regardless of their backgrounds, can garner the information they need to succeed at college or in the workplace. K-12 schools, not colleges, are supposed to be the equalizers. Obviously, America hasn’t yet structured the k-12 system to work as it should, and we keep graduating 18-year-olds who can’t read. Therfore, ed reformers, having so far failed to markedly improve k-12 classrooms, are shifting their aspirations for k-12 schools onto colleges. It’s a foolish strategy, and it will have bad consequences.
A post from guest blogger and Fordham Vice President for Ohio Programs & Policy Terry Ryan.
Ohio Attorney General Marc Dann is embroiled in serious scandals and faces impeachment. His own political party (the Democrats) has disowned him, and he is under intense pressure from the Governor, the statehouse, and the media to resign immediately.
We take no joy in Dann’s troubles, but his leaving office would raise some interesting questions. In September, Dann held a press conference to announce lawsuits aimed at closing two Dayton charter schools (he subsequently added two more schools). Dann cited the state’s charitable trust laws and alleged that the schools had violated their “charitable” missions as 501(c)3 organizations because they were underperforming academically (see Gadfly’s take on the first lawsuits.) One of the schools originally targeted by Dann has subsequently closed, but the second has vowed to fight the lawsuit. Oral arguments for that case are set for May 15 in Dayton.
If successful, this novel theory of trust law would effectively turn the state attorney general into a charter-school prosecutor, judge, jury, and executioner. Under Dann’s legal theory, his office would determine whether a school is successful or not, thereby usurping the regulatory authority of the General Assembly, the Ohio Department of Education, and individual charter school sponsors. If the AG gets this authority, observers wonder what would prevent him from determining that nonprofit colleges and universities aren’t up to snuff and should be closed? Or hospitals? Or any other nonprofit unloved by political supporters of the attorney general, whoever that might be? And why not then in other states, too?
Will the AG’s potential impeachment or resignation impact the Attorney General’s Office in this case? It’s far too early to tell, but one good thing that could come from this bad situation is a more thoughtful approach to dealing with troubled charters than having them killed off by a hard-charging AG.
Although details are still murky, this plan out of Denver, inspired by Chicago’s Renaissance 2010 and New York’s New Visions for Public Schools, seems promising.
The key here will be to keep these schools sufficiently insulated from district regulations. It’s unclear whether they’ll be charter schools, contract schools, private schools, or some hybrid thereof. But as long as they’re truly free to experiment with non-traditional schooling methods—e.g., extended learning time, college-prep culture, rigorous curricula, no-nonsense discipline, variable teacher pay—these schools could make a real impact in the Mile High City.
It’s great to see these bureaucracy-busting approaches catching on around the country.
Here’s another interesting video from The New Yorker Conference (those New Yorker people are always so darn interesting!). In this one, the magazine’s financial columnist, James Surowiecki, chats with Service Employees International Union President Andy Stern about the future of unions. This year’s New Yorker Conference is supposed to focus on innovation, but even as Stern talks about how organized labor has innovated and changed with the shifting economy, it’s clear that he still thinks of employment as a collectivist enterprise. That is, he thinks of writers as working in a writer’s community, not as individuals who should be hired, fired, paid based on their individual skills.
Mississippi has passed legislation, and the governor has signed it, that would fire superintendents whose districts are labeled “underperforming” for two years straight. (Before it’s active, the law needs to be approved by the feds, for Civil Rights-related reasons that Education Week explains.) The Gadflylikes the law. I don’t.
Officials note that the Magnolia State is one of just three (in the company of Alabama and Florida) where some superintendents are elected. The thinking is this: Local elections for superintendent are easily corrupted because of their small turnouts; elected superintendents are more likely to make decisions based on politics, not on the interests of students; and elected superintendents, especially those supported by teachers’ unions, may fill the superintendent role for years without appreciably improving the classroom instruction of which they’re ostensibly in charge. (These concerns relate to few. Most superintendents in Mississippi are appointed.) Furthermore, advocates for the new law say, if the state holds teachers accountable, it should treat superintendents similarly.
Fair points, but points outweighed by the pitfalls of Mississippi’s new law. Pitfalls such as: There is no solid definition of “underperforming”; qualified candidates for superintendent positions will be dissuaded from taking open jobs in Mississippi; two years is not enough time to appreciably improve a failing school district; the law’s process for actually firing underperforming superintendents is complicated (see the Ed Week article); and voters are having their democratic voice overturned by the legislature.
To compare Mississippi’s new superintendent accountability with teacher accountability is to compare apples and rodents. Teachers in Mississippi who fail to drastically improve the test scores of their classrooms are not fired after two years—and neither should they be.
Prediction: The feds approve this law and after two or three years everyone in Mississippi hates it and the legislature tosses it out and why did we bother with this crude, top-down, hasty accountability system in the first place?
Australia’s aboriginal community is suffering from a serious epidemic of children watching pornography at home—and then simulating sex acts in the classroom. Some of these aboriginal children are as young as seven. Even more disturbing, plenty of Australian social workers and community leaders think there’s nothing wrong with it. In their twisted minds, these children are not suffering from child abuse, despite being fed an endless diet of adult porn and, in some instances, having their parents sexually molest them.
The story in the Australian should be a wake-up call to the country’s authorities to crackdown on child abuse, improper sexual behavior in the classroom, and rampant pornography. A formal investigation by a former Supreme Court judge found that communities on the Anangu Pitjantjatjara Yankunytjatjara lands were not only inundated with porn, but that welfare workers and local aboriginal leaders—those who are supposed to be protecting children—deliberately sought to dissuade teachers from tackling the problems of child abuse.
The judge’s report is replete with disturbing examples of illicit sexual behavior by students in classrooms. In one case, a seven-year-old girl dropped her pants in class, simulated sexual intercourse, and jammed several plastic objects into her vagina. School officials suspect she is the victim of incest. In another case, a nine-year-old girl made numerous sexual gestures in class. When confronted by her teacher, she said she learned the moves from “blue movies.” It was later found out that the girl came from an abusive home and that she was physically assaulted by her parents. Repeatedly, teachers tried to intervene on behalf of the children. But they were told by social workers and community leaders that it would only “inflame the problem.” Moreover, welfare case officers stressed that sexualized behavior by seven-year-olds did not reveal “any child abuse concerns.”
Lisa Graham Keegan, school reform trailblazer and former state superintendent of Arizona, has quit her day job to spend most of her time working on behalf of Senator John McCain’s campaign, reports the Arizona Republic:
“Having Senator McCain be in a position to get ready to start talking about education a little bit more fully in his campaign, it’s just a great opportunity to be a part of,” said Keegan, 48, of Peoria. “It just didn’t make sense to do both at the same time.”
Keegan is an extremely effective advocate of school choice, meaningful accountability, and the smart use of data and technology. This is another sign that McCain isn’t planning to cede the education issue to his opponent.
The recent Reading First Impact Study interim report did some thing s correctly (employed a strong design for the questions they asked), but appeared to miss some very important confounds, leading me to have difficulties interpreting the results. First, the evaluation did not address all of the evaluation targets established in the law, thus narrowing the scope and comprehensiveness of the evaluation Congress intended. Second, and most importantly, the sample of states selected for inclusion in the study was not sufficient to test a number of variables that are critical to interpreting the data. As hard as I try, I cannot see how the sample would be considered representative. Third, the evaluation examined the effect of resources (Reading First funding) on a single measure of reading comprehension. As Steve Raudenbush has argued convincingly, an evaluation study comparing a group that received the resources versus another group that did not answers very little about the programs actual effectiveness or the ability of a study to inform improvements in the program or guide policy.
There are many factors at the implementation and instructional level that have to be examined and studied to refine any interpretation of the main effect of no significant difference. As Mr. Stearns probably knows, many school districts that implemented Reading First in some schools implemented the same programs in non-Reading First schools. Professional development activities funded through Reading First were available to all schools in a district, not just Reading First schools. Most of the states that Mr. Barbash highlighted in his article where not included in the sample drawn for the impact study. Approximately 60 percent of Reading First and non-Reading First schools were implementing the same programs by the third year of implementation according to Tim Shanahan. There was a significant degree of contamination from the “bleeding” of programs and resources across Reading First and non-Reading First schools. Believe me, if the final impact study report clarifies all of these issues, that would be very helpful.
According to our own Checker Finn, just yesterday the Institute for Educational Sciences director Russ Whitehurst admitted in front of 200 people that the “bleeding” of Reading First methods to schools in the control group is a probable explanation for the findings of his evaluation. In other words, non Reading First schools were using Reading First’s (proven and effective) methods too. That would have been a nice point to get across to the press before they wrote stories declaring the initiative a failure.
Let it be clear: even the government’s chief education researcher is saying that the findings of his evaluation don’t mean that Reading First is “ineffective” and should be scrapped. Congress, are you listening?
My reasons are that the party needs to get on right now with a lot of business, including figuring out what to do with Michigan and Florida. It’s important to make known right now not only my vote but as many superdelegates as possible.
Asked if this endorsement was a problem for Ed in ‘08, he said:
My partner here, Marc Lampkin is a Bush Republican, a McCain Republican, so we are still one Democrat and one Republican who will be working even handedly.
ABC News implied that his motives might not have been entirely pure:
By making his announcement, Romer may have enhanced his clout in an Obama White House. Plouffe said the Obama campaign will seek the counsel and advice of Romer on education issues.
“Secretary Romer” doesn’t have a bad ring to it—though he’ll be disappointed to discover that the U.S. Department of Education’s discretionary budget is much, much smaller than Ed in ’08’s $60-million bank account.
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