Entries from SchoolFunding

[ed.: I suspect this figure is higher, for 'Freudian' reasions. When you can't change what you have, defense mechanisms ought to protect you from seeing just how bad what you have really is.]

Critics of vouchers are concerned that people want to go private basically for pernicious reasons, right — because they are elitist, because they want to separate themselves off from minorities and from the lower classes. Basically they see vouchers as having greatest appeal to the affluent and to people who are advantaged, and they think that if vouchers were adopted, you would get an exodus of these kinds of people from the public system which would exacerbate existing social biases.

Voucher leaders, of course, claim the opposite and claim that parents are basically interested in performance, not in elitism and race and these other sorts of things, and that the people who would be especially interested in vouchers would be the people who have the lowest performing schools and who have no choice now — I mean, like people who are disadvantaged...



what does the evidence have to say?

[ed.: bullets added]

• First, performance is far and away the most important influence on the decision of parents to go private. So the public parents who are interested in possibly seeking out a private school are thinking first and foremost about finding a good school for their kids, and not about race, not about elitism and so on.

• Number two, choice has greatest appeal to parents who are low in income, minority — especially blacks — and from disadvantaged, typically low-performing school districts.

• Number three, all of the basic factors that sort of represent the arguments that voucher leaders make about parent influence, about moral values, about school prayer, and so on — all of those things show up in the way parents actually think about going private, and all of those things have exactly the impact that you would expect.

• ...attitudes toward diversity — toward busing, let's say — have very little to do with the desire of people to go choice — to go private. I'm not sure what to make of this. I think it's a very sensitive social issue. I don't want to arrive at any definitive conclusion on this. It is the one factor that consistently shows no impact throughout my analysis. I think that the critics of choice would be skeptical of this, and all I can say is it may well be that, with better measures, race would show a bigger impact. I mean, historically, race has been an important thing. I mean, in the '60s and '70s, certainly there were whites avoiding blacks, right? And this is one reason that the NAACP and other groups are skeptical about choice.

but...

• [Race] does, however, play a significant role in the thinking of low-income, white parents in the inner city, and these parents are precisely the ones who are most affected by choice programs because that's where most of the choice programs are....And so this is a red flag for voucher leaders. It appears that, at least for some white people, race does play a role, and it plays exactly the role you could expect. Whites who are opposed to diversity are the ones who seek out private schools. So choice people need to beware on that and need to design their choice programs with that in mind

what would a voucher system look like?

if we predict, just for purposes of simulation — let's say, 25 — the top 25 percent actually do go private — it is interesting to see what would happen, what the new private sector would like as they shift from public to private, and what the new public sector would look like after they leave. And how does that affect the social biases that now characterize the system?

[snip]

....this is purely hypothetical, but it's a very interesting thing to do since it simply reflects the underlying demand that's being expressed here — what we find is that the new private sector is substantially moderated compared to the existing private sector. The gap between public and private goes way down, so now, in the new private sector, the parents are only a little more educated than the new public parents. They are only very slightly higher in income, and in the private sector, there are now, percentage-wise, more minorities than in the public sector. The new private sector, in fact, would be 33 percent minority, whereas the new public sector would only be 22 percent minority. And, in fact, of the people who switch from public to private in this top group, 45 percent of those people are either black or Hispanic. So what you're getting is a big movement of low-income, minority, low-educated people from public to private, and that completely changes that character of the private sector, and really undermines whatever elitist character it has today and brings about not an exacerbation of social biases, but a substantial moderation of social biases.

Now, is this inevitable? No, because there's a supply-side here, and what critics would point out — and I think this is totally valid — is that, well, what if private schools discriminate against poor kids and don't let them in?

[snip]

....when people think about going private, and when they think about evaluating the schools, they are thinking about things that they know about, you know, that are close to home, whereas when it comes to public policy, they are thinking about issues, typically, that are complicated, abstract, and often require — and they often require theoretical thinking, they are remote from their lives, they have no experience with them. And so it is difficult for them to know much about these things, or, in many cases, to care that much about them.



rationally ignorant

Furthermore, they often have little incentive to know about these things, and the reason is that public policies are decided democratically through collective decision processes, and no single person can have much impact on what policies are going to result. And so as a result, since getting information is a costly act, individuals don't have incentives to make that investment to get informed. And so, as a result, people tend to be rationally ignorant, and that's still one of the basic findings of political science. People don't know much about public policy, and it's rational for them not to know much about public policy, that's why they do it.

[snip]

....what the findings suggest is two-thirds of the people are uninformed. They say that they haven't really heard much of anything about vouchers or anything about vouchers. And four years later, Public Agenda asked exactly the same question on their survey, and they got exactly the same answer — about two-thirds of the people say they're just uninformed about the issue.

Okay. So this raises a very interesting problem because in a book about vouchers you would think that the most important question is, "What percentage of the people support vouchers?" That's what everybody wants to know, right? Well, what is it — you know, is it 45 percent, is it 50 percent, is it 60 percent? What is it? You know — but the prior question is, if people are basically uninformed, how can they have any opinions at all?

[snip]

....political scientists have been dealing with this for a long time. It's a central issue in the study of public opinion and voting. The early work in the 1960s basically argued that people are out of it, you know, that basically people don't have real attitudes, and they are sort of responding, you know, in random fashion to surveys, and survey results really didn't mean much.

The more recent work is more generous to voters — not by a lot, but still more generous.



how political scientists interpret survey data

....what I try to argue here is don't focus on the numbers, you know? The fact is that my survey shows 60 percent of the people support vouchers; about 32 percent, I believe, oppose vouchers. I don't make a big deal of that. It doesn't mean to me, well, this is a clean sweep, right? Americans are really strongly in favor of that. That's not what it means at all. If I asked them the same question a month later, I would've gotten different results; if I had slightly varied the wording, I would have gotten different results; if I'd had different questions proceeding it, I would've gotten different results. And so if you look at different surveys like the PDK — Phi Delta Kappa surveys, Gallup surveys — there was one carried out by the National Catholic Education Association — you compare those results, they vary all over the map. They vary from, like, 24 percent support for vouchers to 70 percent support for vouchers. And in some sense, they are all right because they are all reflecting considerations that people care about.?

So the key is what are those considerations? What is going on in their brains? What matters to them? That's what I try to figure out here.

Okay. All right, what do I find out? First, there is a structure to the way they think about these things. There are a set of things that matter to them. What are those things? Well, among parents, the most important consideration is do they want to use a voucher. If they want to use a voucher, they are much more likely to support vouchers.

[snip]

beyond that who are the people who tend to support vouchers? The people who are far and away the strongest supporters of vouchers are people who are low in income, minority — especially black — and from disadvantaged school districts.

[snip]

But, the one that really stands out, again, is equity, and it is especially influential for low-income people.



who supports vouchers?

...…the people who support diversity are supportive of vouchers. Now again, I don't know whether this is a crucial fact about the world or not, or how — but it does fit in with everything else. So the syndrome of characteristics is, you have low-income, minority people from low-performing school districts who put a lot of emphasis on equity and who support diversity. That's the constellation of characteristics. These are basically democratic, liberal characteristics, and I think that is a fundamental point to be made. The constituency for vouchers that is the strongest in its support for vouchers is a democratic liberal constituency.

[snip]

...the main thing is the downside component, which is people are afraid of the risk. And the number one influence — social influence when they are evaluating the social consequences of vouchers on their support for vouchers is risk. And this applies for parents and non-parents alike. And this goes back to their basic support for the public schools. This is a result of, I think, profound political significance.

[snip]

it's really interesting to ask, "Well, are people basically thinking about the voucher issue in social terms, like how would it affect society?"….Are they thinking about their self-interest, about the fact that, you know, they want to use a voucher and, you know, who cares what happens to the rest of society? Are they thinking as citizens or are they thinking as consumers?... it's possible to carry out a statistical analysis where you basically force the social factors to compete with the self-interest factors to see what the balance is. And the results, overall, for parents — since parents are the ones who are really faced with this tension — are that parents think about both….the social considerations are a little bit more important than self-interest when the have to compete with one another.

[snip]

it turns out that low-income people — parents — who are in disadvantaged districts are very, very self-interested. They support vouchers because they want them for themselves, for obvious reasons. But if you move down to talk about people who have more money and who are not located in bad districts, their motivations are very largely social. They're thinking mainly in terms of, sort of, public interest kinds of reasons for supporting vouchers.

[snip]

this means that there are really two very different constituencies out there that are differently motivated. And this is important for the way voucher leaders have to, sort of, frame their appeals, because they can, in principle, provide vouchers to low-income constituencies because they want them for themselves, and at the same time justify what they are doing as being good for society, good for the worst schools in society on public interest grounds. And public interest arguments will resonate with the rest of the population because they are not, first and foremost, self-interested. The fact that they don't get the vouchers is not crucial to them.



all the other questions....

[ed.: bullets added]

• [S]hould religious schools be included or not? You can have a system that has no religious schools, just non-religious. That's totally different.

• Or, should we regulate private schools so that they have to follow certain rules with regard to curriculum, teacher qualifications, how they spend their money, testing students?

• Should private schools be allowed to admit any students they want, or should they have to admit everyone?

• Should religious schools be allowed to admit only students of their own religion or should they be required to admit student of all religions?

Basic regulatory issues. Milton Friedman would like a system with no regulations. But what do the American people want?

• And finally, do they think everybody should get a voucher — if we're going to have a voucher system — or do they think just low-income kids, needy kids should get a voucher?

[These are all] very different kinds of systems, and this obviously is crucial in determining what voucher leaders should propose if they are going to try to maximize their appeal.

[ed.: bullets added]

• One, overwhelmingly, Americans think religious schools should be included. Americans are very, very sympathetic toward religion. The opponents of vouchers, who are very strident in asserting the separation of church and state, and very strident in saying that religious schools should be excluded, are totally out of step of the American public on this issue.

"Americans love regulations"

• When it comes to the regulation issue, it's many of the voucher supporters that are out of step. The fact is, Americans are overwhelmingly in favor of regulations. They love regulations. They think that there should be rules for curriculum, for teacher qualifications, for student testing and so on, and they believe, by a big margin, that private schools should not be able to set their own admissions criteria. They should have to admit everybody. And they want to force religious schools to admit students of any religion. You want to play the voucher game, you've got to play by the rules. They want a system that is accountable and equitable, and regulations help guarantee that. Voucher leaders might not like it, but that's what people want. And it's truly overwhelming — we're talking about 85 percent approval on these things. You don't get that on anything.

• Finally, universalism vs. targeting. This is more subtle. Americans are basically universalists at heart, right? Basically, what they would prefer — if we're going to have a voucher system — is a system in which everybody gets one. That seems fair to them. However, they are also very sympathetic to giving vouchers to poor kids in the inner city. They favor that kind of a program, all by itself, by a big margin, and they are really risk-averse about going immediately to the kind of universal system that, in their hearts, they would really like. And so, their preference is to start small, to start incrementally, and to then move, perhaps, toward a broader system.

what does this mean for the politics of vouchers

...we have to go back to the basic fact of life here, which is Americans like the public schools. They are attached to the public schools. They don't want anything bad to happen to the public schools. On the other hand, they think private schools are better. They are very open to the ideas behind the voucher movement — from the idea of vouchers to the basic arguments that are being made. So that's the basic frame in which this is taking place. So the voucher leaders have to try to make progress in a context in which people are basically pretty satisfied and afraid of upsetting an apple cart that they like.

• ...they have to do everything they can to minimize risk to the system, and that means adopting an incremental approach.

• [first, voucher supporters should target] the obvious constituency that needs vouchers the most — low-income kids, kids in failing school districts. This, it so happens, is their strongest constituency anyway — far and away.

• Third, they should emphasize equity. This is an argument that resonates very strongly with that constituency and with everyone else.

• They have to accept regulation. The free marketers are — you know, they're going to have a nervous breakdown over this, or they might not even do it. But if they don't do it, they're not going to win. They need to be willing to hold private schools accountable, and they need to be willing to take concrete steps to ensure equity. Now, this doesn't mean burying them in a 7000-page education code, as we have in California for public schools, but it does mean having a framework of rules that ensures the public that markets will work as they want them to work.

• ...finally, voucher leaders have to refrain from attacking the public schools, and have to promote voucher programs that are intended to improve the public schools and to coexist with the public schools.

'next action'

....they can either go the initiative route, or they can go the more normal political route which is to seek new legislation.

Okay, what happens if they go the initiative route? Well, it seems attractive. You know, you go for the Hail Mary, right? If the thing passes, all of a sudden you have a voucher program. And if you think that people basically support vouchers — and I think basically they are very open to the idea — it seems like you ought to be able to win.

The problem is that this is wrong. I used to think that it was right, actually — and I'm sort of embarrassed by this, because as a political scientist I should have known better, but I didn't — I thought that if voucher leaders designed low-income voucher programs of the kind I just talked about, and put them out here for people to vote on, that they would vote yes. And I think other things being equal that they would. But other things are not equal....There is a literature on this, and it was this literature that I had never read. I am embarrassed to say so, but I had never read it.

Now I've read it. And this is what it says, basically: there are some issues on which people are basically pretty well informed because these issues are familiar to them and pretty simple — issues like the death penalty or immigration or maybe bilingual education or taxes. But they know where they stand coming in. And so the campaign is not going to have a huge influence on them.

But many issues are not like that. The voucher issue is not like that, but many others are not, either. These issues are not familiar to them, and they're pretty complicated in terms of the variety of social consequences they might have. And so these consequences can be subject to dispute. And so, if there is a strong opponent, then all that opponent has to do is to raise a doubt, and that is an easy thing to do with these kinds of issues. And, in these situations, the maximum voters — [the] maxim of voters is when in doubt, vote no. And if you talk to any professional in initiative campaigns, that's what they'll tell you — when in doubt, voters vote no. And so, on the opposition side, you don't have to convince people that you're right. What you have to do is convince people that there is doubt, that there is uncertainty, that there is risk. And given what people feel about the public school system and their fears about upsetting the apple cart, this is a piece of cake.

So in any initiative campaign where you have the unions willing to spend money to barrage people with these kinds of arguments, they win. And it doesn't matter how much the voucher side spends....So I think the basic lesson that comes out of this is not, oh, people don't want vouchers. The basic question is, don't do this, you know, voucher leaders should not do this. It's a loser. They can't ever win these kinds of battles.

What it does tell them, I think, is that the unions are not creating this opposition out of nothing. Again, go back to the considerations. People, in their heads, have certain considerations that are very pro-voucher, but they have some that are anti-voucher, too. And one of the anti-voucher things is, oh my God, what if something went wrong and hurt the public schools? The unions are just playing on that. It's real, and that's what comes out during the campaign.

So the only way that they can succeed is through legislative politics. And they already have succeeded though legislative — this is the normal way in which we make policy in this country.



veto points

Okay, now, this is no cakewalk because we have the separation power system in which policies are made by having legislation passed through subcommittees and committees and floor votes in two houses, then they have to be reconciled by conference committee, they have to be voted on in identical form by both houses, and the executive has to sign them, but he can veto them. If he does sign it, the courts can get in the way and overturn them. All of these steps are veto points. And so, if you want to get something passed like a new voucher program, you have to get it passed through every single veto point. But if you want to block — which is all the unions want to do, all the opponents want to do — you just have to block at one point, anywhere, it doesn't matter. And then you can get it all the way through the House of Representatives, all the way through the Senate, and then Clinton will veto it. At just one veto point, that's all you need.

Okay, so, it's very difficult to win here, and yet, they've managed to win a number of important victories. They've come very close in a number of states, like in Texas and Pennsylvania and others. And I think over the long haul this is likely to pay off for a couple of reasons, and let me point these out.

[snip]

• Okay, number one — the number one reason — the voucher movement is incredibly fragmented and decentralized, and while most people would say, whoa, this is really unfortunate for the voucher movement, you know, they're not really organized. But the upside of that is these people are everywhere, you know? The law of large numbers works to their advantage over the long haul.

• Number two, the key opponents on the liberal side — some of them — are going to defect, I think, in the coming years. We are already seeing this among certain liberal intellectuals. The Washington Post, the New Republic, Robert Reich, Joe Califano, Martin Luther King III, Andrew Young — all of these people have come out for low-income vouchers in recent years. This is really just the beginning. I think that the opponents are beginning to sort of lose the intellectual battle here. It's hardly over, but this is a tide that is beginning. And I think a lot of it has to do with the fact that the constituency for these vouchers is a democratic liberal constituency, and there's no denying that.

The big event, I think, is going to be that someday — and it may happen soon, but probably it won't, probably it will take a little while — maybe 10 years, maybe longer — the civil rights groups are going to change sides. Right now the civil rights groups are out of step with their constituents. Their constituents are the single strongest supporters of vouchers in the country. Blacks want vouchers, big-time. Why? They are stuck in bad schools. It doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure it out. Well, the NAACP is opposed to vouchers, and their opposition goes back to the experiences that its leaders had during their formative times in the '50s and '60s, seeing that choice had been used by whites to avoid blacks and promote segregation. These are very real and legitimate feelings on their part. It's pretty obvious why they opposed choice — but those things were frozen, and today, decades later, they still oppose choice.

Well, younger blacks, in many cases, don't.....Now the NAACP is engaged in an attempt to convince its own constituents that they are wrong in their perception of their own interests. That is not going to work.



libertarian woes

....when it happens, this is big because that is going to shift the entire balance of power. They're going to be in the driver's seat. I mean, it's not like they're going to move over and support choice and then Milton Friedman is going to be designing the voucher program. It doesn't work that way. If they move over to support choice, they hold the balance of power, they are designing the voucher system, they are not going to get voucher systems they don't want. Milton Friedman is not going to get the programs he wants. He's going to — basically what's happening is the libertarians are going to lose control of their own movement to these people in the center — the liberals who are moving over, over time. And so then the problem will be how are these libertarians going to expand the voucher system, given that these people in the middle don't want to, and can renege in the future?

So, at any rate, once the civil rights groups shift — and I think they will — I think the ball game is over. I think a lot of Democrats will then find strong political reason for shifting over as well and getting in line with their own constituents, because now they find it very difficult and embarrassing to look poor people in the eye and say, "Yes, I know you're in bad schools. Yes, I know you want vouchers, but we are opposed to that. Of course, we support you in every other social policy. Every other program that benefits you we are on your side, but in this particular one, we are opposing you." That's got to go. I think that will go. It's an untenable position, I think, over the long haul, and especially once the civil rights groups and their power move over, the Democrats will move.

And now, again, this is not going to happen overnight. It could take 10 years, 20 years, 30 years.

[snip]

I think what we're looking at is a system that integrates vouchers into the system that we have now and that, over the long haul, simply provides more choice and more competition within a basic framework of governmental control that is a mixed system of markets and government that looks very much like our economy looks today.



Q & A

Q: How will public experience with charter schools affect public views about vouchers?

MR. MOE: Well, my own view is that as people become more and more familiar with choice?they have choice in almost every other area of their lives?and as they become more and more used to having choice in education, I think it becomes easier and easier to think that they ought to have the choice to be able to go to private schools, too. And so I think the people who are hoping that by supporting charter schools they can head off vouchers are wrong.

[ed.: I agree, absolutely. His point that people fear risk comes in here. Once people see that public schools aren't being destroyed by choice in the form of charter schools, they're going to think vouchers are the next step. That seems to be the way it always works. 'Baby steps.']

Q: I was wondering about the two-thirds that you said were uninformed about vouchers, and what percentage of those were actually parents or had kids in the school...

MOE: It's a fascinating thing, you know?...Ignorance is pervasive and widespread and seems to have nothing to do, basically, with the incentives to know about vouchers. And I think the reason for that is, again, this rational ignorance argument that everyone is involved in a collective decision process in which everyone knows that their own vote doesn't count for all that much, and they're not going to be pivotal, and that it costs something to become informed....parents are no better informed than non-parents. And the parents who say they want to go private, they are no better informed than other parents are. It's really quite remarkable.

Q: What sense do you have, as far as voters and the public viewing politicians — well, on the one hand, Bill Clinton, Al Gore, or Jesse Jackson, who have adamantly opposed vouchers, yet, you know, send their own children to private schools? Is that just their right and privilege and wisdom, or is there resentment and they are seen as hypocritical?

MR. MOE: I think that's a very difficult position to take, given that your own constituents are poor. I think Al Gore was squirming a lot during the last campaign. You know, in fact, in one setting, he actually told a poor woman in the audience, "Look, if I were in your shoes, I would probably support vouchers, too." Now, how does that sound? (Laughter.)

Q: How do you explain or reconcile what appears to be some kind of contradiction in that public schools are good, but private schools are better in people's mind; and then, if you get a voucher, you regulate the private schools to look like public schools?

MR. MOE: Well, people are not masters of resolving contradictions, right? So it never occurs to them that there is a contradiction. I don't think that, in their own minds, they think that the rules and regulations that, say, require teacher qualifications or curriculum standards or whatever, are imposing any burden on the public schools. They think those things are good, and if they're good for the public schools, they are good for the private schools. Now, I think it's for program designers to try to take those things into account, and I would hope that program designers, in imposing basic regulations on the private schools — which I think will probably be necessary — will keep them basic. I think the problem in the public schools is not that they have some standards that they have to meet, and not that they are held accountable, but that the rules and regulations are onerous and downright ridiculous. I mean, it really is true that in California we have a 7000-page education code. And we have something like 50, 60, 70 categorical programs that impose so many rules and regulations on the schools you can't even count them all. That's what burdens the schools. It's not having a few basic curriculum requirements.

Q: You mentioned that the public supports competition.

MR. MOE: I didn't quiz them in-depth about what they think competition means. And I think if you did, you would be deeply disappointed. And people are not social theorists. I think they have a sense that competition has something to do with the fact that people are allowed to go somewhere else if they don't like what they're getting. And, you know, really, that is sort of what competition comes down to, that schools are not allowed to take kids and money for granted, as they do today. And parents basically think that's a good idea, to get away from that and to have schools have to perform in order to keep kids and resources. They like that idea.

But there are obviously aspects of competition, for example, that have to do with advertising and that sort of thing, or cut-throat competition, you know, like in the economic marketplace, that turn people off. So, again, there are considerations having to do with competition that sort of weigh on both sides of the issue. But I think basically people are positive about competition....

I think public opinion on for-profit schools is dicey, because the idea of profits and education is not something that people are entirely comfortable with.

Q: I was wondering where educators and administrators fall in this public opinion. I've heard a lot of opposition coming from teachers for the voucher systems, and I wondered if you could just briefly speak to that and, you know, maybe it's different between public and private, and how do their opinions affect the public opinion?

MR. MOE: Well, teachers are, of course, against vouchers on the whole — not every teacher, but most teachers. Teachers, I think, as a group, are highly risk averse. They like job security or they wouldn't be in jobs that give them lifetime tenure. And so — and they believe strongly in the public schools and that what they are doing is right and good ,and many Americans believe the same thing about the public schools. So teachers are very much, on the whole, against vouchers. And this is a very important thing for the politics of it — people like teachers, you know. Ordinary Americans like teachers. [ed.: absolutely true of me. I come from a long line of teachers; my sister-in-law is a teacher; both my sisters were teachers; I've been a teacher myself. I like teachers. Period. This is why I don't particularly like talking about low-SAT scores & low math skills & yadda-yadda-yadda. When push comes to shove, I personally don't really care about any of that. Rationally or not, I like teachers as a group & I trust them.] And teachers are, then, important activists in political campaigns. So when teachers go around and tell parents that vouchers are a bad thing, parents tend to listen. Also, the unions and school administrations do systematically use the schools to send out information to parents and to try to convince the political electorate that vouchers are bad. So the role of teachers is really crucial in this and it makes a very difficult for the voucher movement.

Q: paraphrase: How fast can public opinion change?

MR. MOE: I think it moves glacially. And I think people who think that they can put a few ads on TV and change public opinion are wrong. I think what political scientists have found is most people just aren't paying attention. If they are paying attention, it goes in one ear and out the other, you know, and most people just don't have their attitudes changed very easily, right? Now, over long period of time, things can change their attitudes — salient events can change their attitudes. But I think the most important thing for changing public attitudes are things that change in their lives. And so someone back here asked a question about charter schools. The more charter schools there are, the more people get used to having choice as an integral, natural, normal part of the education system will have their attitudes about choice and about vouchers change.

Also, the private voucher movement in this country has now offered some 60,000 kids — all of them low income, most of them in urban areas — vouchers. These kids are out there using vouchers every day. Their parents are ecstatic about being able to do so. There are number of studies about this now — you know, 10, 15 different studies showing all of them exactly the same things — parents are ecstatic, they love it. Well, they are talking to other people. They are talking to other parents, they are talking to local community leaders. This is affecting the lives of lots of people — way more than 60,000 people, right? And so, over time, people get experience with choice and with vouchers. And I think these experiences are going to have a lot to do with attitudinal change over the long haul. But in the short run, I think public opinion pretty much is what it is.

Q: I didn't know if you asked anything about supply issues in your survey of it, based on your own experience, you have some thoughts about the supply question, which you said you did not talk too much about in the book.

MR. MOE: Okay. A couple of supply issues. One is, will private schools discriminate against low income and minority kids? Most people, as I recall, think not. However, the percentage of people who think yes is not trivial — it's, you know, like 40 percent or 45 percent or something like that. So, Americans worry that there may be a problem over on the supply side with low-income kids actually getting into these schools. And that's one reason — the big reason — that they want to have a few rules. You know, for instance, they overwhelmingly favored a set-aside, you know, where schools that participate in the voucher program — let's say everybody got a voucher — would have to reserve a certain percentage of their slots for poor kids. And behind that is this worry those kids might not be able to get in. And they firmly believe in equity.

Q: I just was curious, were there any studies done of our leaders here in United States in different sectors of the society and whether they came from private schools or public schools?

MR. MOE: ...a number of other people have carried out studies....what they show is what has been recognized for a long time, that, say, members of Congress, a pretty large percentage of them, send their kids to private schools, right? I mean, President Clinton sent Chelsea to private school in Washington D.C. He wouldn't want her to go to the public schools there, even though he vetoed the voucher bill for low-income kids. Al Gore sent his kids to private schools and he went to private schools, you know, and this is a pretty standard story. Elites, whether they are Democrats or Republicans, if they have money, and even, you know, people who are not in politics, just people who have enough money, will not send their kids to bad schools. Money is choice. And that is why, in this country, low-income kids always wind up in the bad schools, because anybody with money doesn't go there. And that is the real travesty of our education system, and it's something that I think vouchers can do something about. And I think it's not an accident that the big supporters of vouchers are low-income people.

Q: I was curious if you see a — the regulation coming in affecting religious liberty in private schools....

MR. MOE: ...My impression, based upon my own reading, is that anti-Catholicism has certainly declined significantly over the years. And I think that the real threat, when it comes to the way a voucher system might be set up and might actually be run, is that there would be court decisions that would, possibly, require a very strict separation of church and state, which would either prohibit those schools from participating at all or, if they do participate, require that they keep religion totally out of their curriculum. And so it's possible, if that happens, that many of those schools would prefer not to participate in the voucher system, and therefore they and their students wouldn't benefit from it. My own view is that that would be unfortunate. The overwhelming majority of Americans agree with me, but ultimately it will be the courts that decide that.

Q: Could you follow up by answering a question on accountability? What did accountability mean in surveys and what is your definition of it?

MR. MOE: Okay. Well, in the survey it simply referred to basic rules about curriculum, about teacher

So accountability basically has to do with public goals that the government determines are important through a democratic process, and efforts by the government, through rules and enforcement, to see to it that those goals are being adequately pursued. My own view is that, of course, that's what government does today and it's a nightmare. So I think we have to be, you know, public opinion aside, I think it's very important to be very careful about how this is done. And I hope that program designers will be very careful. On the other hand, I think anyone who thinks that we're going to have voucher systems in this country without basic regulations to ensure accountability and equity is wrong. And so, we have to come to some agreement on how we're going to do this and do it well.

Q: Okay, I have a question about the ignorance of Americans about vouchers. And I was wondering if you found a difference along racial lines as far as blacks and whites? And I will say that I am not as optimistic that the black leaders will see the light or that they will be replaced,...

MR. MOE: Oh, yes. Yes, there is a difference, but the difference is due to education. On the average, blacks are not as well educated as whites. And education and income — they are lower in income on average — are very highly correlated with knowledge on this issue — with information about it, right? So yes, they are much less informed. On the other hand, most people are uninformed, and people are able to make sense of the issue. It's simple enough, just in terms of its basic concept, that they can get a sense for how they feel....

Now, your position about what black leaders are likely to do? You know, you could be right, but I think that black leaders are, in fact, very concerned about representing their constituents. They know that their constituents are in the worst schools in our country. They know that those schools aren't getting any better. It's been decades and decades and decades of promises that have not been realized. In the meantime, whole generations of kids are being lost....And while the older generation has an abiding faith in the government to help solve their problems, government has not solved this problem....

And the one continuing fact is that this is a socioeconomic reality that hasn't changed for a long time and isn't going to change in the future. Blacks are stuck in bad schools, disproportionately. They are. And they are demanding — many of them — some kind of immediate change so that they don't lose future generations. Vouchers are a response to that in a way that all of these other, sort of, mainstream, "let's fix the public schools" reforms are not responsive. They don't want to wait 10 or 20 years for things to happen. You can lose a couple of generations of kids that way.

Q: A related question. To what extent do you think that exposure to, and the success of, public housing vouchers might transform both public opinion and elite opinion about school vouchers?

MR. MOE: Well, I think every little bit helps because it gets back to this point about the actual everyday experiences of people and how it shapes their perceptions of choice and vouchers. But the fact is that we've had food stamps for a long time, you know, and food stamps are vouchers. Medicare is essentially a voucher program. There are many ways that vouchers play roles in our lives. There is a program for low-income child care where they can get child care vouchers and go to, say, a Catholic day-care program if they want. Pell grants — that's a voucher program. They can take it to any school they want, right? And it doesn't seem to have sunk in, you know, that all these things are voucher programs.



a question about 'fangless' markets

Q: Terry, you mentioned the public's deep attachment to this idea of the public schools. Voucher advocates often argue that one of the virtues of vouchers is that it would force bad public schools to compete with private schools and so they would then become more successful; they would have an incentive to become successful. Isn't one of the implications of your study, though, that we may come up with a voucher system where really no one can fail because that would be a risky thing? We don't — the public doesn't went to see public schools fail. And I'm wondering if, really, what you see out — looking out to the future — are these sort of "fangless" markets that we're going to be creating where bad public schools really don't fail at all?

[ed.: this answer is terrific]

MR. MOE: I actually don't think that's likely to happen. I think a more likely scenario is like the kind of thing that happened in Florida with these two schools — interesting that in the whole state of Florida only two schools were failing. It seems to me — in California we have 8500 schools, you'd think — I would guess, you know, there would be hundreds and hundreds of failing schools — in Florida they had two. But okay, so in Florida they had, like, 58 kids who took vouchers. Well, that was enough to cause all hell to break loose in those schools, and they started scrambling. There was an article in Education Week a while ago, a month ago, about one of the schools. And in that school things changed, heads were rolling. And, as they put it, "We're focusing like a laser on reading and math." Well, you know, why weren't they focusing like a laser before, you know? Why not? Well, they had no incentive to do it before. And that is what this is all about. It's really just about — it's not about destroying the schools or eliminating the schools somehow, it's about giving them different incentives. And one of the things they did is in the mornings is everyone, from the music teacher to the P.E teacher, taught reading. What an idea. And those kids darn well learned to read. And now it's not a failing school anymore. That's the kind of thing that happens, and there are other examples as well.

[ed.: this goes back to the 'teachers are risk averse' observation. The kind of people who go into education as a career are NOT the thick-skinned kind of people who can shrug off 58 kids leaving a school because they got vouchers. IMO. Though Steve's district seems to give the lie to this observation...]

Q: ....a lot of our black leaders, behind closed doors, actually believe that vouchers can make a difference. It's just because of their political realities that they are not willing to come out publicly in favor of vouchers. And I know, in close conversations, a number of leaders, particularly people in the congressional black caucuses said, "Yeah, but I can't do this; they'll kill me politically."

MR. MOE: Who is "they?"

Q: Teachers' union, other supporters that, you know, give campaign contributions and keep their coffers filled and ensure their reelection. That's a political reality that they have.

MR. MOE: I think that is an excellent point, and it is what keeps the system the way it is right now. But I think this is a system that's on its way out of equilibrium because you have a constituency that is over here and a leadership that is out of whack with its constituency and that wants to represent it. And I think what's going to happen over time is that they are going to move. It's just going to take a while. And I think it's the teacher's unions that are going to be isolated on that. And once they move — once these black leaders move and the civil rights groups move, I really do think that they are going to be in the driver's seat on this....

I think a key part of this is that the voucher issue ought to be a liberal democratic issue. The only reason it isn't is the teachers' unions. I think that's true. Otherwise liberal Democrats would say, "Hey, these are our constituents. We provide programs for them in all these different policy areas, and what, on this one issue we're not going to do that? We can do this and not harm the public schools. We can have a better public school system and help these kids now by using vouchers." And it is only the unions who draw the line and say, "Don't you ever support vouchers — ever," because it's a survival issue for the unions. They are the only group in society really — the only powerful group — for whom that's true. All the other groups are much more pragmatic about this: "Let's help these poor kids." And ultimately I think they are going to be alone on this.



my grandkids aren't going to have vouchers

Q: (paraphrasing): What's going to happen to the libertarian AGENDA?

MR. MOE: Right now, you do have this coalition of conservatives and libertarians and the urban poor. They do not have identical interests. I mean, what Milton Freeman has said is, "A program for the poor is a poor program." However, he supports these programs because they're a step along the way to where he wants to go. That is not where a lot of these liberal urban activists want to go, right? They want to provide vouchers for their constituents and that's it.

Ok, now they're in coalition. What's going to happen in the future? What I think has happened is that the voucher movement, which was begun by conservatives and libertarians, is basically a victim of its own success. What's happened is that it has found that by targeting vouchers at needy, low income kids, it can be successful. Because of its success, it has attracted all kinds of people who support low-income vouchers, and are liberal, in many cases. So now the voucher movement contains all those people, and it's getting much bigger, and much more diverse, and the libertarians are sort of like the odd men out in this. So now they've got a movement that they really don't control anymore, and as time goes on it gets worse from their standpoint because they're less and less in control. And I think that if the civil rights groups move over, then the urban representatives of minorities and the poor are in the driver's seat, and they will be the ones designing these programs. And if they decide that say, an extension of the program is not something they want — an expansion to include middle-class kids or whatever — it's not gonna happen, because they hold the balance of power. Also, people in suburban communities have a very weak demand for vouchers.

In Milwaukee, the civil rights leader who did most to bring vouchers to poor kids subsequently split with the movement over the issue of dropping 'means-testing.' She wanted to keep it; didn't want vouchers given to kids who weren't poor. (Must fact-check this, but the jist is correct.)

I'm going to have to carry on lobbying for TEACHING TO MASTERY.

Q: Your survey found that people think it's unfair to trap kids in bad schools, and that people would like more competition and more choice, but that they also like the public schools. That would lead one to conclude they want more public school choice. Could you articulate what it is a voucher system would add beyond what a public school choice system would do?

MR. MOE: Well, allowing children to go private gives them access to the entire private sector. The private sector contains a lot of schools! Like in Milwaukee, there are more than a hundred private schools that these kids now have access to, of all different types. So there's much more diversity, much more choice when you take advantage of the private sector. Also, there's much more dynamism and innovation in the private sector. They can just like, set up a new school. No, not the public schools. No, they have to spend $40 million building buildings that can withstand a nuclear holocaust or something, and it takes forever, right? All this planning and everything, and in the private sector you can get lots of schools being set up, giving kids much more in the way of choice and the kinds of programs they have. You know, there's just a lot more diversity. I think it's very important to include the private schools, and also very important not to see this as some sort of subversion of public education. I think we should think of it as an integral part of public education and that the public's job is to see to it that its money is used to educate kids. And if that's our fundamental goal, it doesn't matter where they get educated, just that they get educated. And the idea that they have to be educated in government-run schools, I think is an old idea, that doesn't make much sense. If we really think about the kids, they don't have to be educated there.

Hear, hear.

jeez

I'm thinking: how can you be pro-social justice and anti-voucher?






TIME/Oprah poll (public school, money, NCLB, 21st century)
the politics of vouchers Terry Moe, political scientist



-- CatherineJohnson - 16 Jan 2006

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AmericansLoveRegulations 23 Jan 2006 - 23:46 CatherineJohnson



They do.

This is the one area in which I'm out of step with Mainstream America — the one area in which Ed is the Real American (inside wrestling reference), not me.

I say we regulate the constructivists.

They could use some adult supervision, and I could provide it.

-- CatherineJohnson - 16 Jan 2006

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StateOfTheUnion2006 06 Feb 2006 - 13:39 CarolynJohnston


From President Bush's state of the union address, a call for 30,000 new math teachers to move from math and science-based professions into teaching (hat tip to JoAnneC, who can't believe we're so late with this post):

"Third, we need to encourage children to take more math and science, and to make sure those courses are rigorous enough to compete with other nations. We've made a good start in the early grades with the No Child Left Behind Act, which is raising standards and lifting test scores across our country. Tonight I propose to train 70,000 high school teachers to lead advanced-placement courses in math and science, bring 30,000 math and science professionals to teach in classrooms, and give early help to students who struggle with math, so they have a better chance at good, high-wage jobs. If we ensure that America's children succeed in life, they will ensure that America succeeds in the world."

My question is this: will there be incentives?

And would President Bush like to pay me to develop teacher training courses?

-- CarolynJohnston - 03 Feb 2006

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PutOnYourBigGirlPanties 04 Feb 2006 - 22:37 CatherineJohnson








I'd noticed that eduwonk had been somewhat perseveratively quoting Margaret Spellings' line about putting on her big girl panties.....which was just odd enough not to cause me instantly to go read the article it came from....but then joannejacobs finally read the article herself, which galvanized me into action.....and let me tell you, I'm glad I got over to WAPO.

Margaret Spellings: In Her Own Class is fantastic:

Spellings is blunter than you might expect, vivid and bigger, as if her photo had been cropped and enlarged. She is a tall woman swinging an iguana-green purse, wearing edgy rectangular glasses and chewing gum. (She spits it into the garbage when you arrive, as if you were the teacher.) Spellings scanned the crowd: "Colin's the little hottie of the school."

She had her babies without pain medication. She's a tough enough manager to be called a "bulldog on details" by Rove; strong enough to raise her girls as a single mom when her first marriage ended; brave enough to admit that she dreams of being a torch singer draped over a piano; Texan enough to live by the motto (on her notepad) "Put on your big girl panties and deal with it."

the good news is —

— she's got a kid in middle school:

Middle school is tricky, Spellings said -- too many hormones and too loose a curriculum. When boys in white shirts and ties shuffled onstage, Spellings said, "They're so awkward, it cracks me up." Her own experience in seventh grade was "the low point of my life," she said. ". . . There's a lot of mush going on in middle school -- one of the nuts we haven't cracked in public education policy."

You can order the big girl doll here.


-- CatherineJohnson - 04 Feb 2006

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FundingForTheDOE 13 Feb 2006 - 23:47 CarolynJohnston


From the desk of JoAnneCobasko, budget highlights related to the President's education proposals in his State of the Union address:

Among the highlights of the FY 2007 budget request are: Preparing America's Students for Global Competition.

$380 million under the American Competitiveness Initiative will strengthen math and science instruction in our elementary and secondary schools, including:

• $125 million for the Math Now for Elementary School Students initiative, modeled after Reading First, to prepare K-7 students for more rigorous courses in later years;

• $125 million for a new Math Now for Middle School Students initiative, based on the principles of the Striving Readers program, to support research-based math interventions in middle schools;

• $10 million for a National Mathematics Panel to identify key mathematics content and instructional principles to create a research base for teachers and guide the implementation of the Math Now programs;

• $5 million for an Evaluation of Mathematics and Science Programs that would determine which federal education programs are the most effective in raising achievement in math and science and how they can be coordinated to save taxpayer money;

• A $90 million increase for Advanced Placement to train 70,000 additional teachers for math, science and foreign language AP-IB courses and increase the number of students taking and passing AP-IB tests in those subjects; and

• $25 million for the Adjunct Teacher Corps to encourage qualified professionals to teach high school courses with an emphasis on math and science.

As usual, this raises more questions than it answers. The first being: what the heck are Reading First and Striving Readers, and why should we base expensive math improvement initiatives on them?? I'm not hostile, I just don't know anything about them.

And the second: just how do they plan to encourage qualified professionals to teach high school math and science courses with $25M? Billboards? I can see it now. "Having a midlife crisis? Sick of that high-paying job at Microsoft? Feeling like you need more meaning in your life? Come teach public school!"

-- CarolynJohnston - 11 Feb 2006

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TheLimitsOfScientificResearch 14 Feb 2006 - 00:02 CatherineJohnson



From a terrific short essay by Chester Finn, warning of an almost-certain-to-occur (IMO) Unintended Consequence. It's worth reading the whole thing.

Science and nonscience: The limits of scientific research

American education research has turned a corner. The 2002 creation of the Institute of Education Sciences (IES), the ascendance of accountability, and the No Child Left Behind act's demand for "scientifically based research" have radically altered an educational research culture that just a few years ago bridled at the "medical model" and too often championed ethnographies, action research, "critical narrative," "discourse analysis," and other approaches that provided parents, practitioners, or policy makers with little useful information.

Together, both NCLB and IES represent a demand that rigorous scientific principles be used to assess programs. This development did not "happen" and it was not an inevitable evolution embraced by the education research community. Rather, this change was the consequence of prodigious efforts by proponents like Congressman Michael Castle, reading expert Reid Lyon, and IES head Russ Whitehurst. For their efforts, they have met with fierce resistance from some quarters of the education research community, as well as professional discourtesy, bizarre conspiracy theories, and ad hominem attacks.

[snip]

Amidst this good news, however, lurks the risk that the pendulum will swing too far, that the lure of "scientifically based research" will cause certain methods of study—especially randomized field trials—to be demanded even when ill-suited for the issue at hand.

[snip]

...we risk stifling sensible and promising structural reforms in schooling. This risk is posed when we start to imagine that reforms to personnel, management, or financial systems need to be subjected to these scientific standards. In such cases, a premature or unyielding application of the tenets of "scientific research" could insulate ineffective and dysfunctional arrangements from needed and attainable reform.

How does this danger arise? In large part, it occurs from an imperfect understanding of how the "medical research model" works in medicine and how and when to import it into education. It's vital to recognize that there are really two kinds of "reforms" in medicine or education—and that the proper role of science and scientifically-based research is very different from one to the other. One kind of reform relates to specialized knowledge of how the mind or body works, and the other relates to the manner in which we design and operate organizations, governments and social institutions.

In education, the former category deals with the science of learning and with behaviors and programs that induce it....Such interventions are readily susceptible to field trials, and findings on effectiveness can reasonably be extrapolated to other populations.

[snip]

The second category of reform entails governance, management, or policy innovations intended to improve organizational effectiveness. It includes such innovations as permitting mayors to appoint school boards, permitting schools to operate free of some regulations, paying employees based on performance, and so on. None of these changes is unique to education. They draw upon a mass of experience gained in other sectors—and their effects are consistent enough and understood well enough across a broad swath of human experience that it's neither useful nor appropriate to use the scientific method to determine whether, for example, initiatives to reward excellence, increase managerial flexibility, or ensure accountability may hold promise in schooling. Such interventions are rarely precise, do not take place in controlled circumstances, and generally are administered to classes of people rather than discrete clients. Since the results of these structural reforms will be contingent on the context and manner in which they are implemented, even well-designed studies will find it problematic to draw lessons from isolated experiments that trump our broader body of knowledge regarding the use of incentives or markets. Of course, we should welcome inquiry and take new findings into account when reflecting on policy or program design. However, it's vital to remember that we've got a vast store of knowledge on these questions, and that whatever the results of small-scale experiments with merit pay or educational competition, this existing body of knowledge ought to weigh more heavily than the results of one or another context-specific study.

[snip]

....in medicine, while we deem it appropriate for the Food and Drug Administration to monitor and approve drug therapies and treatments, we don't require FDA approval before we permit doctors, hospitals, or health care firms to change their management practices, compensation strategies, accountability metrics, or work routines.

In truth, charter schooling, accountability systems, school vouchers, alternative certification, and merit pay are not really "educational" innovations in any meaningful sense. They don't rest on conceptions of teaching or learning processes or practices in the way that decisions about literacy or math programs do. They are decisions about how to arrange and deliver services, similar to those made in social welfare, library management, higher education, or private enterprise. Such decisions draw upon our experience across a wide range of human endeavors and organizations. They apply practical wisdom and experience about human behavior from a wealth of sectors. We should welcome research on the effects and efficacy of such reforms and use them in debating and crafting policy. But we also need to understand the limits of science.

The notion that rewarding performance ought to be subject to scientific validation before adoption is akin to suggesting that the National Institutes of Health should determine permissible compensation systems for doctors.

in a nutshell

• there are two kinds of reforms in education: roughly, 'educational' reform (curriculum & teaching) and 'management' reform (mayoral control, vouchers, pay scale, etc.)

• educational reform is the proper subject of scientific research

• management reform can be studied, and has been studied, but management reform is always context-specific and thus not susceptible to random-assignment controlled studies

• we possess a wide and deep body of knowledge concerning effective management practices, which transcends particular institutions and can be generalized

• there is a danger that in embracing 'science' as the arbiter of all reform, needed management reforms will be held hostage to context-specific studies that will be many years in the making and won't give us as much information as we already have about good management

-- CatherineJohnson - 14 Feb 2006

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RetirementBombsAway 20 Feb 2006 - 21:44 CatherineJohnson



via Education Wonks, Schools face 'death spiral', a USA Today article on the cost of lifetime health insurance for retired teachers.

random factoid:

Los Angeles sets aside $1,000 of its $5,500-per-student budget to cover health care costs for current and retired teachers. To cover the newly estimated $10 billion liability would require $2,087 per student.

Well, I guess the good news is they won't have a lot of money left over for purchasing fancy-shmancy manipulatives or hiring math consultants who don't know any math.

(just kidding)



N Y Times on 'pension bomb' (free link)

Since 1983, the city of Duluth, Minn., has been promising free lifetime health care to all of its retired workers, their spouses and their children up to age 26. No one really knew how much it would cost. Three years ago, the city decided to find out.

It took an actuary about three months to identify all the past and current city workers who qualified for the benefits. She tallied their data by age, sex, previous insurance claims and other factors. Then she estimated how much it would cost to provide free lifetime care to such a group. The total came to about $178 million, or more than double the city's operating budget.

spike my salary, please

My understanding is that many or most public employee pension contracts have the force of law, which I take to mean that citizens can't vote to revise the terms:

...the public pension morass is bigger, more wide ranging, and ultimately more costly than anything you've seen in the corporate world. The practices, quietly approved by elected officials, allow workers to dramatically spike their pre-retirement compensation, to retire on more than 100 percent of their pay, and to draw both their salaries and pensions, with guaranteed market returns, simultaneously.

[snip]

...for almost a decade now, while it has been continually sweetening the pension plan, the [San Diego] city council has also voted to give the pension system far less money than its actuary recommended. But those pension benefits must be paid -- they're protected by California law, just as public pensions are constitutionally guaranteed or protected in 40 other states.

[snip]

A corporation, under federal law, typically must start pumping money into its pension plan once the value of the plan's assets sinks below 80 percent of its liabilities. But there is no such law governing state and local plans -- the decision to pump additional money into a pension plan lies with the individual discretion of state and local governments.

Thanks to this discretionary funding system, shortsighted politicians can simultaneously dole out rich pensions to their heavily unionized workforces (thereby presumably currying favor with a powerful group of voters and avoiding nasty strikes) and keep the rest of their constituents at bay by shoving the liability for those increased benefits onto future taxpayers. "The next generation of taxpayers is not sitting at the table," says Jeremy Gold, a New YorkÐbased pension consultant. "In fact, the money is going from our children's pockets to today's municipal employees."

[snip]

...government plans are generally much richer than those offered by corporations. The average public sector employee now collects an annual pension benefit of 60 percent after 30 years on the job, or 75 percent if he is one of the one-fifth or so of workers who are not eligible to collect Social Security benefits. Of the corporate employers that still offer traditional pensions, the average benefit is equal to 45 percent of salary after 30 years. Just as important, about 80 percent of government retirees receive pensions that are increased each year to keep pace with the cost of living, a feature which protects pensions against the effects of inflation and that can increase the value of a typical pension by hundreds of thousands of dollars over a person's retirement. But such inflation protection is nonexistent in corporate plans.

[snip]

In March [San Diego] agreed to a tentative settlement that would require it to increase its annual payments to the pension plan dramatically, starting with $130 million in 2005 (a 40 percent increase over the prior year) and gradually rising in subsequent years. To put that amount in context, San Diego's total general revenue fund for 2004 is $742 million. No matter what, San Diego residents are now facing some drastic cutbacks in city services or unwanted tax hikes. As for the latest round of pension increases, they can't be reduced because -- you guessed it -- they're protected by law.

[snip]

Governments will probably continue to offset rising pension costs by slashing services and, in the process, laying off workers -- not a pleasant alternative for either the workers or the citizens of the community.

source:
The $366 billion outrage (Wall Street Week with Fortune)



update

Joe Williams links to an AFT response:

This might come as a surprise to many readers, but in the 25 years that I negotiated contracts with school districts for affiliates of the American Federation of Teachers, no one ever threw money at me.

Hey!

Me, neither!

Actually, that's not true.

People threw money at Temple and me for ANIMALS IN TRANSLATION.

Unfortunately, they didn't throw pensions and/or health care.

-- CatherineJohnson - 15 Feb 2006

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QueensLawsuit 01 Mar 2006 - 17:42 CatherineJohnson



I'm intensely interested in this lawsuit.

-- CatherineJohnson - 01 Mar 2006

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ComputersInTheClassroomPartTwo 19 Mar 2006 - 19:20 CatherineJohnson

"No pilot project in educational technology has ever been declared a failure."

source:
High Tech Heretic
Clifford Stoll



computers in the classroom
ed technology never fails
"Computer Delusions"
another negative study



-- CatherineJohnson - 19 Mar 2006

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NoVendorLeftBehindPartOne 19 Mar 2006 - 21:32 CatherineJohnson



This is fun.


-- CatherineJohnson - 19 Mar 2006

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TheFilmstripsOfThe1990s 22 Mar 2006 - 00:21 CatherineJohnson



The Filmstrips of the 1990s....that would be computers in the classroom.

source:
The Atlantic Monthly
July 1997
The Computer Delusion Volume 280, No. 1 pages 45-62



news from nowhere

I'm going to go out on a limb and say that someone, somewhere in the Irvington administration wants to buy lots more technology.

Why do I say this?

1. 'Technology' was a line item on the PTSA Forum wish list. This list, I believe, (NOT FACT-CHECKED) was created by the school board.

2. Irvington is holding its first ever 'Technology Expo,' an event at which teachers from all four schools will show how they use technology to teach. Students will "share digital portfolios, computer programming, and multimedia presentations." Vendors will be present! Call me cynical, but that sounds like a dog and pony show to me.



I'm against it

No more technology.

Please.

Teachers don't like it, as far as I can tell.....at least, judging by the relative non-use of edline thus far.

Back in the fall Raina Kor told parents that many teachers feel 'uncomfortable' with technology. That's why it was going to take awhile for teachers to start using edline; they were uncomfortable.

Well, I say: GOOD FOR THEM.

What is all this technology doing for us? The one skill I have seen a 6th grader use from his 'Technology' class this year is to download soft porn from funbay. I'm serious. His mom asked him where he learned how to pull pictures from the web and put them in his 'Picture File,' and he said, 'I learned it in Technology.'

I don't want any more technology.

I certainly don't want to pay for any more technology.



what do teachers want?

from Computer Delusions by Todd Oppenheimer:

If history really is repeating itself, the schools are in serious trouble. In Teachers and Machines: The Classroom Use of Technology Since 1920 (1986), Larry Cuban, a professor of education at Stanford University and a former school superintendent, observed that as successive rounds of new technology failed their promoters' expectations, a pattern emerged. The cycle began with big promises backed by the technology developers' research. In the classroom, however, teachers never really embraced the new tools, and no significant academic improvement occurred. This provoked consistent responses: the problem was money, spokespeople argued, or teacher resistance, or the paralyzing school bureaucracy. Meanwhile, few people questioned the technology advocates' claims. As results continued to lag, the blame was finally laid on the machines. Soon schools were sold on the next generation of technology, and the lucrative cycle started all over again.

In Oversold and Underused: Computers in the Classroom, Cuban finds that "less than ten percent of teachers used their classroom computers at least once a week."



update: Steve Jobs on technology and the schools

Steven Jobs, one of the founders of Apple Computer and a man who claims to have “spearheaded giving away more computer equipment to schools than anybody else on the planet,” has come to a grim conclusion: “What's wrong with education cannot be fixed with technology,” he told Wired magazine last year. “No amount of technology will make a dent.... You're not going to solve the problems by putting all knowledge onto CD-ROMs. We can put a Web site in every school—none of this is bad. It's bad only if it lulls us into thinking we're doing something to solve the problem with education.”

source:
Computer Delusions
Todd Oppenheimer
ATLANTIC MONTHLY, 280, no. 1 (July 1997): 45-6

Temple (Grandin) says the same thing

Listen to Tom Henning, a physics teacher at Thurgood Marshall, the San Francisco technology high school. Henning has a graduate degree in engineering, and helped to found a Silicon Valley company that manufactures electronic navigation equipment. "My bias is the physical reality," Henning told me, as we sat outside a shop where he was helping students to rebuild an old motorcycle. "I'm no technophobe. I can program computers." What worries Henning is that computers at best engage only two senses, hearing and sight -- and only two-dimensional sight at that. "Even if they're doing three-dimensional computer modeling, that's still a two-D replica of a three-D world. If you took a kid who grew up on Nintendo, he's not going to have the necessary skills. He needs to have done it first with Tinkertoys or clay, or carved it out of balsa wood." As David Elkind, a professor of child development at Tufts University, puts it, "A dean of the University of Iowa's school of engineering used to say the best engineers were the farm boys," because they knew how machinery really worked.

Temple has seen this phenomenon time and again.

Architects who learned to make scale drawings on CAD make core perceptual errors, such as not knowing where the center of a circle is.

This is a brand-new category of error. Architects who learned to make scale drawings by hand never, ever make such mistakes. Never have and never will.

(Temple says that Frank R. Wilson's The Hand: How Its Use Shapes the Brain, Language, and Human Culture explains some of this...when I finally get around to reading, I'll report back.)

silver lining

Turkle's concern is that software of this sort fosters passivity, ultimately dulling people's sense of what they can change in the world. There's a tendency, Turkle told me, "to take things at 'interface' value."Indeed, after mastering SimCity, a popular game about urban planning, a tenth-grade girl boasted to Turkle that she'd learned the following rule: "Raising taxes always leads to riots."

Gee, if Irvington kids are using their many hours online to learn that raising taxes always leads to riots, maybe there's hope we won't see a double-digit increase one of these years...


computers in the classroom
ed technology never fails
"Computer Delusions"
another negative study
Steven Jobs on computers in the classroom
Why Web Users Scan Instead of Read
history without books



-- CatherineJohnson - 19 Mar 2006

---

EmailToThePrincipal 08 Oct 2006 - 22:40 CatherineJohnson




back story here

Ed just talked to the principal on the telephone.

He was aggressive and unresponsive. The principal, I mean. Not Ed.

So.




Hi Scott —

I’m sending a detailed memo covering our experience with Ms. K’s class this year.

But I’d like to respond to one point immediately.

You observed that Ms. K does not know whether Christopher can do the calculations involved in constructing a scale drawing.

Scott, I agree.

Ms K does not know whether her students have learned the material she’s covered in class.

This is true for all of her students, including those who did record their mental math. We know of one child in the class who has earned grades of C and D on his tests, while scoring an unbroken string of As on the Extended Response problems he takes home to do.

What has that child learned about pre-algebra?

Can Ms. K tell you?

Punishing a child for failing to write down mental math is not teaching; nor is it information. Punitive grading is entirely negative. It demoralizes the child, angers the parents, and erodes trust.

We have two core problems with Ms. K’s teaching, one concerning her ability to inspire, motivate and lead her students to success in mathematics, the other concerning her ability to assess performance. It’s the latter that concerns me here.

Ms. K does not perform systematic, ongoing formative assessment.

She covers material, gives tests, and assigns grades.

And there her responsibility ends.

This year Ed and I have been fully responsible for seeing to it that Christopher actually learns the math Ms. K has ‘covered.’

This wasn’t the case at Dows Lane; nor was it the case with all but one of Christopher’s teachers at Main Street School. That teacher was not asked to return.

I would hope everyone involved in Ms. K’s tenure case would ask himself this question:

Suppose Christopher—or any other student in the class—does not know how to construct a scale drawing?

What happens now?

Ms. K’s answer is: Nothing. Once she’s recorded a grade, she’s done.

If Ms. K wanted to know whether Christopher can construct a scale drawing, she would have him do a simple scale drawing in her presence. She should do that with the entire class, because none of the kids I know was able to handle this assignment on his own. By rights, Ms. K ought to be finding out whether any of her students can do a simple scale drawing independently, without parent guidance.

Instead, it’s up to us to make sure Christopher has mastered this skill.

I will do so this summer when I reteach pre-algebra using Saxon Algebra 1/2.

If I’m going to do Ms. K's job, I want a refund. Ms. K, after two years of work, is going to be awarded lifetime employment, lifetime benefits, and a generous retirement, all funded by taxpayers like me.

Scott, I need to earn a living. I have two children with severe handicaps who will require lifetime care; I must fund my own retirement.

I need to be able to rely on our very well paid teachers to teach my son.

Instead I’m pulling worksheets, buying and studying textbooks, reteaching math lessons, preparing Christopher for the state test (Ms. K told the kids not to study because they ‘don’t know what’s going to be on the test’),^* and helping Christopher’s friends in the class to boot.

This isn’t right.

Catherine Johnson

^* Topics covered on the New York State tests are listed here: http://www.emsc.nysed.gov/ciai/mst/mathstandards/g6.html. These topics are also listed in the Glencoe Test Prep book Ms. Kahl sent home sporadically in the run-up to the test.





I am KICKING myself for not homeschooling.

Actually, it's not even at that level.

I'm kicking myself for not having a clue.

I'm kicking myself for not having the slightest idea what was wrong with our public schools.

I'm kicking myself for not even suspecting that, when it comes to public schools, money ≠ quality.




Christopher won't be doing any more 4-hour projects for Ms. K.

That's over.

My only concern now is: is he learning pre-algebra to mastery?

Everything else is noise.




extended response problem from IL state test
extended response problem 1
extended response problem 2
extended response problem 6
extended response problems 7, 8, 9
direct instruction & the rigor conundrum
Dan's daughter reacts to extended response problem
defensive teaching of Singapore bar models
open-ended problems in math ed
problems that teach - "Action Math"
email to the principal

keywords: performance indicators New York state tests New York state standards


-- CatherineJohnson - 27 Mar 2006

---

IrvingtonTutors 05 Apr 2006 - 01:22 CatherineJohnson



Just talked to a friend.

A couple of weeks ago she said she'd hired a tutor. She had to, or her son was going to flunk the year.

So she hired an Irvington teacher. That's what everyone does. When their kids are struggling in school, parents work with them every night, go over the assignments, reteach the matieral, check edline to see if anything's been posted.

Parents here put in a lot of teaching time.

Then, when that doesn't work, they hire an Irvington teacher.

So I just found out how much she's paying this teacher.

Care to guess?



bonus question

What effect, if any, has the tutor had on this child's grades?



update: tonsillectomies in Vermont

After Doug raised the issue of perverse incentives in the Comments thread, a Ktm Guest and teacher disagreed, saying that she refers some students - often those who've missed school - to a colleague who does a terrific job with them. Ktm Guest does not feel that he/she is being influenced by perverse incentives.

That led me to recall a 'tonsillectomy study' finding that doctors on a fee per service pay schedule performed far more tonsillectomies than other doctors, without realizing that their numbers were so high.

Incentives operate at an unconscious as well as a conscious level on all of us. This is core human nature; this is the way the brain functions. Until the entire field of cognitive science jumps in to tell me I'm wrong, which is not going to happen, my Truth is: the unconscious is real, it's UNCONSCIOUS, and it makes its own decisions without feeling it needs to clear them with us.

This morning I went hunting for the tonsillectomy study, which turns out to have been performed by a Dartmouth professor. (for newbies: I graduated from Dartmouth College)

Here's the critical passage:

The Vermont Experience

During the 1960s, Dr. Wennberg began examining the rates at which different hospitals in Vermont were performing tonsillectomies. With four young children, he had a natural interest in this topic. What he found surprised him.

In one area, the rate was so high that about 70% of the children in a particular school system were having their tonsils removed by the time they were 12 years old. In the neighboring town (where Wennberg's children attended school), the rate was about 20%. "By 1973", Wennberg says, "there was a tightening of the general variation throughout the state . . . without any intervention on our part other than simply feeding back the information." Wennberg's team discovered that two physicians in one high-rate area Morrisville had initiated a second opinion procedure along with an extensive review of the relevant literature.

This led to a central question: which rate is right? In many respects Wennberg has been studying the answer to that question ever since. One thing is certain: proper measurement of outcomes is key.

There are a couple of interesting points here.

Number one, the 'inflated' rates of tonsillectomy weren't necessarily inflated. It could just as easily have been the low-tonsillectomy town had a deflated rate. Judging by everything I read and hear, this is what we see today in Medicare and health insurance coverage which tends to cover surgical treatments but not pharmaceutical treatments, physical therapies, and so on. Wennberg's Testimony Before the Subcommittee on Health of the House Committee on Ways and Means discusses these effects.)

Number two, I haven't tracked down the original study, but given how accurate my memory has been thus far (!) I'm going to trust my recollection that the physicians in the 70%-rate-of-tonsillectomy town had no idea they were likely being influenced by an incentive to perform unnecessary tonsillectomies. Just finding out how far out of line they were with other physicians living and working in other towns caused them to scale back.

The truth is that every day in every way we are affected by incentives to do X and disincentives to do Y.

Most of the time we don't know why we do the things we do.



Dr. Wennberg


how much do Irvington teacher-tutors make?
Irvington teacher-tutors, part 2
new Irvington policy



-- CatherineJohnson - 01 Apr 2006

---

CharacterEducationPartnership 02 Apr 2006 - 17:33 CatherineJohnson



What do we know about the Character Education Partnership, if anything?



advice for vendors



-- CatherineJohnson - 02 Apr 2006

---

TaxpayersGuideToSchoolReform 02 Apr 2006 - 20:41 CatherineJohnson







Education Week interview with Larry Cuban.


-- CatherineJohnson - 02 Apr 2006

---

TheCharterBlog 11 Apr 2006 - 00:10 CatherineJohnson



The Charter Blog

I want more charter schools right now.





Speaking of which, I started reading Joanne Jacobs' book.

It's great.

Our School

Joe Williams

And here is Joe Williams' pro-charter blog, The Chalkboard. I've read Williams' book, Cheating Our Kids. It's a page-turner.

The book is especially helpful on the politics of school reform. I had no idea, for instance, that urban school boards are stacked with union members. Board elections are held in 'off-months,' like April, when nobody votes. Unions run candidates, and vote their candidates in. (The whole idea of a 'public sector' union was something I didn't understand until reading Williams' book.)

update, from Anne Dwyer:

In Michigan they changed the law for school elections.

The law states that school elections can only be held in Nov with state and and national elections or in May. If the school district holds the elections in Nov, the entire cost of the election is borne by the clerk's office.

If they decide to hold them in May, then the school district must pay the cost of the elections.

The number of school districts that chose to put their elections in Nov and not have to pay the cost: 1.

Williams also has separate chapters devoted to the Democratic and Republican parties that are extremely useful, along with a prediction about when the Democratic Party will swing around to supporting students instead of school employees and vendors, and how exactly that will happen.








Who is this guy?





Charter Blog links to unknown happy person

-- CatherineJohnson - 10 Apr 2006

---

BlameGame 11 Apr 2006 - 19:25 CatherineJohnson



Ed chose to tell me, over dinner, that the entire country thinks we aren't spending enough money on the schools.

swell

You may or may not be able to access the National Journal page carrying the poll. It's pretty interesting.

For instance, 5% of Americans give U.S. public schools an overall grade of 'A' for excellent.

That's interesting.

from the Poll Track email:

Nearly six in 10 said they would be willing to pay higher taxes to improve the country's public schools. More than 20 points fewer -- 38 percent -- said they would not.

And the survey indicates respondents aren't happy with the amount of money already allocated to education, either. Sixty-four percent said the country is spending too little money on public schools; 22 percent said it was about the right amount and just one in 10 said it was too much.

Nearly a quarter of respondents -- a slim plurality -- blamed finances for some schools' failure to improve test scores. But nearly as many (21 percent) said school districts were at fault. Eighteen percent blamed parents, 14 percent blamed students themselves and 11 percent blamed teachers.

The No Child Left Behind Act, the Bush administration initiative designed partly to address accountability in education, got a mixed response in the poll. Thirty-five percent said they thought the 2002 legislation has had a positive effect on schools, but the same number said they thought it hadn't had much impact at all. Twenty-three percent said they saw a negative effect.

Respondents also revealed some trepidation about curriculum. A majority said schools are not "teaching students the skills they will need for our economy in the 21st century," and a 44-percent plurality gave schools an average grade of C.

OK, I'm going to go scrounge for some glimmers of hope....




Conducted 3/28-30/06 by SRBI Public Affairs; surveyed 1,000 adults; margin of error +/-3% (release, 4/9). A response of * indicates less than 1 percent.

Where do you think the United States ranks internationally when it comes to the quality of education we provide overall? Would you say that America is best when it comes to quality of education, in the top 5, top 10, top 20 or below that?

Best                             3%
Top 5                           25
Top 10                          29
Top 20                          22
Below that                      17
No answer/Don't know             3

In general, what grade would you give public schools in the United States -- an "A" for excellence, a "B", "C", "D" or a failing grade of "F"?

A (Excellent)                    5%
B                               31
C                               44
D                               10
F (Failing grade)                7
No answer/Don't know             3

Do you think that we are spending too much money on public schools, too little money or about the right amount of money on public schools?

Too much                        10%
Too little                      64
About the right amount          22
No answer/Don't know             4

Would you be willing to pay higher taxes to improve the public schools, or not?

Willing to pay higher taxes     59%
Not willing                     38
No answer/Don't know             3

Do you think that the public schools overall are teaching students the skills they will need for our economy in the 21st century, or not?

Teaching the skills they need   38%
Not teaching them               57
No answer/Don't know             6

Do you have any children in your household currently attending school, grades "K" thru grade 12?

Yes                             36%
No                              64

(If "yes") Do any currently attend public schools?

Yes                             86%
No                              14
No answer/Don't know             1

(Asked of those who have children attending public schools) And what grade would you give your child's school -- an "A" for excellence, a "B", "C", "D" or a failing grade of "F"?

A (Excellent)                   23%
B                               46
C                               21
D                                7
F (Failing grade)                3
No answer/Don't know             *

(Asked of those who have children attending public schools) Do you think that your child or children attending public schools are being adequately prepared for college if they decide to go to college?

Yes                             62%
No                              33
No answer/Don't know             6

(Asked of those who have children attending public schools) If you had the choice of sending your child to a different school in your area, would you switch schools, or not?

Would switch schools            40%
Not switch schools              57
No answer/Don't know             3

In your opinion, do you think there is too much emphasis on standardized achievement testing in the public schools in your community, too little or about the right amount?

Too much                        44%
Too little                      11
About the right amount          39
No answer/Don't know             6

In 2001, Congress passed President Bush's "No Child Left Behind" act. How much would you say that you know about the "No Child Left Behind" act?

Great deal                      17%
Some                            40
Not much                        29
Nothing at all                  14
No answer/Don't know             1

Based on anything you may have seen or heard, do you think that the No Child Left Behind act has had a positive impact on education, a negative impact or not much impact at all?

Positive                        35%
Negative                        23
Not much impact                 35
No answer/Don't know             8

Who is to blame when some public schools fail to improve test scores?

Not enough money                24%
School districts                21
Parents                         18
Students                        14
Teachers                        11
No answer/Don't know            11

I'm going to go out on a limb and say that I think the significant finding is the one I've posted in red. 57% say students aren't being prepared for the 21st century. That's huge. (well, I think it's huge....)

My impression is that when you're trying to sort through mixed emotions, or confronting a highly charged issue, a useful strategy is to ask people how they think other people would answer the question.

In this survey, I would have liked to see a question asking people what grade they think other Americans would give public schools.

The question about whether generic students are being generically prepared for the 21st century seems sufficiently abstracted from the immediate reality of a respondent's Public School In My Brain Nexus to cut through Americans' universal love of public schools.

It's also interesting that NCLB polls as well as it does. NCLB is the target of a pervasive, coordinated negative campaign from the unions supported by a wide swathe of the media. (aside: I don't say this as an editorial comment. NCLB may end up doing more harm than good; I have no idea.) If I were running the NEA, the fact that only 23% of the country thinks the law has had a negative impact would have me worried.


TIME/Oprah poll (public school, money, NCLB, 21st century)
the politics of vouchers Terry Moe, political scientist



-- CatherineJohnson - 10 Apr 2006

---

DougOnMoneyAsASignal 27 Apr 2006 - 19:27 CatherineJohnson



from Doug

"But there's hard, and then there's Kafkaesque."

One of the big problems with this is that kids are terrible at telling the difference between the two.

Parent: "Clean up your room."

Kid: "I can't."

After years of that, when a kid comes home saying that his class is "too hard", the parent is biased away from sympathy. If the parent doesn't have very strong knowledge about how to teach appropriately for the skill level of the kid, this is a rational result. After all, we pay teachers to be SMEs (subject-matter experts) in education, so we should listen to them.

Historically, there's been a presumption of competence of our kids' teachers. I don't know that presumption is warranted anymore. It's certainly rebuttable, and all too frequently rebutted.

As to what we should do about this sad state of affairs? Support school choice, whether through charter schools, "choicing in" to regular public schools, or vouchers. There must be effective signalling back to the schools when their results are insufficient, and money is the only signal that works consistently.

Is it true that money is the only signal that works consistently?

I have no idea. I'm asking.

From where I sit, he's right about parents being biased away from sympathy. I'm actually close to developoing a Unified Theory of Middle School, and Doug's observation reminds me that part of the way the whole thing works is that you get middle school grade deflation at the exact moment your kids are most difficult to deal with inspiring of sympathy, confidence, and good thoughts generally.


-- CatherineJohnson - 25 Apr 2006

---

NycEducatorStrikesAgain 12 Aug 2006 - 12:32 CatherineJohnson



arrgh





speaking of administrators

WESTCHESTER: Poorer School Districts Practice Higher Math to Pay Leaders

OSSINING is one of the poorer school districts in Westchester, and its students' achievement levels are average. But in one category, it is competitive with the best districts in the state: Its administrators are well paid.

Superintendent Robert J. Roelle is one of a small but growing group of superintendents who make more than $300,000 in salary and benefits, according to information compiled by the State Education Department. And with 26 assistant superintendents, principals and department chairmen and women making at least $104,000, Ossining has one of the largest contingents of six-figure executives in the state: about 6 per 1,000 students, a level rivaled only by a few other districts in Westchester and Long Island.

"It's more than the governor makes," Irwin Kavy, the school board president, said of Dr. Roelle's salary. "It's extremely high."

Across suburban New York, salaries of school administrators are testing new heights. Districts, competing to give the children of their affluent residents every advantage, have helped create a seller's market for management talent that has pushed some superintendents into the thin air of the $300,000 salary-and-benefit package.

Meanwhile, the $200,000 milestone — effectively the floor for superintendent pay now — has become increasingly common among deputy and assistant superintendents. Fifty-six school administrators in Westchester now make more than $200,000 in total compensation, and 19 of them are assistants or deputies.

[snip]

The median increase in total compensation of superintendents in the county was 8.6 percent last year, according to data reported to the Education Department. Inflation advanced just 3.3 percent in that time.

[snip]

Demand has increased because a cohort of teachers hired in the late 1960's, who became administrators in the 1980's and 1990's, is now retiring. Boards are looking to replace about 80 of the state's approximately 750 superintendents each year, instead of the usual 40 or 45, according to Thomas Rogers, executive director of the New York State Council of School Superintendents.

But supply has dwindled, officials contend, because administrative jobs have become less attractive.

"The job has become incredibly complex," said Vincent T. Beni, a recruiter and former superintendent in Irvington. "Fiscal constraints are imposed from outside, and they drive a lot of the decisions. The imposition of mandates from state and federal government are not funded, and require you to go out and ask people to raise their taxes to pay for them. When I first started, we were education leaders of the community. Now, you've become a fund-raiser."

A word on Vin Beni.

We liked the guy. He was superintendent when we first moved here, and he'd come over from BOCES, so he knew his way around special ed. He was brought in, as far as we can tell, to build the new middle school. He built it, and it was finished on time. But it cost more than it was supposed to cost and the place is already falling down.

At board meetings he never missed a chance to tell us how strongly he opposed state tests & state standards, and how great the pro-tax activists who'd hired him were. (Apparently there had been an anti-tax revolt that was squashed by one of our neighbors, who's been on the school board ever since.)

Vin was a hotshot. It was said that if Al Gore became president Vin would be going with him. That didn't happen, and Vin left in disgrace when a female superintendent over on the east side of the County had him arrested for stalking. Vin was a married guy. Christopher came out of his school one day to find news cameras in front interviewing parents. He thought the cameras were there because his school was so good.

I spent the rest of the day racing to turn off Channel 12 every time they replayed the Vin Beni stalker story.

The charges were dropped eventually, but I find the whole thing pretty hard to forgive.





hostile parents

The job is hard, especially in the small districts where residents expect a lot and costs are soaring.

"The environment is more hostile," he said. "The tension has never been greater because the demand has never been greater and the costs have never been greater."

You bet. This is one hostile environment, here in Irvington. We are paying these people a bloody fortune and we've got a middle school clobbering our kids with punitive grades and Discovery Algebra.

Somehow, when I pay $18,000 a year in property taxes, I don't expect to have the assistant superintendent tell tales about me to our PTSA president behind closed doors.

I don't know why.





it's always worse than you think

Joseph Auricchio, an Edgemont businessman who opposes hefty school taxes, says superintendents in suburban districts are not only overpaid but also, in some cases, not qualified. "Superintendents are teachers plucked out of the classroom to do a C.E.O.'s job totally unprepared and inexperienced," he said in an e-mail exchange.

Mr. Kavy echoed those sentiments. He favors changing the state requirement that administrators be certified teachers, which he believes has contributed to the problems. Because of the requirement, he said, "someone with a great deal of experience in managing, but was never a teacher, can't fill those positions, so there's a shortage of administrators out there.

I had no idea administrators were required by state law to be certified teachers.

On second thought, given the antics of Bloomberg and Joel Klein (constructivism from the top down) I can't see that it matters.





Top Pay for Top Jobs

The shading of each school district is based on its concentration of high-salaried administrators, meaning any superintendents, assistant and deputy superintendents, principals, assistant principals and department heads whose annual salary and benefits exceed $104,000. State law requires all non-city school districts to report information about such employees, but some do not.






-- CatherineJohnson - 28 Apr 2006

---

DianeRavitchAtThisWeekInEducation 09 May 2006 - 19:12 CatherineJohnson


On The HotSeat: Uber-Contrarian Diane Ravitch - worth reading the whole thing, but here are excerpts:


Years ago when you were at the Department and I was working at a research firm, I had a sign up on my bulletin board quoting you about how education research was "a jobs program for the over-educated." Have things gotten any better, or are they worse?

DR: I don't recall saying that, but I do think that education research is definitely improving. There are more and more randomized field trials, more concern for quality, and more education researchers with a strong background in social science.


You and others had been arguing of late that the time was nigh for national standards and testing. I and others had been arguing that the timing wasn't right. Where are you on this topic as of now?

DR: I think that the time will come when this country adopts some form of national curriculum and testing, probably first in mathematics and science. I don't think the time is right around the corner (although it was the Thatcher government in Britain that installed a national curriculum and national testing), but I do think it will happen.


How does a national system actually happen?

DR: I see NCLB as a transition in that direction, with the federal government taking on more responsibility for education quality, and with growing confusion about the difference between high scores on NAEP and much lower scores on state tests. Maybe in three years, or five years, or ten years, but it will happen.


[snip]


In light of recent debacles surrounding the testing industry, tell us the main things we need to know about the textbook approval and publishing industry about which you've written. Same players and issues, or an entirely different beast?

DR: The issues are somewhat different, and to some extent so are the beasts. The basic problem, which is common to both testing and textbooks, is the reliability of the product. The media is shocked, shocked, when there is a foul-up in the testing industry and scores are not reported correctly or lost or something else goes wrong. They should be equally shocked by the errors that appear in textbooks and by the insertion of political correctness or the elimination of controversial passages, but those things don't capture headlines the way the testing problems do.


Why don't textbook errors get as much attention?

DR: In the main, I'd say it is because textbook reviews are few and far between, many are issued by single-issue groups, and even when they are on target and eye-popping, the most coverage they get is a single story on p. 14. Why do testing scandals make big waves and textbook "issues" turn into yawning non-scandals? Probably it is that specific individual students get hurt by the testing scandals, while the "victims" of bad textbooks are widely scattered and have no names.


[snip]


Clinton or GWB, and why?

DR: That's a tough one for me, as I like both of them. Clinton was the best articulator of education issues that I have ever met or heard. He really believed (and I guess still believes) in the importance of strong standards (his original platform—Putting People First-- called for a system of national standards and tests). One time I saw him talk to an assembly at a high school in Silver Spring, Maryland. The kids were nearly leaping out of their chairs and cheering as he urged them to take harder courses and study more. The man really understood and communicated.

GWB is obviously not in the same league as a talker as Clinton. But he understands the issues too and NCLB was his attempt to address them. There are a lot of things wrong with NCLB, but there are a lot of things right about it too. Recall that it passed both houses with 90% of the votes. Many compromises wre required to get to that 90% mark.


Where do you and other right-leaning education thinkers overlap on policy issues, and where -- assuming things aren't as monolithic as they seem -- do you differ?

DR: I am not a right-leaning education thinker. I am an independent-minded education thinker. I put a premium on having a rich liberal arts curriculum, which serves as the basis for testing, professional development, teacher education. That's why I like the Core Knowledge curriculum, which has much similarity to AP and IB but is aimed at pre-K through 8. I care more about what kids learn and whether they get a good education than about the political structure that surrounds schooling. Thus, while I have written favorably about choice, I worry about letting thousands of flowers bloom and discovering that most of them are weeds; I prefer, as one of my heroes Isaac Kandel wrote many years ago, to "prejudice the garden toward roses."


What ideas, left or right, seem over-hyped or otherwise unlikely to meet the expectations that have been set for them?

DR: A favorite of the left--more money--will not by itself produce great education; how it is spent makes a world of difference. A favorite of the right--vouchers--seems unlikely ever to happen, and if it did happen, would be bogged down in endless legal challenges, and even then, might lead to a plethora of mediocre schools that don't get great results. A favorite of the coroporate reformers, who are now in the saddle, is to change the structure (e.g., let the mayor run the schools), but that ignores the fundamental problems of curriculum and instruction.


How has it happened to turn out that it's considered just fine to give federal funding to private and parochial colleges but not to private and parochial K12 schools?

DR: This is a historical fluke. When Pell grants were debated, there was a big issue about whether aid should go to institutions or to students. Ultimately the decision was to aid needy students, and that effectively ended the question about "funding" private and parochial colleges since they too had students who were eligible for Pell grants. Underlying the difference, however, is the fact that the organized interests attached to K-12 education have always been focused on the goal of excluding private and parochial schools from aid formulas. The reasons for this are complex, but the end result has been fairly consistent (with the exception of Title I in 1965, which did include religious schools on a funding-follows-the-student basis).


What about Catholic schools?

DR: Although I’m Jewish and attended public schools for 13 years, I care a lot about Catholic schools, which are especially valuable in urban centers, and would hope we can figure out a way to help them survive. I say this as someone who is deeply committed to public education. In higher education, there is no inherent conflict between supporting the state university and the local Catholic college. Both serve important public purposes.

Is there anyone out there that qualifies as a rising star on education issues from the right, an academic or politician? Who and why?

DR: Frederick Hess of AEI, because he is so articulate and brilliant, even when people disagree with him. [ed.: ditto]


[snip]


A lot of my readers are education reporters. Who are the best education writers our there in the press, and what do you look for in a good education story?

DR: My personal bests are Sam Freedman of the NY Times and Jay Mathews of the Washington Post. To me a good education story is one in which the writer examines the situation, the claims, the press releases, and questions whatever the authorities told him (or her). If for example the government or a think tank or someone else releases a major study, the writer reads it carefully, checks the evidence, talks to people with contrary views, and writes a story that puts the study or report into context.


[snip]


What are you up to right now in terms of writing projects, teaching, research? What's coming next?

DR: Among several things, I am putting the finishing touches on an anthology that I edited with my son Michael Ravitch; it is called The English Reader: What Every Literate Person Needs to Know, and it will be published later this year by Oxford University Press. I am also finishing up a glossary that I call EDSPEAK, which contains about 1,500-2,000 words and phrases of lingo and jargon that educators use. I am also writing and doing research for the Hoover and Brookings Institution, where I am a senior fellow. I am trying to lead a quieter life, with fewer obligations other than to my writing.





I'm going to be ordering both books, along with at least $500-worth of books on writing I'm going to be ordering today, now that I know for a fact that Irvington Middle School does not teach writing and Irvington High School bases admissions to the Honors program on writing.


-- CatherineJohnson - 09 May 2006

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HomeschoolMomSaysParentsAreResponsibleAfterAll 15 May 2006 - 12:02 CatherineJohnson



music to my ears . . .

With regard to the April 25 letter "Defeated budgets ruin opportunities," I laughed at the writer's statement that those who voted against the school budget "failed (her) children."

Parents are responsible for their children's education. With more and more families relying on two incomes to support a household, the public school districts have become a glorified day care system. If you are the type of parent who feels that educating your child is the burden of the taxpayers and local school district, you are the one who is failing your children.

The writer states that she wants her children to "have every opportunity." Then, give it to them. You can start by erasing the notion that taxpayers should foot the bill for extracurricular activities. Dip into your own pocket and support your offspring's endeavors.

With New Jersey's test scores dropping lower each year and incidents of violence in our schools on the rise, budgets that ask for new turf on football fields, additional sports teams and other nonessentials are irresponsible and asinine. If the money were going toward the basics — reading, science, history and mathematics — perhaps more people would consider voting "yes." But don't expect responsible parents and taxpayers to allow their pockets to be tapped once again to support noneducational agendas.

I am the parent of two children. I pulled them out of public school last year and began home-schooling this year because I realize as the parent, these children are my responsibility to educate. I taught them for less than $2,000 this year. That figure includes books, manipulatives, bowling, tae kwon do, music lessons and field trips to places like Philadelphia and Plymouth Rock. Compare what my children have done this year to what other children were offered at an average cost that exceeds $10,000 per pupil.

Unfortunately, I still pay the school portion of my property taxes. But don't expect me to vote "yes" when there is such a discrepancy in spending, overhead and test scores.

Lucille Kentner

via: This Week in Education

I do think it's the state's responsibility to educate children, but seeing as how the state isn't doing it, I'm happy to read letters from mom's who are educating their kids on an annual budget of $2000.

That's probably about what I'm paying to afterschool one child. That and the $18,000 in property taxes.

Of course, that's not counting opportunity costs.


-- CatherineJohnson - 09 May 2006

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SchoolsAndGroceryStores 02 Jun 2006 - 14:15 CatherineJohnson



I've been collecting essays I can have Christopher read and summarize.

Edspresso links to one of the clearest columns on economics I've ever seen:

Government K-12 schools, as now run everywhere in the U.S., will never excel at educating students. The reason is that each school gets its students and its budget without having to compete for them. Imagine if, say, supermarkets were run the same way we run schools. Everyone in my county would pay taxes to fund the county supermarket system; each one of us would then be assigned one specific county supermarket at which we are allowed to shop.

Of course, once in our assigned store, all the groceries that each of us gets are "free" -- meaning, we don't have to pay for them on the spot. If the products and services supplied by the supermarket are of poor quality, we're not allowed to switch to other county markets; we must, instead, complain to politicians.

The managers of the supermarkets will agree that their stores offer abysmal service and undesirable products; they will assert that this sad fact is caused by underfunding. We will be warned that only by paying higher taxes will we have any possibility of getting better supermarkets.

So our taxes will rise and funding for supermarkets will increase. But quality will remain poor -- and the excuses offered by the government-employed managers of the supermarkets will remain that they need yet more funding.

Author Donald J. Boudreaux, chair of George Mason's economics department, also has a nice passage on productivity in France and America:

Average worker productivity will be higher in those economies cursed by heavy government intervention into the labor market. Although at first this prediction might sound counterintuitive, it makes perfect sense. When government artificially raises the cost of hiring workers -- by mandating high minimum wages or by increasing the amount of red tape firms must endure in order to fire workers -- the workers that remain unhired are those who are least productive. Think about it: If the French minimum wage is the equivalent of $10 per hour, then French workers who can produce no more than $9 per hour of revenue for employers will not be hired, while in the U.S. such workers will be hired.

By pricing the lowest-skilled workers out of the labor market, European regulations ensure that only relatively high-skilled workers get jobs. So measures of average worker productivity will tend to show that workers in restrictive countries such as France and Germany are more productive than are workers in America. But this statistical outcome is a deceptive artifact of lamentable labor-market regulations whose burdens fall disproportionately on Europe's poorest peoples.

Can't wait to share that one with Ed, who has more than once told me French workers are more productive than American workers.

I've been wanting Christopher to go to George Mason ever since I read Alexander Tabarrok and Peter Boettke's column about it in SLATE.

Now I'm sure.


-- CatherineJohnson - 31 May 2006

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TheBoyShow 03 Jul 2006 - 22:21 CatherineJohnson




Thank heavens for character education. If we didn't have Character Education integrated into all courses at the middle school, the boys probably wouldn't have gotten any awards.

Step 1: What is my problem?

Step 2: Think, think, think of some solutions.

Step 3: What would happen?

Step 4: Give it a try!

source:
Center on the Social and Emotional Foundations for Early Learning
This material was developed by the Center on the Social
and Emotional Foundations for Early Learning with federal funds
from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services,
Administration for Children and Families

The Girl Show
The Boy Show
The Other Boy Show

USA Today report on 135:100 boys:girls ratio in college
sexism in Everyday Math
invisible boys
boy trouble (New Republic on boys)
slacker boys, middle school, & forbidden positive images of boys in textbooks
throw rocks at them
please remain seated at all times
Ann Althouse thread sums up classroom change
cooperative vs. competitive learning
Where the Boys Aren't

letter from Robert Lerner, former commissioner NCES
Tom Mortenson's research
The Boys Project board
for every 100 girls —

-- CatherineJohnson - 23 Jun 2006

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BillAndMelindaGates 24 Jun 2006 - 15:13 CatherineJohnson







I love this photo.








interview with Bill & Melinda Gates

-- CatherineJohnson - 23 Jun 2006

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FundTheChild 04 Jul 2006 - 00:44 CatherineJohnson




Fund the Child


Haven't read yet.

• Rod Paige in today's TIMES.

• eduwonk on Fund the Child
  

Not that it's of interest to anyone else, but I seem to be experiencing near-daily Synchronicity events.

I learned what weighted scores are & how they're calculated for the first time ever two days ago.

Today I'm reading about a bipartisan weighted funding scheme for school funding.

This kind of thing is happening constantly.

It's sort of fun, but I probably shouldn't count on it lasting forever.

-- CatherineJohnson - 28 Jun 2006

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JayeGreenOnSchoolFundingIncrease 24 Jul 2006 - 00:11 CatherineJohnson

Few people are aware that our education spending per pupil has been growing steadily for 50 years. At the end of World War II, public schools in the United States spent a total of $1,214 per student in inflation-adjusted 2002 dollars. By the middle of the 1950s that figure had roughly doubled to $2,345. By 1972 it had almost doubled again, reaching $4,479. And since then, it has doubled a third time, climbing to $8,745 in 2002.

Since the early 1970s, when the federal government launched a standardized exam called the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), it has been possible to measure student outcomes in a reliable, objective way. Over that period, inflation-adjusted spending per pupil doubled. So if more money produces better results in schools, we would expect to see significant improvements in test scores during this period. That didn't happen. For twelfth-grade students, who represent the end product of the education system, NAEP scores in math, science, and reading have all remained flat over the past 30 years. And the high school graduation rate hasn't budged. Increased spending did not yield more learning.

This big-picture evidence is strongly confirmed by academic research. Though you'd never know it from the tenor of most education debates, the vast majority of studies have found no sustained positive relationship between spending and classroom results. Economist Eric Hanushek of Stanford University examined every solid study on spending and outcomes--a total of 163 research papers--and concluded that extra resources are more likely to be squandered than to have a productive effect.

Still, countless people assume that our schools are underfunded. One explanation is that people don't want to believe that large amounts of public money have been used without producing significant results. There's plenty of room for debate on how best to reform our school system, but the sooner Americans realize that lack of resources is not the real problem in our schools the sooner we can have a meaningful debate on how to make education more productive.

source:
Education Myths
by Jaye Greene

in a nutshell

• end of World War II: $1,214 per student in inflation-adjusted 2002 dollars

• mid 1950s: $2,345

• 1972: $4,479

• 2002: $8,745

• results: Increased spending did not yield more learning.
  

update: here's Mark Roulo —

I have seen these statistics before, and this is not the correct way to view things.

Let us imagine for a moment that today we were spending WW-II (inflation adjusted) numbers to educate students. Let us further imagine that we had 30 students per classroom.

So ... $1,200x30 = $36,000 per classroom. Subtract out maybe $3,000 per year for textbooks and supplies, so we've got $33,000 left. Then subtract out for electricity, heat, janitorial services, cost of running the bus, a small fraction of a librarian, books for the library ...

Maybe we have left $20K-$15K to pay the teacher both salary and benefits. Health care is about $5K per year, so we will be offering average salaries of $10K to $15K per year to the teachers. Starting salaries will be lower.

I think it is pretty obvious that while this was enough salary to compete for talent in 1945, it isn't enough today.

This illustrates the problem with numbers like those quoted. Part of what the money spent on schools is doing is trying to be competitive with salaries offered by other jobs that the people we want to be teachers might take. Inflation adjusted numbers don't take this into account because everyone makes more in inflation adjusted terms since 1945 (that is part of why we are wealthier as a country).

A more relevant number would be something like %GDP-spent-per-pupil (it would be a very small number!) over time. That would (probably) take into account increases in wealth and income across the board.

Now ... I've made a big assumption in the above analysis.

The assumption is that teaching can't get any more efficient (in the economic sense). If I had to guess, I'd guess that engineers get paid maybe 4x today what they did in 1945. Today's engineers, however, can do things that were simply impossible in 1945. In a very real sense, today's engineers are at least 4x as productive as their 1945 counterparts. A huge reason for this is that the tools have gotten better.

Teaching hasn't changed much since 1945. One teacher, one class (15-30 students ... the class size has dropped), chalkboard/whiteboard or maybe overhead-projector or powerpoint. Lecture and books and tests.

Teachers could be paid much better if we could find a way for them to teach more effectively. Unfortunately, while in engineering a lot of money gets spent on building new tools and purchasing new tools that prove to be effective (because the firms that do this correctly make more money), the incentive to do this in education seems to be non-existant.

So, to summarize:

As stated, the inflation numbers don't mean anything in terms of productivity because education must compete for employees in an economy that is gradually becoming wealthier.

         Terrific book.


Illinois Loop page on school funding



-- CatherineJohnson - 19 Jul 2006

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TeacherPayPodgurskyAndHoxby 27 Jul 2006 - 18:58 CatherineJohnson




Two more researchers weigh in on the subject of teacher pay.

source:
Is there a qualified teacher shortage?
by Michael Podgursky
















source:
Wage Distortion
(pdf file: full text)
Wage Distortion
(abridge; not pdf)
by Caroline Hoxby



Hoxby's and Leigh's argument:

The factors contributing to the reduced likelihood that women of high aptitude will enter the teaching profession appear to come from both within and outside the teaching profession. We focus on two that can be expected to be of critical significance.

First, within the teaching profession, the pay scale of public school teachers has become increasingly compressed since the 1960s. The salary distribution has narrowed so that those with the highest aptitude earn no more than those with the lowest. This may have pushed able women out of the field of education.

Second, outside of teaching, college-educated women have achieved greater parity in their pay vis-à-vis male workers, luring more able women to alternative professions. High-aptitude women may have pulled away from education in order to take special advantage of the new opportunities.

While there could be other explanations outside our investigation, conventional wisdom has long pointed to new opportunities for college-educated women as the primary explanation for the change in teacher quality that many have sensed. We were inclined to accept the conventional wisdom when we began this project, but, after systematically comparing the relative importance of the two factors, we found, surprisingly enough, that pay compression within the teaching profession, induced by the introduction of collective bargaining, has had by far the greater effect.

On further reflection, we were not quite so surprised by the results. For one thing, the overall timing of the decline in teacher quality corresponds to the rise of collective bargaining within education. Teacher unions won collective bargaining rights in key cities and states during the 1960s. Over the next 20 years, collective bargaining spread from state to state across the country.

As a result of union action, the average salary for teachers increased modestly. But as the average was edging upward, the range of the scale narrowed sharply, so much so that able young women were bound to take notice. Moreover, collectively bargained contracts placed a premium on characteristics such as seniority and credentials rather than performance, further depressing the opportunities for the high-aptitude teacher.

[snip]

Although compression of pay within teaching and improved parity with pay for women in other occupations occurred simultaneously over the past 40 years, we were able to distinguish their independent effects, because the timing of their impact varied considerably from one state to the next. For example, parity of pay for women improved sooner in some states than in others. Since we had data, by state, on the earnings of men and women who graduated from college in the same year, we could estimate the independent impact of pay parity separately for each state by calculating the ratio of female-to-male earnings of nonteachers who graduated from similar colleges at the same time.

[snip]

Unionization and the introduction of collective bargaining can be expected to increase average pay for all teachers but reduce the difference between average pay and the pay received by those with both high and low aptitudes, thereby discouraging entry into teaching by women with higher aptitude while attracting those with lower aptitudes.

[snip]

The economic news for educators as a whole was fairly good over the approximately 40 years of the study. Our data indicate that, nationwide, the real (inflation-adjusted) earnings of the average new female teacher rose by 8 percent between 1963 and 2000. But this change was not evenly distributed across aptitude groups. The earnings of teachers in the lowest aptitude group (those from the bottom-tier colleges) rose dramatically relative to the average, so that teachers who in 1963 earned 73 percent of the average salary for teachers could expect to earn exactly the average by 2000. Meanwhile, the ratio of the earnings of teachers in the highest-aptitude group (from the highly selective colleges) to earnings of average teachers fell dramatically. In states where they began with an earnings ratio of 157 percent, they ended with a ratio of 98 percent. By 2000, most states had earnings ratios near 100 percent for all aptitude groups, indicating that graduates of the most highly selective colleges earned no more as teachers than did graduates from bottom-tier schools!

[snip]

While parity of pay for men and women and the base pay for males in other occupations changed similarly for all women regardless of aptitude, the change in union-induced compression of the pay spread for teachers was especially large.

As a result teaching became much more attractive to those with lower aptitudes—and much less attractive to the most talented. Pay compression increased the share of the lowest-aptitude female college graduates who became teachers by about 9 percentage points. Meanwhile, the share of the highest-aptitude graduates who became teachers shifted downward by about 12 percentage points.


Conclusion

We find that pay compression explains about 80 percent of the decline of teachers from highly selective colleges and about 25 percent of the increase in the share of teachers from the least selective colleges. Meanwhile, changes in pay parity in nonteaching occupations explains only 9 percent of the decline in the share of teachers coming from highly selective colleges—and only 6 percent of the increase in teachers from the bottom tier of colleges. The sheer increase in the proportion of all college graduates coming from these bottom-tier colleges accounts for much of the remaining increment in the percentage of low-aptitude teachers.

These results are striking: union-driven pay compression alone accounts for more than three-quarters of the decline in teacher quality. The finding is best understood by recognizing that pay parity increased only moderately and at a similar rate for college-educated women of all abilities....

Put another way, we cannot expect high-performing college graduates to continue to enter teaching if that is the one profession in which pay is decoupled from performance. Indeed, other professions have been raising the reward for performance over the past few decades. We suspect that this trend exacerbated the degree to which pay compression pushed high-aptitude people out of teaching. A push from one direction has more effect on someone who is being simultaneously pulled from the other direction.

Christian Science Monitor's take on the Hoxby - Leigh paper: How do the new teachers measure up? by Teresa Mendez:

"These teachers were never a big share, but they were a non-negligible share," says Caroline Hoxby, a professor of economics at Harvard University in Cambridge, Mass., whose research focuses on the economics of education. "People say they were important leaders. They weren't in every classroom but they were mentors."

CSM's graphic, drawn from Hoxby's & Leigh's data:





The Hoxby-Leigh article, which I read a year ago, was a revelation.

Like everyone else, I had assumed that greater opportunities for women in other realms made teaching a less attractive occupation across the board.

It hadn't occurred to me that a factor like wage compression, while making teaching less attractive to some women, would make the field more attractive to others.



-- CatherineJohnson - 20 Jul 2006

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LarrySummersFallOut 26 Oct 2006 - 12:53 CatherineJohnson




$265 M

wow


I've ended up being somewhat "con" Larry Summers, mostly in light of Ericsson's research on expert performance, which I have yet to write a word about here.

I'd read somewhere that Summers told a gathering of professors that economists have the highest IQs, political scientists have the next highest IQs, and sociologists have the lowest IQs of the three. I thought he couldn't possibly have said such a thing in public, but it turns out he did. Ed's friend who teaches at Harvard, and who was pro-Summers I think, was there when he said it.

blech

And then there's Ben Barres.

The new blog Creating Passionate Users has a terrific post on expert performance that (almost) renders anything I would write superfluous. (She also has a follow-up on her own experience with the Shangri-La diet which I know all you ectomorph Math Brains eagerly await.)

UPDATE 7-29-06: Christopher has lost 2 lbs in 2 weeks & Jimmy has probably lost the same — lots of water retention ups-and-downs with him no doubt due to meds. His high was 222, his low 216.5, and for the past few days he's been steady at 218. I've lost nothing, but have eaten no junk fook in 3 weeks thanks to ELOO. Virtue will have to be its own reward in my case.)

UPDATE 8-7-06: Christopher has lost 5 lbs since July 20. That's 5 lbs in 19 days. It's still hard to tell with Jimmy, because his weight veers wildly, apparently due to huge swings in water weight. We think he may have lost 3 pounds. I seem to have lost 2 lbs. Everyone's appetite is down.

Here's her expert performance graph:








My feeling about this chart is that fuzzy math and bad teaching prevent students from leaping above the "suck threshold." When you never practice to mastery, because you understand a concept or because you "can always look it up" - where are you on the curve?

At the bottom.

With the drop-outs.

The Cambridge Handbook of Expertise and Expert Performance TOC & excerpt
expert performance
Daniel Willingham on Ericsson's research

The Shangri-La Diet at Amazon
Seth Roberts website

Shangri La diet in freakonomics
Shangri La diet part 2
early adopter
diet, evolution of the brain, & McDonalds
Marginal Revolution on Shangri La
your own lying eyes
progress report 7-23-06
Jimmy 7-24-06
mind hacks & Shangri-La 7-26-06
7-29-06 update
my life and welcome to it - 8-6-06 - success
compare and contrast photo op 8-12-06
9-12-06 update
9-17-06 Jimmy is melting
10-4-2006 Dr. Erika's olive oil diet works, too

shangrila


-- CatherineJohnson - 27 Jul 2006

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LovelessOnEducationPhilanthropy 04 Aug 2006 - 20:27 CatherineJohnson

The title of my paper is how program officers at education philanthropies view education. It is inspired by a 1997 study of education professors done by the Public Agenda Foundation in New York City, and in that particular survey, what Public Agenda found was, and I quote from the study: "Professors of education have a distinct, perhaps even singular prescription for what good teachers should do, one that differs markedly from that of most parents and taxpayers."

[snip]

The study concluded with the following. Quote. "While the public's priorities are discipline, basic skills and good behavior in the classroom, teachers of teachers severely downplay such goals."

So what I decided to do was give the same survey to program officers at education foundations, and in a nutshell, what I found was that they too are far outside the mainstream, on some issues [program officers are] even farther outside the mainstream than education professors.

[snip]

You can see in these bottom... six different classroom activities. These are sort of mainstays of progressive education. These are thing that come under criticism by progressives over the last 100 years.

Take a look. Should kids be given--this is the percentage that responded that more of this would be a good thing. Should kids be given more homework assignments? Only 21 percent of the program officers felt that they should be given more homework.

41 percent. The education professors are tougher on homework. Penalties for students who break the rules. Only 19 percent of the program officers. 37 percent, again about twice as many of education professors. And in a minute I'm going to show you what the general thinks about these things.

The title of the public agenda report was Different Drummers. The program officers at the philanthropies appeared to be even more different than the different drummers, at least on issues of discipline and basic skills. Those are the two main differences.

Memorization, endorsed by only 11 percent of the program officers. Prizes to reward good behavior in the classroom. This is Alfie Cohn's [ph] big problem, he has a big problem with that. Only 11 percent. And then multiple choice exams, not popular at all.

source:
With the Best of Intentions: Lessons Learned in K-12 Education Philanthropy

character ed

Look at the question on schools fail to teach religious values. If you see that as a serious problem or not. Only 6 percent of program officers think that's a problem. Among traditional Christian parents, not surprisingly, 70 percent see as a problem.

But even in the general public, almost half, 47 percent, think it's a serious problem.

I'm surprised to discover that, if I had to choose, I would come down on the "serious problem" side of this issue.

I don't want public schools to teach religious faith, though I support vouchers for religious schools and I wish to heck our schools would teach the Bible as subject matter content.

Biblical literacy: a good thing.

On the other hand, I don't want public schools teaching values - namely narcissism and yay-me blather - that directly contradict my own religious values. At Main Street School (grades 4-5) the kids apparently recited some kind of self-respect affirmation each and every morning, after the Pledge of Allegiance. Christopher can't remember the words now, and neither can I, but he thinks he had to say something like, "I am an amazing person." Every single morning. I am an amazing person.

Then, at the 5th grade graduation, the superintendent read an "Alphabet of Values" - "A is for Achievement" - that kind of thing. Most of it was nice, but the entry for L was awful:

L: Love yourself first and always.

It may have been even worse; it may have been "Love yourself first and best."

blech

I was sitting there thinking, "So what happened to Love thy neighbor as thyself?" (Which leads me to think it probably was "Love yourself first and best.")

As far as I'm concerned, there are many, many occasions in life when loving yourself first is a very bad idea. Anyone who a) gets married and b) has kids is going to experience these occasions.

Probably anyone going into the teaching profession is going to experience them.

I don't want my kids being taught to love themselves first. I also don't want them spending a lot of time thinking, "I am an amazing person." As a matter of fact, I would go so far as to say that spending any at all time thinking the words I-am-an-amazing-person is a terrible idea, and I could probably support my view empirically if I had all day to scan the archives of the PERSONALITY AND SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY BULLETIN. (I have no idea whether this particular study does or does not support the anti-I am amazing person viewpoint. I think it might.)

So, yes.

At this point I'm thinking a failure to teach "religious values" is a problem.



some good news

Loveless:

The program officers with teaching experience are closer to the mainstream public views.

This jibes with my feeling that teachers are more likely than their superiors to think radical constructivism is a crock. Hirsch has a nice observation to the effect that while no one has been able to defeat ed school ideology, no one's been able to defeat reality, either. Students learn the way they learn.

Teachers are in the trenches.



question from the audience

QUESTION: Hi. My question sort of is which side are you on, or actually, which side are the philanthropists on in regard to the education wars that are being fought across this country, often under the name of the reading wars or the math wars. You know, to what extent are they facilitating the reform agenda and to what extent are they facilitating maybe the opposite.

MR. LOVELESS: I don't mind taking a stab at that. For the most part, they're on the neoprogressive side, which in the--I edited a book, a couple years back, called The Great Curriculum Debate, and it's about the wars in both math and reading that have occurred over the last 15 years, whole language versus phonics, and in math, math reform or NCT and math reform versus more basic emphasis on arithmetic and other traditional mathematics.

And for the most part, the philanthropies have supported, financially, the neoprogressive side.

So the question is, given the fact that lots more money poured into the schools over the past decades hasn't improved them, can lots more money poured into the schools make schools worse?

My feeling is yes. It's possible to have too much money.

This reminds me of the various studies showing that rich people undergo all kinds of unnecessary surgery. My line on that used to be, "You go into Cedars-Sinai for a c-section, you come out with a nose job."

In context - i.e. living baja Beverly Hills - it was funny.



-- CatherineJohnson - 03 Aug 2006

---

PaulPetersonOnDoePrivatePublicStudy 04 Aug 2006 - 10:57 CatherineJohnson




I've added Peterson's critique to the original post. (Scroll down.)





source:
St. Louis Historic Context - Education



-- CatherineJohnson - 04 Aug 2006

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TwoSides 12 Aug 2006 - 14:53 CatherineJohnson




Shortly after posting a link to Michael J. Petrilli's What Works vs. Whatever Works: Inside the No Child Left Behind law’s internal contradictions (registration required) it struck me: there are only two sides, and neither of them is neoprogressive.

-- CatherineJohnson - 04 Aug 2006

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HelpWantedTestingCzar 12 Aug 2006 - 12:14 CatherineJohnson




In the Sun today:

Here's a bit of news from the New York State Department of Education. It didn't come to me as a result of a press conference or a news release, nor did any unnamed source meet furtively with me in a garage to slip me a package of confidential information. Rather this news came in the form of a help wanted ad that appeared in newspapers Sunday.

The news is that the state of New York, whose programs to administer academic tests to students has come under so much criticism, is simply not serious about fixing their broken system. As a result the education of millions of New York's children will continue to be compromised.

How do I know that the state isn't serious about reforming its test programs? The job in question is the director of the Division of Educational Testing for the state, and the advertised salary for the post is $94,543 a year. After some unspecified period of time and "performance advances," the salary could reach a maximum of $119, 658.

Let's put this into perspective. This is about the pay scale of an elementary school principal in New York City. Middle and High School principals make more. Principals in dozens of suburban districts earn significantly more. [ed.: I'll say]

source:
Testing Truths ($)
By ANDREW WOLF
August 4, 2006

It gets better:

When questioned about the low salary, the State Education Department spokesman, Jonathan Burman, suggested that the cost of living in Albany, where the job is located, is much lower than the city. This is true. But the Albany location is in itself a downside, not one of the most exciting cities for a top professional to relocate to.

The requirements for the post also suggest that the state is not serious in finding a high-powered person. Only a non-specific Masters degree is required, which could be satisfied by an M.S. in animal husbandry, along with just seven years of educational experience , three of which must be in testing and assessment.

The successful applicant must "oversee management of the Test Development and Test Administration Units for quality process improvements in the preparation, production and distribution of Statewide examinations." These include the Regents exams taken in many subject areas by high school students and the testing of children in K-8 that is required by the No Child Left Behind law.

and better —

Just a few weeks ago, the Sun reported that among all states, New York is the slowest to grade its standardized exams, making them useless as a tool to help evaluate individual students.

and better —

while the state claims 70% of its fourth graders to be performing acceptably in reading, NAEP suggests that the figure is only 33%. New York has one of the worst gaps of any state evaluated, according to an article in the scholarly journal Education Next.

Meanwhile psychometricians can name their price:

Sz-Shyan Wu is not a Cuban baseball star or a dissident musician. But in urging the United States government to grant him a work visa, the New York State Education Department is arguing that Mr. Wu, too, has talents so rare that bureaucracy must be cut and a red carpet rolled out.

Mr. Wu is a psychometrician or, in plain English, an expert on testing. And testing experts are in high demand.

With federal law requiring wider testing of schoolchildren, the nation faces a critical shortage of people like Mr. Wu with the mathematical, scientific, psychological and educational skills to create tests and analyze the results. The problem has sent states, testing companies and big school districts into a heated hiring competition, with test companies offering salaries as high as $200,000 a year or more plus perks.

[snip]

These experts are needed in virtually every aspect of developing, administering and scoring exams, from deciding what test will best measure certain skills to drawing up questions and answer sheets. Doctoral programs are producing at most 50 graduates a year in the field.

"This was always a very, very tight, small group of individuals prior to No Child Left Behind," said Wayne J. Camara, vice president for research and psychometrics at the College Board, which publishes the SAT and Advanced Placement exams. "Since No Child Left Behind, it has just gotten ridiculous."

Mr. Wu, who came from Taiwan for graduate school and who has adopted the name Bryan, got his Ph.D. from the University of Georgia last June. In months, he had a $74,597-a-year post in New York. "I also had a couple of other job opportunities," he said, in halting but good English. [ed.: So NY has psychometricians on staff? And we want a person with a Masters in education to over see their work?]

[snip]

Without psychometricians, the basic calculations cannot be made. For instance, the translation of a raw score of 40 correct answers out of 50 questions into a scale score of, say, 720 out of 800 on a standardized test is a result of their work.

These experts also wrestle with sophisticated questions about how to measure learning.

When the Michigan testing system suffered breakdowns three years ago, the state combined a $114,305-a-year Civil Service position with an additional contract worth additional tens of thousands of dollars to persuade Edward D. Roeber, head of state testing from 1976 to 1991, to return. Dr. Roeber, 62, said he went back knowing that he could secure a state pension and still find lucrative private work after retiring.

"If I were to go to a major testing company, I'd probably easily be able to pick up an additional $50,000 to $75,000 a year plus the bonuses," he said.

[snip]

All the major companies have openings, and like big law firms, many now aggressively recruit graduate students with well-paid summer jobs and other enticements.

"It's incredibly hard to recruit people," Mr. Camara said. "We have three openings, doctoral-level openings at the College Board, and we have had them since the end of 2005 and we'll be very lucky if we fill them by Labor Day."

As Test-Taking Grows, Test-Makers Grow Rarer ($)
By DAVID M. HERSZENHORN
NY TIMES
May 5, 2006

I want to be a psychometrician when I grow up.

In the meantime, today's news galvanized me into action. Last year Lone Ranger left links for two companies that allow homeschoolers to administer the Iowa Test of Basic Skills to their children. Dealing with these folks is more rigmarole than I feeling like going through, but I'm going to do it. As a direct consequence of NCLB, a law I support, Irvington no longer gives a standardized test that would actually tell parents something useful about our children's comparative achievement levels.

The New York tests don't even tell us anything useful about what sorts of things our children do and do not know. When Christopher was in 5th grade no one could even begin to explain to me what skills were tested in the "Measurement" section of the TONYSS, which almost cost Christopher his '4' in math. (What is a 4 in math? I don't know, and nor does anyone else.) Someone at the school thought maybe it covered perimeters.

Even supposing it did cover perimeters, I would still have no idea how Christopher's poor knowledge of perimeters stacked up against other kids' poor knowledge of perimeters.

So our kids are being chronically tested with no actual information emerging from the process.

For some reason I decided, months ago, that BJU Press was the easier of the two companies to deal with.

news flash: I have just this moment discovered that "BJU" stands for "Bob Jones University" — and that, at Bob Jones University, critical thinking is considered crucial to learning.

wow

The pod people really have taken over the world.

In fact, it appears that the pod people took over Bob Jones University 30 years ago.

They're probably responsible for the demise of INVASION.



how to give your child a real standardized test

• request a copy of your college transcript showing conferral of degree

• download and fill out form from BJU site

• mail or fax with copy of transcript

• sign statement saying you are a homeschooler (i.e. that you do not intend to use the test professionally)
  

After that the process is pretty easy, iirc. They send you the test, you administer it to your child, and you get the scores 4 to 8 weeks later. I sent away for my transcript today.

BJU URLs

• contact: 1.800.845.5731 or
  1.864.242.5100 ext. 3300 (for questions)
  testing@bjupress.com
  Customer Services
  1700 Wade Hampton Blvd.
  Greenville, SC 29614-0062

• Iowa Test of Basic Skills

• test interpretation

• BJU FAQs

• forms and applications

• Terms and Conditions

• cost: $57.50
  

how one father used the ITBS to improve his daughter's reading

here




UPDATE 9-19-2006:

Making slow but steady progress on administering the ITBS to Christopher now that my district no longer gives any standardized tests apart from the indecipherable state tests.

The process thus far:

• order transcript from your alma mater showing that you have a Bachelors degree

• fill out application posted on Brochures and Forms at BJU Press

• download pdf file of Iowa Test Administrator's Application (62 kb) — very brief, one-page application

• fill out application and mail to BJU Press with copy of transcript

• within 4 to 5 days BJU will have approved your application; if you're in a hurry you can receive approval over the telephone at that time. If you're not you can wait for approval to arrive by mail.

• download pdf file of 2006 Testing & Evaluation Homeschool Order Form (155 kb), fill out, and mail to BJU Press. (Link to form is posted on Brochures and Forms page.)

• TO BE CONTINUED

BJU Press contact info:

BJU Press, Customer Services
1700 Wade Hampton Blvd.
Greenville, SC 29614-0062

FAX | 1.800.525.8398 | 1.864.271.8151 (local & overseas)
E-mail | testing@bjup.com
Website | www.bjup.com

The folks at BJU Press are easy to get on the phone and helpful once you've reached them. So if you have questions (you will) it's no problem getting answers.


I started on this process in the beginning of August.

It is now mid-September.

Planning to get this whole thing wrapped up by....Halloween?

Too bad my school doesn't offer nationally recognized norm-referenced tests.

Here's what I want from the feds: I want the DOE to post downloadable standardized tests - tests from all over the world - parents can download and administer to children if they choose.

I want some way to measure where my child stands in relation to his peers across the country and around the world.

thank you

myshortpencil
ITBS
iowatestofbasicskills
jerrymoore



-- CatherineJohnson - 04 Aug 2006

---

WordForTheDay 06 Aug 2006 - 00:38 CatherineJohnson





BLOB



-- CatherineJohnson - 06 Aug 2006

---

ReadingScores2006 02 Sep 2006 - 13:30 CatherineJohnson




NOTE: IF YOU ARE READING THIS POST AT THE TOP OF AN ARCHIVED MONTH OR CATEGORY THREAD, BE FOREWARNED THAT A NUMBER OF THE POSTS SHOW UP INCORRECTLY. IF THERE ARE MISSING WORDS OR IMAGES, CLICK ON THE POST TITLE & READ IT IN A SEPARATE WINDOW. (SORRY!)



Christian is so proud of his reading score on the Accuplacer test. It's good to see.

He should be proud. He went through Yonkers schools, graduated with an IEP diploma - the diploma Jimmy and presumably Andrew will earn - and he's reading at college level. That puts him ahead of half the kids taking the ACT this year:

Despite the increases, the results suggest that the majority of ACT-tested graduates are still likely to struggle in first-year college math and science courses.

• 42 percent of test-takers met or exceeded the College Readiness Benchmark on the ACT Math Test (a score of 22), indicating they have a high probability of earning a "C" or higher and a 50/50 chance of earning a "B" or higher in college algebra.

• Only 27 percent met or exceeded the benchmark on the ACT Science Test (a score of 24), indicating they are ready to succeed in college biology.

• Just over half (53%) met or exceeded the benchmark on the ACT Reading Test (a score of 21), indicating they are ready to succeed in first-year college social science courses.

• Nearly seven in ten (69%) met or exceeded the benchmark on the ACT English Test (a score of 18), indicating they are ready to succeed in college composition.

• Only two in ten (21%) met or exceeded the College Readiness Benchmark scores on all four ACT exams, unchanged from last year.
  

2006 ACT National Score Report News Release
August 16, 2006

Our meeting with the special ed attorney was an eye-opener.

More on that later.

(Preview: it's always worse than you think.)

In the meantime, you might want to read Gerry Garibaldi's article on boys and school in City Journal (Ben Calvin linked to this a little while back I think):

The notion of male ethical inferiority first arises in grammar school, where women make up the overwhelming majority of teachers. It’s here that the alphabet soup of supposed male dysfunctions begins. And make no mistake: while girls occasionally exhibit symptoms of male-related disorders in this world, females diagnosed with learning disabilities simply don’t exist.

For a generation now, many well-meaning parents, worn down by their boy’s failure to flourish in school, his poor self-esteem and unhappiness, his discipline problems, decide to accept administration recommendations to have him tested for disabilities. The pitch sounds reasonable: admission into special ed qualifies him for tutoring, modified lessons, extra time on tests (including the SAT), and other supposed benefits. It’s all a hustle, Mom and Dad privately advise their boy. Don’t worry about it. We know there’s nothing wrong with you.

To get into special ed, however, administrators must find something wrong. In my four years of teaching, I’ve never seen them fail. In the first IEP (Individualized Educational Program) meeting, the boy and his parents learn the results of disability testing. When the boy hears from three smiling adults that he does indeed have a learning disability, his young face quivers like Jell-O. For him, it was never a hustle. From then on, however, his expectations of himself—and those of his teachers—plummet.

Special ed is the great spangled elephant in the education parade. Each year, it grows larger and more lumbering, drawing more and more boys into the procession. Since the publication of Sommers’s book, it has grown tenfold. Special ed now is the single largest budget item, outside of basic operations, in most school districts across the country.

Special-ed boosters like to point to the success that boys enjoy after they begin the program. Their grades rise, and the phone calls home cease. Anxious parents feel reassured that progress is happening. In truth, I have rarely seen any real improvement in a student’s performance after he’s become a special-ed kid.

How the Schools Shortchange Boys
christianlearnsmath

-- CatherineJohnson - 02 Sep 2006

---

CommunityCollegeStudents 05 Sep 2006 - 04:54 CatherineJohnson

At first, Michael Walton, starting at community college here, was sure that there was some mistake. Having done so well in high school in West Virginia that he graduated a year and a half early, how could he need remedial math?

At 2-Year Colleges, Students Eager but Unready
By DIANA JEAN SCHEMO

keep reading, it gets better

The sheer numbers of enrollees like Mr. Walton who have to take make-up math is overwhelming, with 8,000 last year among the nearly 30,000 degree-seeking students systemwide....

More than one in four remedial students work on elementary and middle school arithmetic. Math is where students often lose confidence and give up.

“It brings up a lot of emotional stuff for them,’’ Dr. McKusik said.

She told of 20 students who had just burst into tears on receiving their math entrance exam scores and walked out on college. Mr. Walton remembers a fellow student who failed to hand in a math assignment for the fourth time in the last week of class and learned that he would fail. The student lunged toward the professor and said, “I’ll kill you.”

“You can say whatever you want, but this really isn’t helping your grade,” the professor replied, Mr. Walton said.

this is incredibly cool —

But Mr. Walton made it through that remedial math class four years ago, ultimately praising the dean for standing firm. In June, he crossed a stage to receive an associate’s degree in computer science. Next year, he plans to earn another degree in, of all things, math.

He said he would like to earn a full bachelor’s, but hesitates.

“I’m scared to death of going to college,’’ he said. “I’ll be up to my eyeballs in debt.’’

This summer he sent his résumé even to employers demanding bachelor’s degrees and several years’ experience, hoping that his enthusiasm would compensate where credentials fell short. He sought positions that included tuition breaks for employees.

His strategy paid off with two offers, one in data entry at the community college here, a job he held on work study before graduating, and another as a technician repairing copying machines. Mr. Walton went for the second.

It offers benefits, tuition reimbursement and a salary of $22,850 a year, with extra money toward buying a new car every few years.

“I feel a little bit more — I don’t want to say confident — but maybe worthy,’’ Mr. Walton said. “Now, I feel like I’m all that, and a bag of chips.’’

Well, that's the way it's going to be around here. Step by step.

-- CatherineJohnson - 02 Sep 2006

---

EverythingYouAlwaysWantedToKnowAboutCharacterEducation 27 Sep 2006 - 01:50 CatherineJohnson




right here

also here



character ed Q & A

Who needs character education?

Thomas Lickona: Kids need character building, regardless of where they live—inner city, suburbs, rural settings—the problems really exist everywhere. Rising youth violence, increasing disrespect for authority, increasing dishonesty, sexual promiscuity, drug abuse, illiteracy, lack of knowledge of things as basic as the golden rule—these problems really cut across all segments of society. The development of good character is really part of every child's birthright. Parents and schools and communities have an obligation to meet that need of children.


Shouldn't parents be solely responsible for teaching their children values?

Teacher: There are a lot of children who really aren't reared in environments where certain virtues are stressed. There are some children, for example, who don't even believe that honesty really is important; in other words, they think that if they steal something, or whatever, that it really isn't such an issue. So I believe, yes, that teachers and administrators and parents are all in this together, and we all need to stress these virtues.

We are not in this together.

Character education is yet another reform that has been decided upon by educators and imposed by fiat.

There is no "together," and there is no "partnering."

There is instead a generalizing to advantaged children of the problems educators see as universally true of advantaged children: "these problems really cut across all segments of society." Parents who "don't care" about education, "don't discipline" their children, "don't model moral behavior," etc.

Crime, drug use, illiteracy: these are the taken-for-granted attributes most educators — and most of the public — routinely attribute to The Poor.

Now they're attributing them to the non-poor.

-- CatherineJohnson - 26 Sep 2006

---

AmericanEducatorFall2006 22 Oct 2006 - 23:51 CatherineJohnson




My new copy of American Educator is here.

Lots of interesting stuff.

Among other things, Willingham debunks brain-based learning. This is the first of his articles to leave me a bit frustrated:

Ultimately, the neuroscience behind gender differences adds a great deal to our knowledge of how the brain works—but it doesn’t add any practical knowledge that can be applied in the classroom. If we’re interested in cognitive differences—such as differences in memory—then the findings from cognitive studies are decisive. After all, neuroscience is the study of the nervous system and cognitive science is the study of mental tasks and processes.

He's trying to beat back the notion that boys should do hands-on learning and the like because their brains are different.

I always cringe when I read sex-difference authors recommending hands-on learning for boys, but I cringe when I read educators recommending hands-on learning for girls, too.

Boys are getting clobbered in middle schools not because they're being required to learn the way girls learn, but because they're being required to act the way girls act. No roughhousing, no self-defense, and no losing your binder — all boy specialties, and I stand by that view!

Boys are getting clobbered on the "noncognitive skills" like question-asking & organization. Brain science does have something to tell us about that, I believe; it seems also to have something interesting to tell us about sex differences in that realm.


Left-brain/right-brain distinction is bunk, too, he says.

Not surprised.


Last but not least, he's predicting a near-term use of scans to diagnose reading problems early. Haven't read that page yet (must pick up Jimmy at his program) — but that's exciting news.


this is bad news...

There's also an article on the new Public Agenda survey finding that "Parents are Pleased with Schools' Higher Standards—But Now They're Focused on Funding, Class Size, and Behavior," to quote the subhead.

That would certainly explain the direction of my own district.



...but this is good

"Most parents support proposals to make high schools more competitive internationally." 56% of parents think this would improve high schools.

Sixty seven percent want high schools to "increase the quantity and quality of math and science courses."

Most parents, because they haven't thought about it, don't instantly see that improving the high schools means improving K-8, too. I didn't realize it myself before I started writing Kitchen Table Math. But all parents, in my experience, quickly grasp this point when they do stop to think about it.

So: parents don't want more testing and standards, and do want our schools to be internationally competitive.

That is a logically correct position as far as I'm concerned.

Given the lousy standards and deceptive scoring practices^* of our current state testing programs, I (provisionally) conclude that "more standardized testing" isn't going to make our kids competitive with their peers in other countries.

I still wish the state and/or federal government would post norm- and criterion-referenced standardized tests online for parents to give to their children or not, as they see fit.

I don't need the state of New York micromanaging my kid's testing.

Actually, it's worse than that.

Having the state of New York in the business of micromanaging tests means my kid takes tests that are meaningless to me and give me exactly zero ability to hold my school accountable.

Thanks, guys!

I'll just sit here waiting for that nySTART thing you've got cooked up!

nySTART

^* "The gap between results on New York's tests and those on the National Assessment of Educational Progress is one of the highest in the nation.The discerning reader should understand that the true figures of gradelevel competency are inflated by, in some cases, a factor of two. Other states, such as Massachusetts and North Carolina, have managed to test their children and get results that are remarkably close to those on the NAEP, considered the gold standard of testing."

source:
Money Isn't The Issue
by Andrew Wolf

and see: Keeping an Eye on State Standards



-- CatherineJohnson - 21 Oct 2006

---

SlideAndGlide 10 Dec 2006 - 23:54 CatherineJohnson

The problems with AYP are clearly evident in .... schools whose students are meeting their AYP goals, but little growth is occurring. Most such schools are found in affluent communities, where high test scores go hand in hand with high family income. These schools can be referred to as “slideand- glide” schools because they rest easily on the laurels of their students. It is important to understand that NCLB does nothing to hold these schools accountable for providing their students with the annual growth to which they are entitled. In a global economy characterized by fierce competition for demanding jobs that pay high salaries and benefits, this is a highly significant shortcoming.

Value-Added Assessment and Systemic Reform: A Response to the Challenge of Human Capital Development

NCLB's requirement that schools bring all their children to high standards by 2014 is a worthy goal. So, too, is the insistence that school-wide averages are not enough - student subgroups, including low-income, non-English-speaking, special needs and those of varied ethnicities, must meet these standards as well. The problem with the legislation, however, is that it doesn't identify which schools are on target to meet these requirements. In most cases, NCLB's AYP measures can correctly sort out successful schools from those that are failing their students. But for many schools, AYP measures do not provide a fair and complete assessment of school performance.

At the heart of this problem is the fact that AYP focuses on achievement to the exclusion of growth. The following chart helps us identify and understand AYP's twin deficiencies. Proficiency (achievement), high and low, is tracked on the vertical axis, while growth, high and low, is tracked on the horizontal axis. In the bottom left cell are schools that are clearly not serving the needs of their students - providing them with low proficiency and low growth - and thus deserve to be sanctioned. Schools in the top right cell are performing wonderfully. They are doing what we want all schools to do: provide their students with both high proficiency and high growth. For the schools in these two cells, AYP measures accurately reflect their educational outcomes.

The KIPP Academy is in the lower right-hand corner.


slide and glide in Seattle

The Seattle Times requested the district's data for all schools from 2002-04 and shared its findings with district officials, who agreed with the trends The Times identified. The analysis revealed:

• High WASL scores don't automatically mean students learned more: For example, in reading, six elementary schools — all of them in affluent neighborhoods — with above-average WASL scores gave the average student less than a year's growth.

• Districtwide, the average student in grades four and seven is gaining more than a year's growth in math and reading; in grades six, nine and 10, normal growth. But there is wide variation among schools, with high-poverty schools tending to show the most robust gains.

• High schools vary greatly: In 2004 the average 10th-grade student at three schools fell behind in reading, and at five other schools grew more than a year. Passing the WASL is a graduation requirement starting with the Class of 2008.

• The average student falls behind the year after taking the WASL, which has been given in grades four, seven and 10. In half the schools, eighth-graders didn't show a year's gain in reading and math, and in more than half the schools, fifth-graders didn't show a year's gain in math.

Those trends raise many questions: Are advanced students in some schools being challenged enough? Why are students advancing their skills in some grades and falling behind in others? Why is one high school more successful than another in taking its slowest students' skills to the next level? And does this measuring tool simply allow schools to shift the focus off low test scores?

A new way of judging how well schools are doing
By Sanjay Bhatt
Monday, August 29, 2005

slide and glide

Those are the words I've been missing.

Unfortunately, "slide and glide" doesn't solve the issue of factoring out the tutors and parent reteachers.

Unless Sanders has something to say about that, too. Which I imagine he may.

smoking gun

Clowes: Is there any reason why students in schools with high concentrations of poverty should learn any less than students in an affluent district?

Sanders: Interestingly, I've caught the most political heat from some of the schools in affluent areas, where we've exposed what I call "slide and glide." One of the top-dollar districts in the state had always bragged about its test scores, but our measurements showed that their average second-grader was in the 72nd percentile. By the time those children were sixth-graders, they were in the 44th percentile. Under our value-added scheme, the district was profiled in the bottom 10 percent of districts in state. They were not happy. You'd think I had nuked the place.

With our value-added approach, we can demonstrate that our measure of school effectiveness is totally unrelated to traditional socioeconomic indicators. We have more than 1,300 elementary schools in this state; their effectiveness is totally unrelated to the racial composition of the school or the percentage of children in the federal free and reduced-price lunch program. That's looking at measures of progress, not at raw test scores.

You shouldn't hold teachers and principals of school districts accountable for things over which they have no control. You should hold them accountable for those things they do have control over. Schools and teachers don't have control over the achievement level when children walk in the door, but they do have control over how much that level is raised during the year.

If that is sustained over time, it becomes like compound interest, and what you see is populations of children constantly rising to higher and higher levels of achievement in later grades, regardless of where they started.

interview, William Sanders

interview William Sanders
slide and glide
statement of Kati Haycock
value-added assessment
value-added assessment in PDK

-- CatherineJohnson - 06 Dec 2006

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