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MoneyClassSizeMathAchievement 16 Sep 2006 - 20:00 CatherineJohnson


This item made my day.

After our school board announced that budgetary constraints had left them no choice but to increase class size in the 4th and 5th grades (from 19 or 20 students per room up to 23 or 24) parents voted in our second double-digit tax increase in a row.

Our fourth and fifth grade classes will remain small.

I was skeptical.

For one thing, I was aware that Asian math classes are far larger than our own.

For another, I was aware that comparative education researcher James Stigler* actually recommends increasing class size as a means of improving math achievement in America. Larger class size would allow American teachers to meet with colleagues in the lesson study groups that are standard practice in high-achieving countries.

But while I knew all this, I hadn’t quite allowed myself to draw the obvious conclusion.

I hadn’t grokked the possibility that if you’re living in a school district where everyone’s clamoring for small class size, and no one’s clamoring for teacher release time, . . . that might be a problem.

So this afternoon I found this analysis of TIMSS data in Education Next:


When other factors are taken into account, higher
spending and smaller class sizes seem to correspond
to inferior mathematics and science results, though
the overall effect is relatively small.


Well, all I’ve got to say is, thank heavens there’s only a small correspondence between high spending, small class size, and inferior mathematics and science results.

Because if there were a large correspondence we’d be in trouble.


+ + +


I like this chart, too:

ednext20012_69.gif



soucre:
Why Students in Some Countries Do Better
by LUDGER WOESSMAN
EDUCATION NEXT


* James Stigler was one of the investigators in the 1999 TIMSS study and is coauthor of The Teaching Gap: Best Ideas from the World's Teachers for Improving Education in the Classroom by James W. Stigler, James Hiebert and The Learning Gap: Why Our Schools Are Failing and What We Can Learn from Japanese and Chinese Education by Harold W. Stevenson, James W. Stigler.




HighTechHeretic 12 Jul 2005 - 18:13 CatherineJohnson


Jeff Boulier just pointed me to High Tech Heretic: Why Computers Don't Belong In the Classroom and Other Reflections by a Computer Contrarian.

This reminds me that I never got around to reading The Cuckoo's Egg: Tracking a Spy Through the Maze of Computer Espionage, so I'm ordering that, too!

I think Clifford is right about computers in classrooms.

The research I've seen makes me think that Computers are Calculators writ large, with many of the same negative effects on learning.

Even if I hadn't seen the research, the fact that we have Mystery NGOs actively promoting the use of computers in classrooms--and being cited as authorities by Steve Leinwand--would make me leery.

I'll get around to posting the studies I've found on this question sooner rather than later, I hope.


update

Oops.

I already did post the Israeli study of computer use in the classroom.



MoneyWellSpent 14 Jul 2005 - 14:43 CatherineJohnson


Bastiaan Braams has just posted the June 15 D.C. Board of Ed resolution, which includes these items:

Based on the evaluation of the submitted materials, the following recommendations are being made to the Superintendent of Schools for immediate adoption to insure delivery for SY 2005 - 2006:

Elementary Mathematics

Mathematics (Grades PK - 5) - It is recommended that the Board of Education for the District of Columbia Public Schools approve the adoption of Wright Group/McGraw-Hill: Everyday Mathematics. Cost: $1,207,875.

Mathematics (Supplemental) - It is recommended that the Board of Education for the District of Columbia Public Schools approve the adoption of Pearson Scott Foresman: Investigations in Number, Data, and Space. Cost: $470,000.

Middle School Mathematics

Middle School Mathematics (Grades 6 - 8) - It is recommended that the Board of Education for the District of Columbia Public Schools approve the adoption of Pearson Prentice Hall: Connected Mathematics. Cost: $875,567.



Puts me in mind of the Boston tea party.

I don't know why.


EverydayMathInDC



MikePiscalOnPublicSchools 01 Aug 2005 - 21:13 CatherineJohnson


Go read Mike Piscal right now.

You might want to scroll down and begin with his first post, which ends with this:

There are four special interests that have blocked, clogged, and undermined reform for decades. It is all about money, control, and power. It is diseased value system that leaves our kids uneducated, exposed to violence and drugs, and with too few or zero opportunities to pursue the American Dream. Who are the four? Emphatically, I name names: the teacher’s unions, the University Schools of Education, the bureaucracies, and (unbelievably) the PTA’s.

In my blogs, I will name the leaders of these entities and expose their lies, their self-interest, and their unwillingness to change the status quo.

I'm looking forward to hearing what he has to say about the PTA.


Here's Thomas Toch, of Brookings:

The PTA has particularly strong ties to teacher unions. Charlotte Frass, chief Washington lobbyist for the American Federation of Teachers, said, "We often lobby together." Ties are even close to the nation's other leading teachers union, the National Education Association. One of the PTA's three Washington lobbyists is married to an N.E.A. lobbyist, and from the founding of the PTA's Washington legislative office in 1978 through 1993, its lobbyists were housed in rent-reduced offices in the N.E.A.'s headquarters a few block from the White House.

Like the unions, the PTA pushes relentlessly for more federal education financing. Earlier this year more than 200 PTA political activists descended on Capitol Hill, urging members of Congress to back the Clinton administration's proposals for $25 billion in federally subsidized school-construction bonds and $5 billion in grants to reduce public school class sizes.

The organization rejects the belief of many would-be school reformers today that public schools would work harder to improve if they had to compete for students and financing. "There are always winners and losers in a marketplace," Maribeth Oakes, the PTA's legislative director, said, "and we shouldn't have an education system where there are losers." The group has backed charter school laws only if they require that the hybrid public schools report to traditional school boards. Critics contend that strips the schools of the very independence that is the basis of the charter concept.



And here's Chester Finn:

[the PTA has] been politicized, ideologized, bureaucratized and, at least in the PTA's case, has become part of the public-education establishment, more interested in propping up institutional claims and employee interests than advancing the interests of parents and kids. 'All T and no P' is how I've come to describe the National PTA and its state affiliates. ... I can't name a single policy issue of consequence at the state or national level where the PTA's testimony doesn't mirror that of the NEA and/or AFT.

(thanks to Illinois Loop)


PTAbook.jpg



ChildrenLeftBehind 27 Nov 2005 - 14:18 CarolynJohnston


At Yet Another Really Great Blog (YARGB), some sharp criticism of the No Child Left Behind Act.



IfTheStudentHasntLearned 23 Dec 2005 - 22:16 CatherineJohnson





ktmTee3.png



revision

From Catherine:

Our new pretend-shirt specifically says "If the student hasn't learned, the school hasn't taught," not 'the teacher hasn't taught'.

No more thoughtless (and unintended) teacher-bashing.

Seriously. I'm the last person to want to make teachers feel blamed and bashed, seeing as how half my relatives have been or are currently teachers. I'm sure I'll be one again at some point, too.

The problem is that, when you talk about schools, it's the teachers who are visible. They're in the trenches, so they get the blame. (I realize I'm not telling teachers anything they don't know.) I know better than that, but I've been sounding like I don't.

Time for a course correction.

From Carolyn:

Hey, my entire family on my mother's side were also teachers, every man and woman Jack of them. I've been a teacher too; so has Catherine.

My observation is that policy flows downhill in a school, and the buck stops with the teachers. They get the responsibility, but not the authority; policy changes really have to start with upper management.

We're here to put the pressure on upper management, and support the teachers in doing what they know how to do.



ThoughtsAboutTeacherPay 14 Jun 2006 - 19:51 CarolynJohnston


Catherine's comment that some teachers in Irvington are earning six-figure salaries led me to wonder what salaries are like for teachers in general. If some teachers are earning six-figure salaries, then my information on teacher salaries is sadly out of date.

First, I came across this 2004 study from the Economic Policy Institute on teacher pay. Here's an excerpt:

The importance of salaries (relative to other job characteristics, such as working conditions, summers off, and job flexibility) to the recruitment of high-quality teachers has also been studied in great detail. While the popular view is that teacher pay is relatively low and has not kept up with comparable professions over time, new claims suggest that teachers are actually well compensated when work hours, weeks of work, or benefits packages are taken into account. Whatever the case, the many unique features of the teaching profession have almost certainly complicated efforts to compare its compensation to that of other professions.

So: maybe teachers really have a great deal going: it's hard to tell. But then here are some of the main findings of the study:

  • Several types of analyses show that teachers earn significantly less than comparable workers, and this wage disadvantage has grown considerably over the last 10 years.

  • An analysis of weekly wage trends shows that teachers' wages have fallen behind those of other workers since 1996, with teachers' inflation-adjusted weekly wages rising just 0.8%, far less than the 12% weekly wage growth of other college graduates and of all workers.

  • A comparison of teachers' weekly wages to those of other workers with similar education and experience shows that, since 1993, female teacher wages have fallen behind 13% and male teacher wages 12.5% (11.5% among all teachers). Since 1979 teacher wages relative to those of other similar workers have dropped 18.5% among women, 9.3% among men, and 13.1% among both combined.

  • A comparison of teachers' wages to those of workers with comparable skill requirements, including accountants, reporters, registered nurses, computer programmers, clergy, personnel officers, and vocational counselors and inspectors, shows that teachers earned $116 less per week in 2002, a wage disadvantage of 12.2%. Because teachers worked more hours per week, the hourly wage disadvantage was an even larger 14.1%.

And, as if that weren't bad news enough, I also came across a study of the state of charter schools in Colorado (from 2002) that indicates charter school teachers in Colorado are getting shafted in comparison with public school teachers. Not surprising, since charter schools get a fraction of the funding that public schools get. The study also indicated that, in general, maybe the charter school teachers aren't even as well qualified as the public school teachers (but who knows what qualified means?).

The average teacher salary in charter schools in 2001-02 was 30% less than the state average salary of $40,659. This salary gap has grown slightly since 1997. In that year, the average salary for teachers in charter schools ($26,802) was about 28% less than the average teacher salary in the state of Colorado ($37,240).

Finally, searching for more data about charter schools in Colorado, I came across this highly edifying (and entertaining!) study someone did of the charter school movement in a school district in Colorado that they called a 'crucible of school choice': my very own Boulder Valley School District.

This study paints a picture of a school choice plan that is so aggressively successful that it is actually creating racial, social and intellectual inequality where there would otherwise have been none. And we know that this is true, because BVSD is almost uniformly populated by families that are white, wealthy, and highly edumacated.

BVSD procedures and practices are a potentially important factor in the patterns of stratification. First, the practice of prominently displaying test scores in the local newspaper's annual open-enrollment insert, as well as on district and school Web pages, helps explain the prominence of test scores in the demand for BVSD schools. Second, requiring parents to obtain their own information on open enrollment, providing most information in English only, requiring parents to visit schools in which they wish to open-enroll their children, and requiring them to provide their own transportation help explain why choice has a stratifying effect. This system favors parents with savvy, time, and resources. It also favors parents who are connected to the parent information network, the importance of which was shown by how prominent word of mouth was as a student recruitment method.

So here is the picture I end up with: teacher pay stinks, and the stinkiest teacher pay of all is happening at the most elite schools in my own hometown. What sense does this make?

We visited one of the charter schools in BVSD, Summit Middle School, during the open enrollment period last year (Summit is pseudonymized as 'Pinnacle' in the BVSD school choice article). Summit has very highly educated and dedicated teachers, most of whom could easily have jobs elsewhere. They have their pick of the best students in BVSD because their requirements (for homework and the like) scare off all but the strongest students and the most ambitious parents. There is the sense, at Summit, of an elite learning community; that bright, hardworking kids are being trained for brilliant futures. And there are also summers off; why wouldn't a person want to teach there?

Look no farther than Summit to understand why schools in general are having a hard time retaining quality teachers. When I left Florida Atlantic University, my salary was 32K per year, and had grown slower than inflation for several years. I wasn't crazy about that, but the low salary wasn't keeping me from pursuing a career as a math professor. Being a math professor was a profession in which I could pursue my interests and retain my self-respect.

I still think the self-respect issue is at the heart of our teacher qualification problems in this country. It's a self-perpetuating problem; teachers don't get respect, people who demand respect won't consider the profession, so it attracts underqualified people (or, less frequently, extremely dedicated ones). How do you fix that problem? And how come nobody ever talks about it?



RiseOfTheSixFigureTeacher 19 May 2006 - 21:49 CatherineJohnson



6-figureteachers2.jpg


6-figureteachers3.jpg

But in Central Islip, where 40 percent of families with children in the schools are poor enough to qualify for lunch subsidies, the high school is on the state's list of schools needing improvement. Nearly one in five teachers in Central Islip makes $100,000 or more, and Yvette Camacho, a school board member, says ''Our taxpayers cannot afford them.''

''Our taxpayers are your average Joes who work two jobs to pay the mortgage,'' Ms. Camacho said. ''We have wonderful teachers. But some are not wonderful, and they're making $115,000.''

Rise of the Six-Figure Teacher by Ford Fessenden and Josh Barbanel NYT May 15, 2005



Overall, our teachers make far more money than I do, and their health and retirement benefits are generous and secure. Yes, there are years when my income is higher than a teacher's. Those are the years when I get healthy book advances. The years when I'm actually writing the book I'm being paid to write are extremely low-income years. When you average it out, I'd be much better off working as a teacher, not a writer. Even as a bestselling author—and my advance for ANIMALS IN TRANSLATION was very high—I earn less than teachers here in Irvington.

And nobody sets up a pension for a writer.

Meanwhile I'm spending thousands of dollars on materials and KUMON programs to teach my children what our faculty and administration aren't teaching them. I'm sacrificing thousands more in lost income.

And I have now had the experience of witnessing an Irvington teacher bully my child, as I foot the bill for an expensive and time-consuming Character Education Program for the kids. The Character Education Program seems to take place primarily during Study Skills, which brings me to yet another aggravation-making irony: Christopher did not learn study skills in Study Skills class. Then, when his grades reflected the fact that he does not know how to study, his Study Skills teacher had him sign a Grade Contract acknowledging 'full responsibility.'

So at this point I'm what you call a grumpy taxpayer. I really can't read another word on the teachers-are-underpaid theme.

When I start seeing articles about writers being underpaid, maybe I'll feel differently.

Just call me 'Average Joe!'


and one more thing!

AND Ed just read the NYRB review of that big, long history of Ivy League admissions......and the review said that any child living in a circle around Manhattan is at a distinct disadvantage when it comes to getting into elite schools, because the schools are looking for geographical diversity (and I'm assuming not quite so many Jewish last names, though I didn't read the article).

So I'm thinking:

a) we change Christopher's last name from Berenson to Johnson

b) we give my brother's address in Chatham, IL when we apply to colleges

um.....that leaves the question of how to disguise the location of K-12 Schools Attended.

I'll think of something.

Maybe we'll just move to Chatham for senior year.




EdsStatementToPtsaForum 16 Sep 2006 - 20:07 CatherineJohnson



I mentioned yesterday that the president of the PTSA had emailed Ed asking him whether he wanted to make a statement about the budget.

Here's his reply:

Catherine and I will be there tonight, but my proposal is the following: we should recommend that there be no increases in the "real" school budget — no increases, that is, beyond the costs of inflation and of the various contractual agreements or legal requirements over which we have limited control: staff benefits, special education, debt service, and the like. If we want to add new items to the school budget or spend more on existing items, we should look critically at the rationale for those items, asking ourselves whether the evidence clearly shows that the proposed new spending will have the desired effect. If the answer is "yes," we should then recommend offsetting cuts in other areas of the budget. We should also ask the District to evaluate all programs, curricula, and educational initiatives after an appropriate period of time. Any program whose evaluations fail to show clear-cut gains for our kids should be dropped. In most cases, programs that can't be readily evaluated should not be adopted in the first place.


I wasn't there when he made his statement, but from where I sit he did it brilliantly.

At that point in the meeting (maybe 25 minutes in?) no one had mentioned TRAILBLAZERS.

After Ed gave his statement, parents asked him what programs he would want the school to evaluate for effectiveness.

Ed said, D.A.R.E. & No Put-Downs (the character education program brought into the Main Street School last year thanks to parent fundraising. No Put-downs cost the teachers & kids 20 minutes of lost instructional time each and every morning for 5 months (maybe more).

Did it work?

Was there less bullying?

How much bullying was there in the first place?

We don't know!

Now the community is paying for the program; the Irvington Education Foundation picked up the tab for the first year only.

So Ed said he'd evaluate D.A.R.E. & No Put-Downs.

Then he said, 'And the district should evaluate TRAILBLAZERS. We have an expensive and controversial math curriculum supported by an inadequate research base. The program needs to be evaluated for effectiveness.'

He is good.

Both the Superintendent and the Assistant Superintendent for Curriculum were present.



Irvington PTSA Forum
PTSA Forum Tonight
Ed's statement to the PTSA Forum
report: PTSA Forum
fact sheet for forum: Singapore Math & teaching to mastery & TIMSS gap





StupidInAmerica 12 Jan 2006 - 17:55 CatherineJohnson



Ken left a link to John Stossel's special 'Stupid in America' tomorrow night at 10. (January 13, 2006)

Jan. 9, 2006 — American students fizzle in international comparisons, placing 18th in reading, 22nd in science and 28th in math - behind countries like Poland, Australia and Korea. But why? Are American kids less intelligent? John Stossel looks at the ways the U.S. public education system cheats students out of a quality education in "Stupid in America: How We Cheat Our Kids," airing this Friday at 10 p.m.

"We're not stupid. & But we could do better," one high school student tells Stossel. Another says, "I think it has to be something with the school, 'cause I don't think we're stupider."

That's the question Stossel examines in his special report: What is it that's going wrong in public schools?

There are many factors that contribute to failure in school. A major factor, Stossel finds, is the government's monopoly over the school system. Parents don't get to choose where to send their children. In other countries, choice brings competition, and competition improves performance.

Stossel questions government officials, union leaders, parents and students and learns some surprising things about what's happening in U.S. schools. He also examines how the educational system can be improved upon and reports on innovative programs across the country.

"Stupid In America: How We Cheat Our Kids" with John Stossel airs Jan. 13, at 10 p.m.



I'm setting up the TIVO.




BriefReportPtsaForum 16 Sep 2006 - 20:10 CatherineJohnson



Well, I was going to write an account of last night's PTSA Forum, but now it's 5:39 pm and the whole thing's a blur.

Let's see.

Basically, it went great.

Since Ed had been asked to give a statement, he came prepared. [update 4-11-06: Ed now says he wasn't invited to give his statement, he was merely asked whether he'd like to give his statement or have the PTSA president give it &mdash which, if true, completely changes my view of reality....sigh]

We were both semi-braced for tension, because the PTSA-hosted Q&A with the school board candidates had been so unpleasant.

Part of the reason it was unpleasant was that we were apparently the only people in town remotely concerned about annual tax increases. We've had double-digit property tax increases for at least two years running; it might be three.

Last winter, when Ed asked the school board how much money we're spending on administrative costs the President of the Board said, "A lot."

A lot.

That was the answer.

He clearly thought 'A lot' was a good answer.

It was a nasty scene. The school board was threatening to increase class size slightly in 4th and 5th grades, and parents were frantic. One mother was in tears; others basically said, 'We'll spend whatever it takes. Just tell us how much.'

The board voted to increase class size and then, at the last moment, 'discovered' some sources of revenue they didn't know about — something like that. (As I say, I'm not a Budget Maven.)

But that was the jist, more or less, and it didn't make us happy.

Surprise money?

In a school district?

Doubletree suddenly paid its taxes?

The whole scenario seemed cooked-up. Threaten parents with increased class size & voila. They're begging for a tax increase. (One parent directly asked the Board to increase taxes as much as possible.)

We could be wrong about this, and we probably are. But the fact remains that the budget drama last year gave the impression of having been manipulated for maximum impact, whether it was or not.

So that's the back story.



yes, it's a $9 million dollar playing field!

Last night's surprise, which wouldn't have been a surprise if we'd been paying attention, was that the district is planning to propose a Bond to borrow money for a $9,000,000 playing field at the high school.

This on top of the $50,000,000 we just borrowed 4 years ago to build a new Middle School Campus equipped with state of the art everything, but already in need of repair. I've mentioned the architect we know here, the guy who's working on the new buildings for Ground Zero.....he's not happy.

If he's not happy, we're not happy.

All of which means we are so not interested in putting 9 million dollars into brand new state of the art playing fields virtually guaranteed to make the Ground Zero guy even more unhappy than he already is.



so here's the good news

Nobody was interested in putting 9 million dollars into a brand-new state of the art playing field. Nobody. Not one living soul.

In fact, one group has already formed to oppose it — and guess what?

They're none too happy about the curriculum, either.

They want to know how we can be spending $18,000 per pupil and have no books in the library.

That was a shocker.

The Forum was held in the brand-new state of the art Campus Presentation Room, located just off the brand-new two-story state of the art Library.

The mom who's leading the group opposed to the 9-million dollar playing field pointed around to the bookshelves on the 2nd floor. They're empty. I had no idea. I'd never looked at the shelves to see if they actually had books in them. I just assumed there were books. My thinking was: It's a library, there are shelves, ergo there are books.

There aren't.

There are all kinds of missing books, as a matter of fact. Fourth grade ELA doesn't have a textbook at all, just packets; other classes have some books, but not enough books.

Then there are the missing tissues. Apparently the district has formally dropped its budget for Kleenex in the classroom. So, unless the teacher buys Kleenex for the kids with her own money, there's no Kleenex.

Who knew?

Ken said once that tax revolts can happen fast. There's a tipping point.

Last year's budget sailed through 2 to 1, so I assumed every budget would always sail through 2 to 1, forever & ever.

That's not the way it looked last night.

Even one of the moms who's been most active getting budget increases passed every year (we have to vote the budget through) was sounding astonishingly negative. She was saying things like, "I've always done a lot of propaganda* that was the word she usedfor the budget, back in the Dark Ages when nobody voted, and now parents all vote, and it's great, and now we have a Superintendent and an Assistant Superintendent and an assistant for the assistant and a Principal K-3 and a Vice Principal and another Principal Grades 4-5.....' I'm serious! This is the way she was talking! (This particular mom is a Math Brain who has an autistic kid, and she's always like that. She's hilarious; speaks her mind. She's a friend of ours. She asked Ed to write an op-ed supporting a tax increase a couple of years ago, and he did.)

There wasn't One Living Soul there who was feeling like The School Needs More Money.



TRAILBLAZERS

I've been saying Since Day One that I didn't know why on earth the district would deliberately go out and choose a math textbook that was guaranteed to get parents up in arms.

I was right.

Parents are just about to be up in arms; more than a few already are.

That's the point of the Math Enrichment Specialist: appeasement. Consciously or no, the administration is attempting to buy off the GATE parents by spending more of our money.

First we have to pay for a lousy math curriculum; then we have to pay for a Math Enrichment Specialist (which means health insurance & pension paymentsuntil that person is dead) to make up for it.

No one was told, going in, that Implementing TRAILBLAZERS would then mean HIRING AT LEAST TWO MORE FULL-TIME PEOPLE just to make up for the deficiencies of TRAILBLAZERS.

No thanks.

Give the Math-Brain kids a decent curriculum, and while you're at it give my kid a decent curriculum, too. That's what I thought I was paying for when I came here.



drip, drip, drip

I've mentioned that 'spaced repetition,' which is the fundamental principle of learning, works.

Last night was further proof.

I've been saying the words 'Singapore Math' constantly ever since fall 2004.

It's gotten around.

Late yesterday I made up a Fact Sheet to hand out to everyone so I could avoid the humiliation of my Previous Appearance at a PTSA event, when I spoke longer than my allotted 3 minutes and then got ticked off when they told me to sit down.

(I will never get over that.)

So I printed up a Fact Sheet.

Four sections:

Sample problem from Singapore grade 6 placement test (end of grade 5)

Can Irvington children pass Singapore tests?

Mathematics achievement in the U.S.

The spiraling curriculum

I got there late, and sat in the back. The mom next to me said hi, and I gave her one of the sheets. She took one look at it and said, 'Oh, Singapore Math. I'm very interested in that.'

Word gets around.

You just have to keep putting it out there.



consciousness raising

Ed and I both spoke about spiraling versus mastery curricula, separately, so we were able to do spaced repetition in the same night. Then I brought up spiraling versus mastery for a third time when a mom complained about backpack weight.

I'd be willing to bet that every person there, or close to, could tell you today what spiraling is.

They could certainly tell you what mastery is: teaching to mastery is what they thought their schools were already doing.

That's sure what I thought.

When it was my turn to talk, I said I'd made up fact sheets and would just pass those out instead of speaking. Then I asked the president to add 'spiraling versus mastery curriculum' to the list she was writing up front, because she hadn't written down the point when Ed made it first.

At that point, people asked me to stand up and tell them what spiraling was.

They wanted to know.

The cool thing was that a 2nd grade teacher was sitting behind Ed, and she confirmed to parents sitting around her that, yes, Irvington schools use a spiral curriculum. I'm not sure whether there were 2 teachers there, or just one. One teacher told the parents nearby that some skills are taught to mastery while others are spiraled. I'd love to know how they choose which skills to teach to mastery, and which to teach to exposure.

Once people know that teaching to mastery isn't being done — purposely and knowingly is not being done — that knowledge isn't going to go away. It's going to grow, and the implications are going to become clear.



other parents

The other parents were fantastic.

This was the single best parent meeting I've ever attended.

People were incredibly articulate, and no one was competing for attention, undermining other people's positions — fantastic.

No one wants a 9 million dollar playing field, everyone wants an excellent curriculum, and everyone wants to know what that curriculum is.

My friend Kathy said (paraphrasing) 'All the extras are nice, the art, the drama. But having earned a Ph.D. in the social sciences, I'm aware that American students are considered completely unprepared. Our children need an excellent education in the basics. If my daughter has a calculator in 6th grade, that's all the technology she needs. I don't want to buy any more technology for the school until I can sleep at night knowing she's getting a sound education in the basic subjects.'

It was brilliant. Amazing. She had a huge effect on the room.

Her friend, Ellen, was incredible, too (she's the mother of the GATE child).

Great, great, great.



lost instructional time

I'll have to check this story, but Kathy also heard, from a teacher, that the kids in her class had only two uninterrupted weeks of instruction all last fall. Their routine is chronically interrupted.

We are besieged by extras.

Every week there's some Special Event for the kids, something wonderful, special, and extra. It's chronic.

It's time to get back to what should be the core mission of the schools. Education. Reading, writing, math. Taught to mastery.



sample problem

Here's the sample problem I included at the top of my Fact Sheet, from the 6th grade placement test:

8. The ratio of Zoe’s money to Yolanda’s is 3:7. Yolanda has $64 more than Zoe. If Yolanda gives ¼ of her money to Zoe, what will be the new ratio of Zoe’s money to Yolanda’s?


Every parent there had to have looked at that problem and thought, No Irvington 5th grader can do this problem.



update

from Carolyn: Wrong. Every parent there was looking at it and saying... can I do this problem?

I'm guffawing!

It's true!

(I had a couple of seconds there wondering the same thing.)



I don't think TRAILBLAZERS is going to last too long here.

My goal is for Irvington to be the first town in Westchester to bring in Singapore Math.

Of course, I'm also going to have to start hassling people about Teaching To Mastery (pdf file).


Irvington PTSA Forum
PTSA Forum Tonight
Ed's statement to the PTSA Forum
report: PTSA Forum
fact sheet for forum: Singapore Math & teaching to mastery & TIMSS gap



* that was the word she used: propaganda




FactSheetPtsaForum 16 Sep 2006 - 20:20 CatherineJohnson



This is the Fact Sheet I distributed to parents & to the PTSA Executive Committee.

I don't think this is the most effective Fact Sheet possible; I would have preferred something much simpler.

I think a very effective Fact Sheet would be just one word problem printed in the middle of the page with this question:

Will your child be able to solve this problem at the end of 5th grade?

I would also want to get across the information that a perfectly average child in Singapore can solve this problem.

However, I really wanted to raise the issue of teaching to mastery and the spiral curriculum, so I filled up the sheet. Under the circumstances, I think that was OK.



Anyone who'd like to use this sheet for anyone reason — please do! And, of course, feel free to modify & improve it.

I would also appreciate feedback. I made this up very quickly, because I didn't get inspired until Ken left his post about teaching to mastery.

This is the best I could do in 15 minutes or so.

NOTE: all of this material fit on one side of one sheet of paper.





Sample problem from Singapore grade 6 placement test (end of grade 5)
The ratio of Zoe’s money to Yolanda’s is 3:7. Yolanda has $64 more than Zoe. If Yolanda gives ¼ of her money to Zoe, what will be the new ratio of Zoe’s money to Yolanda’s? http://www.singaporemath.com/EasyEditor/assets/pl_pm6atest.pdf (pdf file)


Can Irvington children pass Singapore tests?
Tests are available online at:
https://www.sonlight.com/singapore-placement-tests.html
http://www.singaporemath.com/Placement_s/12.htm



Mathematics achievement in the U.S.

  • Average eighth grade U.S. student is 3 years behind average student in Singapore, Japan & Korea source: Beaton et al, 1996 Mathematics Achievement in the Middle Grades
  • Nine percent of U.S. fourth-graders would be included in a talent pool made up of the top 10 percent of all students who took TIMSS [Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study – includes students from undeveloped countries].
  • Only 5 percent of U.S. eighth-graders would be included in this pool instead of the expected 10 percent.
  • The most advanced mathematics students in the United States (about 5 percent of the 12th grade cohort), performed similarly to 10 percent to 20 percent of that same cohort in other countries. Source: Lessons from the World: What TIMSS Tells Us about Mathematics Achievement, Curriculum and Instruction      source: American Federation of Teachers http://www.aft.org/pubs-reports/downloads/teachers/Policy10.pdf



The spiraling curriculum
“…if I put in front of you a fifth, sixth, seventh, and eighth grade textbook in math and opened up to page 200 and I jumbled them up, and said, “order them from fifth through eighth grade in order,” you'd have a very tough time because they all look the same. That's because, unfortunately, we have this national strategy of “we're not really going to teach to master, we're going to teach to exposure and over lots and lots of years of kids seeing page 200 in the math book, eventually somehow they're going to learn it. We're going to teach them how to reduce fractions in fifth grade, in sixth grade, in seventh grade, in eighth grade, in ninth grade and continue until finally somehow magically they're going to get it…..[at KIPP] we have a different math strategy and a different math philosophy.”
Source: Mike Feinberg, co-founder Knowledge is Power Program KIPP. 80% of KIPP 8th graders – disadvantaged children in the Bronx – pass Regents A at the end of 8th grade, as compared to approximately 30 to 40% of Irvington 8th graders, depending on the year http://www.pbs.org/makingschoolswork/sbs/kipp/feinberg.html



Time costs of teaching to exposure, not mastery
Summer regression under spiraling curriculum: 1 month at least
(source: Time for School: Its Duration and Allocation http://www.asu.edu/educ/epsl/EPRU/documents/EPRU%202002-101/Chapter%2004-Glass-Final.pdf)

Summer regression with mastery curriculum: 1 week at most
{source: Student-Program Alignment and Teaching to Mastery http://www.zigsite.com/PDFs/StuPro_Align.pdf spiralling curricula (pdf file, p 16)

American Children lose 3 weeks’ instructional time at a minimum each year that children in other countries do not lose. Some children lose more. While U.S. children are being re-taught skills they did not learn to mastery the year before, their peers in high-achieving countries are mastering new skills and concepts. Over the years, this lost instructional time adds up. 3 weeks lost in second grade means U.S. children are 6 weeks behind in 3rd grade, 9 weeks in 4th, 12 weeks in 5th and so on down the line. The gap widens each year.



Irvington PTSA Forum
PTSA Forum Tonight
Ed's statement to the PTSA Forum
report: PTSA Forum
fact sheet for forum: Singapore Math & teaching to mastery & TIMSS gap





StupidInAmericaPart1 16 Jan 2006 - 18:39 CatherineJohnson


Of course I missed the show, but the message boards are a hoot.

This one is from sharpeteacher:

Stupid in America does not start in the schools. It is the stupid adults that produce these lazy, under-achievers. When the parent see no reason to act like civilized people why would you expect the children to. The problem I have in my classroom is parents. Parents support their disrespectful children. They defend them when they get suspended or act like fools. [ed.: true! case in point!] (Parents like the one on tv that said her child was in high school and could not read.) It is the parents responsiblity more than the teacher to be sure the child is progressing. Maybe if parents suck it up and quit being selfish, stupid people then there children would care and learn about the real world and do well in school. You are comparing these countries and states that do not have the same rules or even the same tests. If you take a test and I take another test we can not compare our scores because we did not take the same test. Parents do not care enough to change their childs school. What we need is for someone to stand up and broadcast a show about stupid parents in America!!!!!


Here's a school administrator:

I agree as an administrator we have more stupid parents that bad teachers. It only takes discipline.


Another satisfied customer:

It's funny, that only teachers are responding to this thread. Let me tell you that I have read to my 2 children since day one, have helped with homework every night, volunteered uncountable hours in the public school system and am probably over involved in my kids lives. But just recently I have encountered this problem. My 10th grader just dropped 2 grades in Geometry in 4 weeks and I did not know about it until the week before Christmas break. After a conversation with the teacher she tried to tell me that I "should have known" that my child was in trouble. She said that she had done everything she was supposed to do to inform me. She had sent a letter home at the beginning of the year, stating that she would eventually send a password home to log on to an account to check grades and that my son, "if he were doing his job" was keeping a running tab of grades. I never received either. She obviously does not have children, thinking that they are going to come to you, saying, "mom, I'm flunking Math". Give me a break! The teacher gets paid for making sure my child learns [ed.: a common misconception! no! she doesn't get paid to make sure your child learns! she gets paid to spiral!] and obviously, my child was not learning, and his teacher felt that I did not need a note concerning this fact. Hey, as long as she can pick up that paycheck for putting in those hours, what makes the difference whether my child learns or not. Let me also tell you that I am not an absentee parent. I have volunteered in the public school system for 13 years, and am always available. This "teacher" also went on to say that it was all three of our responsibilitys' to make sure that my son was progressing. [ed.: hey! I got the same line from the Study Skills teacher who hung up on me!] I can't fix what I do not know about. She also said that she had 132 students and couldn't keep track of everything. Well, then maybe she should only get part of her paycheck, if she is only doing part of her job. Let me also add, that in the week since we have found out about the grade drop, we have gotten him two tutors, (pretty bad when a child has to go to another teacher for tutoring), have helped him more at home and he has raised his GPA by 5% in one week! [ed: I Should Have Homeschooled, Part 100-something] Teachers are always saying that the student needs to take responsibility....just once I would like to see a teacher step up and take responsibilty for what they have done...or in this case what they haven't. Public Education in America really stinks!


why do new teachers quit within 5 years?

I spent three years as a high school teacher, getting a job at a public school straight out of college. Three other rookies started with me. One quit after one year; the second year another quit; I quit the third year; the other rookie is now the high school’s activities director, eyeing a vice principal position.

Most new teachers leave the profession within five years. Teachers like to point at this statistic as proof of how hard their job is. It isn’t. It’s proof of the job’s meaninglessness. It takes a month or so at the job to realize that it doesn’t matter how hard you work, or how well you do. Your students will appreciate it, a little, but they are gone when the bell rings, and at the end of the year, they’re out of your life. The administration will take no notice. Your pay isn’t attached to it in any way.

Beyond that, your class of 25 becomes a class of 40 with ten special ed students. You’ve got a future felon you’d like to throw out of your class but can’t, because no one cares how well you teach, but cares a lot if you deem one kid a bad apple. For someone young, who has visions of a rewarding career, it quickly becomes apparent that public school teaching is an empty profession.

Career public school teachers come in two flavors, both shown in the John Stossel special.

a) the lazy bum who likes the free ride. That teacher who had his geography students playing Monopoly isn’t the exception, he’s the rule. I guarantee you that the teachers on this message board and in your lives who speak of working 60 hours a week are LYING! At my school, all the teachers arrived five minutes before the first bell and left five minutes afterward, and didn’t take any work home with them. They ran personal errands during their prep periods, and milked the image of the overwork teacher to anyone who wasn’t in the club.

b) The activist. The Union President who made such a fool of herself on the show is the other model. This teacher is also prevalent in the schools. She doesn’t care that kids learn math, science, English, or history. She got in this business to become a brainwasher, and uses her classroom as her personal political forum.

I’ve left the profession, and now work for a corporation in a cubicle. And despite the fact that my job is much harder now, at least it feels like I am accomplishing something!



uh-oh

The sad state of affairs on this matter is that the majority of us have personally experienced a really bad teacher on more than one occasion. That's too many bad teachers!

Me? I personally spent from the beginning of my junior year to the month of February teaching myself AB Calulus. Why you ask? Because my teacher was too busy planning the annual math club ski trip during my class period. I also, by my choice, went to a local college that summer to take AB Calculus to be sure I was ready for BC Calculus my Senior year.

I then spent my daughter's 6th grade year giving her the math lesson she should have been taught at school everyday by the teacher who couldn't stay off her cell phone long enough to teach. Her idea of teaching was handing out worksheets, reams of them, for the children to do without any lesson. The proverbial straw was the worksheet asking to calculate areas and perimeters of squares, triangles, parellograms, circles, etc. The worksheet had a diagram with measurements and an A = under each one. No formulas. I asked my daughter where her notes were from class on this. She said Mrs. Teacher didn't teach that day. They did worksheets with 5 digit numbers multiplied by 5 digit numbers...busy work.




helicopter parents of the world, unite



update

eduwonk likes this book, from Brookings:

1544377.gif


Apparently the Wall Street Journal called it, "The education book of the year . . . an icon-smashing book on school reform."


There's a terrifically interesting-sounding (awkward modifier alert) list of books under "People who bought this book also bought":




the politics of vouchers (interview with Terry Moe)





VouchersAndTheFreeForAllArgument 17 Jan 2006 - 23:14 CatherineJohnson



I've mentioned that I began life as a pro-public-schools, anti-voucher person.

Today I'm pro-charter, pro-voucher, pro-homeschool. Anywhere but here.

After a few years of browbeating, Ed has become a supporter of vouchers for inner city kids, including vouchers to attend religious schools. But he's adamantly opposed to vouchers for everyone else. He wants charters for everyone; he wants open enrollment for everyone. He's probably come around to the view that homeschooling is superior to public schooling (though he doesn't want me homeschooling).

But he's intransigent on the subject of vouchers for all.

He's against it, because he thinks we'd end up with an educational free-for-all.

While the prospect of an educational free-for-all doesn't strike terror into my own heart, I have to say that this passage from John Stossel doesn't exactly make me want to March on Washington for vouchers:

If people got to choose their kids' school, education options would be endless. There could soon be technology schools, cheap Wal-Mart-like schools, virtual schools where you learn at home on your computer, sports schools, music schools, schools that go all year, schools with uniforms, schools that open early and keep kids later, and, who knows? If there were competition, all kinds of new ideas would bloom.


This is the kind of thing that makes me feel like saying, 'You know what?'

'Parents are too stupid to figure out their own kids' education.'

STUPID IN AMERICA!

Sorry. Just kidding.

The point is: if a pro-voucher person like me can read a pro-voucher paragraph like this and feel instant dismay.....I'm not going to be persuading people like Ed any time soon.



what kind of voucher program would lots of people support?

I don't know the answer to that, but Ed is a reasonably good proxie for the anti-voucher voter. (Anti-voucher-voter? Sounds like robo-Roto-rooter. If this were a real book, I'd have to re-write that.)

Yesterday & today Ed was telling me what kinds' of voucher programs he would support:

  • He would enthuiastically support a voucher program if we had either a national curriculum or national standards. I asked how he'd feel if individual states had leeway to choose & create their own curricula, with the federal government setting forth a set of general standards and tying money to meeting those standards (as NCLB does). That was no problem for him at all. As I've mentioned, he helped write the CA history-social science frameworks, so he knows the different levels of specificity you can and/or must have. He says you could absolutely have a federal layer of 'standards' that are rigorous but allow states to figure out the detail. He also said this is never, ever, going to happen. My motto is 'never say never,' but I don't see a national curriculum happening any time soon. either. One last thing: European countries like Belgium, which have voucher programs, probably also have national standards and/or centralized exams — although I wasn't able to track this down for Belgium....

I suspect lots of people would come on board for universal vouchers if there were some kind of outputs audit in the form of, say, centralized testing.



research on countries that audit outputs

Apparently, outputs auditing in the form of centralized exams works well:

Centralized exams. Of the 39 countries in this study, 15 have some kind of centralized exams, in the sense that an administrative body beyond the schooling level writes and administers the exams to all students. This can profoundly alter the incentive structure within the educational system by measuring student performance against an external standard, making performance comparable across classes and schools. It makes it easier to tell whether a given student’s poor performance is an exception within a class or whether the whole class is doing poorly relative to the country as a whole. In other words, centralized exams make it obvious whether it is the student or the teacher who is to blame. This reduces the teachers’ leeway and creates incentives to use resources more effectively. It makes the whole system transparent: parents can assess the performance of children, teachers, and schools; heads of schools can assess the performance of teachers; and the government and administration can assess the performance of different schools.

Centralized exams also alter the incentive structure for students by making their performance more transparent to employers and advanced educational institutions. Their rewards for learning thus should grow and become more visible. Without external assessments, students in a class looking to maximize their joint welfare will encourage one another not to study very hard. Centralized exams render this strategy futile. All in all, given this analysis, we should expect centralized exams to boost student performance.

And they seem to. All things being equal, students in countries with centralized exams scored 16 points higher in math and 11 points higher in science, although the science finding is not statistically significant due to the small number of countries in the sample (see Figure 3 for results). Furthermore, students in schools where external exams or standardized tests heavily influence the curriculum scored 4 points higher in math, though there appears to be no effect in science. This suggests that science tests may lend themselves less readily to standardization.



I like this idea:

  • Ed's other idea — and I think this may be original to him (at least I've never heard anyone else bring it up) — is a voucher program in which only private schools with proven track records make the 'voucher accreditation' list.

Offhand, I love that idea.

The fact is, I'm not particularly interested in throwing tax money at Start-up Voucher Schools. I'm just not. I can easily imagine 'Voucher Mills' popping up all over creation, and I have zero interest in funding 'Sports Schools' or 'Technology Schools.'

I do believe in the wisdom of the crowd; it's entirely possible that a pure market approach would inevitably result in the best schools 'winning.' I wouldn't oppose a voucher free-for-all.

But I'm not enthusiastic.

I am enthusiastic about a pure voucher system where voucher schools have to show results before they get tax dollars.

'Showing results' wouldn't have to be complicated. We already have norm-referenced tests available; private schools would simply have to show that they have X-number of students working at grade level, or some such.

Now that sounds good.

I think it's possible such a plan would sound good to a majority — even a large majority — of Americans.


ECONOMIST on FL Supreme Court striking down voucheres
a voucher program many people might support



-- CatherineJohnson - 15 Jan 2006



DataWarehousing 07 Oct 2006 - 22:10 CatherineJohnson



Our school district is now using 'data warehousing.'

The couple who came to dinner Friday night — both employed in math-related fields — were highly unenthusiastic about this development.

My neighbor, the statistician, had the same reaction when she read about it.

The Friday-night-couple said data warehousing is the same thing as data mining.....which I think I favor.

Is that wrong?

I'm certain they're right, though, that data mining will allow the district to flummox parents with whatever statistics they decide to pull out.

Although.....so far district efforts to flummmox parents, namely me, have been unimpressive to say the least. These efforts consist of the Assistant Superintendent sending me one letter and one email telling me 'scores have gone up' since we purchased TRAILBLAZERS.

I pointed out that scores went up all over the state and that, furthermore, 'scores went up' is raw data, and we left it at that.

Color me Not flummoxed.

Then they shut down my Singapore Math course.



not flummoxed now & don't plan to be in the future

What do I need to start learning in order to not get flummoxed down the line?

Apart from real knowledge, comprehension, & procedural skills, I could use some lingo, just so I sound like I know what I'm talking about.

If the District is going to blow smoke-with-data, I need to be able to blow my own smoke, which I can do just through language. (Have I mentioned how ruthless I am lately?)



whose data is it, anyway?

What I fear — because we've hit this brick wall many, many times in special ed — is that parents won't get to see data because parents seeing data will represent an invasion of other parents' privacy.

Maybe things won't go that way, but seeing as how they've always gone that way for us in the past, and seeing as how Bush & c. had to pass a huge, major, revolutionary law just to get schools to disaggregate and publish their data some place where parents could find it, tells my Bayesian mind to count on it.

So maybe I should be familiarizing myself with the FOIA, right?



Wal-Mart has a warehouse for data, too

No idea whether this book would be useful or not.


6556819.gif



-- CatherineJohnson - 16 Jan 2006



ThePoliticsOfVouchers 17 Jan 2006 - 23:17 CatherineJohnson



I've just finished reading The Brookings Brown Center on Education Policy Presents Terry Moe Discussing Schools, Vouchers and the American Public.

It's terrific.

NOTE: most of the bullets here have been added (by me), and my comments are in bold.



JUNE 7, 2001

TOM LOVELESS: It was about a decade ago that Terry [Moe] and John Chubb published a book that is now considered a classic in American education, "Politics, Markets and America's Schools," and that was while they were senior fellows here at Brookings. That book, which remains still controversial, unleashed a movement — a national movement in support of vouchers that is still rippling today.

[snip]

LOVELESS: This is a very different book. In Terry's new book, he analyzes, really, the structure of public opinion on the voucher issue, and it's a fascinating bit of research that he has done and makes a wonderful contribution, not only to education, but to political science as well.

[snip]

TERRY MOE: There are people around now, especially some of the critics of vouchers, who are saying that this thing is about to die out. The movement has peaked and it's essentially yesterday's news. And the evidence for that is the results of the initiative campaigns in Michigan and California where vouchers went down to resounding and humiliating defeat.

[snip]

...I do think that these [critics] have started at the right place because they are starting with public opinion. Now this is a thoroughly Democratic nation and public opinion really matters.

[snip]

a survey that I carried out of 4700 American adults. They were asked an array of questions on public and private schools and on vouchers. And what I tried to do here was to go well beyond the kinds of survey that you normally come across. The typical survey on vouchers — and there are a lot of them out there — ask one question, and it's a question about — basically, do you support vouchers or not?

[snip]

....what I've tried to do here is to carry out an analysis of public opinion, and I'm not just interested in describing it. If I wanted to describe it, I would have issued my own brief report in 1995, which is when this survey was actually carried out.

[snip]

...the risk is obviously is that things could have changed since 1995. But if you look at other surveys, it appears that things really haven't changed much, if at all, surprisingly — at least as far as the mass public is concerned.

[snip]

I support vouchers. Normally in my own work — I'm a political scientist — I wouldn't say where I stand on these issues, I would just do my work, you know. But in the voucher issue, it's important, I think, to know where the author is coming from because so much of this literature, unfortunately, is infused by ideology and is slanted and is not particularly well done and is not particularly scientific. I think that's really a bad thing and something that we need to get away from.

So I expect people to be skeptical — I want them to be. But I want to underline that I am, first and foremost, a social scientist, and my concern here is not to be a cheerleader for vouchers and not to convince people that vouchers are a good thing. My goal in this book is to be right...

[snip]

...the place to start is with a simple point that couldn't be more profound in its importance for politics of this issue, and that is that Americans like the public schools. In the first place, they are reasonably satisfied with the performance of the public schools. They think their local schools, as a system, are doing pretty well. They're not ecstatic, but they think they're doing pretty well. They are even more positive about the schools that their own kids go to. Their direct experiences with the public schools are quite good — surprisingly good.

Secondly, many Americans embrace what I call "the public school ideology" which means that they have a set of values that lead them to think that having a public education system is a good thing. They believe in the ideals of this system. They like having a public school system. They want to support this kind of a system, quite aside from specific performance issues. So this is a really fundamental thing that voucher leaders have to face, because it's obviously not optimal from their standpoint to have a population that's reasonably satisfied and normatively committed in this way.

[ed.: I'll say]

So if this were the end of it, voucher leaders could pretty much pack their bags and go home. But this isn't the end of it. And the rest of the story is more positive by quite a bit. Number one, Americans think, on the average, that private schools are better than public schools. And it's really in their minds a matter of relative performance. They think the public schools are pretty good, but they think private schools are better, and when they are making choices about going private and about vouchers, that's what they are thinking about — they are thinking about relative performance, not the fact that the public schools are pretty good.

Okay, secondly, there are a number of very specific issues that are important to them on which they're not satisfied.

[ed.: bullets added]

  • ...they think that this education system is inequitable.

  • They think that parents don't have enough influence.

  • They think that the schools are too big.

  • They think that the schools do a bad job of teaching moral values.

  • They think that competition and other elements of markets would be a healthy thing, basically, for schools.

  • They think that voluntary prayer is a good thing.

These are precisely the kinds of arguments that voucher leaders make. So there is a constituency for what the voucher movement is offering.



pull-quote:

So the voucher movement faces fundamental challenge here. Their challenge is how to make progress with a public that tends to like its ideas but is really not interested in radical change because it also likes the current system.


It's obviously crucial for the voucher movement that enough parents want to go private. So the first point to make here is that lots of parents do want to go private. Parents who are now in the public sector — 52 percent say that if money weren't a problem, they would be interested in seeking out a private school for their child.

[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 — y