Edu Commentary

USA Today editorial board weighs in on No Child Left Behind fixes. They essentially call for separating the sheep from the goats in terms of who wants to fix it and who wants to completely undermine it. Worth reading, here’s a taste:

Little wonder the law’s critics gathered this month in Washington to find ways to fix the flaws they see. But instead of producing alternative ways to achieve the same goals, they came up with ways to water down the law. Their ideas range from de-emphasizing testing to scaling back education aims they consider too ambitious.

The critics are partly right. The law’s one-size-fits-all approach causes real problems, even for its avid supporters. For instance, the law lumps into the same group truly failing schools with effective ones that fall short in one area, such as special education.

Such circumstances need fixing — but with a scalpel, not a meat cleaver. The law has achieved far too much to junk.

There is a response, too. More money. One quibble, USA Today seems too ready to accept the notion that testing must come with sharp edges. How about an editorial calling on the Bush Administration to really provide funding and assistance to states to develop top-flight assessment systems rather than low-balling it as they are now and creating predictable problems?

In its current issue Chief Information Officer magazine honors 100 agile companies around the country. Two school districts are among the honorees, Fairfax County in Virginia and Ventura Unified School District in California. Via Boardbuzz (who seem a little defensive…).

Much more on the AFT-NYT versus charter schools:

NY Post ed board here, Checker Finn in the NY Post here. Former Democratic Congressman Floyd Flake in the New York Times here. Let’s hope Flake’s op-ed is not what passes for a clarification/correction because it doesn’t address the problems with the way The Times chose to present the story and the data. Lot’s of stuff around the blogs also. Drezner here, Yglesias here, Jacobs here and here. New Democratic Network joins in here.

More blogging: Boardbuzz is on this too but they (a) can’t bring themselves to criticize the NYT (though Edu Commentary thinks they’d have no problem doing so if it were traditional public schools taking the cheap shot here…) or the AFT (b) repeat the low-grade rumor that the Bushies were sitting on the scores (as much fun as Edu Commentary thinks that scandal would be, it’s just not the case…remember, don’t mistake ineptness for nefariousness!) and (c) turn the whole thing into a whine about AYP!

Update: IBD here, AZ Republic here, CSM here, Denver Post here, and a pissed-off Rocky Mountain News here.

Update II: Seattle Times here, key quote, U of W’s Mary Beth Celio, “It was one of the most unsophisticated, low-level analyses I’ve ever seen.”

Several moderate-income to affluent Chicago area school districts are weighing whether to reject Title I aid to avoid complying with No Child Left Behind. Two already have. One of the districts considering rejecting aid, Evanston Township High School, is headed by Allan Alson who is also active in the Minority Student Achievement Network.

One Chicago area superintendent speculated to Edu Commentary that Alson was setting himself up for charges of hypocrisy and acidly noted that while quibbling over $100K in federal aid for poor kids and the accompanying requirements these districts “will spend $2 million to light their athletic fields…”

Perhaps, but Edu Commentary can see the press playing the storyline either way. It could be portrayed as a pretty clear case of adults trying to make a political point at the expense of kids or as just another indication that NCLB is fatally flawed. Hopefully it won’t come to that in the first place. In any event, Edu Commentary can’t remember where we are in the press cycle just now, is NCLB good or bad at the present time?

Unbelievable.

The NYT editorial board tees-off on charter schools in today’s paper. They specifically cite California and Michigan as demonstrating the pitfalls of charters. Nevermind that data from both states shows a lot of promise for charters (in CA, 4th-grade charter school students did about as well as other public school students according to the new NAEP data that started this whole thing and in MI results on the 2003 state test are very encouraging although there were gaps on the new NAEP–not accounting for race and poverty).

More importantly, the effort to hang all this around President Bush’s neck is ridiculous. Let’s not forget that President Clinton was a strong charter school supporter as are many liberals and liberal-leaning organizations. Maybe criticize Bush for not doing more to support charter schools, public school choice, and the creation of new public schools in distressed communities!

Anyway, Edu Commentary very much hopes that George Bush loses in November, too! But this burn the village to save it mentality is remarkably counterproductive to what should be liberal goals.

Update: They’ve lost The Prospect!

All kinds of responses to the NYT’s charter school story from yesterday.

Mickey Kaus weighs in here and notes that, “I can’t quite believe that former AFT head Albert Shanker–who was one of the two or three smartest and most no-B.S. public figures I’ve ever seen in action–would tolerate this sort of deception if he were still alive. And if he got hold of a nuclear weapon …” Ouch.

Chicago Tribune here, Newsday here. CSLC here. NYT runs Rod Paige’s response here. Key graf:

“The secretary’s reaction prompted surprise from Darvin Winnick, chairman of the National Assessment Governing Board, which oversees the national test for the federal government. Mr. Winnick said that while he would interpret the scores with caution, he did not see much cause for arguing with the outcomes themselves.”

Interpret with caution is exactly what The Times didn’t do!

In the Wall Street Journal the trio of William G. Howell, Paul E. Peterson and Martin R. West take issue with the AFT study too. And, the AFT may have opened a can of worms here. Howell and company use the same data to evaluate the NAEP performance of parochial school students and find them outpacing charters and traditional public schools. Uh oh.

Couple of quick thoughts. This whole thing may well blowback the other way because it’s so outrageous. However, that shouldn’t obviate the reality that too many charter schools are not getting the job done. The goal of charters was not to create schools that were as good as the urban status quo but rather to foster the creation of schools that were significantly better.

And, it does bear mentioning that the whole notion of turning all low-performing schools into charter schools is ludicrous in the first place. Reconstituting low-performing schools as charter schools is but one option that states and school districts can take. Obviously, unless it’s accompanied by sustained support and real changes, then just giving a school a new moniker won’t accomplish much. That’s the issue because, frankly, if a “blind taste test” were possible in education, good charter schools and good traditional public schools would be largely indistinguishable in the first place. Charters are about creating space for good providers of public education to enter the educational sector, there is nothing magical about the charter label per se.

The other aspect of this whole story is the low-grade “scandal” about whether the Bush Administration buried this data for political reasons. Where some see scandal, Edu Commentary sees characteristic Bush Administration ineptness. Had the Bushies wanted to hide the data they likely could have done that. Instead, they apparently just were not on the ball and let this potentially explosive situation lay idle too long. More great management! Yet, if it turns out down the road that the Bushies were up to something, then it will be a low day indeed for federal research and something that Congress ought to look into. (Thanks for all the 411 on this that has been sent so far, and please send more, anonymity guaranteed).

The Washington Post looks at how Title I formula changes are impacting to suburban Washington counties. All formulas are somewhat arbitrary and those on the short-end will always complain. And, often this issue is being used to call attention to overall NCLB funding issues rather than the allocation issue itself. Besides, considering Fairfax County’s astronomical assessed value per-pupil (which most school districts would kill for) it’s hard to gin up too much sympathy for their “plight.” NCLB’s focus on better targeting Title I funds to low-income students is one of its more laudable aspects.

However, there may be a problem with some of the data being used to make allocation determinations that are adversely impacting high poverty communities. Edu Commentary’s still looking at the numbers so this isn’t ready for prime time, but in some places school districts that are experiencing an increase in low-income youngsters might be undercounted in the new allocations. Several possible causes: (A) formula problems (B) different methods for determining allocations for small school districts which may not be based on reliable data (C) problems with the census data because of possible undercounting of poor, minority, and immigrant students. B and C seem more likely culprits.

The New York Times reports that No Child Left Behind is facing obstacles in the states. True enough, put they pale compared to the obstacles it’s facing from The New York Times! Amazingly, no mention in this story of George Miller, The Education Trust, the Citizens Commission on Civil Rights. Probably just an oversight!

NYT’s Freedman writes up an interesting Rhode Island program. Dead white guys galore!

New data on reading teachers in elementary schools from NCES.

In the NY Sun, Kate Walsh of NCTQ says it’s time to move the debate about teacher quality forward. James Grissom of the California Department of Education says it’s time to reanalyze the data about bilingual education there.

Terrific Chronicle of Higher Education article ($) this week about steps that colleges and universities are taking to help incoming students who are in recovery from substance abuse.

In DE, a troubled path for “new” accountability measures. Via educationnews.org.

He’s the superintendent of schools in Decatur Township in Indiana and he wants Indy Mayor Bart Peterson to help him open some charter schools.

For years many people routinely castigated public schools based on incomplete or misleading data. Some of these are now charter school supporters. So, if turnabout is fair play then there is nothing unfair about today’s big New York Times story about public charter schools.

The American Federation of Teachers fed the NYT the new National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) data that included a sample of charter schools. The thrust of the article: Charter schools don’t do as well as other schools, even other urban schools.

Of course, it’s not that simple. For starters most of the charters are new and so this data is better considered as baseline data rather than some sort of final evaluation. In addition, charters tend to serve the most at-risk and struggling students. These can be difficult variables to operationalize, complicating comparisons with other schools even while holding some demographic factors constant.

Most importantly, though, when one controls the grade 4 data for race it turns out there is no statistically significant difference between charter schools and other public schools. But, you’ll search in vain in the Times story for that context. In fact, to the contrary, a chart accompanying the story fails to offer readers any significance tests for the numbers they’re looking at, inaccurately indicating that there are significant differences by race.

Is this important? Yes, since charters in this sample disproportionately serve minority students by an almost 2-1 margin compared to traditional public schools. By the way, don’t take Edu Commentary’s word for this, it’s in the AFT report (pdf) which was released today in conjunction with the Times article. See page 10-11.

Is every charter school great? Of course not. Are there too many low-performing ones? Yes. However, the solution to that problem is not to do away with charters but rather to ensure that public policies rigorously weed-out the low-performers while not hamstringing the many high performing public charter schools changing the lives of youngsters every day. For that to happen though requires a détente on all sides of this debate and Edu Commentary doesn’t see that happening anytime soon since most charter critics don’t want good charter schools, they want no charter schools and some in the charter movement don’t seem to have much use for the “public” aspects of public schooling.

Incidentally, per the Times story, how long can the AFT continue to trade on the notion that all this is more in sorrow than anger? They just don’t like charter schools, they’re not reluctantly concluding that they don’t work, they’re fervently hoping and working to ensure that’s the case.

Update: CER notes that the race issue notwithstanding, charters did not uniformly under-perform other public schools. Funny, that didn’t make the cut in the Times story either. Dan Okrent, call your office. But, CER also notes that the NAEP tested less than one percent of charter school students, implicitly saying it should be taken with, at least, a grain of salt. Funny, they don’t say that when criticizing achievement in traditional public schools based on other NAEP samples…

More Updates: More here, here, here, and NYT Flashback here. If you’re just looking for the links, click here.

Gallup asked 2,250 adults:

In general, do you think that black children have as good a chance as white children in your community to get a good education, or don’t you think they have as good a chance?



Eighty percent of whites said “as good a chance.” Only 51 percent of blacks did.

Worth thinking about as achievement gap data comes in over the next month.

A big thanks to Richard Colvin and Sara Mead for their great contributions this past two weeks. Edu Commentary is back so we’re returning to regular (or irregular as the case may be) order.

One vacation related note: Local press coverage of No Child Left Behind in Alaska was interesting to read. The achievement gap as it impacts native students (and the narrowing of this gap by many schools in the past couple of years) was getting a lot of attention. The Eduwife’s fishing exploits, however, were more attention grabbing…

Other things as Edu Commentary digs through his email box and becomes an ever-stronger supporter of anti-spam legislation:

The Education Trust has a handy guide to the NCLB data that is coming out right now.

Education Commission of the States has taken a look at school improvement efforts in Baltimore. Case study here, policy brief here.

And it turns out that President Bush is a blogger…

Hiring math and literacy “coaches” to help teachers improve their practice seems to be following the usual path of change in public education—going from innovation to fad with little interruption and little research. As Alexander Russo describes in the latest Harvard Education Letter, coaching emerged as an alternative to traditional approaches to professional development in New York’s old community school district 2 and in Boston. It then spread to the West Coast when Tony Alvarado went to help Alan Bersin in San Diego, got picked in Los Angeles and then began spreading everywhere. Russo lays out the case in favor of coaches but he also raises questions that haven’t been widely asked. Little attention to this phenomenon, which in many places has been financed by a redirection of Title I money, has been paid in the mainstream press.

Education Week takes a look at ways school districts are rethinking high school promotion policies to avoid holding kids back in the 9th grade, which leads to many of them dropping out. With evidence of the dropout crisis in this country mounting (see the work of Robert Balfanz and his team at Johns Hopkins in which they identify schools that lack “promoting power”), this discussion is timely. As is noted in the Ed Week article, the transition to high school derails many 9th graders. Coddled in middle school, many freshmen arrive in high school without the basic skills, study habits or dispositions necessary to succeed. (One idea for how schools can work on this is here.)Middle schools, of course, ought to be more focused on preparing students academically. But, beyond that, high school counselors should be learning about the incoming class in January or February, instead of waiting until September when they show up on the doorstep. Middle school teachers should recommend courses based on the students’ needs. The high school should hold meetings in the spring for parents of incoming middle schoolers, to discuss their options. The middle schoolers should tour the high school. A high school student should be assigned to each middle schooler as a mentor to help them their first weeks. The high school should make a “study skills” class a requirement, to help kids learn to take notes, something many do only for the first time in high school. On and on. If schools were serious about easing this transition, there’s a lot they could do.

A new report out last week from the Education Commission of the States on community colleges deserved more attention. Called Keeping America’s Promise, the report said these institutions are affordable and effective, but are undervalued and underfunded. “The U.S. is currently number one in the global economic race, but mediocre performance on international assessments of educational quality suggest that its preeminent status is living on borrowed time,” writes Anthony Carnevale, a senior fellow with the National Center on Education and the Economy and Donna Desrochers, a director of policy research with the Educational Testing Service. They add, “As economic and demographic changes increase the demand for workers with at least some college, income differentials between the most and least skilled will continue to grow, threatening the egalitarian base at the core of America’s culture.” Half of all community college students are poorly prepared academically and far too many fail to stick around long enough to get an associate’s degree, let alone go on for a four-year degree.