The Talented Tenth

As the former president of the Fairfax County Association for the Gifted and a parent of three children who attended Thomas Jefferson (TJ) High School for Science and Technology in Alexandria, Virginia, I was thrilled to see the study that looked more closely at how well the U.S. is (not) doing at teaching math to gifted students (“Teaching Math to the Talented,” features, Winter 2011). Normally, research studies focus on scores for No Child Left Behind assessments, rather than on how much or little academically gifted students are learning.

I’m not sure that your prescription to cure this problem will work that well, though, especially for elementary and middle-school students. At least in areas where there is a critical mass of highly and exceptionally gifted math students, a better solution may be to group them together in a magnet school with unusually rigorous classes that go above and beyond the normal “honors” or “advanced” curriculum. That’s basically what TJ does for 9th- through 12th-grade students, and it works well.

Children, no matter how gifted, often have difficulty with online courses. Some students lack the discipline to do what’s required on a timely and consistent basis. Some students are not technically savvy enough to figure out what they are supposed to be doing. For example, they may have difficulty understanding how to access and turn in assignments.

Further, making rigorous online courses available does not mean that gifted students will be allowed to take them for credit. At least in the Fairfax County Public Schools (FCPS), students generally are not allowed to earn credit for rigorous online math courses offered by organizations such as the Johns Hopkins University’s Center for Talented Youth (CTY), Stanford’s Education Program for Gifted Youth (EPGY), or the Art of Problem Solving. Instead, gifted students are required to take online courses developed by FCPS employees for an academically heterogeneous mix of students.

In some areas of the United States, the logistics of having a magnet school for the highly gifted may be so daunting that online math courses are the best option. In more densely populated areas, however, I believe there is a better alternative. Just restructure gifted programs so that there are enough highly and exceptionally gifted students in one school building, and provide those students with appropriately challenging classes.

Louise Epstein
McLean, Virginia

Differentiating Instruction

I am writing in response to Michael J. Petrilli’s article (“All Together Now?” features, Winter 2011). Many years ago, in my third year as a public school teacher, I discovered that about half of my 7th-grade students read four or more years below grade level, and about half read four or more years above grade level. There were few, if any, students in the middle range. I had to figure out how to orchestrate a language arts classroom that worked for students at a wide range of readiness levels. There were no books on differentiated instruction to guide me.

Once at the university, after 20 years of teaching middle school, I found that many teachers were eager for strategies to help them teach successfully in heterogeneous settings. What I began to write about and to call “differentiated instruction” was rooted in what I learned through classroom practice and now has become more fully developed through observing many other practicing teachers, conducting research, and studying the research of others.

Here are two conclusions that seem solid to me at this point: The idea of homogeneity in a classroom has always been a myth. When educators sort students into those whom we perceive to be capable of learning robustly and those whom we perceive not to be, we are often inaccurate.

Most of the research that is positive about tracking or ability grouping compares two conditions: 1) heterogeneous settings in which teachers do little to attend to student differences, and 2) tracked or grouped classes, where the teacher teaches at the perceived readiness level of the students. There is rarely a third group studied—one in which a teacher differentiates instruction in a knowledgeable way to address student differences.

Teaching with student differences in mind is not easy (although, like virtually all other learned skills, it becomes much easier and more natural with sustained practice). Like students, teachers differ at any given point in skill and will to learn new things. They learn when someone meets them at their point of entry and persistently supports them in moving forward. Practicing teachers who learn and sustain these skills most often do so under the sustained guidance of effective building principals, who provide intelligent, proactive support for teacher growth.

In a nation where “minority” students are already the majority in some school districts, and where they will become the national majority within a few years, we cannot afford the cost, ethically or economically, of “teaching down” to any group of students. We might do well, in fact, to study those schools and teachers that have learned to “teach up.”

Carol Ann Tomlinson
Curry School of Education
University of Virginia

Performance Pay

While other public school systems remain paralyzed, ankle deep in the teacher performance pay waters (see “Diplomatic Mission,” features, Winter 2011), Houston’s policy leaders and teachers joined hands and took the plunge years ago. That leap of faith in the idea that schools can’t be truly transformed without great educators in every classroom is now paying dividends.

Each teaching job opening in the Houston Independent School District (HISD) today draws 100 more applicants than in 2006, when Texas’s largest school system began rewarding its best educators with thousands of extra dollars for boosting student achievement.

Good teachers are staying and, the early data show, the ineffective ones are looking for work elsewhere. Nearly 92 percent of teachers who earned bonuses return to the classroom the next school year. On the flip side, only 2 percent of those teachers whose students came up short of our expectations were back on the job in the fall.

Since 2006, the number of Houston schools earning one of the state’s top ratings has more than doubled to exceed 200 campuses, fewer students are repeating a grade level, and more are testing at the highest levels of academic achievement. In high school, more students are passing college-level Advanced Placement exams than ever before.

Teachers here know that our research-based reward system measures the progress individual students make in their classrooms, and educators who do the best job tailoring instruction to meet each child’s specific needs tend to receive the highest marks.

This is why Houston teachers are buying into our system. According to our most recent survey, Houston teachers who said they favor merit pay outnumbered those opposed it two to one. Houston’s experience should make it clear that good teachers don’t want to be treated like the “interchangeable widgets” that, as Secretary of Education Arne Duncan said, they are reduced to under seniority-based pay systems.

Talented, hard-working teachers deserve better. That’s why we’ve partnered with The New Teacher Project, founded by teachers, to overhaul the way Houston’s educators are evaluated and rewarded. When this multimillion-dollar initiative is finished, HISD will have the nation’s best system in place for recruiting teachers, judging their performance, training them to overcome their shortcomings, and promoting the best ones into jobs where they can have the most impact.

Terry B. Grier
Superintendent of Schools
Houston Independent ?School District

2010 EdNext Poll

Sitting where I do, in a progressive think tank, my perceptions closely track those of the Education Next survey and the authors’ conclusions (see “Meeting of the Minds,” features, Winter 2011). Indeed, as an education reformer, I find the survey encouraging. I would like to see Congress move ahead with the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) reauthorization and take steps on most of the core issues addressed in the survey.

I do have two quibbles. First, under a heading titled “Student and School Accountability,” the authors discuss student accountability only. Were there any questions about school accountability? The consequences of chronic, low-level, school-wide student performance are very controversial. The issue of school accountability overshadows student accountability, which is probably why student accountability gets little attention.

It’s also not fair to paint elite politics or teachers unions as the main opponents of accountability requirements. Local community members in neighborhoods surrounding low-performing schools have been quite boisterous in opposing school closures and massive teacher transfers and they have conveyed their views to their representatives in Congress. At the same time, the poll results seem to show that these communities strongly support school choice, charters, and tax credits. These options have not been successful enough for the communities with the most troubled schools. For example, there are rarely enough schools within a reasonable travel distance for their children to transfer to.

My second quibble is with how the question on teacher tenure seems to have been asked. There is a difference between opposing tenure and favoring tenure reform. Were any questions asked about tenure reform? Randi Weingarten [president of the American Federation of teachers] is in favor of it!

In general, I agree with the potential for some Republican and Democratic cooperation on ESEA. I would move tenure reform into the list of potential partnership positions. But school spending is another matter. The landmark No Child Left Behind legislation was accompanied by big increases in federal education spending. That seems unlikely in the future, unless legislators agree that well-targeted increases tied to performance results are a necessary part of getting the United States out of its economic doldrums.

Cynthia G. Brown
Vice President for Education Policy
Center for American Progress

Howell, Peterson, and West respond:

We share Cynthia Brown’s interest in the public’s views on school accountability and included a variety of such questions on our previous surveys. Interestingly, the public in 2007 was considerably less supportive of the practice of publishing the average test scores at each school than of requiring students to pass a test to move to the next grade or receive a high-school diploma. Even so, 60 percent of the public supported the publication of test results while only 20 percent opposed it. The complete results of all Education Next–PEPG surveys are available at educationnext.org.

Tackling the ?Straw Man Middle School

The two recent articles on middle schools (“The Middle School Mess,” features, Winter 2011, and “Stuck in the Middle,” research, Fall 2010) share an interesting characteristic: They treat the title “middle school” as if it represents a uniform, monolithic method and structure of schooling. I write to challenge the logical fallacy of the “straw man” middle school these articles depict and the negative effects associated with it.

I’ll begin with grade configuration, the criteria used by the authors to define a middle school. National Center for Education Statistics 2005 data reveal that 6th, 7th, and/or 8th graders are found in schools with at least 60 different grade configurations. That statistic alone challenges the use of grade configuration as the defining factor for the straw man middle school. It’s also worth noting that the EdSource study (“Gaining Ground in the Middle Grades: Why Some Schools Do Better,” 2010) cited in “The Middle School Mess,” did not find grade configuration to be a factor in student performance.

A broader definition of a middle-level or middle-grades school is a separate school that serves a group of young adolescents, ages 10–14, in one or more grades. Using that definition, what can the authors tell us about why such schools, in their view, are not successful? The answer is “not much.” For example, the articles do not address the professional preparation of the teachers in middle-grades schools compared to those in K–8 schools, although NCATE’s [National Council for Accreditation of Teacher Education] recent report on teacher preparation highlights the critical connections between teacher preparation and student outcomes.

The articles also do not take up what is happening inside the classrooms and in interactions between and among educators and young adolescents, nor the organizational structure of the schools, nor the policy and community contexts within which those schools reside. In describing middle schools as ineffective without addressing the variability represented among schools with those two words on the sign out front, the authors use a broad brush—some would argue a bucket of mud—to splatter aspersions on every school that educates young adolescents within a distinct structure. This approach seems illogical because, in fact, it is.

Gayle Andrews
President
National Forum to Accelerate ?Middle-Grades Reform

Give Parents More Information

Matthew Chingos, Michael Henderson, and Martin West (“Grading Schools” features, Fall 2010) provide a valuable look at the criteria that Americans, especially parents, use when evaluating the schools in their community. While conventional wisdom, at least in some circles, holds that people judge schools on the basis of something other than academic quality—most odiously, the racial mix of their student body—here we have reassuring evidence that people evaluate schools on the basis of academics. Perhaps most importantly, we also see rigorous evidence that socially disadvantaged Americans are just as likely to rate schools on the basis of their academic profile as are people with high income and high education. This squares with my own experience. One need only speak with inner-city parents whose children are attending underperforming schools—as I have—to see that they are fully aware of what their children are missing. They know what a quality education is, and is not.

Lest we be complacent, however, remember that people can only evaluate schools based on the information they have. Currently, a simple Google search pulls up a wealth of information about student performance in one’s local neighborhood school, truly a revolution in transparency. However, that information is generally limited to math and reading. Clearly, these subjects are integral to a good education. But so are science, civics, and history. The evidence mustered by Chingos, Henderson, and West makes the case for ensuring that performance in these other subjects is both rigorously evaluated and made publicly available as well. Are our students learning the principles of science? The essentials of government? The fundamentals of history? Rarely do parents, or voters, have that information. And they should. Math and reading are a start, but a well-rounded education calls for more.

David E. Campbell
Associate Professor of Political Science
University of Notre Dame

Middle-School Decline

Thank you for the interesting and informative article “Stuck in the Middle” by Jonah E. Rockoff and Benjamin B. Lockwood (research, Fall 2010). The authors found that in the specific year when students move to a middle school (or to a junior high), their academic achievement, as measured by standardized tests, falls substantially in both math and English relative to that of their counterparts who continue to attend a K–8 elementary school.

I am glad to see the findings of their research. When I was with the New York City Department of Education and responsible for our secondary-school reform strategy, we created models of 6–12 and K–8, where this was feasible. Our own research indicated that having fewer transitions would benefit high-need students.

Michele Cahill
Vice President for National Programs and Director of Urban Education
Carnegie Corporation

Equity and the Arts

There is much to appreciate in “Advocating for Arts in the Classroom” (features, Fall 2010). In the recent past, the central issue inhibiting a quality arts education for U.S. public school children has been an overemphasis on high-stakes testing. For too many policymakers, student achievement is defined solely by test scores in reading and math, which has led in turn to the disappearance of the arts, particularly in low-performing schools. Turning this around will require a well-crafted message that includes and significantly expands on the value of great art in and of itself.

But I disagree with Mark Bauerlein’s viewpoint on arts education advocates: we need more advocates, not fewer. For some principals, the spring concert may be what brings parents into the school building. For special needs students, the process and tools of the arts open up important new pathways of learning. For new Americans, the arts in the schools may provide the means to share their cultural heritage while celebrating a diverse citizenry. For others, it will be the discovery of Kandinsky. Arts education today is more than instruction: it is also a barometer of our willingness as a nation to provide equity through our public institutions.I applaud Rocco Landesman for bringing his important message directly to Secretary of Education Arne Duncan at their joint appearance at the Arts Education Partnership: “Arts exposure is fine, but unless students are prepared for the art, unless teachers are integrating the art into the student’s overall learning for the year, it remains exposure, not education…. The public schools need to own arts education. It should not be outsourced to us.”Presumably Landesman recognizes that school teachers identify the NEA as the National Education Association, rather than the National Endowment for the Arts, and that as chairman he can have much greater impact advocating for arts education with the White House, Congress, and U.S. Department of Education than he will through direct work with the arts education field. While the programs of the National Endowment for the Arts are indeed vital, stimulating arts education–friendly policies at the USDOE must not be overlooked.

Richard Kessler
Executive Director
The Center for Arts Education

I agree with Mr. Bauerlein’s twin observations that arts education adherents need to go beyond the social/behavioral-rectification benefits of the arts and demand more rigor and an understanding of art’s context. Focusing solely on arts-specific practice has led the general public to look upon arts education as worthwhile only for those kids who want to be artists (e.g., “Glee-wannabes”), hence the current overemphasis on practitioner development. It also follows that there should be a better balance between self-expression and communication: expression is easy, effective communication more demanding.

Given the current educational climate, the rich value of arts in education has yet to be mined. According to [executive director of the Massachusetts Advocates for the Arts, Sciences, and Humanities] Dan Hunter, who helped to draft the “Creativity Challenge Index” legislation recently passed in Massachusetts, there is no political imperative for arts education in this country—none. But there is a growing awareness that if we want kids to grow up and become capable adults they must develop 21st-century skills such as creativity, imagination, cross-cultural understanding, and an entrepreneurial mind-set. By definition, these are “arts” skills. By leveraging these skills, and capitalizing on the catalyst of emotional engagement (our stock on the shelf), we can bring about significant student achievement.The challenge for us in the arts education community is to demonstrate how teachers can employ those very same skills in their teaching, whatever the discipline. The “habits of mind” inherent in the arts are not arts-dependent, but can be readily employed in other contexts. My colleagues and I have been discussing such an approach with Marc Hauser at Harvard, Ed Pajak at Johns Hopkins, and Jonathan Plucker at Indiana University. Our aim is to demonstrate these ways of thinking in terms that are reasonably accessible.We will be giving a presentation on these challenges at the ASCD conference next March in San Francisco and hope to further this work in a weeklong institute in collaboration with the Smithsonian Institution next summer.

Bruce Taylor
Director of Education for
Washington National Opera

Defending Discovering Math

As the publisher of the Discovering Mathematics series, Key Curriculum Press agrees with Joshua Dunn’s conclusion in “2+2=Litigation” that “pedagogical disputes are beyond the courts’ proper constitutional role and institutional capacity.” The Seattle court’s ruling is unique and shocking in the sense that the courts are dictating school curriculum, a topic that should be left to parents and educators. This would be equivalent to the courts dictating to doctors how to practice medicine.

Yet Dunn does readers a disservice by introducing a number of factual errors that should be corrected. The article states, “The Discovering series, which the Seattle district already used in elementary and middle schools,” and “Students, no doubt to their delight, also begin using calculators early in elementary school as part of the series.” The Discovering Mathematics series is a high-school math curriculum of algebra 1, geometry, and algebra 2 content. The elementary- and middle-school math curricula used in Seattle schools are not part of the Discovering Mathematics series and are not published by Key Curriculum Press.

Additionally, Dunn writes, “Parents have filed a lawsuit against the wealthy Issaquah school district since its adoption of the Discovering series; the similarly wealthy Bellevue school district is also facing a possible lawsuit.” A lawsuit disputing the adoption of the Discovering materials in Issaquah has not been filed, and the Bellevue school district did not adopt the Discovering series; therefore, any lawsuit being considered would not involve the Discovering materials.

We also take issue with some of Dunn’s characterizations of the curriculum. For instance, he makes the assertion that there are “faddish ideas afflicting the Discovering series.” It is difficult to balance the term “faddish” with the facts that Discovering Geometry has been used in schools since 1989 and the three-year Discovering series has been available for 10 years. Since the materials have been used in all 50 states, by more than 1200 schools, for over 10 years, we think Dunn should reflect on what he considers a “fad.”

Jim Ryan
Vice President of Marketing
Key Curriculum Press

Dunn responds:

If Mr. Ryan truly believes “pedagogical disputes are beyond the courts’ proper constitutional role and institutional capacity,” then his own company’s lawsuit against Washington’s Superintendent of Public Instruction appears quite peculiar. He is correct that the Discovering Series is for high school. The Seattle school district has been using a discovery-based math curriculum in the lower grades and clearly viewed the Discovering Series as an extension of those pedagogical choices.

Regarding Issaquah, I am delighted to hear that the parents reconsidered their decision and chose not to follow the litigious example of both Key Curriculum Press and the Seattle plaintiffs. Finally, whether discovery-based learning is faddish, I suppose, is in the eye of the beholder. Since mathematics and how best to teach it have been subjects of inquiry for at least two and a half millennia (see, for example, Socrates’s use of what could be called “direct” instruction in Plato’s Meno), 1989 seems fairly recent.

June Kronholz (“Competition Makes a Comeback,” features, Summer 2010) writes that the self-esteem movement in the 1990s made many educators squeamish about competition. In fact, American educators have had a love/hate relationship with it over the past century. For example, in the 1930s and the 1960s there were conscious moves away from competition in schools.

What we have seen is that as schools move away from promoting competition, those parents who think schools are not providing enough competitive outlets go outside of the traditional education system. Often these parents tend to be middle class or upper middle class, and they create or join extracurricular organizations that charge participation fees. This development has led to increased inequality, as children who cannot pay to play are excluded.

Not only is there growing inequality associated with afterschool competition, but increasingly younger and younger students are diving into competitive tournaments on sports fields, in dance and music studios, and in other venues, such as academic bees. Kronholz focused on middle schoolers (which is also a shift—it used to be only high school students who engaged in competitive tournaments), but elementary school–age children also now participate in a variety of highly competitive and organized afterschool activities. Formal competition, tryouts, and practices are part of the everyday grind, as ever-increasing numbers of American children are being raised to play to win both inside and outside of the classroom.

We do not know the long-term consequences of being engaged in competition from an early age, either psychologically or in terms of educational outcomes (e.g., Do competitive kids attend “better” colleges and universities or pursue more advanced degrees?). Education scholars should consider how to incorporate these types of extracurricular activities into existing theories, frameworks, and models.

Hilary Levey
Robert Wood Johnson Scholar in Health Policy
Harvard University

NCLB and Achievement

Thomas Dee and Brian Jacob tackle with sophistication the pivotal question of whether No Child Left Behind (NCLB) has sparked gains in student achievement since its enactment in 2002 (“Evaluating NCLB,” research, Summer 2010). We have known that math scores among 4th and 8th graders continued to grow under NCLB, a trend that began a quarter century ago. Reading scores have largely failed to budge nationwide since the late 1990s, according to the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP). Achievement gaps have widened slightly in recent years.

Dee and Jacob convincingly show that certain subgroups of children attending schools in states with weak accountability regimes prior to NCLB partially caught up with children in states with stronger programs. This good news applies to students of color, primarily Latino kids, but only for progress in mathematics. Effects were larger for girls in the 8th grade than for boys, and few benefits were observed for reading (not surprising, since reading scores have hit a flat, dusty plateau nationally).

By focusing on states that displayed weak state-led accountability, Dee and Jacob give us a highly innovative analysis. But it remains slippery to infer that NCLB per se has driven this catch-up in weak accountability states. Well over a century ago, states with lagging enrollment rates displayed accelerating attendance after passage of compulsory attendance laws. But was it the legal intervention that drove local behavior, or the pervasive spread of expectations and more-demanding norms, seeping out to states that lagged behind (in this case, urban states where demand for young workers had long suppressed school enrollment)?

There’s now little doubt that NCLB advanced more-demanding expectations for state officials and local educators, creating stiffer expectations for, and material policies enforcing, tighter accountability among the laggard states. But was it the federal policy bundle or specific policy elements that moved these new norms out into the accountability hinterlands?

Bill Clinton likes to say, “If you find a turtle on the fencepost, he probably didn’t get there by himself.” The Dee-Jacob findings offer good news, confirming with sound analysis that a federal presence in the accountability push has reinforced state efforts. Going forward, though, how a more robust federal partnership might yield the next generation of benefits, especially to raise students’ capacity to read and reason, is the pressing question.

Bruce Fuller
Professor of Education and Public Policy
University of California, Berkeley

Measuring Public Benefit

Rick Hess’s discussion of for-profit and nonprofit funding models (“Fueling the Engine,” features, Summer 2010) raises more interesting questions than it answers. There is indeed a fascination about finding points of overlap between business and philanthropic investment strategies, but in most fields this remains more of an aspiration than a reality.

From the start, attempts to turn philanthropy into social investing and to apply principles of venture capital to grantmaking have run into a single enormous obstacle: the absence of performance metrics that would allow one to determine anything remotely close to “social return on investment.” Nonprofit entrepreneurs across the sector would dearly love to be able to show that charitable gifts are actually producing valuable public benefits. The tools and techniques to nail down claims of “returns” remain blunt, however, and nowhere near as sharp as performance metrics in the business world, where profit and loss are revealed on a bottom line. In many fields of activity, legions of imprecise and incommensurable performance standards do not inspire confidence about claims of comparative performance advantages of one organization over another.

The foundations and donors supporting the education reform movement do have one enormous advantage over their philanthropic counterparts in the arts, health, the environment, human services, and any number of other fields, namely, the presence of measures of student achievement that allow real comparisons of school performance.

Hess is correct that there is an impulse to be more rigorous in the school reform movement. For this to happen, real student-achievement data must drive funding decisions and be at the center of fateful choices about which school models are to be scaled and which are not. The funders in the charter space are doing this tough work. They are in some ways the vanguard of the so-called venture philanthropy movement, mainly because they actually have quality and commensurable data to work with. So many other funders working in areas from housing to immigration to historical preservation do not have the kind of data that could drive decisionmaking.

In the end, Hess is right to draw our attention to growing parallels between business and philanthropic investments. He just needs to be more grateful for how lucky the school reform movement is to have quality, meaningful performance data to drive funding decisions.

Peter Frumkin
Professor of Public Affairs
University of Texas at Austin

Charter School Segregation

In “A Closer Look at Charter Schools and Segregation” (check the facts, Summer 2010), Gary Ritter and several colleagues offer a reanalysis of our February 2010 charter-school report. On the Education Next blog, we responded to the team’s claims. Below we recount our primary argument.

The major empirical distinction between our analysis and the Ritter team’s reanalysis is that we aggregated school-level charter enrollment data to the national, state, and metropolitan-area levels. The use of metropolitan areas stemmed from a deliberate methodological decision. As the U.S. Department of Education has noted, “charter schools often draw students from outside their home district’s attendance boundaries.”

The Ritter team reanalysis instead compared the racial enrollment of charter schools to that of central-city schools, describing it as “the best available unit of comparison,” and argued that the geographic concentration of charter schools in urban areas merits a comparison of schools located only within urban districts.

We disagree. The urban concentration of charter schools is irrelevant if charter schools are drawing students from across boundary lines. In many of the metropolitan areas containing at least 20 charter schools, minority segregation was higher in charter schools than in the metro’s regular public schools.

We did, in fact, examine the segregation of students in charter and traditional public schools by geography—comparing students in these school sectors within cities, suburbs, and rural areas. Significantly, we found that the geographical skew of charter schools mitigates very little of the differences in minority segregation. Fifty-two percent of city charter-school students were in 90 to 100 percent minority schools, compared to 34 percent of traditional public-school students.

Our study does not stand in isolation from the growing research consensus concerning segregation in charter schools. Further, it is extremely important to emphasize that our report focused on a number of other civil rights dimensions in charter schools, none of which have been addressed in this critique. We urge the government to improve data about charter schools and to monitor the civil rights of all students who attend or wish to attend charters, in addition to further examining the effects charter schools have on surrounding public schools.

Erica Frankenberg
Genevieve Siegel-Hawley
Gary Orfield
The Civil Rights Project, UCLA

Ritter, Jensen, Kisida, and McGee respond:

While Metropolitan areas (CBSAs) are very large, most charters are concentrated in very small areas within them. In Washington, D.C., 93 percent of the charter schools in the 5,000-square-mile metro area are located in inner-city D.C. Since the evidence shows that most charter students do not travel more than 10 miles to attend school, it is not likely that students are crossing state and city boundaries to attend inner-city schools.

While the CRP authors do present a city-based analysis, it is off-base because it includes small cities with fewer than 100,000 people; these are not places in which charters predominately locate. Finally, the authors overlook a fundamental fact: because charter students choose these schools, their civil rights are enhanced rather than limited.

Most of America’s 5,000 public charter schools are located in cities, many in tough neighborhoods with failed public schools. Consequently, charters proudly enroll higher percentages of black and Hispanic children than other public schools, and a growing body of research underscores their success.

Yet the Civil Rights Project (CRP) sees only a geographic concentration “that skews the charter school enrollment toward having higher percentages of poor and minority students.” This misses the point. By putting low-income students of color on the path to college, charters are attacking the real civil rights problem of our day: negligent schooling that shatters the life prospects of our most vulnerable students.

The CRP makes inappropriate comparisons of inner-city charter-school demographics with those of entire metropolitan areas, as if the charters were evenly distributed among Chicago, Joliet, and Naperville, in one example. The University of Arkansas research team dismantles this fallacy with solid data, realistic analysis, and plain common sense.

What remains puzzling is why the CRP seems so driven to go after charter schools, even to the point of contorting evidence.

Their report repeatedly refers to federal data showing only 7 English Language Learners (ELL) enrolled in California charter schools. We agree that this illustrates a troubling gap in federal record keeping, but a quick check of the California Department of Education web site would show that, in fact, more than 47,000 ELL students were enrolled during the 2008–09 school year, about 18 percent of the state’s charter-school population.

And again: “Between 20 and 25 percent of charter schools show no evidence of offering the National School Lunch Program, thus calling into question whether they are enrolling low-income students.” True, some charters don’t participate, not because they bar low-income students but because the program can be burdensome. It requires that lunches come from a USDA-approved “School Food Authority” that can dictate menus and meal-delivery times that may be at odds with the schools’ tastes and timetables.

The pursuit of equal educational opportunity is a serious matter, and good people can differ on the right strategies. It’s distressing that the Civil Rights Project is so wedded to formulas and methods that predate charter schools by decades and that they are expending such effort to discredit a movement that is bringing new hope to students who need it most.

Nelson Smith
Senior Advisor
National Alliance for Public Charter Schools

Finance Lawsuits

In their article “School-Finance Reform in Red and Blue” (research, Summer 2010), Christopher Berry and Charles Wysong not surprisingly find that partisan politics affect how much a state spends on K–12 education and how such money is allocated. However, my own experience suggests that it is more politics as usual, rather than the particular terms or even fact of a court judgment, that leads to the outcomes found by the authors. I am therefore concerned that the article may overstate the effects of school-finance judgments (SFJs).

There are several reasons for my concerns. First, some of the court decisions on which they rely are not decisions holding the state’s school-financing system unconstitutional, but are preliminary decisions in cases not actually decided on their merits until years later. For example, the 1995 decision in New York’s Campaign for Fiscal Equality case cited by the authors simply permitted the adequacy case to proceed to trial. It was not until early 2001 that the state’s school-finance system was first declared unconstitutional. Similarly, in South Carolina, it was in 2005, not 1999, that the courts declared the state’s system of school finance unconstitutional.

The impact of relying on these preliminary decisions could be significant. In New York, for example, some of the largest increases in education aid in the state’s history took place between 1995 and 2001, well before the first court decision declaring the system unconstitutional. It is also interesting to note that the huge increases in New York in 2006 were enacted despite a decision by the state’s highest court several months earlier that a significantly lower appropriation was needed to meet constitutional requirements, indicating that something other than the court decision was behind the unprecedented increases.

Second, as the authors themselves point out, the small number (three) of Republican states with an SFJ gives one pause. Wyoming runs counter to their findings, with dramatic increases in school spending due mainly to budget surpluses and an ability to tax mineral interests in the state without significant political retribution. The decisions in the other two Republican states were also unusual. In 2003, the Ohio Supreme Court decided it had no jurisdiction to enforce its earlier 1997 ruling, removing any threat to the legislature’s authority that the court order posed. In New Hampshire, the adequacy aspects of the court decrees were very limited, with the court merely ordering the legislature to define an “adequate” education.

Finally, in selecting states with SFJs, the authors apparently made no attempt to distinguish between “equity” cases, which focus on equalizing funding, and “adequacy” cases, which have as their goal increased funding. An example is Kansas, where the authors relied on an equity case (the 1991 Mock case) instead of the much later 2005 adequacy decision in Montoy, which expressly required significant appropriation increases.

Alfred A. Lindseth
Of Counsel
Sutherland Asbill & Brennan

Defending Edutopia

I am dismayed that Education Next would publish Robert Pondiscio’s article on the George Lucas Education Foundation (GLEF) and its Edutopia initiatives (“Edutopian Vision,” features, Summer 2010). I have served for years as a member of GLEF’s National Advisory Board (as a labor of love; advisory board members are unpaid) because I believe in the value of this enterprise.

Pondiscio charges that the Edutopia principles are ungrounded in research. For example, he attacks the principle of comprehensive assessment, citing a 1995 RAND report on a single statewide program. He should instead examine the extensive 2006 National Research Council report on “Systems for State Science Assessment” or the excellent assessment section in the draft “National Educational Technology Plan 2010,” from the U.S. Department of Education, which describes multiple ways of making alternative assessments practical. Similarly, instead of quoting a single cognitive scientist about the deficiencies of project-based learning, Pondiscio should examine the National Research Council’s 2005 volume on “How Students Learn: History, Mathematics, and Science in the Classroom” or the excellent research synthesis on project-based learning in the 2006 Cambridge Handbook of the Learning Sciences. The deficits in having research evidence to support one’s position are Pondiscio’s problem, not Edutopia’s.

Chris Dede
Wirth Professor in Learning Technologies
Harvard Graduate School of Education

L.A. Charters

Bruce Fuller’s article (“Palace Revolt in Los Angeles?” features, Summer 2010) accurately captured Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa’s history with the city’s unions and outlined the schism that arose when the mayor pushed for the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) to open 36 schools to operators including charters.

What Fuller did not explore is what transpired behind the scenes. That story reveals the limit to the mayor’s pushback on behalf of charters and the fact that there is no limit to what United Teachers Los Angeles (UTLA) will do to prevent the growth of the charter movement.

UTLA quietly and feverishly worked to ensure that no or few schools were awarded to charter school operators. In addition to pumping money in, UTLA called in the help of all the local unions. The L.A. Times reported that Maria Elena Durazo, leader of the 800,000-strong L.A. County AFL-CIO, met with every LAUSD board member the day before the vote. The day of the vote, the mayor was in Washington, D.C.

The voice of the South L.A. community—a community underserved for decades by the public school system—was ignored. The overwhelming majority supported ICEF Public Schools as the operator of the new Barack Obama Global Leadership Academy, as did the superintendent and his panel of experts. Sadly, Los Angeles Unified bowed to pressure from union leadership rather than allow successful charters access to this facility and other district campuses.

In a neighborhood where more than 50 percent of students drop out of high school, ICEF Public Schools—with 15 high-achieving schools that serve students who live in the area surrounded by the four major South L.A. freeways—has graduated 100 percent of the seniors in all four graduating classes. All have been accepted to college. We have also narrowed the achievement gap in performance on standardized tests between African American and white students to single-digit numbers.

While progressive unions throughout the country are working with charter schools, having concluded that charter schools are bettering public education, local L.A. teachers union head A. J. Duffy told the L.A. Daily News, “We’re never happy when a charter school opens up.”

Here at ICEF Public Schools, we won’t be thwarted from achieving our ultimate goal. We will continue to fight for the students in our neighborhood and their right to a high-quality public education.

Michael Piscal
Founder and CEO
ICEF Public Schools

Charter High Schools

For far too long, studies and reports about our nation’s high schools have been great at diagnosing prob­lems and highlighting failures. “The Unknown World of Charter High Schools” (research, Spring 2010) offers a refreshing change from the typical “gloom and doom” by providing evi­dence that public charter students in Chicago and Florida have significantly higher graduation and college atten­dance rates than their peers in tradi­tional public schools.

“The Unknown World of Char­ter High Schools” is an important research document for two reasons. First, it focuses not on student achieve­ment, but more importantly, on edu­cational attainment, specifically, high school graduation and college matric­ulation. Unfortunately, this “bottom line” research focus is rare. While studies showing growth on standard­ized tests can prove helpful, schools exist to prepare students to be produc­tive and successful adults. Educational attainment is a much clearer indicator of school quality. A similar bottom-line approach has been central to our success at YES Prep Public Schools, and it is why we require every stu­dent to secure acceptance into a four-year college in order to receive a high school diploma.

Second, the methodology used in the study effectively addresses the usual creaming and self-selection arguments that arise with any study demonstrating positive student out­comes in public charter schools. By limiting the high school students in the study to those who attended a charter school for 8th grade, the authors account for the argument that charter students perform at higher levels simply because they are more motivated or come from families in which the parents are more involved in their education.

This outcomes-based focus and thoughtful research design gives the study the credibility that it needs to serve as an important “proof point” that extends beyond charter high schools. The study serves as an important step in identifying factors in school success. With this knowl­edge of “the what,” we can confidently dig deeper and better understand “the how.” Research like this com­bined with over a decade of practical experience and significant results at high-performing charter public high schools like YES Prep will unlock “the how” to high school reform so we can move past diagnosing the prob­lem and begin implementing real and effective solutions for increasing high school and college completion rates across the country.

Chris Barbic
Founder and Head of Schools
YES Prep Public Schools

Coleman’s Legacy

Thanks to Paul Peterson for inves­tigating the links between James Coleman’s adolescent experiences and his studies of adolescent life and high schools (“A Courageous Look at the American High School,” features, Spring 2010). Peterson provides a great service to scholars.

Peterson mentions Coleman’s experience at Manual High in Louis­ville, Kentucky, where he adjusted by becoming a member of the school’s football team. Coleman’s athleticism had roots deeper than the limited opportunities at his high school, however. His father and grandfather were both football heroes. I recall a comical scene at a graduate-stu­dent baseball game. Jim wanted two captains to choose their teams the old-fashioned way: one player at a time. Considering that most gradu­ate students were working from their own adolescent experiences (i.e., their lack of childhood athleticism), a revolt was quickly organized. No one should have to be the last one chosen! All in jest, Jim settled for odd and even birth dates to establish the teams.

Coleman’s adult interest in ado­lescence was not limited to scholarly analysis. Most know of his attempts to develop academically related games that could stir the interest of adolescents. Fewer know of his weekly commitment to tutor a pub­lic high school’s mathematics team in Chicago.

While his competitive instincts remained with him as a scholar, so did his sense of fair play. As Tom Hoffer and I waded through all the commentaries and critiques of the study of public and private high schools, Jim had strict rules of engagement. Roughly, they were these: Concede well-founded criti­cisms first. Play on the critics’ court (i.e., you can’t use sociological argu­ments to criticize an economist). Protect the junior scholars and give seniors fair hits.

Sally B. Kilgore
President and CEO
Modern Red SchoolHouse Institute

In reading Paul Peterson’s thoughtful account of James Coleman’s research and its role in history, and of Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s reaction, I was reminded that Coleman’s big study came out a year after the Moynihan Report (1965). (I had done the research for Moynihan.) At that time, Moyni­han’s report was in the middle of a firestorm, and I know he found some relief in learning from that study how important the family was.

While I have always thought that the family and neighborhood conditions were a very large factor in achievement differences, I have not thought that the Coleman report itself established the relative contributions of school and family. Poor neighborhoods and low-quality schools are interrelated, and it is very hard to sort it out.

Very much later I stumbled onto a 1972 article by Coleman titled “Pol­icy Research in the Social Sciences” and found that Coleman did not think his study had established such rela­tive contributions. He said that “The plan of the analysis was not appro­priate for study of the relative effects of background and school variables, but it was correct for study of relative weights of different school variables.” One wonders how many people heard this from him.

As the father of the concept of “social capital,” Coleman would be pleased to know how far that concept has come, and that it has been applied in the monumental longitudinal study by a team led by Anthony Bryk (Organizing Schools for Improvement: Lessons from Chicago, 2010). The study established the strong relation­ship between the success of school improvement efforts and the strength of social capital in the neighborhoods where the schools were located. Our debt to Coleman is huge, as a pioneer on many important fronts.

Paul E. Barton
Education writer and consultant

Universal Pre-K

Elizabeth Cascio (“What Hap­pened When Kindergarten Went Universal,” research, Spring 2010) has estimated the effects of uni­versal kindergarten to inform the debate about universal pre-K. She claims existing research provides little insight into the relative merits of universal programs and those tar­geted to specific groups.

While Cascio’s results are not fully consistent with other stud­ies, the estimated one-fifth drop in incarceration for whites is intrigu­ing. Ultimately, her effort is unsatis­fying because her methods and data provide a weak basis for conclusions, and there is far more relevant infor­mation on the long-term effects than she acknowledges.

Too often the results of complex models such as Cascio’s owe more to the assumptions and idiosyncra­sies of the way data are selected and coded than to reality. Despite the model’s complexity, there is too much that cannot be adequately taken into account: for example, the potential for schools to use the resources freed by state support for kindergarten to fund other services or reduce class sizes for older children; the effects of large, sud­den increases in kindergarten enroll­ments on quality; large increases and decreases in cohort size over the time period studied; and immigration pat­terns over time. Among other prob­lems, Cascio’s speculations about Head Start fail to consider the impacts on children who begin Head Start a year earlier as kindergarten replaced Head Start for those who were age five.

Cascio seems unaware of sub­stantial evidence on the longer-term effects of preschool education pro­grams other than model programs and Head Start, evidence that bears more directly on the question at hand. Several literature reviews (including Barnett in 2008 and Nores and Bar­nett in 2010) have summarized much of this work. The evidence includes the longitudinal study of Child Par­ent Centers operated by the Chicago Public Schools and studies of the effects of several state pre-K pro­grams (including universal pre-K in Georgia) that find positive effects on achievement and reductions in grade repetition. Studies from abroad have found universal pre-K increased test scores, improved behavior, decreased grade repetition, and increased edu­cational attainment. Finally, interna­tional comparisons indicate that as participation in pre-K moves beyond 60 percent toward universal, average test scores at age 15 rise and inequal­ity in these scores declines.

Steve Barnett

Milagros Nores
National Institute for Early Education Research

Cascio responds:

Drs. Barnett and Nores leave the impression that I have overlooked a vast and relevant literature on the long-term effects of universal pre­school. Yet almost all the U.S. pro­grams they reference were targeted, not universal; short-term outcomes like test scores are not deterministi­cally related to adult well-being, which was my focus; and experiences of other countries—with very different policy landscapes and populations—provide at least as weak a basis for drawing conclusions for the U.S. Moreover, I estimate the net effects of a large public investment in early education, not the effects of attending preschool per se. Large interventions may have effects that offset any benefits from atten­dance. That my estimates incorporate such responses may make them more, not less, instructive.

Vouchers in New Orleans

Thanks to Education Next for pub­lishing Michael B. Henderson’s informative article on the voucher pro­gram in New Orleans (“In the Wake of the Storm,” features, Spring 2010). With so much attention being focused on the expansion of charter schools after Hurricane Katrina, these schol­arships tend to be overlooked. Mr. Henderson’s piece serves as a useful reminder of the program’s existence as well as an informative description of how the legislation was passed.

Unlike the charter schools, which have received broad support since their inception, the voucher program was a “heavy lift” for Governor Bobby Jindal. He and the legislature deserve much credit for taking this on. It would have been easy for reformers to use the continuing expansion of charter schools as an excuse for inac­tion on the voucher front, but thanks to their commitment hundreds of children can now attend the school of their choice.

In some respects, the expansion of charter schools made it harder for voucher advocates to make a com­pelling case for their need. But as Mr. Henderson describes, effective advocacy by organizations including the Archdiocese of New Orleans and the Black Alliance for Educational Options helped build support for these scholarships.

As Mr. Henderson points out, a number of conditions made it possible for New Orleans to become a hotbed of school reform. Some of these con­ditions may be replicable in other cit­ies and some may not. But what these reforms can do is lay the groundwork for change around the country.

Perhaps success in New Orleans will serve as a springboard for expanding school choice in cities that still cope with inflexible unions and reluctant policymakers. That could be a more likely, and more beneficial, outcome than hoping that someone can replicate the unusual path to school choice that has been taken here in New Orleans.

Kevin Kane
President
Pelican Institute for Public Policy

School Budgets

In “The Phony Funding Crisis” (features, Winter 2010), James Guthrie and Arthur Peng examine the apparent phenomenon in which schools, while claiming continual underfunding and budget cuts, continue to open their doors and educate students. As logical as their argument sounds, we believe it comes from the 30,000 foot level and differs from what is experienced on the ground.

The authors seem to assume that, faced with an economic downturn, states will respond to their constitutional mandate and other pressures and automatically raise taxes. Our studies suggest that instead, many states have played a shell game with American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) funds, backfilling cuts to education with those one-time dollars.

Over the past year, the American Association of School Administrators has monitored the impact of the economic downturn on public schools from the ground level. Our fall 2009 survey found that the financial crisis continues to threaten and impact the progress and stability schools have enjoyed in the past. Responding from 49 states and the District of Columbia, school district leaders observed they have yet to see concrete indicators of a rebound in the nation’s economy: When asked how ARRA dollars impacted their state and local revenues, 83 percent reported that ARRA dollars did not represent a funding increase. More than one-third (35 percent) of respondents were unable to save core teaching jobs as a result of ARRA monies.

America’s schools were not immune to the most recent economic downturn. The funding crisis is far from phony. Looking forward, the 2010–11 and 2011–12 school years pack a one-two punch, with school district leaders facing the end of ARRA dollars and answering tough questions about programs and personnel that have been (and will be) cut, while trying to figure out what, if any, economic recovery is in store at the state and local levels.

Robert S. McCord
University of Nevada at Las Vegas
Noelle M. Ellerson
American Association of School Administrators

Guthrie and Peng respond:

The civility of the McCord and Ellerson rejoinder is appreciated. Moreover, their self-reports of school-district financial shortfalls are no doubt heartfelt.

However, the 30,000-foot perspective for which we are impugned is the more accurate view. We report objectively derived federal government–calculated national averages over a century. The long-run overall pattern is crystal clear: America has supported its public schools plentifully for a century. Nothing McCord and Ellerson say refutes this.

By crying fiscal wolf year after year, in the face of contrary data, public school advocates deceive taxpayers and avoid the four-decade reality of stagnant student performance and woeful mismanagement in places such as Detroit.

Turnarounds

Andy Smarick’s “The Turnaround Fallacy” (features, Winter 2010) suffers from three fallacies. First, Smarick erroneously believes that school turnarounds have been tried widely and haven’t worked. In fact, interventions in failing schools are typically lukewarm and reliant on coaching, new curriculum packages, or other rearranging of deck chairs. Real turnaround attempts, in which a district hires a highly capable leader with “the big yes” to do what’s needed to fix the school, almost never happen.

Second, he wrongly suggests that in healthy industries, leaders don’t try to fix failing units, which simply close and make way for new upstarts. In fact, large companies with failing units try many strategies. They typically start by enforcing faithful execution of practices that work in other areas. When that doesn’t work, they replace the leader and give the new manager a change mandate. Smarick is right that the threat of closure is essential; today, bad schools have more lives than cats. To rescue more schools from “the brink of doom,” policymakers must make the option of school “doom” real, but then vigorously try to fix failing schools in the meantime.

Third, he grossly overstates the potential of start-up schools. Don’t get us wrong. We strongly back a large-scale effort to start great new schools. But research from other sectors pegs the probability of start-up success at about 25 percent, comparable to the estimated 30 percent of major corporate-change efforts that succeed. Like Smarick, we’re fans of outliers like KIPP, but together these networks will add a few hundred schools, not the few thousand we need. Even if these networks are joined by other wildly successful upstarts, only a small fraction of students in failing schools will benefit.

That’s why the nation needs a portfolio of strategies to change the fortunes of kids trapped in failing schools. Clinging to just one approach will write off millions who desperately need something different. Let’s start great new schools and fix bad ones. Let’s expect both strategies to work some of the time, but not always. And when they don’t work, let’s try again, rapidly, so kids don’t continue to languish in schools that aren’t getting the job done.

Bryan C. Hassel
Emily Ayscue Hassel
Co-Directors
Public Impact

Incremental improvement strategies are not the same as whole-school turnaround. Andy Smarick’s recent article applies the word “turnaround” to a wide range of efforts to help struggling schools, and while he makes an interesting case, I disagree with his premise that school-turnaround efforts “have consistently fallen far short of hopes and expectations.”

Using a very specific turnaround model, my organization, the Academy for Urban School Leadership (AUSL), has had success in transforming some of Chicago’s poorest-performing schools. The Chicago Public Schools first brought in AUSL in 2006 to turn around eight schools in which test scores, attendance, discipline issues, and graduation rates made it clear that the students were not getting the education they needed. Our top-to-bottom approach is like hitting a reset button for these schools.

We accomplish this without disruption to students. They return in the fall to their neighborhood school, which has been transformed with renovated facilities and a new principal who has handpicked a new team of teachers, a new curriculum, new conduct codes and disciplinary standards, and new expectations for student success. And we deliberately foster the direct involvement of parents and community members.

Our data—dramatically improved attendance, test scores, and attitudes toward learning—demonstrate success. We also have the overwhelming support of students, parents, and teachers who have participated in the process, some of whom had been among our loudest critics.

It’s not realistic to think that dozens of failing schools in Chicago (and thousands nationally) can be closed and effectively replaced with new-start schools. There aren’t sufficient budget and time resources. And our students do not have time to wait while we sort out new-start school options. At AUSL, we are transforming schools now because our students deserve nothing less.

Donald Feinstein
Executive Director
Academy for Urban School Leadership

Andy Smarick suggests that the energy we spend turning around failing schools would be better spent shutting them down and starting new ones. That’s part of the solution, but we should be skeptical that closure alone is the answer.

First, this argument assumes that “close and replace” always beats turnaround on results. Smarick cites literature on businesses in the private sector, where turnarounds work only one-third of the time. He’s right, but what’s not cited is the fact that less than 30 percent of new businesses last more than six years. Not the dramatically better results we’re looking for.

But maybe this churn means better student outcomes, which leads to my second point. The data don’t look good for that, either. A recent report by the Consortium on Chicago School Research studied the nation’s largest close-and-replace strategy. More often than not, the strategy meant worse outcomes for the children. Moreover, a recent study by CREDO (Center for Research on Education Outcomes) at Stanford tells us that only one-third of new charter schools are demonstrably better than their neighborhood comparisons. The rest are the same or worse.

Third, the word “turnaround” can be used to mean different things, and sometimes it’s code for weak interventions. I agree with Smarick when he talks about the failed strategies of the past, but a reasonable definition of turnaround should exclude those half measures. The new federal guidelines for school improvement adopt a more robust definition of turnaround, wherein the adults in a building, especially teachers and leadership, are subject to change, and outside organizations can manage schools under performance contracts.

Our research shows that high-poverty schools that outperform their peers share certain qualities: an intense focus on instructional practice, an integrated approach to student support services, and flexibility from bureaucratic operating conditions. The creative destruction and market competition inherent in closure are great for allocating scarce resources, but they’re not enough to ensure quality and equity for vulnerable children. We need to invest in turning around failing schools as well.

Justin C. Cohen
The School Turnaround Strategy Group
Mass Insight

Andy Smarick makes a compelling argument that we would be better off closing failing schools, but he doesn’t take into account the stark reality that often urban districts simply have too many “failing schools” to close them all. Closing a district’s most persistently underperforming schools must be an option, but districts cannot stop there. Even the most extreme school-closure program will leave the majority of students in their current schools, many of which are also inadequate. Instead, districts must develop a comprehensive approach to address all of their turnaround schools as well as low-performing schools that don’t quite qualify for turnaround attention.

At Education Resource Strategies (ERS) we believe that districts need to make decisions about failing schools as part of a long-range, districtwide strategy that incorporates all resources: people, time, and money. While we agree with Smarick that evidence is not clear on a single turnaround strategy that works, we do know that schools can accelerate improvement through strong, transformational leaders; collaborative teacher teams; and targeting expertise and resources to help students who have fallen behind. There is a lot that districts can do to increase the probability of success: 1) Implement a districtwide strategy for measuring school performance and determining appropriate action, including the possibility of school closure; 2) Recruit transformational school leaders who can establish high expectations for improved performance; 3) Implement strategies that give these leaders the flexibility to efficiently assign teaching staff and to assemble high-performing teams with appropriate expertise; 4) Ensure sufficient expert instructional support and collaborative time for teachers to adjust instruction based on data; 5) Fund targeted student support and take the time to accelerate student learning; and 6) Provide additional problem solving and support from central staff.

A successful turnaround strategy might be as ambitious as a “cure for cancer,” as Smarick claims. So just like medical researchers, we have to keep trying. Closing schools should unquestionably be part of a school district’s strategy, but only a districtwide transformation will result in improving education for all children that the district serves.

Karen Hawley Miles
President and Executive Director
Education Resource Strategies

D.C.’s Rhee

It’s hard to know what image the title of June Kronholz’s piece on Michelle Rhee—“D.C.’s Braveheart” (features, Winter 2010)—is meant to conjure up: a hopelessly romantic quest, a quixotic uprising against corrupt power, Rhee’s eventually being drawn and quartered. Or is it confrontation for confrontation’s sake?

None of the images it brings to mind are encouraging. Having just completed a study (Leading for Equity, Harvard Education Press, 2009) of the public schools in neighboring Montgomery County, Maryland (MCPS), which is encouraging, there is much to be said about Superintendent Jerry Weast’s nonconfrontational style. But MCPS and D.C. share only a common boundary. In no other respect are they comparable, and it is as hard to imagine Jerry’s approach working in D.C. as it is Rhee’s in MCPS. (For what it’s worth, Paul Vance was superintendent of both districts and left an indifferent legacy.) The underlying question, of course, is will Rhee’s in-your-face style work in D.C.?

To Rhee’s credit, she has gotten everyone’s attention. And she has effectively raised the issue of accountability. (Years ago, one of her predecessors, Vince Reed, told me he thought the whole system was hopeless.) I’m an MCPS alumnus and my sister is a D.C. alumna and we wish these very different districts well. I for one am skeptical about Rhee’s unvarnished approach: too much stick, too little carrot. But the jury is still out, and she still has time to build bridges to teachers. Without their support, all is lost; with their support, there is a fighting chance.

At minimum—in the one-size-fits-all No Child Left Behind era—her tenure reminds us of the real genius of the federal system, the opportunity to try many different approaches to a shared objective: increased academic achievement for all students.

Denis Doyle
Schoolnet

Teacher Pensions

“Golden Handcuffs” (research, Winter 2010) draws attention to the important incentives that are built into many teacher pensions, but shortcomings in the authors’ analysis lead them to spurious conclusions.

First, despite the authors’ claim, legally and otherwise, pension plans cannot and do not redistribute wealth.

Second, the authors incorrectly assert that there is no justification for the incentives embedded in teacher pensions. To the contrary, one of the most pressing issues facing schools is keeping top talent, especially in hard-to-staff areas. In light of this, retention incentives (which the authors refer to as “mobility penalties”) make perfect sense.

Economic research stretching back more than two decades has documented the strong retention effects embedded in traditional defined benefit (DB) plans, where benefits are based on an employee’s final pay. Authors Costrell and Podgursky describe the well-recognized pattern of benefit accruals in such plans and then jump to the conclusion that it serves no purpose. But, as economists have long known, it is precisely because of this pattern, which offers greater rewards for loyal employees who provide long service to an employer, that many employers offer DB pensions. Because turnover is costly (both in dollar terms and in terms of productivity), it makes sense for employers to build incentives into compensation that reward long service.

Indeed, until only recently, the vast majority of Fortune 500 companies relied heavily on DB pensions to retain top talent. Even as some private-sector employers have moved away from these plans in recent years, they have been careful to develop other compensation structures that mimic the incentives provided by DB pensions. Deferred compensation in the form of stock options or restricted stock awards is similar to pensions in that it encourages loyalty to an employer.

The problem is that school districts and government entities cannot offer stock options, restricted stock, or similar benefits. Thus, jettisoning DB pensions, as the authors recommend, can be expected to cause increased turnover and attrition of our most-effective teachers, hurting productivity and quality, in other words, exactly the wrong solution for our schools.

Beth Almeida
Executive Director
National Institute on Retirement Security

Costrell and Podgursky respond:

In Missouri, a teacher who retires at age 55 receives a lifetime pension worth 33 percent of cumulative earnings, but only 1 percent if she leaves at 35. Yet in both cases her employer contributed 12.5 percent of earnings each year. Redistribution or not? These incentives do encourage teachers, effective or not, to stay until early retirement (but no longer), while likely discouraging entry of mobile young teachers with 10 to 15 years to offer. Peculiar incentives or rational? The huge penalties for cross-state mobility may be rational for each state, but not for the U.S. K–12 system. Do we recommend jettisoning DB pensions? No, we recommend cash balance systems, which are DB but offer far greater portability and reward all years of service equally: benefits are tied to contributions, so no redistribution occurs.

Special Education Vouchers

Jay Greene and Stuart Buck (“The Case for Special Education Vouchers,” features, Winter 2010) are correct that some children with disabilities have unique needs that require private schooling. That’s why the federal Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) allows children with disabilities to attend private schools at public expense when their districts cannot provide a free, appropriate public education (FAPE).

But only a small percentage of children with disabilities have such placements, and not, as Greene and Buck contend, because the law’s processes for securing private placements are inadequate, but because the vast majority of children with disabilities can, and do, receive FAPE in the public schools. That’s not to gloss over the shortcomings in our special education system, or the difficulties some parents face in obtaining services for their children. But there’s no evidence that children with disabilities need additional education options more than any other youngsters in underperforming schools, or that vouchers address the underlying problems in special education. Rather, voucher proponents have seized on this population because they are more sympathetic beneficiaries than poor and minority youngsters. Using children with disabilities to increase public support for vouchers may be smart politics, but it doesn’t mean that special education vouchers are good policy.

Policymakers must take steps to expand education options for children with disabilities and make it easier for their parents to access needed services. But special education vouchers are not the best way to do this; they create other, adverse consequences, such as further segregating or perpetuating double standards for children with disabilities and creating perverse incentives for parents and educators.

Other approaches—expanding high-cost/low-incidence pools, improving IDEA’s dispute-resolution and placement processes, enhancing charter schools’ capacity to serve children with disabilities, and authorizing more charters with specific missions to serve disabled youngsters—have more promise to expand high-quality, accountable options for youngsters with disabilities.

Sara Mead
Senior Research Fellow
New America Foundation

Greene and Buck respond:

Sara Mead makes several assertions that are contrary to the findings of our article, but she presents no evidence to substantiate those assertions or to contradict the evidence we presented.

For example, she says that there are so few private placements of special education students “not…because the law’s processes for securing private placements are inadequate, but because the vast majority of children with disabilities can, and do, receive FAPE in the public schools.” How does she know this? She doesn’t say. Nor does she do anything to refute the evidence we presented that shows the inadequacy of the current private placement system.

It is insufficient simply to contradict claims. One needs to address evidence and Mead fails to do so.

Federal Lunch Program

[an unabridged version of the following letter appears at the end]

In “Fraud in the Lunchroom?” (check the facts, Winter 2010), David Bass presents evidence of substantial error in students’ eligibility for free or reduced-price school meals through the National School Lunch Program (NSLP), citing a recent Mathematica study that found most errors result from misreporting of household income. The title of Mr. Bass’s article implies that these errors may be intentional.

Our research suggests that fraud is not a major factor in explaining errors. Households that fail to respond to a district’s request for income verification are not necessarily engaging in fraud. We examined a randomly selected set of households that did not respond, finding that most were eligible for free or reduced-price meals. In the Access, Participation, Eligibility, and Certification (APEC) study, we found that, in more than 40 percent of household misreporting errors, parents overreported, rather than underreported, their income. If fraud were rampant, we would have expected much less of this type of error. Instead, we believe that most errors are unintentional: parents do not understand which household members should be included, forget about a minor income source, report net instead of gross income, or incorrectly enter the frequency of income receipt.

Even if fraud is minimal, the resulting costs to taxpayers are substantial. How might policymakers respond? We caution against requiring income documentation from all applicants. As Mr. Bass notes, our research showed that a test of this approach not only failed to reduce benefit receipt for ineligible households, but also reduced benefit receipt for eligible households.

A simple approach that could reduce error by one-third would eliminate the distinction between free and reduced-price benefits, since much program error results from misclassification. We could also build on current federal initiatives such as direct certification to improve NSLP certification accuracy. Under this policy, now required in all districts, households receiving benefits from other federal programs with more rigorous income-verification requirements are automatically eligible for NSLP. The U.S. Department of Agriculture is also considering using existing surveys to estimate the proportion of eligible children in selected schools, and then developing schoolwide reimbursement rates. This would eliminate the need for districts to certify households through the current process.

Philip Gleason
Senior Fellow
Michael Ponza
Senior Fellow
Mathematica Policy Research

In “Fraud in the Lunchroom?” (check the facts, Winter 2010) David Bass presents evidence of substantial error in students’ eligibility for free or reduced-price school meals. He notes high rates of nonresponse when districts try to verify students’ eligibility for benefits. He also cites Mathematica’s recent Access, Participation, Eligibility, and Certification (APEC) study, which found that most error results from households’ misreporting of eligibility information on their applications (Ponza et al. 2007). Bass raises the question of whether this error is the result of fraud—in other words, ineligible households lie about their income to receive benefits.

Our research suggests that fraud is not a major factor in explaining this error. We examined a randomly selected set of households that did not respond to a request for income verification (Burghardt et al. 2004). Over half were eligible for the benefits they were receiving. Furthermore, 80 percent were eligible for either free or reduced-price meals. This suggests that they failed to respond to the verification request because they forgot, were too busy, could not locate the documentation requested, or some similar reason other than fraud.

Bass notes that the APEC study found 15 percent of participants received more benefits than they were eligible for. However, many of these participants were eligible for some level of benefits; the errors involved misclassifications between free and reduced-price status. We believe the type of error most indicative of fraud would involve ineligible students receiving free meals. We found that only about 6 percent of students receiving free meals were ineligible.

Most certification errors result from households’ reporting less income or a larger household than they should have, resulting in higher benefits than they are eligible for. However, we also found substantial error in the other direction: more than 40 percent of cases involved the parent reporting more income or fewer persons in the household than they should have. If there were rampant fraud, we would have expected fewer reporting errors of this type.

The presence of substantial over- and underreporting of income suggests that many applicants have difficulty understanding how to complete the application and that most errors are unintentional. Although districts provide detailed instructions on how to complete meal applications, unintentional errors can occur for many reasons: applicants do not understand which household members to include, forget about a minor income source, report net instead of gross income, or incorrectly enter the frequency of income receipt (e.g., record “monthly” when it should be “weekly”).

Even if the level of fraud is minor, evidence suggests that the level of reporting error is substantial. Given the costs of this error to taxpayers and the widespread use of program eligibility as a poverty indicator, how might policymakers respond? We caution against requiring income documentation from all applicants. As Bass notes, our research showed that a test of this approach not only failed to reduce the rate at which ineligible households received benefits, but it also reduced access to the program for eligible households (Gleason et al. 2008).

A simple approach that could reduce error by as much as one-third would eliminate the distinction between free and reduced-price benefits altogether. Because a lot of program error results from misclassification, removing this distinction would both reduce the error rate and cut administrative costs. To be budget-neutral, the federal reimbursement for this new category combining free and reduced-price benefits could be set somewhere between the current free and reduced-price rates.

Current federal initiatives such as direct certification aim to improve the accuracy of National School Lunch Program (NSLP) certification. Under this policy, now required in all districts to take advantage of more intensive income-verification efforts in other federal programs, households receiving benefits from these programs are automatically eligible for the NSLP. In addition, the Food and Nutrition Service of the U.S. Department of Agriculture is considering using extant surveys to provide small-area estimates of the proportion of children eligible for free and reduced-price benefits. These data would be used to develop the percentages by which USDA sets school- or districtwide meal reimbursement rates for some schools, eliminating the need to certify households through the current process.

The research upon which some of these ideas are based includes:

Burghardt, J., Silva, T., and Hulsey, L. “Case Study of National School Lunch Program Verification Outcomes in Large Metropolitan School Districts.” Special Nutrition Program Report Series, No. CN-04-AV3. U.S. Department of Agriculture, Food and Nutrition Service, Office of Analysis, Nutrition and Evaluation. Alexandria, VA: 2004.

Ponza, M., Gleason, P., Moore, Q., and Hulsey, L. NSLP/SBP Access, Participation, Eligibility, and Certification Study?Erroneous Payments in the NSLP and SBP, Vol. I: Study Findings, U.S. Department of Agriculture, Food and Nutrition Service, Office of Research, Nutrition and Analysis. Alexandria, VA: 2007.

Gleason, P., Burghardt, J., Strasberg, P., and Hulsey L. “Tightening Income Documentation in a Means-Tested Program: Who Stays Away?” Evaluation Review 32, no. 3 (2008), 273–97.

Philip Gleason
Senior Fellow
Michael Ponza
Senior Fellow
Mathematica Policy Research

Pre-K for All

Pre-K-for-all programs with research-based quality standards have led to larger enrollments of low-income children than targeted efforts and produced impressive outcomes regardless of family background. Oklahoma’s program has narrowed the achievement gap between lower- and higher-income children while elevating early math and literacy skills for all participants. The advances made by middle-class students are vital; one in three does not know the alphabet at kindergarten entry. Data suggest that low-income children have benefited more by learning alongside upper-income classmates instead of in the isolation of targeted programs.

Higher graduation rates and other lasting effects have been documented in large pre-K programs like Chicago’s Child-Parent Centers—conspicuously ignored by Finn. Though in relatively early stages, ongoing longitudinal studies in Michigan, South Carolina, and West Virginia are finding similar outcomes. Among New Jersey 2nd graders, those with two years of state pre-K were half as likely to have been held back.

Public pre-K regularly enhances and coordinates efforts to help the most disadvantaged. Enrollment policies typically prioritize children at greater risk of failing school. Many states combine pre-K dollars with funding from other sources, such as Head Start, to provide more comprehensive programs to high-need children. In Illinois, a portion of each appropriation toward its “pre-K for all” goal is dedicated to services for at-risk infants and toddlers.

Most important, parents’ quality pre-K options have expanded. Private and charter schools, for-profit and nonprofit centers, and faith-based groups are delivering state-funded early education, gaining the means for crucial quality improvements in the process. In Wisconsin, more than 80 school districts collaborate with businesses and organizations to give families a wider choice of pre-K settings.

States’ pre-K budgets rose 37 percent from FY06 to FY09, to $5.2 billion, because policymakers know that this investment is the first step in K–12 reform and offers a great return, a return that is maximized when all children are eligible.

Libby Doggett
Deputy Director
Pew Center on the States

Defending PISA
If Mark Schneider has doubts about the usefulness of the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) (“The International PISA Test,” check the facts, Fall 2009), he should consider whether the U.S. has used PISA effectively. Among the G8 economies, the U.S. assessed the second smallest number of students for PISA and collected the least contextual information, limiting the inferences that can be drawn for states and the usefulness of PISA for policy. While much of the industrialized world has extended PISA toward interactive electronic tests, the U.S. stuck to paper-and-pencil versions. While Schneider rightly notes that only longitudinal studies can establish causality, Australia, Canada, and Denmark are already implementing them, keeping track of the students assessed in PISA to find out how their knowledge and skills shape their subsequent life opportunities. In virtually every other federal nation, whether it is Canada or Mexico in North America; Belgium, Germany, Italy, Spain, Switzerland, or the U.K. in Europe; or Australia in the Pacific, individual states have implemented PISA successfully, employ it effectively, and find it useful for policy formation. They recognize that the yardstick for educational success is no longer improvement by state and national standards alone, but by the standards of the best-performing education systems internationally.

Schneider worries that international assessments, like any evaluations, embody judgments about what should be measured. That is so, and much of their value lies in allowing states to see their own standards through the prism of the judgments that the principal industrialized countries make collectively as to what skills matter for the success of individuals in a global economy.

Do international assessments provide causal evidence on what makes school systems succeed? No, but they shed light on important features in which education systems show similarities and differences, and, by making those features visible, can help to ask the right questions. Are the contextual data currently used for this perfect? Certainly not, and Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) nations constantly review and refine them. The methods used, however, are far more robust than the ways in which Schneider’s organization is patching together data from U.S. states and international assessments to suggest to states that they can pass over a process of thorough international benchmarking.

Andreas Schleicher
Directorate for Education
Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development

Schneider responds:

Mr. Schleicher fails to address my concern that because PISA’s policy advice is not based on methodologically sound analysis and often fits preconceived notions, states will not get reliable guidance. Second, it is for this nation to decide how PISA fits into the U.S. system of testing and data-collection efforts in which we have invested hundreds of millions of dollars, including, for example, the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) and student-based longitudinal data systems. Mr. Schleicher’s comparison of the United States to countries that have not made similar investments is unhelpful. Finally, states have spent millions of dollars to ensure that their tests match what they expect schools to teach in each subject. How can states align with an international test that admits, even celebrates, not testing what schools teach?

Opportunity Scholarships
I applaud Professor Patrick Wolf for his excellent review of the D.C. Opportunity Scholarship Program (OSP) (“Lost Opportunities,” research, Fall 2009). Three of Professor Wolf’s main points warrant further amplification.

First, the evidence is clear and unequivocal that the program is working for the children and families who participate in it. Professor Wolf methodically dissects the evaluation conducted by the Institute of Education Sciences (IES) and notes that the program improved the reading achievement of the treatment group students overall across all subgroups examined. Importantly, the evaluation suggests that such gains will continue over time. While it is true that there were no statistical gains in math achievement found for the treatment group, it must also be noted that the review covered a three-year period compatible with the program’s infancy. It is reasonable to project that the longer a student is in the OSP, the more benefit will be realized in all academic areas.

Second, Professor Wolf points out how striking the OSP’s achievement results are when compared to the results of other programs. According to Wolf, only 3 of the 11 experimental evaluations conducted by the National Center for Education Evaluation and Regional Assistance (NCEE) at IES have demonstrated statistically significant achievement impacts overall in either reading or math. The reading impact of the OSP is the largest achievement impact yet reported in an evaluation overseen by the NCEE. This finding is extraordinary.

Finally, in discussing the OSP’s impact on expanding school choice for parents, Professor Wolf relates that approximately 81 percent of parents placed their child in a private or public school of choice three years after winning the scholarship lottery, as did 46 percent of those who lost the lottery. He points out the high level of satisfaction with the program among parents. District parents are becoming more sophisticated about education options for their children, and they are sharing their knowledge with their neighbors and friends. The OSP, along with the successful D.C. charter school experiment, has created an atmosphere of receptivity for changing how we view K–12 education in our nation’s capital.

Kevin P. Chavous
Distinguished Fellow
Center for Education Reform

NCLB 2.0
As I was reading “The Future of No Child Left Behind” (forum, Summer 2009), I found myself agreeing with both authors. I support the tenets of No Child Left Behind (NCLB) in theory, but in practice I think it misses the mark. And while the authors spend time debating the theoretical issues, neither one addresses how to change the law at the ground level. The problem is that lawmakers, theorists, and educators look at the law and what changes should be made to it, rather than scrutinizing how the changes will affect students. The new NCLB needs a “regs” before the law approach.

The number-one change that should be made: judge schools on a set of measures that together create a school quotient score. Sixty percent of the quotient should reflect the average of two sets of test scores, one set based on state standards and tests and the other based on national standards and tests (NAEP, the Stanford 10, etc.). The rest of the quotient should reflect such measures as opportunities for gifted students, including AP classes; participation in the arts, music, and extracurricular programs; attendance and dropout rates; community service projects; special education exit rates; use of technology; staff turnover; participation in state tests and pass rates among English language learners; and parent involvement. The quotient could be used to judge schools against established benchmarks and ensure they are developing well-rounded, capable learners. The quotient could also be used to judge the progress of schools over time.

NCLB needs to change. One option is developing a school quotient score that would maintain the tenets of NCLB while acknowledging other school strengths as well.

Peter Weilenmann
National Board-Certified Teacher
Arlington, Virginia

School Discipline
Richard Arum and Doreet Preiss have identified an often-overlooked impediment to education reform (“Law and Disorder in the Classroom,” research, Fall 2009). Due process was initially introduced into the public school context to protect basic fundamental rights. Today, an overly expansive understanding of what the law requires has produced rigid, bureaucratic discipline procedures that undermine the flexibility needed for intelligent, effective school management.

A culture of order and respect is the foundation of every successful school. It makes sense intuitively, and we have seen repeatedly that successful school reform, charter schools, and turnaround initiatives focus first on discipline and culture to establish a foundation for learning. Children cannot learn in disorderly schools where educators feel powerless and teachers spend as much time on discipline as they do on instruction.

Strong leadership, respect for authority, and perception of fairness are essential to create a positive, productive school culture. And yet the encroachment of due process into daily discipline decisions has undermined all three. Arum and Preiss show that the threat of litigation is a real presence in the lives of educators, one that casts a shadow over their decisions.

If we take just one lesson from Arum and Preiss’s research, it should be that we are on the wrong path. To reverse course, we need a dramatic reclarification of authority and an endorsement of educators as the leaders of schools. We also need to reeducate parents, students, educators, and the broader community about the value of strong leadership. Finally, we need to make school culture a priority and encourage all members of the school community to participate in promoting the values and discipline protocols in schools.

Philip K. Howard
Chair
Common Good

Union Voice
In “Brighter Choices in Albany” (features, Fall 2009), New York’s anti-union charter spokesmen misstated New York State United Teachers’ (NYSUT) position on charter schools.

As a union of more than 600,000 professionals, NYSUT proudly represents teachers in charter schools and regular public schools across New York State. Our local unions are strong partners in their schools. As the single strongest advocate for the public resources that benefit charter and regular public schools, NYSUT supports members with research, professional development, and advocacy. That includes pressing charter management on issues of accountability, just as we do in district schools.

We believe quality charter schools can strengthen public education by piloting and sharing replicable practices that advance student learning. But not all charters or their corporate arms are created equal. Too many put profits before performance, are run by operators who don’t know what they are doing, get lackluster results, and aren’t, as envisioned, collaborating with district schools.

Intended to be exemplars, only 17 percent of charter schools outperform their public counterparts, according to Stanford University’s June 2009 study. That means all of us—teachers, principals, administrators, researchers, and policymakers—in charter and in public schools alike, must redouble our commitment to scholarship and transparency in identifying “lessons learned” from the charter movement.

Are the Brighter Choice test scores a result of changed educational practices? Of millions in corporate and philanthropic support? Or an apples-to-oranges comparison? (The Albany Times Union reports Albany charters enroll and test only a fraction of students with disabilities in district schools.)

The questions matter. Honest answers should be sought through forums that go beyond “charter corporate” to include unions as a leading force in education reform. Union leaders at the local, state, and national levels are committed to ending the achievement gap as an essential part of our mission. We are dedicated to a principle of fairness that means support for charter or regular public schools should not come at the other’s expense.

As NYSUT’s policy and practice attest, we embrace high standards, accountability, and transparency for regular public schools and charter schools alike. Our members, who walk the walk every day in the classroom, deserve no less.

Richard C. Iannuzzi
President
New York State United Teachers

A New Model of Teaching
In “How to Get the Teachers We Want” (features, Summer 2009), Rick Hess urges us to rethink the teacher challenges of the 21st century. He argues convincingly that to ensure that all our schools have sufficient numbers of high-quality teachers to teach all our children well, we need to move away from outdated assumptions about teacher recruitment and the irrational arrangements of teachers’ work.

Taken together and implemented meaningfully, the changes Dr. Hess promotes would constitute radical, almost revolutionary, reform. Oddly, Dr. Hess ends on a moderate note, suggesting that we ought to “recognize that institutions change slowly and celebrate incremental advances” toward a “more flexible, rewarding, and performance-focused profession.”

We respectfully disagree. We believe that a large-scale transformation of schooling in America is just over the horizon and therefore the professional arrangements of the teaching enterprise will have to change sooner rather than later.

American schooling, as we’ve known it for more than a century, has already been disrupted. The Internet and an aggressive network of education entrepreneurs have exploded the monopoly that teachers and textbooks have long held over students’ access to knowledge. It is becoming increasingly clear that to truly educate all children well, instruction must be personalized for every student yet at the same time directed toward common goals.

Dr. Hess notes that to meet these instructional challenges, teachers’ roles must be specialized. We wholeheartedly agree, adding that what we term “unbundled education” requires that schools implement what we’re calling (in “Toward the Structural Transformation of Schools: Innovations in Staffing,” a paper from Learning Point Associates) a “neo-differentiated” staffing model. This model differentiates instructional roles according to staff skill and expertise and puts each student at the center of the organizational chart. It outsources some of the work of teachers to experts in the community in virtual learning spaces.

Structural transformation and differentiated staffing sound intimidating, but the work has already begun. Take a look at New Hampshire’s Extended Learning Opportunities (ELO) initiative or the newly piloted School of One in New York City. These innovations reject schooling’s “industrial rhythms” of the past. The options in 2009 are only as containable as we allow them to be. Now is the time to begin working together toward a system that helps to facilitate success for all learners.

Jane G. Coggshall
Research Associate

Molly Lasagna
Policy Specialist
Learning Point Associates

Like Florida’s schools, New York City’s serve a high-needs population. But we are not allowing demographics to define our outcomes. Since 2002, our students have made steady progress. Today, far more students are meeting and exceeding standards in math and reading. We’ve substantially narrowed the racial and ethnic achievement gap, our students are catching up to students in the rest of the state, and our graduation rate is the highest it has been in decades.

How have we done this? We have set high standards and created a school accountability system that holds schools responsible for outcomes and gives schools, parents, and educators the information they need to address students’ strengths and weaknesses. We have raised pay for educators and created incentive programs for teachers and principals that help us attract the best talent to our schools. Since 2002, we have replaced hundreds of failing schools with new small schools that provide New York City families with good options.

We still have a long way to go, but it’s clear that even the most disadvantaged students can achieve at high levels when provided with a strong education.

It’s time for leaders across America to stop making excuses for low student performance. As Florida and New York City demonstrate, we can offer all students, regardless of their backgrounds, the educational opportunity they need and deserve.

Joel I. Klein
New York City Schools Chancellor

Education Reform Work Is Not Complete
Regarding “Accountability Overboard” (features, Spring 2009), the heated rhetoric that the Massachusetts Readiness Project with its goal to move public education into the 21st century somehow represents a “wavering” on standards is off the mark.

As the article correctly points out, Achieve, Inc., has reviewed the Massachusetts standards and found them to be top-notch; they combine rigorous content with clear expectations that students develop problem-solving and reasoning skills as they learn the content. In fact, Achieve regularly uses the Massachusetts standards as a model when working with other states that seek to raise their expectations. As the article rightly notes, Massachusetts students not only perform at the top of U.S. measures such as NAEP, but are globally competitive, as recent TIMSS results have shown.

Every state needs to review and update its standards periodically. That Governor Deval Patrick wants Massachusetts to build on its tradition of excellence by ensuring that standards enable students to access and attain rigorous content, as well as meet assessment goals requiring that they demonstrate their ability to apply their knowledge, does not represent a “wavering” on content, but rather a way to enhance the state’s current world-class standards. High-performing countries, such as Singapore, are doing the same. Rather than getting distracted by false choices or creating controversies where none need exist, it would be far more helpful for the debate in Massachusetts to focus on the best strategies for ensuring that classroom instruction effectively delivers the standards to all students throughout Massachusetts.

Michael Cohen
President, Achieve, Inc.

The achievement of students in Massachusetts is well documented. The state’s commitment to high standards, rigorous curricula, and accountability for student achievement is widely regarded to be among the best in the nation. Results on NAEP, SAT, and TIMSS confirm that the hard work is paying off, and MCAS scores continue to improve in the great majority of subjects and grades tested.

Massachusetts is clearly doing well. But Governor Deval Patrick has repeatedly said that doing well is not good enough. I could not agree more.

Too many students, particularly black and Latino students and those with limited English proficiency and special needs, are not reaching higher levels of academic proficiency, are falling behind, and are dropping out. It was with those students in mind, with their future at stake, and in the interest of the Commonwealth’s economic vitality, that the governor engaged more than 200 citizens to develop an action plan, a series of recommendations spanning 10 years with an immediate focus on turning around low-performing schools and ensuring that students are receiving the support they need outside of school to take full advantage of improved teaching and learning inside of school.

Governor Patrick and his education secretary Paul Reville should be praised for their efforts to transform the public education system into one that works for and promotes high achievement for all students. Instead, he is vilified on the pages of this publication with such wanton disregard for the integrity of the facts that the presentation bears absolutely no relationship to what is actually occurring in Massachusetts.

Massachusetts has a great base on which to build, but in order for students to truly achieve, to succeed, and to develop into the future leaders of this state, this country, and this world, they need additional time for learning, additional time on the core subjects, and additional time to build out their knowledge and ability to apply what they learn in class to a college classroom or their chosen field of work. Governor Patrick has begun that work in Massachusetts and I believe the students will be better served by acknowledging where the state needs to improve its education reform efforts than by simply declaring victory based on past success.

Thomas W. Payzant
Former Superintendent
Boston Public Schools

Measuring Benefits
Marguerite Roza’s excellent article (“Breaking Down School Budgets,” features, Summer 2009) provides only half of the story. Traditional cost-benefit analyses explore the benefits as well as the costs of programs. By providing only the cost side of a cost-benefit analysis, Roza, in effect, assumes the benefits of all high school classes are equal.

While providing curricular electives may cost more per pupil than basic courses in the core subject areas, electives often keep students interested and attending school. Electives also develop talents missed with traditional core subject classes. The future financial benefits to students and their employers of knowing a second language certainly balance a slightly higher cost ratio for providing foreign language classes, for example.

Over time, Advanced Placement classes save students money. Each year, thousands of high school graduates arrive on university campuses already having earned college credit through their AP classes. Not only do these credits save parents and students tuition dollars, they decrease the time, and thereby the cost, of earning a college degree.

Additionally, the potential costs of not addressing the needs of high-achieving high school students through honors and AP courses are great. Ignoring the educational needs of students with the greatest potential effectively restricts the level of achievement in our schools. Many gifted elementary school students know much of the material to be covered in their current grade prior to the start of school. Nearly half of the low-income students who are classified as high-achieving when they enter 1st grade can no longer be classified as such by the time they reach 5th grade. These students clearly need educational opportunities that their parents often cannot provide. We can do better than to ignore almost half of our nation’s talent.

Failing to adequately educate our nation’s youth by reducing the cost per class is not a blueprint for informed local resource decisionmaking. Instead, it is a formula for sacrificing our nation’s intellectual capital.

Del Siegle
President
National Association for Gifted Children

Educating the Public
Charter schools are public schools. The movement has been repeating that mantra for 17 years, but the point hasn’t completely sunk in. In surveys conducted for the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools, the portion of registered voters recognizing charters as public schools has hovered around 40 percent for the past four years. The diversity within charter schooling may work against any common definition. Chartering empowers thousands of African American families to create a vibrant new public-school sector in Harlem; it liberates a group of Minnesota teachers to start and run their own schools; and it provides a Teach for America alum the freedom to start a network of college-prep charters serving Mexican immigrants in Texas.

How charter schools are defined matters greatly. The information William Howell and Martin West provided to survey respondents (“Educating the Public,” features, Summer 2009)—that charters are tuition free and do not teach religion—is only one slice of what defines charters and what distinguishes them from other public schools. When people are given a fuller definition, including the public nature of charters, the freedom charters have to be more innovative while being held accountable for improved student achievement, and the greater partnerships among parents, teachers, and students often found at charters, we see support grow across partisan and ideological lines.

In states where there are more charter schools, we see a significant increase in knowledge and understanding reflected in surveys. While charter schools still serve less than 5 percent of the public school population, in a dozen population centers charters now enroll more than 20 percent of public school students. In the District of Columbia, for example, where nearly 100 charter campuses are educating more than one-third of the public school students, charters are increasingly accepted as an integral part of the public education delivery system: Sixty-three percent of D.C. residents know they are public schools. And in California, a state with close to 800 charters, 52 percent of voters in a 2007 poll knew they were public schools.

Howell and West’s commendable work was done in 2008, which predates what we’ve been calling the Obama Effect. The president has made his commitment to charter schools known, and this has not gone unnoticed. In our latest survey, conducted in late March 2009, we saw a sharp increase in the number of people who identified charter schools as an educational option in their community (from 18 percent in 2008 to 29 percent in 2009). In state after state, legislators who previously opposed charters are reconsidering their positions because of the president’s strong support for these schools. If we in the charter community respond with robust growth of high-quality schools, we will surely see greater public understanding from all quarters.

Nelson Smith
President and CEO
National Alliance for Public Charter Schools

Class Size
In Paul E. Peterson’s recent editorial (“What Is Good for General Motors… Is Good for Education,” from the editors, Spring 2009), he optimistically suggests that the economic crisis could spur some much-needed fiscal reform within the education sector.

While I absolutely agree that too much of our taxpayers’ money is spent on stuff that isn’t making our schools better, I couldn’t disagree more with what Peterson identifies as fat. His analysis of class-size data is particularly baffling to me. Eight pupils per teacher? My own state of California limits class size to 32 at the secondary level and 20 at the primary level. In other words, as a high school teacher in California, I can be pretty sure that I will have 32 names on each of my class rosters each semester. And in some cases, I’ll have more.

Peterson arrives at his number by lumping all instructional employees into the teacher category. But isn’t that a little misleading? Not once has an administrator directly helped teach my class. And guidance counselors? Their caseload is impossibly large as it is; they certainly don’t have time to help me grade essays.
Peterson misrepresents class-size data and draws the flawed conclusion that class-size reduction is not working. This seems a disservice to the hardworking teachers of this nation who struggle every day to leave no child behind in shamefully overcrowded classrooms. Class-size reduction isn’t working because it doesn’t exist.
Peterson is right to propose that the fiscal crisis affords us the opportunity to reassess where our money is going. I just hope—if and when that conversation occurs—that teachers are a part of it. Too much of what passes as reform these days is anti-teacher, or at the very least, out of sync with what teachers are facing on the ground.

As teachers, we must find ways to interject our voice into the conversation. Otherwise, we give permission to academics and bureaucrats to dictate next year’s policies (and budgets). All that will be left is for us to ask, “How high?”

Alistair Bomphray
Teacher
Hayward, CA

Paul Peterson responds:
According to the official Digest of Education Statistics, released by the National Center for Education Statistics, the ratio of pupils to instructional employees in the United States declined from 14:1 in 1970 to 8:1 in 2005. Instructional employees include teachers, administrators, guidance counselors, librarians, and other professional educators. About half are teachers, which explains why the pupil-teacher ratio is 15:1, a decline from 23:1 since 1970. If class-size reduction hasn’t happened, the reason can only be the result of inefficient utilization of instructional talent by school districts. In other industries, that is called “fat.”

Book Review
The review by Chester E. Finn Jr. (“More Money for Less Accountability?” book review, Spring 2009) of Richard Rothstein, Rebecca Jacobsen, and Tamara Wilder’s book Grading Education: Getting Accountability Right simply misses the mark.

The book at issue does not undermine school accountability and it is not about NAEP. What Rothstein and colleagues do is to document very well the ways in which accountability systems can and do corrupt the delivery of services as people manipulate the system. This was done in the case of hospitals with high heart-patient mortality rates that “fixed” the problem by simply no longer taking such cases. The authors look at how current education accountability systems have become similarly skewed and suggest some very useful alternatives.

Education accountability takes place at the school, district, and state levels. The levers available to the federal government are indirect; states are where the action and authority reside. Let the feds set expectations and parameters and hold systems accountable. Let us not pretend that the feds can deal directly with 100,000 schools and 13,000 school districts. We must think very carefully about whatever system is put in place. The potential for harm is great, the needs of children even greater. The importance of the right accountability system is too great to keep getting it wrong.

Christopher T. Cross
Chairman, Cross & Joftus
Bethesda, MD

Genuine Alternatives
As Paul Peterson and Daniel Nadler (“What Happens When States Have Genuine Alternative Certification?” check the facts, Winter 2009) correctly assert, there is considerable resistance to genuine alternative certification in a number of states. The motive for this resistance is simply to preserve the power and influence of a traditional system that is becoming increasingly irrelevant with each passing year.

The traditional route to teacher certification, a college degree that requires 30-plus credit hours of education-related coursework, has created a kind of cult within the teaching profession. Those who acquire their teaching credentials through alternate means tend to be viewed as second-class citizens in the schools where they work.
I have two sons, so I have had considerable interaction with teachers at several different schools over a fairly long period of time. Most teachers have gone through the traditional certification process at one of our states’ public universities. In my experience, it is not unusual for teachers to 1) not really know that much about the test scores they are attempting to explain, and 2) be civil toward me yet completely discount most of the questions I ask and the concerns I raise. I am seen as an “outsider” and therefore my views can be taken with a proverbial grain of salt.

I have also taught a graduate course on testing and assessment for several years, and teachers typically constitute the largest segment of the class. It is obvious that many teachers have been indoctrinated with an exclusive attitude that suggests “unless you have been in the trenches, you can’t possibly know what it’s like, and therefore what could I possibly learn from you?” They believe that the traditional route to teacher certification has provided them with insights into reality to which the rest of us are not privy. This mindset signifies a false sense of competence and confidence that contributes to the gradual decline of the effectiveness of our entire education system.

Far from being the cause of many of the problems associated with our schools, genuine alternative certification programs may prove to be our best hope for putting in our schools trained professionals who can truly make a difference.

Aaron W. Hughey
Department of Counseling and Student Affairs
Western Kentucky University

One of the most problematic planks in President Obama’s education platform (Straddling the Democratic Divide, features, Spring 2009) was the proposal that all schools of education must be accredited. In theory, it seems desirable to have schools of education reviewed by outside authorities. But accreditation by the National Council for Accreditation of Teacher Education (NCATE) and the Teacher Education Accreditation Council (TEAC), both private agencies, has so far failed to assure a high level of quality in training institutions. Arthur Levines 2006 study, Educating School Teachers, for example, found no significant difference in mathematics or reading achievement in students taught by teachers educated at NCATE- and non-NCATE-accredited institutions. It also found low-quality programs that had earned NCATE accreditation.

Why doesn’t accreditation improve the quality of teacher preparation programs as judged by measurable increases in learning outcomes for the students in the classes of their graduates? The Achilles heel of the accreditation process is the composition of the reviewers.

NCATE is composed only of educational, not discipline-based, organizations, and its reviewers are chiefly if not solely from other schools of education. This means, for example, that a licensure program for history or U. S. government teachers is NCATE-evaluated by academic and professional standards developed by members of the National Council for the Social Studies, not by the standards developed by members of a professional organization for historians or political scientists.

Having only education school faculty as the peer reviewers for accreditation is rather like having visiting foxes advise the local foxes on how well they have designed the lock on the chicken coop. The absence of subject matter experts (as well as members of other professions, the educated public, and the state legislature) on review teams keeps anti-disciplinary and anti-instructional theories dominant in our education schools and helps them to avoid criticisms of academically weak teacher preparation programs.

Levine would like a new accrediting agency in which the nation’s best-known education schools (like Teachers College, Columbia University) set professional standards. However, until the reviewers bring a broader and academic perspective to their observations, we cannot count on accreditation to upgrade the quality of our teacher preparation programs. In fact, we might get more academically qualified and pedagogically effective teachers if we simply eliminated completion of an approved program from licensure requirements.

Sandra Stotsky
Professor of Education
University of Arkansas

Bay State

Pioneer Institute has launched yet another attack on the education record of Governor Deval Patrick and the Commonwealth of Massachusetts (Accountability Overboard, features, Spring 2009). The following is just one of many examples of errors purposefully made by Pioneer. They write, Results in September 2008 showed a sharp drop in MCAS pass rates and flat or declining scores in the elementary and middle school grades.

This is simply wrong. Pass rates improved or stayed steady on 12 of the 16 tests administered. Math results reached an all-time high, including improvement in every grade.

The authors praise the work of Massachusetts students in citing the recent results on TIMSS, pointing to this exceptional performance as an illustration of the influence of status quo reforms while later falsely condemning students’ MCAS results to suggest a downward slide in performance.

Students have demonstrated consistent improvement on the MCAS over the years, improvement that has continued since Governor Patrick took office in 2006. However, the results mask a persistent achievement gap that must be addressed. For example, on the grade 10 MCAS science exam, just 28 percent of black students and 24 percent of Latino students scored proficient or higher compared to 65 percent of white students and 68 percent of Asian students. These results show us that while we have been successful with some students, we are woefully behind with others. Our mission is far from complete.

Pioneer’s vision of the future is apparently more of the same, notwithstanding the data on gaps. The Pioneer authors counsel a strict adherence to the status quo, defying data telling us that education reform in Massachusetts must significantly improve if we are to close achievement gaps and provide all students with a 21st-century education. Governor Patrick believes a bolder, more sophisticated approach is required, and I invite readers to judge his agenda on its merits at cleantext_url_o64oqr31s401oo2s162q685t88tqqo08ma-edplan-finalrev1.pdf.

Paul Reville
Secretary of Education
Commonwealth of Massachusetts

Charles Chieppo and James Gass respond:

MCAS math scores in 2008 were up by just a single percentage point in three elementary grades, and early-grade MCAS English Language Arts (ELA) scores, which are the best predictors of future success, fell the most. In fact, ELA scores for 2008 were either down or flat in six out of seven grades.

As for simultaneously pointing to stagnating MCAS and excellent TIMSS scores, 2008 was the only time Massachusetts students have participated in TIMSS; those scores are the fruits of more than a decade of reform. MCAS scores are subject to year-to-year comparison.

It should be noted that between 1998 and 2005, Massachusetts was among the states that saw the most narrowing in achievement gaps.

We do acknowledge two errors in the printed version of our article. The Readiness Finance Commission favored raising the state sales tax rather than the income tax from 5 to 6 percent. The waiting list for charter schools in Boston is about 7,000 students, not 1,720. The Patrick administrations poison pilllaced plan to raise the cap on charter schools in some districts was proposed too late to be discussed in our article.

We should also have disclosed Mr. Gasss previous employment at the Massachusetts Office of Educational Quality and Accountability. He left that agency in 2005.

Scaling Up KIPP

As Jay Mathewss portrait reveals (Work Hard. Be Nice. features, Spring 2009), KIPP students succeed because they benefit from extraordinary teachers. Where do these educators come from? I examined five KIPP schools and found that 72 percent of their teachers and school leaders had attended top undergraduate institutions ranked very competitive to most competitive by Barron’s. That compares to 19 percent of public school teachers generally.

The labor pool of such elite college graduates is small. Even if 1 in every 10 of these graduates entered teaching for two years (average tenure at KIPP-like No Excuses charter schools) before moving onto other careers, they would provide only 6 percent of the some 450,000 teachers currently working in the member districts of the Council of Great City Schools (the nations 66 largest urban public-school systems).

Simply put, we might have enough of these teachers to staff a few hundred more No Excuses schools, but not a few thousand more, and certainly not enough to reach every disadvantaged child in America.

That’s why recent plans by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and others to sponsor tool providers should be applauded. The development of a new wave of intellectual property for schools may in time permit a broad swath of career educators to achieve KIPP-like results. Consider two such new tools. Teachers will soon be able to access superior resources from automated systems that integrate and mine contributions from hundreds of star educators. No Excuses teachers may find it intellectually challenging to craft their own curricula, pacing charts, lesson plans, curriculum tests, and the like, all keyed to state standards, but these demands also contribute to long hours and high teacher turnover. Such tasks needn’t be tackled anew by individual teachers.

Similarly, the methods of star teachers – how they construct a culture of high expectations in their classroom and deliver vibrant and effective instruction – are at last being codified as specific techniques that can be mastered by novice teachers. Prototypes of these tools, while little known, exist today.

As KIPP has demonstrated, wholesale social transformation is not a precondition for narrowing the achievement gap. But human-capital limits may constrain the models reach. To plot a course from KIPPs individual successes toward achievement at scale takes nothing away from the organizations unprecedented accomplishments.

Steven F. Wilson
President
Ascend Learning

Other Routes to Teaching

The Newton Teacher Training Institute is an alternative teacher-training program in Massachusetts, similar to those described in Katherine Newman’s article (Teacher Training, Tailor-Made, features, Spring 2009). I suggest that the best phrase to describe these programs is practice-based. They are founded on the idea that the only way to learn to teach well is to practice teaching in a real school setting.

The article overlooks a significant benefit of practice-based programs: the creation of a true career path for talented classroom teachers. The career path in teaching is notoriously flat. Excellent teachers receive the same pay as colleagues who are equally experienced but not nearly as talented, and the responsibilities of a 20-year veteran are virtually indistinguishable from those of a second- or third-year beginner. The only way up in teaching is out of the classroom, through a promotion to an administrative job. Practice-based teacher-training programs offer a way out of this trap. Excellent teachers can become program faculty, where their talents in the classroom are leveraged for the benefit of future generations, and where they can earn stipends and status. In a practice-based teacher education program with rigorous faculty selection criteria and high admissions standards, the best teachers would train the best teaching candidates. This approach should not, in my view, be seen as an alternative to regular teacher preparation; it should be the way high-quality teacher preparation is done. The end result would surely be positive for the teaching profession, for students, and for society.

Jonathan Bassett
Program Director
Newton Teacher Training Institute

Philadelphia Story

Paul Peterson and Matthew Chingoss conclusion that for-profit entities outperformed nonprofit entities in their management of Philadelphia schools from 2002 to 2008 is not in and of itself a reason for our members to celebrate (For-Profit and Nonprofit Management in Philadelphia Schools, research, Spring 2009). Rather, it was the willingness of Pennsylvania and Philadelphia to innovate, apply new ideas, and reach beyond the status quo on behalf of the children of Philadelphia that should be roundly applauded.

For-profit providers of educational products and services, including members of the Education Industry Association, whether school management companies, tutoring providers, or developers of learning materials and technologies, view students, parents, school districts, and state departments of education as customers. They value innovation, expect to be held accountable for the quality and effectiveness of their programs, and understand the consequences of failure. They understand that they do not have all the answers to educations challenges and problems and that such solutions are produced only through cooperative public-private partnerships in which the parties view themselves as collaborators and not competitors.

The Philadelphia story, then, is not so much a tale of for-profits winning against nonprofits or district-run schools, but a valuable lesson in how to approach education reform effectively and produce real results. Indeed, the real victors in Philadelphia, and elsewhere where such public-private partnerships exist, are the students.

Steven Pines
Executive Director
Education Industry Association

Selling Success

Emily Hassel and Bryan Hassel (The Big U-Turn, features, Winter 2009) are right to examine how public schools could learn from successful corporations and other public programs. One of the underlying themes of those successful turnarounds is enhancement of the publics perception of their success. The new carpets at Continental Airlines and the crackdown on petty crime in the New York Police Department were put into place to convince the general public that these organizations were doing well.

This focus was not on the core businesses of these organizations, or even their customers per se, but rather the general public, who might become customers and supporters of the program. For public schools, following their lead would mean paying closer attention to that segment of the population who are not the parents of current students, the general tax-paying public, who provide the majority of support for the schools.

For example, schools might focus on those few places where the public can see students and teachers during the school day, such as on field trips or at dismissal. What impression does the public get of a school if the students are blocking traffic and cursing? Paying more attention to student behavior at these times could directly affect the publics perception of school success.

Another area of emphasis might be the kind of data released to the public. Currently, schools focus on data that are useful primarily to parents, such as grades, achievement scores, awards, etc. The public wants to know about the success of the schools graduates: the adults they hire, work with, and bump into on the street. It is the graduates, not the students, who provide the benefit they get from their support of the schools.

Peter Dodington
Teacher
Bronx Latin School

Teacher Co-ops

While attention is welcome, it’s disappointing that two recent studies, and other insights from Minnesota New Country School (MNCS), the original teacher cooperative, were not included in Teacher Cooperatives (features, Spring 2009). Moreover, much of the reporting focuses on Milwaukee schools, where teachers are not allowed to set their salaries and benefits, key parts of the teacher co-op idea according to MNCS cofounder and EdVisions Cooperative director Doug Thomas.

While almost half of MNCS students are low income, and more than 30 percent have some form of disability, studies by Scott Wurdinger and Jennifer Rudolph of Minnesota State University, Mankato, and by EdVisions Cooperative cofounder and staffer Ron Newell found results worthy of note: the average ACT score of MNCS students (and EdVisions Cooperative members) is higher than the national average. More than 90 percent of MNCS alumni responding to a survey have enrolled in postsecondary education and report that MNCS gave them an advantage over college classmates. Sixty-nine percent of MNCS alumni responding had completed a two- or four-year postsecondary degree. Student surveys show growing enthusiasm for learning, self-confidence, and goal setting, compared to declines among students in many larger district high schools.

MNCS agrees on the need for high standards and uses projects to help students reach them. MNCS recognizes that projects like documenting and testifying to legislators on mutated frogs near the school (which led to national attention because others later found similar phenomena) help develop problem-solving, research, and public-speaking skills. But projects aren’t sufficient, for example, to master algebra.

Though she mentions MNCS, its not clear whether author Beth Hawkins actually visited the school. No MNCS student, parent, or teacher is quoted. Having helped a little to start MNCS, Im not neutral. But I believe strong academic results and key teacher cooperative details deserved more detailed coverage. There are good reasons that the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation recently gave MNCS more money to replicate itself.  

Joe Nathan
Director, Center for School Change
University of Minnesota

Book Alert

I was shocked by the fundamental distortion of my ideas in the review of my book, The Global Achievement Gap (book alert, Winter 2009). I wonder what evidence the reviewer could provide from my book to substantiate this assertion: He deplores results-based accountability for schools, educators, and kids. Unlike many so-called progressive educators, I am a strong advocate for accountability. I spend most of one chapter analyzing the difference between good and bad tests. My critique of No Child Left Behind is precisely that the standards for accountability, which rely mainly on multiple-choice factual recall tests, are too low and are putting our country at a serious competitive disadvantage. I advocate for a national writing test and use of the Collegiate Learning Assessment and PISA tests for accountability purposes. And I spend an entire chapter discussing the importance of holding schools of education and teachers to a much higher standard of demonstrated excellence for certification and recertification, and suggest ways of phasing out the tenure system.

Finally, I describe two public charter schools that succeed in teaching their predominantly minority students both rigorous academic content and 21st-century skills, while holding themselves to the standard of graduating 100 percent of their students, and sending nearly all to four-year colleges.

If this is not accountability, then what is?

Tony Wagner
Change Leadership Group
Harvard Graduate School of Education

The most intriguing aspect of the study of the relationship between the proportion of pupils in nongovernment schools and achievement on the PISA international comparisons (“School Choice International,” research, Winter 2009) is its use of data from 1900 to identify countries with a history of competitive education systems. Almost every country in the world has had a sector of elite private schools for the children of privilege. It is only under a special set of circumstances, however, that a nongovernment sector of schools rivaling public schools in providing popular instruction has developed in some countries. The principal example of this among the Western democracies has been the creation of alternative systems of Catholic schools in countries with a significant Catholic population but a public school system considered by the church hierarchy inappropriate for Catholic children.

This is a history that my own books have traced for dozens of countries, from the perspective of educational freedom and the rights of conscience of parents and their children. West and Woessmann give it a completely new twist, however, showing the significant unanticipated consequences of these developments for the quality of education as measured by academic outcomes. Alternative systems, competing across the board with government-operated schools, seem to have stimulated the latter to be more efficient (as measured by cost) and more effective (as measured by outcomes) than systems in countries where no such competition exists.

Countries without such alternative systems, either because the public systems were acceptable to Catholic leadership (as in Italy, Spain, Austria, and most of Latin America) or because the Catholic share of the population was too small to create and sustain an alternative system competing across the board with public schools, have not experienced the benefits of such competition.

Those who created these alternative systems were concerned with freedom and religious conviction, not international comparisons of academic outcomes. West and Woessmann demonstrate that despite all the warnings by supporters of the common state school, the existence of an extensive sector of alternative schools is of benefit to everyone.

Charles L. Glenn
Boston University School of Education
IES under Whitehurst

When Andrew Rudalevige interviewed me for his recent article (“Juggling Act,” features, Winter 2009), the National Board for Education Sciences, an Institute of Education Sciences (IES) advisory board that I chaired, had not yet completed its congressionally mandated report on the performance of IES. It is now final and available at the institute’s web site.

Rudalevige and the board agree that IES has made exceptional progress in improving the rigor and relevance of education research. We also agree that much of the progress is due to the well-crafted authorizing legislation, the Education Sciences Reform Act (ESRA), which established the institute and is currently awaiting reauthorization. Because ESRA led to such strong results, the board recommended its reauthorization with few changes. My view is that there is no reason to rush reauthorization, because the act is working well.

The institute’s exemplary performance is due in large part to its first and only director, Russ Whitehurst, who completed his term in November 2008. Russ is known for his interest in “what works” with a concomitant emphasis on field experiments, and his greatest legacy may be his attention to infrastructure. He implemented high-quality peer review systems for grants and reports, a continuously improving What Works Clearinghouse, a revamped Education Resources Information Center (ERIC) system, and multidisciplinary pre- and postdoctoral programs that attract and train promising researchers.

Yet much work remains. I advocate an R&D approach based on large-scale, practitioner-generated changes in policy and practice, which are studied using strong designs and methods before being widely implemented. Such studies should be designed to tell us if the changes are effective and provide ideas about why. I also think we need an improved understanding about how practitioners acquire and use research findings.

Despite the successes of ESRA and IES, this enterprise is fragile. President Obama will appoint the next director of IES and nominate members for 9 open seats on the 15-member board. Given Whitehurst’s impact, the next director will obviously influence the direction and functioning of IES. The president has a number of pressing issues to tackle immediately—altering how the federal government funds education research isn’t one of them.

Robert C. Granger
President
William T. Grant Foundation

Milwaukee Choice Finance

Robert Costrell’s analysis of school choice finance in Milwaukee (“Who Gains, Who Loses?” research, Winter 2009) fills a gaping void. Throughout the 18-year history of the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program, misinformation about its fiscal impact has been widespread. Three factors explain this.

First, the subject is complicated. Connecting the dots is a major challenge.

Second, many school choice opponents are indifferent to the facts. They knowingly misstate the program’s impact on taxpayers.

Third, the Wisconsin news media has been missing in action. Costrell has done what a host of political and education reporters have failed to do. Their failure has enabled misinformation to proliferate.

Will the news media take advantage of the homework that Costrell has done for them? That remains to be seen.

George Mitchell
Education policy consultant
Milwaukee, Wisconsin

Home Schooling

I read Milton Gaither’s fine piece on home schooling (“Home Schooling Goes Mainstream,” features, Winter 2009) as I was preparing for an evening meeting of the board of directors of the South Carolina Association of Independent Home Schools (SCAIHS). Gaither’s essay reminded me of how much this part of the education landscape has changed since the mid-1980s, when my wife and I began teaching our children at home. Police officers now seldom serve truancy citations to home schoolers (in 1990 in our case). Indeed, home-schooling families now enjoy a high level of public support and admiration as well as generally positive press.

Though these “Anabaptists of American education,” as I called parents who have opted for home-based schooling in The Dissenting Tradition in American Education, are certainly an increasingly diverse lot, they are united by a common commitment to the proposition that parents, not the state, have the primary right and responsibility to direct the upbringing and education of their children. They are, in columnist David Brooks’s words, “more spiritually, emotionally, and physically invested in their homes than in other spheres of life, having concluded that parenthood is the most enriching and elevating thing they can do.”

As Gaither points out, the growth of home-based education has added to the increasing diversity of educational options. The “hybridization” of home schooling has, along with other choice mechanisms and recent Establishment Clause interpretation, blurred the line between government and private educational spheres. As these characteristics were features of education in our colonial period, home-schooling families are reclaiming what was once a primary function of the household.

James C. Carper
Department of Educational Studies
University of South Carolina

Milton Gaither correctly notes that the variety of people practicing home schooling and their pedagogical practices has notably broadened. And he is correct in saying that home schooling is, in many ways, mainstream. He does, however, miss a few key points.

First, he relies too heavily on one 2003 study that collapsed to six the number of most-important reasons parents gave for home schooling. “Most important” hides the multiple and nuanced reasons parents usually give. The overlap between “religion/morality” and “school environment” obfuscates what portion of the reasons is actually worldview-, philosophy-, or religion-based. Furthermore, caution should be taken in relying on one study that generalized from 239 home-schooled students (and their families) to the 1.1 million or more in the nation in 2003.

Gaither also claims home schooling is no longer a “political movement.” Home schooling clearly continues to be a political (and other) movement because its advocates know they must labor to keep fundamental parental rights over the education and upbringing of children recognized and protected from statist academics and government violation. One of their core beliefs, a millennia-old view, is that parents have a basic right not to put their children under education controlled or “approved” by the state. They continually see attacks on their perspective and practice in courts, legislatures, and academic journals.

Finally, Gaither is correct that the increase in tax-funded virtual charter schools blurs lines in the education arena. Home-school advocates, however, do not have “animus toward government” but philosophically and politically oppose government control, based on what the classical liberal theorist Frédéric Bastiat called “legal plunder,” over the teaching, training, and indoctrination of children in a “free” nation. They want to see state-run schooling diminish and private education increase. Home schooling is a form of private and independent education. Virtual charter schools are public (government) schools at home (PSAH). PSAH essentially places the government into a family’s home and both legally and pedagogically increases state control and influence over children’s knowledge, values, and attitudes while diminishing that of the parents.

Brian D. Ray
President
National Home Education Research Institute

Alternative Certification

I applaud Education Next for its research on ways in which nontraditional programs are recruiting individuals of color into the teaching field. The National Council for Accreditation of Teacher Education (NCATE) has accredited Western Governors University, an institution committed to producing more teachers of color for hard-to-staff schools, especially in rural areas. NCATE has also just completed a study of urban teacher residency (UTR) programs. UTRs succeed in attracting teachers of color to teach in urban areas in shortage fields, which traditional programs have failed to do in large enough numbers. Moreover, unlike some other alternative programs, UTRs retain the teachers they have trained in these hard-to-staff schools. In short, NCATE is interested in accrediting break-the-mold programs of high quality.

However, Peterson and Nadler (“What Happens When States Have Genuine Certification?” check the facts, Winter 2009) define “genuine alternative route” as any program requiring under 30 credit hours of coursework; they note, “Of 21 states we consider to have genuine alternate certification, 7 required only that the person pass a test.” While NCATE supports high-quality preparation programs, whether they are traditional or alternative routes, it does not support approaches that place unprepared individuals in classrooms on the basis of a test without an accompanying strategy to build these individuals’ capacity to teach effectively.

The issue is not alternative certification versus traditional routes. Multiple pathways to becoming a teacher, both within and outside of higher education institutions, should be applauded if they are of high quality. Preparing completers who affect P–12 student learning positively and increasing teacher retention are key criteria by which all programs should be measured and held accountable. All things being equal, cost-effective programs that expand access should be favored, whoever provides them. So far, however, in the absence of clear definitions and standards for alternative programs in many states and in response to urgent needs for classroom teachers, programs of questionable quality have been permitted to exist.

We face a national challenge in transforming our education system to reflect 21st-century learning skills and global influences. Alternative providers, and entrepreneurial market forces more broadly, can contribute to this transformation in important ways, but no one should equate the scope of their role with the magnitude of the problem we face in transforming America’s education system.

James G. Cibulka
President
National Council for Accreditation of Teacher Education (NCATE)

Union Watch

Linda Seebach (“Same Old, Same Old,” features, Winter 2009) asserts that new leadership at both the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) and the National Education Association (NEA) signifies no change in these organizations’ policies or positions, a situation she finds untenable. The new national presidents have only been in office since July. Let’s give them a little time before declaring their administrations moribund.

Ms. Seebach does point out at least one change that AFT president Randi Weingarten is advocating—community schools. While the author ridicules the idea, and it is true, Ms. Weingarten’s maiden speech did not provide detail (yes, the devil is often in the details), the idea has considerable saliency among significant segments of the education and policy communites.

The notion of what Ms. Weingarten describes as community schools is not, as Linda Seebach suggests, that schools become the sole providers of all social services. The idea, which was widely tried in California and elsewhere in the 1980s under the name “school-linked services” or “school-based services,” is that students cannot learn when they come to school hungry, or ill, or in pain. Providing ready access to social services, on the school site or nearby, helps to level the academic playing field for these students.

In addition, I can only assume Ms. Seebach’s article was written before Randi Weingarten made her November 17 speech at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C. In that speech, the new AFT president stated, “With the exception of vouchers…no issue should be off the table….” Under the category “no issue,” Weingarten included teacher assignments, tenure, and differentiated pay. Sounds to me like change may be blowing in the wind after all.

Julia E. Koppich
San Francisco, CA

Technology for Learning

Regarding the article “How Do We Transform Our Schools?” (features, Summer 2008), I agree that as organizations continue successful integration of software and web-based solutions into existing teaching methods, the software applications will become  more customized; they will have to. The way a student would interact with a web-video player featuring a biology step-by-step video is different from how a student would interact with a web-video featuring a home economics step-by-step video. I remain excited for what lies ahead: TV and Internet media channel convergence is around the corner, and this will significantly assist adoption of video as a learning tool.

Luis F. Corzo
Founder and VP Marketing
www.doflick.com

Just as we in Denver successfully completed 10 months of tough negotiations with our teachers union, the issue of Education Next with Jacob Vigdor’s article (“Scrap the Sacrosanct Salary Schedule,” features, Fall 2008) dropped into my mailbox. After all the cross-table arguing, I found it a relief to read someone who got it. He offered the basic policy rationale for what we had spent the last 10 months working on.

Vigdor’s case is as elegant as algebra: Raise entry pay. Decrease the size of salary increases teachers earn in the latter half of their careers. Change the way you manage the workforce. Start salaries high enough to attract the highest performers and reduce rewards for experience and for additional degrees and licenses, which have little demonstrable value on teacher effectiveness. How hard can it be?

Teacher leader Greg Ahrnsbrak, who helped organize Denver Teachers for Change, made an astute observation, “As a union, we’ve wanted to pay more teachers more money earlier in their career for as long as I can remember. We call it schedule compression. But we haven’t learned the obvious. You can’t front-load and back-load at the same time.”

The trade-off is easier when, as Vigdor points out, you take defined benefit pensions into account. In the last 10 years of their career, teachers earn as much per year in accrued pension benefits as they do in salary. Pension works as an extraordinary incentive to stay on during these years. Any late-career teacher has a gut sense for what each year is worth.

Vigdor may be a little too quick to press the easy button when he imagines making a rational pay system a reality. You need the revenue. Fortunately, in Denver voters have approved the money to cover the cost of ProComp. You need union leaders who acknowledge the long-term value of making a tough choice. In Denver, union members supported the trade-off that union leaders were resisting. And there are tough policy issues—teacher turnover, measurement of teacher effectiveness, varying teacher career paths, variable pay and incentives—that must be addressed in a comprehensive compensation package. Had we neglected these issues, the successful revision of ProComp would have been much harder to achieve.

Vigdor’s recommendations come as a breath of fresh air, even if it is after the fact to all of us in Denver. He points to a reasonable compromise that, with will, revenue, and a sense of opportunity, can be accomplished.

Brad Jupp
Senior Academic Policy Advisor
Denver Public Schools

California Home Schooling

We read with great interest your legal beat article on the California home-schooling case (“Home Schoolers Strike Back,” Fall 2008). After the article was published, the California Court of Appeal for the Second Appellate District reversed its earlier ruling, which said that parents must be certified teachers before they can educate their own children at home, and recognized home schooling as a legal “species” of private school education. This is one of the most significant rulings in the history of the home-school movement. If the court had upheld its previous ruling, it would have effectively banned home schooling in California and overruled the clear intent of the California legislature.

We hope that this decision will encourage home schoolers across the country. Relatively few states have restrictive home-schooling laws, and hopefully this decision, and the attention it brought to home schooling, will prove to be a significant step toward home-schooling freedom for everyone.

James R. Mason III
Senior Counsel
Home School Legal Defense Association

Student Incentives Work

I celebrate Professor Kirabo Jackson’s article (“Cash for Test Scores,” research, Fall 2008). It corroborates and extends my evaluation of the Advanced Placement Incentive Program carried out for the O’Donnell Foundation, which pioneered the program. Beginning with the 1990–91 school year, the foundation paid students $100 for each passing Advanced Placement examination score in English, calculus, statistics, computer science, biology, chemistry, and physics, plus a reimbursement for the cost of taking the exam. The program also provided a $2,500 stipend to each teacher undergoing training to teach advanced courses in these subjects. Teachers received $100 for each passing AP examination score their students earned.

In the nine participating Dallas schools, sharply increasing numbers of boys and girls of all major ethnic groups took and passed the AP exams. The number of passing students rose more than twelvefold from 41 the year before the program began to 521 when it ended in 1994–95. After termination, the program continued to have carry-over effects: in the 1996–97 school year, 442 students passed, about 11 times more than the number in the year before the program began. Interviews with students, teachers, and college admission officers revealed high regard for the program.

Using a much larger sample and sophisticated statistical methods, Professor Jackson substantially extends these findings and shows higher SAT and ACT scores and percentages of students going to college as a result of the program. He points out that at least nine western states have implemented similar incentive programs.

Incentives appear to work in schools as they do in other aspects of life. The lack of incentives in school seems an important reason students find academics so boring and sports so exciting. Though not all incentives are monetary, rational people require reasons to work hard.

Herbert J. Walberg
Distinguished Visiting Fellow
Hoover Institution
Stanford University

The Value of Discipline

I commend David Whitman for his article (“An Appeal to Authority,” features, Fall 2008) calling attention to an intriguing, comparatively new genre of public schools that are registering impressive academic gains with inner-city, mostly minority students. The schools he writes about set high expectations, demand much of their students academically, and maintain tight order so that the atmosphere does not careen out of control. In my mind, what is truly distinctive about these schools is how deeply invested they are in fostering the social development of their students, many of whom are reared in homes and communities that are dysfunctional and unsupportive in ways that undermine the youngsters’ ability to function well in school, much less in life.

For more than three decades I have been fascinated by the lessons that can be drawn from the military to strengthen the academic and, yes, social skills of youngsters who are struggling in school and in life. When I served as vice president of the Rockefeller Foundation in the late 1980s, I proposed to the head of the National Guard that the Guard establish a quasi-military youth corps for high school dropouts. The Guard enthusiastically embraced the concept and in 1992 launched what is now known as the National Guard Youth ChalleNGe Program. Since its inception, more than 80,000 youngsters have completed the 5 1/2-month residential phase of the program, registering average gains of 1.5grades in reading and 2.2 grades in math.

My main quarrel with Whitman concerns nomenclature. Just as I often labor to explain that “military” means far more than discipline, so the term “paternalism” obscures the robust commitment the schools Whitman touts have to the academic and social development of their students. The ChalleNGe Program addresses the needs of the whole adolescent, as evidenced by its eight core components: leadership/followership; academic excellence (i.e., high school diplomas or GED certificates); responsible citizenship; service to the community; life coping skills; physical fitness; health and hygiene; and job skills.

I have one final quibble. Whitman focuses, for perfectly legitimate reasons, on the benefits of so-called paternalistic schools for urban, minority students. The fact that nearly half of the former high school dropouts who join ChalleNGe are white shows that a broad swath of America’s teenagers would profit from a healthy dose of academic and social development.

Hugh B. Price
Visiting Professor
Woodrow Wilson School
Princeton University

Classrooms for the Future

In painting all initiatives that include mass distribution of computers in schools with the same broad brush stroke, Clayton Christensen and Michael Horn (“How Do We Transform Our Schools?” features, Summer 2008) risk dismissing the kind of true innovations that are occurring in Pennsylvania’s classrooms.

Over the last two years, Pennsylvania’s Classrooms for the Future program has put 100,000 laptops on student desks in high school English, math, science, and social studies classrooms. But Classrooms for the Future is not a technology initiative; it is a strategy to transform classroom instruction.

Professional development, not the technology itself, is the key to success for the Classrooms for the Future program. Teachers receive two days of hands-on training and then participate in a minimum of 30 hours of additional professional development on mandated content each year. Training is conducted onsite via a teacher coach, online in facilitated courses, and in regional meetings of participating districts. The role of the coach is to support teachers to effectively integrate the laptops and other equipment into their daily lessons.

Only because we have focused so heavily on improving instruction is Classrooms for the Future working. An independent evaluation of the program’s first few months found that teachers spent significantly less time simply lecturing and more time working with small groups of students and interacting with individual students, and that there was significant change in the nature of assignments given to students toward “real-world, hands-on projects.”

The students in America’s classrooms are members of the Technology Generation, and either we will find ways to teach them on their terms, or we could lose them altogether. In Pennsylvania, we are seizing the opportunity of introducing new technology to transform classroom instruction. The two must go hand in hand if we are going to have an impact on the one thing that matters: increasing student achievement.

Gerald L. Zahorchak
Secretary of Education
Commonwealth of Pennsylvania

Clay Christensen and Michael Horn’s essay (“How Do We Transform Our Schools?” features, Summer 2008) has a plaintive quality to it. Their argument about disruptive innovation is compelling in a for-profit setting, not so in elementary and secondary schools, which are positively hostile to innovation, nondisruptive as well as disruptive. It makes no difference whether the schools in question are public or private, not-for-profit or for-profit. They all look and act the same. Why? The culture: in the things that matter—organization, administration, curriculum, teaching, and learning—they are all cut from the same cloth.

Consider entrepreneurial behavior for a moment. It requires incentives (to think as an entrepreneur) and rewards (to behave as an entrepreneur). Neither exists in elementary and secondary schooling. To the contrary, schools are positively hostile to entrepreneurship, the key condition for successful innovation of any kind. What is more likely than a disruptive technology in the schools is a disruptive technology that end-runs the schools: indeed, all the things that kids like about technology—games, Facebook, texting, PDAs, cell phones, smaller and smaller computers, 24/7 uncensored web access—are off-limits in schools.

The authors’ conjecture about the “commercial system” in the U.S. beginning with the “writing of concepts in textbooks” reveals more than they perhaps intended. Made possible by Gutenberg and invented by Jan Comenius (The Great Didactic), the textbook was the technology that made mass education possible (and has come to symbolize the anti-intellectualism that is the hallmark of American schools). Wikis, collaborative web sites for storing and sharing data, may be the ultimate disruptive technology, spelling both the emblematic and literal end of the textbook, an event to be devoutly welcomed and applauded.

Denis P. Doyle
Co-founder and Chief Academic Officer
SchoolNet, Inc.

The Governator

Daniel Weintraub’s chronicle of the tortured path of education politics under Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger (“No Country for Strong Men,” features, Summer 2008) hints at the frustration surrounding the death of the Year of Education Reform in California, but it fails to reach the obvious conclusion: if the “Governator” cannot do it, nobody is likely to do it—now or in the future.

The backdrop of current California education politics is a $2 million set of studies that convincingly argue that the system is the problem. The studies conclude that virtually any amount of added funding is likely to be swallowed up without a trace of improvement in student achievement and without significant changes in the rules, regulations, and incentives. Based on those studies, the governor’s own commission, of which I am a member, called for an array of interlocking changes that would break school districts free to deal with California students mired at the bottom of state rankings on the National Assessment of Educational Progress.

Governor Schwarzenegger, because of his immense personal power and because he became governor without the usual strings attached to California politicians going through the primary process, stands in a unique position to move the schools forward. But it appears that even he finds the task of securing the future for California children to be too difficult. If that doesn’t change, California will fuel its economy with imported workers from other states and countries, because California schools simply are not preparing students for a dynamic, skills-based labor market.

Stories of education politics always have their punch lines centered on which of the named combatants wins. The stories are grounded in the battles over propositions, budgets, and the like. And, they find it easy to ignore the real losers—the students.

Eric Hanushek
Senior Fellow
Hoover Institution
Stanford University

Daniel Weintraub’s article is an excellent overview of Schwarzenegger’s limited vision and impact on K–12 education. Just when the governor appeared ready to think hard about new concepts, an $18 billion budget deficit appeared. When there was money, in 2006, the governor and legislature created more than 20 small-widget categorical programs rather than addressing fundamental problems. They spent all the new money rather than saving it for years when state economic growth slows.

But my conclusion from his speeches and discussions is that the governor hopes his proposals for larger system change will trickle down to education. He is relying on voter initiatives for legislative redistricting and saving money from good revenue years. Redistricting may produce more legislators who are moderates and not as beholden to interest groups. Health care, however, is his top priority, so even these initiatives may never touch education.

The education coalition will not permit real policy change without a lot of new money. The coalition is more than teachers unions and includes school boards, administrators, PTAs, and noncertified employees represented by several different unions, including the Service Employees International Union (SEIU). Governor Schwarzenegger has no coalition that can overcome this alliance, with its proven pressure tactics that include student demonstrations. So the best strategy is to wait for economic conditions to improve and try to put together a deal that has more money and real reform. This approach has not been implemented since 1983, and this governor is term-limited in 2010.

Michael W. Kirst
Professor Emeritus
Stanford University

Reading First

Shep Barbash has done a masterful job of explaining the goals of the Reading First program and its journey through periods of legislative gymnastics, controversy, and success in selected states (“Looking Beyond the Reading First Controversy,” features, Summer 2008). Barbash has underscored the unique nontraditional features of the program and how those features made both acceptance of the program and its implementation difficult. His analysis is timely given the recent Reading First Impact Study, which will no doubt provide fuel for gutting the program.

The need to design and implement a rigorous impact study was essential to the improvement of the evidence-based Reading First program. That is why Bob Sweet and I included evaluation targets in the law and substantial funds ($25 million) to address the targets. However, for this interim report, few evaluation tasks were completed, including the determination of which instructional materials improve reading proficiency. Unless the final report addresses this issue, it will not be possible to identify which programs and materials were most beneficial for which children and under what conditions.

The Department of Education was provided the resources to reduce misinterpretation of the study’s findings, positive or negative. Yet it delayed the evaluation by using a research design that was not originally intended, potentially limiting an analysis of factors essential to valid interpretation. Evaluations are about accountability and improvement. Improvement is difficult if you have to guess what the data mean.

Barbash’s review of Reading First programs in four states and in the Bureau of Indian Education is important because it highlights critical factors essential to reading improvement: strong leadership, effective professional development for teachers and principals, data-driven differentiated instruction, specific coaching and guidance to ensure implementation fidelity, and continuous program evaluation. Barbash has vividly described why change in education is so hard, but has given us examples of states and systems achieving the almost impossible on behalf of struggling readers. That is a real contribution.

G. Reid Lyon
Professor of Educational Leadership and Policy
Southern Methodist University

Wrong Numbers

William Howell and Martin West have written an interesting article about Americans’ utter ignorance concerning the amounts their tax dollars contribute to public education costs (“Is the Price Right?” features, Summer 2008). While homeowners and parents were somewhat more knowledgeable than others, they too were way off in their estimates of per-pupil expenditures in their districts and average teacher salaries in their states. Yet the vast majority of Americans support increased spending on schools and believe that more money will result in more student learning.

It is humbling for us policy wonks to see how far off the public is about not only their investments in public schooling, but what might make a difference in student outcomes. But frankly, I’m more concerned about the taxpayers’ and the pollsters’ lack of interest in the unfairness of how the nation’s only universal service is funded. Every level of government—local, state, and federal—underfunds the least well-off communities, with few exceptions, when considering varying student needs generated by poverty, disability, and language. Clearly, major efforts to educate the public are going to be necessary if school financing is ever to become fairer as well as wiser. We have learned that how money is spent is just as important as the amount. And given the lack of knowledge about funding, I shudder to think what a survey would show about what the money buys.

But are Americans any more informed about how their taxes and tax breaks work in other sectors, with the likely exception of the war in Iraq? Homeowners deduct mortgages and lower-income renters get virtually no help. We provide much more support to the elderly than we do to young children. Even the pinch of high health-care costs has not yet generated a successful public demand for more government investment. My hunch is that the public’s knowledge of school funding is no less than their knowledge of other important funding issues.

Cynthia G. Brown
Director of Education Policy
Center for American Progress

A Matter of Time

We read with great interest the article by Caroline Hoxby and Sonali Murarka, which reports promising results from their randomized-control study of New York City charter school students (“New York City Charter Schools,” research, Summer 2008). One aspect of their research in particular caught our eye: the association of more school time with improved learning outcomes. Their finding that a longer year (and in many schools, a longer day, too) correlates to higher student proficiency rates is yet another indication that the traditional school calendar in the U.S. is not sufficient if we are going to meet our goal of moving all students to, at minimum, academic proficiency.

At least one-third of charter schools across the country operate with an expanded schedule. In Illinois and New Jersey, 80 percent of charter schools have a longer school day or year or both. At the newly formed National Center on Time & Learning, we are firm believers that more time can improve student learning because, like Hoxby and Murarka, we have seen it work. In Massachusetts, 18 urban district schools have added at least 300 hours to their school calendar. An analysis after one year of the initiative (involving 10 schools) showed that students in these schools outpaced average proficiency gains in the state in math, science, and English language arts. Our research suggests that an expanded school schedule offers a multitude of educational benefits, including more time on task, a broader array of enrichment programs to engage students in school, and time for teachers to participate in real collaborative planning and additional professional development.

This year we mark the 25th anniversary of A Nation at Risk. That report outlined four key recommendations concerning educational content, expectations, teachers, and time, noting that progress on each of these fronts would require leadership and fiscal support. We can point to important federal and state progress on all the recommendations, except for time. Only Massachusetts has a statewide initiative to assist traditional public schools in expanding school schedules. Now that Hoxby and Murarka’s charter school data and the Massachusetts initiative show such promising results, we are hopeful that “time” will finally take its rightful place in our country’s education reform lineup.

Jennifer Davis
President

David Farbman
Co-Director of Research
National Center on Time & Learning

Charters as a Diverse Sector

Charter schools are too often treated as a monolithic reform and too rarely treated as a diverse sector. When we think of charter schools as a reform, we tend to either praise or criticize, depending on the particular snapshot of charter schools we’re discussing. When we think of them as a sector, we understand that charter schools mirror other sectors—private schools and traditional publics—in their range of quality and outcomes. And we can learn from their successes and failures.

Viewed from this sector perspective, your two charter school articles (“Brand-Name Charters,” features, and “New York City Charter Schools,” research, Summer 2008) offer valuable contributions. From a reform perspective? Not so much.

The article about franchise charter schools describes a vibrant subsector. It explores the problem of growing beyond a small number of successful schools while simultaneously addressing quality control. Where the article runs into trouble is when it tells readers, with no empirical backing, that the charter movement began “with tremendous potential for narrowing the achievement gap,” suggesting that there are “too few” charter schools to fulfill that promise. In truth, research has shown charter performance to be similar, on average, to the performance of traditional public schools.

The second article offers a more direct comparison of charters to other public schools, using a random lottery design. The results add one more data point to the diverse assortment of studies about charter performance: an example of the charter sector outperforming, on the whole, nearby traditional schools. The comparison here, it should be noted, is to New York City schools that have been criticized as underfunded and underperforming. The study thus tells us either that the charters did well, the other schools did poorly, or a combination of both.

The authors are careful to state that the significance of the findings is limited to large cities with similar student populations, to which I would add a caution about the generalizability beyond New York City itself. As with the first article, the second is strongest when it approaches charters as a diverse sector, teasing out the sorts of school practices associated with higher test scores. Let’s keep trying to learn about what works.

Kevin G. Welner
Education and the Public Interest Center
University of Colorado at Boulder

We take the essence of Eric Hanu­shek’s article (“Pseudo Science and a Sound Basic Education,” check the facts, Fall 2005) to be that existing means for appraising “adequate” school financing levels are, at best, inexact, and when in the hands of irresponsible advocates, often result simply in “junk science.”

Perhaps surprising to some readers, the principals of Management Analysis & Planning (MAP) concur with his thesis.

Indeed, in several articles published elsewhere, we have stated that in pursuing the doctrine of “adequacy,” the judicial system has far outstripped the capacity of social science to provide precise and verifiable answers.

How much does it take to enable a student from economically disadvantaged circumstances to achieve statespecified learning standards in mathematics, science, or language arts? What should high-school class sizes be? What are the characteristics of an effective teacher, one who achieves superior student outcomes?

Frankly, anyone who claims to know with certainty the answers to these crucial questions is usually an unabashed advocate for more money for schools and has little respect for policy analysis or research. We believe that qualified professionals who have demonstrated success providing instruction to diverse student populations can apply their knowledge to the discussion about what programs and processes are more likely to produce desired student outcomes. For that MAP offers no apologies. However, when professional judgment panel results are misused, that is indeed a problem, and it is in such circumstances Hanushek’s argument deserves attention.

MAP has never claimed, in any of its adequacy studies, to have determined the amount below which expenditures are inadequate. We always offer estimates for policymakers to consider given assumptions specified in the analytic and estimation exercises. We had no control over how New York referees would use the report and its findings. We share Professor Hanushek’s concern that the referees apparently relied on a bottom-line estimate without considering the assumptions and methodology underlying that estimate. Had they done so they would have discovered several assumptions and statistical procedures that served to inflate the estimate, but about which reasonable experts could disagree.

That said, Professor Hanushek’s thesis falls a bit shy, and here is why.

Professor Hanushek’s criticisms of the voodoo science of professional judgment and successful schools models of adequacy analysis, though justified when they are used to determine “the” number, lead then to reliance upon another analytic technique, cost-function analysis. But that, when applied by economists to the circumstances in New York, called for even more money than any of the professional judgment analyses specified.

In many ways, AIR/MAP (American Institutes for Research) figures were the median of all estimates if one includes those produced by William Duncombe and John Yinger of Syracuse. The latter use a cost-function analysis and claim to incorporate “efficiency” into their estimation models. Thus criticisms of the professional judgment studies without addressing cost-function estimates leave Hanushek’s arguments incomplete and open to even higher estimates by advocates relying upon econometric methods.

MAP acknowledges and, when provided with an opportunity, has always insisted that any infusion of additional school money should be accompanied by other systemic reforms, including stronger accountability for school failure with an emphasis on performance above all else, changes in antiquated systems (for example, single-salary schedules), and a stronger focus on evaluations to determine success and failure of programs and individuals. We realize that money by itself is not an answer to the nation’s education challenges.

Professor Hanushek does not declare how much money is the “right” amount for New York. That is good. He should not. No one knows the “right” amount. However, one can know the right process. The right process is to provide the political system with the best advice one can and then let the deliberative dynamics of representative government take hold.

James R. Smith
President
James W. Guthrie
Chairman, Management Analysis
and Planning, Inc.

Eric Hanushek replies: The MAP principals underscore a fundamental problem that runs throughout the use of costing-out studies, in New York and elsewhere. School finance policy is politics, in both the good and bad sense of the term. While science may provide guidance on some aspects of the problem, the costing-out studies are not scientific in the traditional sense. Even so, partisans in the dispute distort and misuse those studies under the banner of science. The authors, even with the best of intentions, unleash a process that they cannot control—and at least in this case, seem dismayed by.

As Smith and Guthrie point out, other methods have now found their way into the costing-out world, including the cost-function method. (Still another is the “state of the art” or evidence-based method.) Although they did not play a prominent role in the CFE judgment, such models have been introduced in a number of other state court cases and legislative deliberations. As Smith and Guthrie indicate, these alternatives are no better than the professional judgment or successful schools approaches—and may be worse in important dimensions.

It is clear, though, why costing-out studies are almost always commissioned by partisans in the school finance debates. Courts and legislatures are not going to make any nuanced use of them, but instead tend to extract a number, paint it as science, and use it for their purposes. Think alchemy, not science.

North Carolina Charters

Renowned pollster George Gallup once referred to data gathering this way: “Not everything that can be counted counts; and not everything that counts can be counted.” This comment is apropos to any discussion of charter school research, especially recent findings from Robert Bifulco and Helen Ladd (“Results from the Tar Heel State,” research, Fall 2005). Their study, sharply critical of North Carolina charter schools, is flawed and fails to “count” what matters most to parents and students.

The authors conclude that charter schools negatively affect performance, and that the public interest is not “well-served” by these schools. Consider, though, that only students who either entered a charter school after 4th grade, or exited a charter school before 8th grade, were included in their main analysis. This means that longer-term charter-school attendees (and, presumably, those students deriving the greatest benefit from these schools, since they stayed put) were excluded. In addition, the data used to assess performance came from state end-of-grade tests measuring knowledge of state curriculum—a seemingly obvious bias against innovative charter schools exercising their freedom to employ alternative curricula.

Bifulco and Ladd’s data also differ from recent Department of Public Instruction statistics. In 2004–05, 63 percent of regular North Carolina charter schools made adequate yearly progress under federal accountability guidelines, compared with just 58 percent of traditional public schools. Charter schools were also more likely to earn the label “school of excellence” than traditional public schools (33 percent compared to 24 percent).

And what about those intangibles that aren’t easily “counted”? Charter schools (and choice programs) empower parents—not school boards—with the freedom to select the best school for their child. In the final analysis, Bifulco and Ladd’s study demonstrates what parents have known all along: no one school can possibly meet the needs of all students, be it public, private, or charter. But charter schools do provide valuable and much-needed options, often to poor and disenfranchised families who cannot afford private school tuition. Doesn’t it make sense to let parents be the ultimate arbiters of whether their interests are “well-served” by charter schools?

Lindalyn Kakadelis
Director, North Carolina
Education Alliance

Bifulco and Ladd’s negative conclusion about North Carolina charters is much less certain than it appears. For instance, despite their finding that students in charters make less academic progress than students in regular public schools, enrollment in N.C. charter schools persists, and grows.

It’s also troubling that the negative effect of charters that they report depends upon charter age. My research shows that the apparent negative effect of charters in their third year, or older, was small—.01 to .03 standard deviations—and in some instances insignificant. I also find that the negative effect varied by grade level: larger for 3rd through 5th graders and statistically insignificant for 6th through 8th graders.

The authors also tout their method as addressing the problem of self-selection. It does, but at a cost. The method can mislead unless we understand why students enter charters and why students leave. Some students enter because they are having difficulty in the regular public schools, difficulty that continues to affect them, even worsen, while attending charters. As for students leaving charters, charters may simply not be a good fit for everybody. No doubt some students leave Ivy League colleges and do better elsewhere. Does that mean the Ivy League schools are teaching poorly?

Finally, the effect of charters on students who leave is likely a worst-case estimate; it should be complemented by one comparing the academic growth of students who stay in charters with the effect of students who stay in regular public schools. My research finds that math-score growth for North Carolina students who stay in charters is not significantly different from students who stay in regular public schools; reading-score growth is higher, significantly so, for students staying four or five consecutive years.

Craig Newmark
Associate Professor of Economics
North Carolina State University

Bifulco and Ladd reply: We agree with Ms. Kakadelis that test scores don’t count for everything. At the same time, they clearly matter, especially in a state such as North Carolina that has long had a statewide course of study and a set of state tests aligned with that curriculum. Given that state taxes are used to pay for charter schools, the public has a valid interest in the extent to which the students in those schools are meeting state achievement goals.

Like Kakadelis, we support the idea of more schooling options, especially for students in low-income families. We differ, however, in wanting those new options to be as effective in promoting student achievement, at least on average, as the traditional public schools. Our study indicates that North Carolina charter schools are not meeting that standard.

Newmark, whose own detailed study of North Carolina charter schools also finds negative achievement effects, suggests our results are misleading because students who choose charter schools may be on a downward achievement trajectory before they switch to a charter school. The full version of our paper reports an additional test to rule out this hypothesis.

Bloomberg’s revolution

Sol Stern’s “An Education Revolution That Never Was” (forum, Fall 2005) is neither forthright about education in New York City nor informed about education generally, as his use of sources and data makes evident.

He quotes a teacher alleging that she was punished for asking “uncomfortable questions” during training, for example. He neglects to mention the thousands of teachers who applaud our professional development. Nor does he mention that we have had more teacher applications than ever before.

On our alleged unwillingness to use phonics-centered reading programs, Stern quotes the developer of one such program whose $27 million contract with the city was discontinued. Stern notes that this reading program helped raise scores in the city’s lowest-performing schools in the 1990s. But he fails to mention that the program was part of an intensive effort to improve these schools that included a vast infusion of additional resources, including teachers for class-size reduction, capping of enrollment, coaches, administrators, and restructuring—elements of our reform for all schools. And Stern doesn’t take issue with improved test scores unless they are our scores—which represent the greatest gains in memory.

Stern’s fixed idea about the teaching of phonics obscures the central point in our curriculum reforms: phonics is essential to reading instruction, but it is not the only essential skill. Anyone who has taught children knows this at least intuitively. As even a brief visit to our web site indicates, the New York public schools offer a rich and diverse menu of reading programs and interventions for its students. We tailor offerings to a student’s needs: not all children need a fortified diet of phonics, but those who do, get it.

Stern also fails to mention how some of our early critics are now our supporters—experts who criticized our phonics component in 2003 (his sole point of reference) have been partners and advisors in the intervention strategies we have designed with help from special-education consultant Dr. Eileen Marzola.

We value the experience and the different strengths of our teachers. We understand the potential and the strengths of our students. That is why we have a curriculum and interventions that allow for nuance, creativity, critical thinking, and academic rigor. The results show it.

Carmen Farina
Deputy Chancellor for
Teaching and Learning
New York City Department of Education

Sol Stern replies: Ms. Farina writes that “thousands of teachers applaud our professional development.” How does she know? The DOE has never asked the teachers for their opinion. She claims that the Success for All phonics program was only “part” of the reason for academic improvement in the lowest scoring schools. Again, how does she know? Her department didn’t study SFA’s relative contribution before it recklessly ditched the program. She says some “early critics” have become supporters, but only cites someone who’s on the DOE payroll. All of which highlights one of the main points of my article: namely, that we need an independent research agency to evaluate DOE operations and claims of success. Otherwise, all we have is spin from a mayoral agency dedicated to getting the boss reelected.

Private Schools for the Poor

James Tooley (“Private Schools for the Poor,” features, Fall 2005) reports widespread existence of private schools in five poor countries—India, Ghana, Kenya, Nigeria, and (to a lesser extent) China—and addresses two common “myths” about such schooling: that “private education for the poor does not exist” and that “private education for the poor is low quality.”

Evidence for debunking the first myth already existed nearly a decade ago. Several studies found that even the poorest households in India and Pakistan use private schools extensively. Tooley’s contribution is to extend the South Asian evidence to countries in Africa and to test it in communist China.

His findings also add to the evidence base on the second myth: namely, that, in several developing countries, private school students outperform their public-school counterparts after controlling for schools’ student-intakes. Thus the article helps to build a fuller picture of private and public schools for the poor in developing countries and adds to existing knowledge.

However, I believe that Tooley’s concern that public intervention crowds out private initiative in education is not well placed. First, the evidence adduced for such a trade-off is weak. Second, surely one should not lament parents’ abandonment of private for public schools when fees are abolished in the latter. It is a welfare-maximizing choice parents make in light of information about their circumstances, which is far more information than that available to the analyst.

While agreeing with Tooley that private schools tend to provide better-quality education (as I also found in a 1996 study I conducted), I would be more cautious and nuanced about the policy implications. Tooley advocates reform programs that support private initiative with government support, such as voucher schemes and charter schools. From colonial times, India has used a charter-like system of publicly funded, privately produced education; such private-public partnerships are called “aided” schools. However, evidence from Uttar Pradesh, India, suggests that such schools are just as ineffective and poorly resourced as public schools.

Thus private ownership per se may not be the key. Other attendant factors are also crucial: whether there are performance criteria or incentives built in to the formula for government aid (there are none in India); how much central oversight the government provides (a great deal in India); and to what extent the government is able to resist demands from aided-school teachers to be granted the same employment and other arrangements as those existing for public school teachers.

In Uttar Pradesh, militantly organized aided-school teachers’ unions have demanded and successfully obtained treatment comparable to that received by public school teachers. Over time, aided schools have become very similar to public schools in terms of level of teachers’ salaries, school resources, centralized administration,  salary disbursement, teacher appointment procedures, and student achievement outcomes. Aided-school teachers are no longer locally accountable. This example encourages caution in assuming that private delivery of publicly funded education is a panacea. A good deal of thought may be necessary about the design of incentives in the grant to such schools and on how to keep “private”truly private by resisting demands from vested interests to make such schools more like public schools.

Geeta Kingdon
Research Officer, Centre for
the Study of African Economies
University of Oxford

Peter Meyer (“Can Catholic Schools Be Saved?” features, Spring 2007) left us with plenty of challenging questions about the future of Catholic schools. At their peak in 1964, Catholic schools enrolled approximately 5 million students and served about 52 percent of Catholic school-age children. Currently, about 2.5 million are enrolled, including less than 18 percent of Catholic school-age children. Private education enrollment as a whole increased by 18 percent from 1988 to 2001 and is predicted to grow another 7 percent by 2013. Public school enrollment increased by 19 percent during the same period and will rise another 4 percent by 2013. Just what are most Catholic families telling us?

Should we accept the “simple” answer that it is all about the cost? Consider that in 1960 Catholic elementary schools enrolled 89 percent of the private school students in the United States. By 2000 that number had slipped to 49 percent! By contrast, comparably priced conservative Christian schools had a 46 percent increase in enrollment between 1989 and 2003. This represents 75 percent of the total private school increase during that period. Why are Christian-school parents making this commitment for their children while most Catholic parents are not?

What are our prospects? Catholic school tuition rates skyrocket, aging buildings require major repair, and parish subsidies shrink (from 63 percent in 1969 to 28 percent in 1994). Meanwhile, Catholics migrate farther from the city and build their new “villages” complete with well-resourced but free public schools. We need to collaborate on a bold transition to more affordable and better resourced Catholic schools supported in large part by those who have benefited from their own Catholic-school experience.

We are running out of time for many Catholic schools. Judging by the past 40 years, we can realistically conclude that Catholic schools in the United States are indeed reaching their “twilight” as Andrew Greeley said a decade ago. Can the Church agree on a more-focused mission and collaborative strategy for Catholic schools especially regarding whom we wish to serve? Unless we do, Catholic schools are destined to complete their journey to a slow death.

Theodore J. Wallace
Career educator and Catholic schools consultant

Peter Meyer’s article invoked vivid memories of my own high school days in northern Michigan, where I attended a very small K–12 Catholic school. After a recent teachers’ meeting on how the new student handbook should address plagiarism and cheating, I was reminded that “back in the day” there were few problems with this issue. Administrators and school boards were adamant: “You cheat, you’re done!”

Another reason there was little “copying” was the ever-vigilant eyes of the nuns, who seemed to be right there, always, looking for cheaters and sinners. They really did have rulers and other weapons of mass humiliation tucked under the folds of their black habits, believe me. If a student’s eyes roamed for any reason away from the paper being used, one of the weapons was smacked firmly on the desk as a reminder and, if a second reminder was needed, squarely on the hand.

The other deterrent to cheating was the demerit card. Roughly the size of a credit card, it had numbers up to 50 on one side and rules and demeritable offenses on the other. Tardy to class, 3 demerits; not having your homework, 5 demerits; not wearing the proper attire, 3 demerits; swearing (depending on the choice word or phrase), 5 to 7 demerits; teasing classmates, 2 demerits; pranks, 7 to 15 demerits (depending if they were meant to hurt someone or not); and cheating, 10 to 50 demerits. Accumulating 51 demerits meant you were expelled, no questions asked.

A few years ago I wrote to my English instructor, Sister Joan (now retired), that I too had become an English teacher, and although I might have complained and was probably a pain in the neck, I really had a marvelous language arts background due to the days spent in her class. She wrote back a couple of days later: “Dear Richard: God does have a sense of humor, doesn’t he? God bless you.”

Rick Fowler
Harbor Springs, Michigan

Teacher Dispositions

Laurie Moses Hines (“Return of the Thought Police?” research, Spring 2007) is surely right: present-day “dispositions” standards have their roots in much earlier efforts to measure and mold the “personality” of the American teacher. But Hines’s otherwise superb analysis misses one very important difference between the two campaigns. During the Cold War period, personality testing aimed quite explicitly at locating and even at cultivating Americans who stood near the “average” in every respect, especially in their politics. Social critic William H. Whyte captured this cautious, middle-of-the-road spirit in his 1956 classic, The Organization Man, which contained a semisatirical set of instructions for “How to Cheat on a Personality Test.” When in doubt, Whyte advised, test-takers should say or write, “I like things pretty well the way they are.” And whenever a political question arose, they should seek to sound “conservative,” but not too much so. “To go to either extreme earns you a bad score,” Whyte cautioned, “but in most situations you should resolve any doubts…by deciding in favor of the accepted.”

Fast-forward to our current emphasis upon “dispositions,” and you’ll see how much things have changed. As Hines deftly shows, we continue to focus on the psychic interior of the prospective teacher. But the traits that we expect, indeed, that we demand, are completely different. Whereas the midcentury teacher was asked to hew closely to a happily patriotic version of America, the present-day instructor must critique its “racism, sexism, homophobia, and classism,” to quote one ed school web site. And if you think the students aren’t listening, come visit during my office hours one day. A few years ago, a student strolled in and asked, quite casually, if I “buy” the “NYU line on bilingual education.” Unaware that universities took official stances on contentious political questions, I asked what that “line” might be. But we both knew. “Bilingual education is a good thing,” the student said, smiling. “And people who oppose it are racists.” During the Cold War, especially, we promoted a bland, flag-waving nationalism; today, we emphasize “power” and “privilege” and “oppression.” But it’s still indoctrination, not education, because we continue to judge students based on how well they echo our own political dispositions. Talk about an abuse of power and privilege!

Jonathan Zimmerman
Professor of education and history
New York University

In her excellent essay, Laurie Moses Hines raises some provocative questions about the current use of disposition assessments in schools of education. Yet despite Hines’s careful attention to historical antecedents, her examination of origins remains incomplete.

First, Hines locates the origins of personality testing in the immediate post–World War II era. While it is true that Life magazine declared the 1950s the “age of psychology,” the genesis of mass psychological testing dated back to World War I and the 1920s. The main driver behind the spread of personality tests was bureaucratization: of American business firms; of the modern military; and, most germane to this discussion, of the American public school. Like business and military leaders, school officials turned to the new science of psychology to bring order to their rapidly expanding institutions. Testing teachers and students using psychological tools proved indispensable in an organizational culture that no longer lent itself to face-to-face contact and interactions.

Hines also argues that it was the ideology of educational progressivism that fueled the spread of personality assessments throughout the education profession. But to suggest that “the policing of teacher personality” stemmed solely from educational progressivism is to obscure the more complex origins and outcomes of personality testing in modern American life. Personality assessments have been, and continue to be, administered to millions of Americans each year. Future doctors, lawyers, firefighters, service industry employees, Catholic priests, and even professional athletes are routinely subjected to personality tests as a condition of their employment. To capture the historical significance of disposition assessment requires a broader worldview.

Over the course of the 20th century, some of the most persistent challenges in public education—from the dropout problem in the 1950s, to educational disadvantage in the 1960s, to school discipline in recent years—have been reframed in psychological terms. The current trend of reducing the complex inner lives of potential teachers to a number, a score, indeed a “disposition,” perhaps demands the strictest scrutiny of all.

Catherine Gavin Loss
Charlottesville, Virginia

Laurie Moses Hines explores one of the most sensitive issues facing teacher educators today. She is absolutely right: “those committed to academic freedom [and I assume that this includes both conservatives and liberals] in higher education should be concerned when professional socialization trumps freedom of conscience in teacher education programs.” At a time when civil liberties are too easily trampled, educators need to be vigilant. While I applaud her for wading in where others have not, I want to ask her some questions:

• Why is an emphasis on “social justice” evidence of a left-leaning perspective? I have assumed that my conservative colleagues are equally concerned about justice; we simply disagree about the best way to achieve justice in today’s complex world.

• Does Hines really want future teachers to be judged only on the basis of skill and mastery of content knowledge? Can we ethically give our support to someone who may have great skill and knowledge but who believes that, based on their race or gender, some children are inferior? Hines says that she wants to be sure that we do not support teachers who will do harm to children but she lists drug dealers and child abusers and not people who fundamentally dislike children or do not expect them to succeed.

• Why can’t Hines embrace Susan Fuhrman’s belief that “responsiveness to the diversity of students’ backgrounds and previous experiences” is essential? Skill and content knowledge without this responsiveness is destructive. This is quite a different matter from judging future teachers by whether they agree or disagree with us regarding a particular multicultural curriculum or progressivism in education.

In the end, we teacher educators must balance a deep commitment to the academic freedom of our students, especially students with whom we may profoundly disagree, with an equally deep commitment that those whom we certify will, at minimum, “do no harm.” Perhaps this is a topic where nuance is better than absolutism.

James W. Fraser
Steinhardt School of Education
New York University

Hines responds:

As Professor Loss notes, broader psychological contexts exist and testing predated 1940. My intention, however, was a comparison with current dispositions practice. In the post-1940 era, teacher education attempted to use psychological assessments to police teacher personality and to substitute those for local school administrators’ judgments about teacher selection and behavior.

Teacher education cannot preserve freedom of conscience and speech while at the same time assessing students on their beliefs. As ugly as some beliefs are, in this country individuals have a right to hold them. Because teacher education is not an unbiased adjudicator, it should not police beliefs or behaviors. Character is certainly important, and local school administrators can consider it when making decisions about teacher employment; unlike teacher education faculty, they are accountable to a local community.

I agree with Professor Fraser that liberals and conservatives are “equally concerned” but “simply disagree about the best way to achieve justice.” For this reason, teacher education should abandon dispositions assessment.

As to “Why can’t [I] embrace Susan Fuhrman’s belief,” I do embrace diversity, including diversity of belief. I don’t embrace institutional demands on students to adhere to ideological positions or control mechanisms that are no guarantee of teacher quality, are not openly or fairly adjudicated, and do not reflect moral consensus.

Private Placements

The authors of “Debunking a Special Education Myth” (check the facts, Spring 2007) appear to misinterpret what school officials and education policymakers are saying about the cost of educating all children. Without question, school districts are committed to providing appropriate educational services to all children, including private placements when services cannot be provided by the local schools.

Local school officials aren’t blaming students with disabilities for the need to provide appropriate educational services. They are simply advocating that the real costs of educating all children far exceed the funding that is made available to most local school districts, forcing school officials to make difficult and sometimes unfair choices. After all, it is not unusual for some private placements to cost $100,000 or more. For most any local school district, that’s significant.

At the local level, gaps between what resources are needed and what resources are available are real, and the only options for local school officials are to reduce needed educational programs or needed staff or both. However, given the bittersweet fact that parents of students with disabilities have access to the courts should appropriate educational services not be offered, it seems fairly easy to understand why so many school officials are frustrated and often feel abandoned.

If there is any blame, it is typically directed toward the federal government for reneging on its promises to fund 40 percent of the cost of the average per pupil expenditure; such failed federal promises now total more than $40 billion over the past six years.

Imagine what additional improvements could be made in closing the achievement gap if Congress would close the significant federal funding gap that has existed far too long. We agree that the overall cost of private placement, on average, nationwide constitutes a tiny proportion of the overall cost of public school spending, but that’s not the point.

National School Boards Association
Alexandria, VA

Greene and Winters respond:

The National School Boards Association (NSBA) begins its letter by denying that school officials blame special education and private placement for draining resources from general education and then proceed to repeat the very argument that they deny making. The NSBA letter emphasizes that the cost of special education forces “difficult choices” and compels districts to “reduce needed educational programs.” But the authors provide no data to refute our findings that private placement imposes a trivial financial burden on public schools or that the overall financial burden of special education has not increased over the last three decades. The best they can do is to make the unsubstantiated claim that it is “not unusual for some private placements to cost $100,000 or more” and to blame the federal government for not providing as large a subsidy as they would like. As we documented, expensive private placements are extremely “unusual.” And an increase in the federal subsidy cannot be supported by claiming that special education places a greater financial strain on schools, as the percentage of school revenue devoted to special education has not increased in the last three decades.

Regulating Software

The marketing and procurement practices Todd Oppenheimer describes (“Selling Software,” features, Spring 2007) were in place decades before NCLB. Even 10 years ago, the largest school contracts were with multinational publishers for textbooks. States either made approval a political process or delegated the function to districts. The discretion that legislation granted to districts for purchasing reflected beliefs that administrators would honor their fiduciary obligations to students and that educators were the real experts on curriculum. Student outcomes did not matter quite enough to districts that providers had to demonstrate results.

Now that educational outcomes matter, procurement decisions are critical to school success. Unfortunately, the market is unprepared. Market leaders’ programs lack evidence of efficacy. Administrators lack the capacity to deal with the vast array of providers, products, and services now available. State and local agency heads have not kept up with the state of the art of education science. Evaluation methodology has not advanced far beyond considering whether an intervention will have some effect on some students. Above all, the federal government has neither defined nor enforced NCLB’s requirements that federal funds only be used to purchase programs proven effective through scientifically based research.

But there is good news. Several hundred firms and nonprofits grew up in the last decade because entrepreneurs and venture investors believed that the standards and accountability movement would apply to products and services as well as teachers and administrators. Research and evaluation is built into their offerings. But if they are to compete with entrenched multinational publishers, these emerging school improvement providers will need institutional capital. These funds will flow only when investors see movement to a regulatory environment that rewards program efficacy.

When educators demand better products the market will respond, but government must help. Federal policymakers need to establish a regulatory regime that sets a standard for quality, encourages innovative firms to compete against the historic market leaders, and gives administrators leeway to determine programmatic fit. The secretary of education has the authority to approve the clear, workable definition for scientifically based research that is needed. The real question raised by the Oppenheimer article is why she hasn’t already acted.

Marc Dean Millot
Editor
New Education Economy

Preschool Curriculum

While Dr. Pianta makes some excellent points (“Preschool Is School, Sometimes,” features, Winter 2007), especially related to teacher training and classroom behaviors, I am concerned by his lack of focus on curriculum development and planning. Many excellent teachers have found it difficult to find appropriate materials to teach four-year-olds. I have used a comprehensive planning template to develop most of the materials I use with my four-year-old students from low socioeconomic backgrounds because there are limited “appropriate and challenging” materials available, especially in math, science, and social studies.

While there are a growing number of “comprehensive” curricula, they are often adapted from kindergarten curricula or are built by pulling together components from various companies. According to the National Association for the Education of Young Children, “The National Research Council (2001) warns that such a piecemeal approach can result in a disconnected conglomeration of activities and teaching methods, lacking focus, coherence, or comprehensiveness.” An appropriate planning template can help ensure that preschool curricula align with and are conceptually consistent with other aspects of the program. The template would ensure that the curricula address the needs of individual students by providing a challenging curriculum that encourages creativity and higher-order thinking skills.

While, as Pianta writes, “the science of early education holds considerable promise for further development and scaling up of effective approaches and training and supporting the teachers of our youngest,” curriculum development should not be left out of the discussion. Appropriate planning can enable programs to offer a wide variety of activities that incorporate all the learning domains and take into account appropriate learning theories.

Peter Weilenmann
National Board certified teacher and early childhood generalist
Arlington, Virginia

Teacher Preparation

Authors Kane, Rockoff, and Staiger (“Photo Finish,” research, Winter 2007) did not account for the difference that high-quality teacher preparation makes in teacher performance. They found that alternatively certified and uncertified teachers did less well in producing student achievement initially than did certified teachers, but that most of the differences disappeared by the third year of teaching. As a result, the authors conclude that teacher preparation does not matter. However, most of those uncertified teachers who made it to year three had by then completed their training in a master’s degree program. The authors do not account for the teachers receiving and benefiting from this education and ongoing mentoring. Most of the uncertified teachers in the study who did not enroll in the master’s degree program left after the first or second year of teaching; indeed, only 18 percent remained by year five.

More fine-grained research on the effects of teacher education and certification needs to be conducted. However, there is no evidence to suggest that teachers do not need to be prepared to teach before they begin to teach. Students deserve teachers who know content, how to teach it using different strategies for different learners, and how to use assessment to improve instruction and learning. All of these skills cannot be sufficiently learned in a crash course offered a few weeks before school starts. Furthermore, millions of dollars are wasted in recruiting and orienting new teachers each year, not to mention the tragic effects on students taught by those who do not know how to teach. The United States can take a page from other industrialized nations, where teacher preparation is required and funded adequately.

Arthur E. Wise
President
National Council for Accreditation of Teacher Education

Kane, Rockoff, and Staiger’s findings (“Photo Finish: Certification Doesn’t Guarantee a Winner,” research, Winter 2007), supported by other recent research (including my own), are persuasive in suggesting that certification requirements do little to create or identify effective teachers. The findings might have been strengthened if measures of teacher ability had been included in the analysis, because the alternatively certified teachers in the study, from Teach For America (TFA) and the NYC Teaching Fellows program, represent high-achieving students from the nation’s elite universities. Thus one might interpret the finding of little difference between regularly certified teachers and their more pedigreed peers to show that teacher certification requirements compensate for greater intellect or better overall undergraduate academic preparation.

The wide variation in quality within groups should come as no surprise, though documenting it with sound research is helpful. What is unexpected, and of concern to those who believe recruiting better-quality undergraduates will improve teacher quality, is that by year three the TFA alumni aren’t doing substantially better than their regularly certified counterparts.

This thoughtful research raises important policy questions. Can we do without certification requirements? This study doesn’t answer that question. What we really want to know is how to create effective teachers. If, as the authors suggest, classroom experience and not certification is linked to effective teaching, we might consider moving teacher preparation programs toward a model of more K–12 classroom experience, and away from coursework.

Laura M. Desimone
Assistant Professor of Public Policy and Education
Vanderbilt University

Thank you for featuring research on the fundamental role of teachers in the achievement of New York City’s students in “Photo Finish.” The Board of Regents and the New York State Education Department are committed to improving the quality of teaching for the benefit of all our students.

We agree that multiple pathways to certification can be effective at recruiting teachers who can improve student achievement. The conclusion, however, that “certification matters little” is not supported by the analysis presented. By using teachers’ certification status when hired, rather than when providing instruction, the authors cannot assess the impact of certification on student achievement. Because of state requirements, all teachers hired without certification would have been on a pathway toward certification and many did become certified during the study period. In addition, because certification is required, it is virtually impossible to explore what would happen in its absence. For example, ill-prepared individuals who do not attempt to teach because certification is required, but who could become teachers if certification were not required, are not represented in the group labeled uncertified in the study.

The Board of Regents has always required teachers without certification to be making satisfactory progress toward certification in order to remain employed. Teachers receive “transitional” certificates that permit them to teach for up to three years provided they receive school-based mentoring and make satisfactory progress toward full certification. Similar requirements applied to individuals with temporary licenses prior to the elimination of that pathway. The preparation and induction of these individuals likely would be quite different if certification were not required.

Johanna Duncan-Poitier
Deputy Commissioner
New York State Education Department

Adequacy Studies

Jim Guthrie and Matthew Springer’s article “Courtroom Alchemy” (features, Winter 2007) presents a mistaken analysis of education-funding adequacy studies. First, the authors dismiss the pressure schools face from the federal No Child Left Behind Act, which requires near-universal student proficiency less than seven years from now. The authors infer solely from cost data that states with currently higher test scores on exams such as the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) should not need significant new resources.

Second, the article provides a figure that displays the supposed differences in instructional personnel per 1,000 students across eight state studies to indicate a weakness in the overall professional judgment approach, which relies on the judgement of a panel of educators. The figure fails to account for several factors:

• Every state has its own unique accountability system with unique standards. The level of resources required to meet those standards necessarily differs as well.

• The panelists consulted in each state make different decisions about how resources should be deployed.

• These panelists make different tradeoffs regarding the personnel required to educate at-risk, English Language Learners (ELL), or special-education students. These tradeoffs can result in higher or lower staffing numbers for regular-education students.

• Differences in average school size across states can have an impact on the number of overall personnel that panels might identify.

Finally, the authors’ analysis equates the validity of adequacy studies with a universal, one-size-fits-all answer to education funding. Such an easy answer does not exist. Instead, each state’s unique circumstances, standards, history, demographics, and geography all argue for education policy decisions to remain within the state and local purview.

John Augenblick
Augenblick, Palaich and Associates, Inc.

Guthrie and Springer respond:

John Augenblick proffers two arguments in support of his preferred method, professional judgment, for determining revenue levels presumed to provide an adequate educational opportunity. Regrettably, neither of his arguments addresses our principal criticism of professional judgment: the educator panels he routinely convenes employ no science in their estimates of needed revenues, but rather just guesses based on their experience and biases.

National Standards

Regarding the forum, “National Standards: Should the Federal Government Tell Schools What to Teach?” (Fall 2006), the greater the centralization of school decisions nationwide, the lower is the possibility of excellence in academic achievement. If there were a “single provider” of education policy decisions, the country would suffer a disastrous loss of competition. It would become an inevitable race to the bottom. The only effective education lobbyists would be the well-funded national ones, with their own narrow, intolerant agendas.

Consider what the federal government has already done to produce excellent education in the country. Nothing much. After billions of dollars and millions of words over decades of studies and programs, there is no definitive best teaching or learning method coming from the federal government. The slogan “No Child Left Behind” is a perfect example. It focuses on the bottom of the barrel, those who presumably are “left behind,” perhaps 10 percent of the population. The other 90 percent of students and parents are by definition “left outside” the concerns of Washington’s bureaucrats.

Carl Olson
Founder, Textbook Trust

Restructuring Questions

Michael Petrilli (“The Cure: Will NCLB’s Restructuring Wonder Drug Prove Meaningless?” what next, Fall 2006) shines a spotlight on a critical issue in the implementation of No Child Left Behind: the dearth of outside education providers ready to jump in to help states and districts deal with the increasing number of schools eligible for restructuring.

Contracting with for-profit and nonprofit school management organizations—or working with them to reopen failing schools as charter schools—could be a powerful “transplant” approach. However, two factors restrict this solution. First, turning around existing schools is a far different business from creating them from scratch. Many organizations are wrestling with whether restructuring and conversion opportunities fit within their mission. Some nonprofit charter management organizations (CMOs) have been launched specifically to respond to this opportunity, including Education for Change, in Oakland; others, such as Mastery Charter Schools, in Philadelphia, partner with districts to extend their impact. Organizations must determine whether the opportunity presented by restructuring (which may involve free or low-cost facilities and other incentives from the district) is worth the loss of the autonomy and flexibility they believe are essential for improving student achievement.

Second, the demand for school management organizations exceeds supply for a reason. Most have chosen to grow slowly, to ensure consistently high-quality academic outcomes for students across their schools. NewSchools Venture Fund has supported nonprofit CMOs across the country—including nine that were not included in the article’s graphic—and collectively run another 50 schools. In total, the 14 CMOs we support today have nearly 100 charter schools open this fall and expect to manage 175 schools by the 2008–09 school year. We believe that by taking a careful approach to scale, these charter school systems will have a greater impact on public education in the long term.

Julie Petersen
Communications Manager
NewSchools Venture Fund

Spotlight on Newark

Your essay on Mayor Cory Booker’s aspirations for change in the Newark Public Schools District (“Home Is Where the Heart Is,” features, Fall 2006) was encouraging in one respect but discouraging in many others. It is extremely important to have a chief executive running our city who is clearly committed to helping all children achieve in school and reach for a higher standard of living. I, as superintendent of the district, and a veteran of 38 years, welcome Mayor Booker’s voice, support, and leadership. On the other hand, it was disturbing to read a depiction of our schools as “still a mess.”

While we have much more to do, there are several areas in which the district is improving. Over the last four years, in language arts our 4th-grade students improved from a passing rate of 52 percent to 70 percent, and in math for the same period, from 31 to 71.5 percent. From 1999 to 2005, high-school graduation rates increased from 45.7 to 75.9 percent. During the same period, the number of high-school students enrolled in AP classes quadrupled.

In 2004 and 2005, the Newark district received commendations for good management from the Association of School Business Officials International (ASBO) in Financial Reporting. We also received a Facilities Master Award for Excellence in the Facility Operations Program from ASBO for two consecutive years, making Newark the only district in the country to have achieved that distinction.

It is a disservice to our newly elected mayor to place the onus for “saving Newark schools” on one individual. It will require resources and a collaborative effort involving all students, teachers, parents, administrators, and other citizens to ensure that our children gain the necessary skills to thrive in their own community and to prepare them to compete globally.

Our district is not a mess. It would only seem so to one who has not taken the time to investigate.

Marion A. Bolden
Superintendent
Newark Public Schools

Kids and Exercise

Thanks to “Don’t Sweat It” (features, Fall 2006) and “Not Your Father’s PE” (research, Fall 2006), we now know that top-down solutions to child obesity offer minimal benefit. A “bottom-up” approach would be to change the way we fund schooling. We fund systems; we do not fund students. Because districts tend to add classrooms to existing structures as enrollment grows, we have large schools.

District consolidation also put us on the road to supersize schools. In 1931, there were 120,000 school districts. By 2000, there were fewer than 15,000. University of Chicago professor Christopher Berry (“School Inflation,” research, Fall 2004) studied the period of greatest school-district consolidation, 1930–70. Berry found a consistent correlation of .70 between school size and district size, across states. Big districts have big schools.

How do big schools lead to inactive, overweight kids? To go to and from big, consolidated schools—often at remote sites—children wait for and sit in buses instead of walking or bicycling to a nearby school and playing in the schoolyard before and after the bell. High schoolers and middle schoolers are doubly afflicted: when they finally arrive at their very large schools, they find that the most popular sports are dominated by elite athletes. A glance at almost any high-school annual of the 1920s through the 1950s (before the final wave of consolidation) will reveal a lot of skinny young people, small senior classes, and wide participation in the major sports.

Were we to fund students rather than systems, such schools—and skinny kids—would make a comeback.

Tom Shuford
Retired Public School Teacher
Lenoir, North Carolina

For combating kids’ weight problems, K–12 dance education offers unique potential. Merging mind and body, dance education can contribute to students’ intellectual growth in many academic subjects. Student dance making can offer some of what reading and writing offer—fantasy, storytelling, and performer-audience connection.

Dance is a way to cope with stress. In dances they make, kids can embody troubling ideas, hold them up to scrutiny, play with them, and, consequently, make them less threatening.

Kids need to get hooked on a physical activity in which they burn calories in physical education and that they can pursue outside of school. Breaking and krumping became popular on the streets, Mad Hot Ballroom engaged kids in and out of school, and So You Think You Can Dance drew huge audiences. Let kids make their own dances, compete, and find dances in their neighborhoods or on TV to demonstrate to classmates.

Judith Lynne Hanna
Senior Research Scholar
University of Maryland

Bob Cullen has done a fine job of identifying some of the challenges physical education teachers face. In “Don’t Sweat It,” Mr. Cullen implies that it is nearly impossible to have a permanent positive impact on the health and fitness of the students given the current graduation requirements for physical education, the attitudes of the kids and parents toward PE, social and cultural factors, the declining fitness levels of physical education teachers, and the low enthusiasm among teachers. Here in Miami-Dade Public Schools, we must add to this most difficult equation low family incomes, poor nutritional habits of students, extreme heat, no use of the indoor gymnasium, large classes, lack of adequate fountains for students to keep hydrated, and lack of classroom space.

Bennett Packman
Physical Education Teacher
Miami-Dade County Public Schools

Let’s agree that you can’t generalize from 8th graders, in the throes of puberty, to the effects of matching student and teacher gender at other ages. More research is needed. Now let’s move on.

What if Professor Dee (“The Why Chromosome,” research, Fall 2006) is right? What policy implications follow?

Matching girls with female teachers and boys with male teachers is both impractical and undesirable. Most teachers are female, and boys will come up short. We want boys to become adults who are able to work well with women, and we want girls to become adults who are able to work well with men. We all recoil from the anti-egalitarian idea that we can be comfortable and achieve at our best only when we are with “people like us,” in terms of sex, ethnicity, religion, social class, politics, or anything else.

Since boys are about a grade level behind girls in reading and writing and girls have just about closed the gap in mathematics and science, I’ll focus on raising the achievement of boys. What might male teachers be doing in their classrooms that female teachers are less likely to do?

I offer a number of testable hypotheses, which come from the work of Michael Gurian, William Pollack, Leonard Sax, KathyStevens, Michael Thompson, and Peter West. These ideas emerge from knowledge of the biology and psychology of boys and the craft knowledge of teachers, what Lee Shulman has called the “wisdom of practice.”

1. Boys learn more when teachers talk less, especially when teachers avoid great torrents of repetitive words.

2. Boys learn more when teachers use lots of joking and humor, the currency of male social life.

3. Boys learn more when teachers themselves are captivated by the great, universal themes that engage male minds and hearts–––facing adversity and danger, embarking on great adventures, attaining strength and competence, fighting battles for good and for glory, testing yourself and becoming a hero, and learning how to make the physical world do your bidding.

4. Boys learn more when teachers are neither awed nor enraged by boys’ physicality and displays of anger, and respond in calm and measured ways, using such strategies as assigning activities that help boys calm down and regain control.

5. Boys learn more when the teacher does not humiliate them by forgetting that genuine vulnerability and lack of confidence lie underneath their cocky displays of toughness and bravado.

6. Boys learn more in structured, authoritative educational environments, under clear teacher control, which provide them with safety and security from the power plays and put-downs of other boys.

7. Boys learn more when competition gets them excited, when they need to learn so as to do well for their team, when they get to be active, when they get breaks, when they are having fun, and when teachers make the point of the learning activity clear.

8. Boys learn more when teachers praise and mentor them and when they believe that the teacher understands, likes, and respects boys.

What we need is not gender matching but greater understanding of the biological differences between males and females and the different psychological worlds each sex inhabits.

Judith Kleinfeld
Professor of Psychology and Director of Boys Project
University of Alaska, Fairbanks

I have two major objections to Professor Dee’s assumptions and methods. First, he asserts that “the majority of arguments for single-sex schools and classrooms focus on the effects on interactions among students.” That statement may have had some validity 20 years ago, but minimizing distractions is no longer an empirically sound justification for single-sex education (and perhaps it never was). Single-sex education is more likely to have positive outcomes for 2nd-grade boys than for 11th-grade boys. And yet 11th-grade boys are, presumably, more distracted by 11th-grade girls than 2nd-grade boys are by 2nd-grade girls.

Recent research demonstrates that girls and boys learn in profoundly different ways. These differences are based in part on hardwired differences in how girls and boys hear and see, which in turn derive from hardwired differences in the cochlea and retina, respectively. Single-sex education works not because it minimizes distractions but because it creates an opportunity for knowledgeable teachers to take advantage of the differences in how girls and boys learn.

Second, Professor Dee’s analysis is based on a survey of teachers who had no training in best practices for teaching girls and for teaching boys. Women can learn to teach boys, and men can learn to teach girls if teachers have appropriate training in evidence-based best practices: that requires 7 to 14 hours over 1 or 2 days. Indeed, some of the most effective teachers at our boys’ schools are women, and some of the most effective teachers at our girls’ schools are men.

Professor Dee conjectures that perhaps we should have more men teaching boys, and women teaching girls. I recommend, instead, that we focus on training men how to teach girls, and training women how to teach boys.

Leonard Sax
Executive Director, National Association for Single Sex Public Education

Thomas Dee replies:

Both Dr. Sax’s and Professor Kleinfeld’s otherwise insightful commentaries seem to take as their motivation a dramatic policy prescription that I have explicitly not advocated, namely, the gender matching of students and teachers. My study does indicate that 8th graders in the National Education Longitudinal Survey (1988) performed better on a variety of outcomes when assigned to a teacher of their own gender. However, I am also careful to point out that there are a variety of rich, contextual explanations for why these “reduced-form” effects exist. As both letters indicate, one provocative explanation is that boys and girls have distinct learning styles, which may be more effectively accommodated by same-gender teachers as they are currently trained. However, there are also other possible explanations for these results (e.g., role-model effects and stereotype threat). A convincing research base that discriminated among the relative contributions of these various phenomena would provide the basis for targeted and effective interventions.

Kathryn Newmark and Veronique de Rugy’s brief mention of the comparatively rapid rebound of Catholic schools in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina (“Hope after Katrina,” features, Fall 2006) casts the private school sector as “more nimble” than the public system. The superintendent of Catholic schools in New Orleans, Fr. William Maestri, offers an alternate explanation: “We believe that schools are magnets of hope in the midst of despair, and by reopening them, you ensure that people will come back.”

Forty-two days after Katrina devastated the city, 45 percent of the 107 Catholic elementary and high schools were back in operation, and 80 percent of the nearly 50,000. students were back in school classrooms either in the archdiocese, which embraces eight civil parishes (counties) in southeast Louisiana, or neighboring dioceses. By the end of January 2006, 75 percent of the schools had reopened and 86 percent of the total student population had returned. A greater contrast to the public schools’ record could hardly be imagined. Making the archdiocese’s recovery all the more remarkable is the fact that its schools suffered losses in the hundreds of millions of dollars.

Catholic leaders said they never entertained doubts they could bring the school system back. The archdiocese pledged to accept any Catholic or public school students, whether or not they could pay the tuition. Some 300 public school students accepted the offer. The archdiocese has since applied for, and is hopeful of getting, displaced student tuition reimbursement from the federal government’s hurricane relief fund. The Catholic school system also decided to return tuition money to the family of any student forced to relocate to another school. “This was a fundamental moral point for us,” noted Fr. Maestri. “We couldn’t keep tuition for services that weren’t rendered, nor could we have parents whose children relocated to other schools pay tuition twice.” The Catholic schools have proved an extraordinary beacon of hope for the future of New Orleans.

Randy Young
Freelance Writer

Kathryn Newmark and Veronique de Rugy have made the most positive case for school choice in New Orleans. They could be right; I hope so. But there are problems they didn’t acknowledge.

First, the state of Louisiana’s Recovery District, which wanted to charter all the schools under its control, couldn’t find enough competent charter-school operators. Indeed, the National Association of Charter School Operators judged that only a small minority of applicants could be trusted to run a school, limiting the growth of choice in New Orleans.

Second, unable to charter all the schools, the Recovery District opened non-charter schools of its own. The people running those schools weren’t required to write charter applications, and I suspect few of them could have done it well. Thus, the state now oversees charter schools, plus other schools that probably couldn’t have met the standards charters were held to. The charter schools can be closed if they don’t perform well, and their staffs have jobs only as long as the schools survive, but it is not clear whether the same is true of district-run schools. Preoccupied with the need to open schools any way it can, the state is in danger of reproducing what New Orleans had before—schools that didn’t work and nobody wanted.

Third, national foundations really haven’t contributed much to the effort. The school redevelopment process has been underresourced, in my view. It is not too late for some big foundations to help out.

Fourth, it isn’t clear whether the Bring New Orleans Back model will ever be used. The state will eventually return all the schools to local control. If the new local authority looks like the one
Tulane president Scott Cowen’s group devised, and all the schools can be replaced if they don’t work, then New Orleans could become a model school district.

Things could work out as well as Newmark and de Rugy predict, but I wouldn’t count on it.

Paul Hill
Research Professor of Public Affairs
University of Washington

In “Miracle Math” (features, Fall 2006), Barry Garelick contends that the Montgomery County Public Schools (MCPS) briefly piloted Singapore Math and then abandoned the math curriculum for budgetary reasons. Nothing could be further from the truth.

MCPS incorporated the greatest strengths of Singapore Math into its revised mathematics curriculum in 2001, and the results have been excellent. The system’s new math curriculum is aligned with state, national, and world standards and has led to unprecedented student achievement. (Readers may see the unabridged version of Edwards’s letter at www.educationnext.org for more details.)

The article highlights one of Singapore Math’s strategies, called “bar modeling,” as an ideal way to solve math word problems. MCPS agrees and has incorporated bar modeling into the revised curriculum. The article also notes that the Singapore Math curriculum is sequential in nature and builds on students’ prior knowledge. The MCPS revised curriculum uses the same principle and techniques. Concepts of fact families are integral to Singapore Math, and one will find those same concepts in the MCPS math curriculum as well.

What Garelick didn’t discuss is how Singapore Math fails to fulfill the needs of American math education. For example, the measurements used in Singapore Math are metric. Therefore, if only Singapore Math textbooks are used, MCPS would have to provide additional materials to teach measurement. Singapore Math has little focus on computation with common fractions, a concept that is needed when solving customary measurement problems. Finally, Singapore Math does not include sufficient material on statistics and probability.

MCPS learned a great deal from its Singapore Math pilot and used its concepts significantly in the revised curriculum. Unfortunately, Garelick didn’t demonstrate a mastery of the “math facts” in Montgomery County in his opinion piece, and that is a disservice to the readers of Education Next.

Brian Edwards
Director, Public Information Office
Montgomery County Public Schools

Barry Garelick replies:

Mr. Edwards’s statement that “the system’s new math curriculum … has led to unprecedented student achievement” would make sense only if there were a baseline for comparison. According to [former MCPS parent] John Hoven, “Superintendent Weast terminated the long-standing Montgomery County Public Schools (MCPS) math testing program that could have provided a basis to judge his success or failure against his predecessors.”

MCPS-style “statistics and probability” does not teach the basics of how to make reliable statistical inferences from imprecise data. Singapore Math (SM) does that in high school; MCPS math never does.

The legacy of “bar modeling” from the SM pilot shows up in MCPS now only as a passing mention in teacher’s guides. This is not enough to get across the nuances and techniques for students to solve the multistep problems in Singapore Math.

Finally, Mr. Edwards’s statement that “Singapore Math has little focus on computation with common fractions” is inaccurate. Singapore Math covers fractions extensively. Here is a problem from the 5th grade text: “3/7 of the apples in a box are red apples. The rest are green apples. There are 24 green apples. How many apples are there altogether?” And here is a question for Mr. Edwards: How many MCPS 5th graders can solve that problem?

The National Association for Sport and Physical Education (NASPE) is pleased that research (“Not Your Father’s PE,” research, Fall 2006) is being done to study the impact of physical education on individuals’ participation in physical activity and their weight status. However, the purpose of physical education is broader than those two outcomes. As defined by the National Standards for Physical Education (NASPE, 2004), desired outcomes also include the development of knowledge and motor and behavioral skills, and the valuing of physical activity for health, enjoyment, challenge, self-expression, and/or social interaction. The goal of high-quality physical education is not just to increase physical activity for a week, but rather, for a lifetime.

This exploratory study asks some important questions, but its results should be viewed tentatively. The article assumes that whatever policy is established at the state level will equate to what happens in the physical education classrooms across each state. However, education in this country is locally controlled. The authors are making a big leap from state-level policies to student reports of active time in physical education classes without examining the intervening steps, such as policies set by school districts, school requirements, and the number of available minutes in a class period. Additionally, the combination of two data sets (i.e., from the “National Youth Risk Behavior Survey” and the “Shape of the Nation Report”) makes it difficult to interpret the study results.

NASPE hopes that the study, and responses to it, will lead to additional research on the long- and short-term outcomes of high-quality physical education programs.

Jacalyn Lund
President, NASPE

Charlene R. Burgeson
Executive Director, NASPE

David Skinner’s article (“Home Is Where the Heart Is,” features, Fall 2006) provides excellent coverage of the challenge facing Cory Booker, the newly elected mayor of Newark, New Jersey, in his effort to revitalize the school district. Newark’s school system encompasses nearly every structural impediment possible, including a tradition of patronage, mismanagement of resources, large numbers of failing schools, and lack of public trust. The situation clearly calls for direct mayoral involvement. As we’ve learned from other urban systems, the key lies in the mayor’s willingness to assume responsibility for the performance of the district.

To turn around Newark schools, Mayor Booker has to take bold actions and willingly be held accountable by the public for the results. Is Mayor Booker willing to spend political capital to leverage broad support and harness community-wide resources for school reform? He will need to broaden the expertise of the school management team, create competition for the traditional public schools, ensure incentives for school personnel to be responsive to their student clients, implement academic standards, and weed out incompetent teachers and principals. He will benefit from state legislation that enables him to take over the school district and frees him from regulatory and collective bargaining constraints during the reform’s start-up phase.

If Mayor Booker integrates school improvement into his overall strategy to enhance the quality of life in Newark, he will join the handful of mayors who have shown that improving the schools is good electoral politics. Mayoral leadership can reduce the institutional insulation of public schools, sharpen the focus on accountability, and improve the organizational and fiscal conditions to support teaching and learning. When mayors are committed to leading public schools, the entire school system tends to benefit. The children of Newark are waiting for the mayor to take this decisive step forward.

Kenneth K. Wong
Director, Urban Education Policy Program
Brown University

The appeal of national standards for K–12 public education is understandable (“National Standards,” forum, Fall 2006). The notion of a set of academic aspirations for all America’s children is neat and clean and simple. And it provides an antidote to the confusing and often confused landscape of academic standards and assessments assembled by the states. Given the global competitiveness America must maintain, national standards seem commonsensical. We are a nation after all, and a nation should coalesce around a shared sense of what its students need to know in order to compete and succeed in the 21st century.

But beneath the veneer of the appeal there are problems, and perhaps even threats. It is fair to ask if national standards and assessments might start us down the road to a national K–12 system of public education, effectively turning on its head a system defined today by state and local policymakers and resources.

There may be something to be said for such a scenario. If the current system were getting the job done, this discussion probably would not be taking place. But nationalizing public education will surely widen the already troubling gulf between the American people and their public schools.

Most people view public education through the prism of their own experiences. National standards might reinforce the notion that all that matters is “how well my child and his school are doing” and make it even more difficult to get Americans to ask an equally, if not more, important question: “How well is my nation doing?” Rather than seeking a national remedy for the problems that afflict the system, we should seek to refresh and restore the public’s relationship with its schools.

Gene Hickok
Senior Policy Director, Dutko Worldwide
former U.S. deputy secretary of education

Tom Payzant had an extraordinary ten-year run as superintendent of schools in Boston, as described in Alexander Russo’s fine story (“The Bostonian,” features, Summer 2006). Although it’s hard to remember now, Boston public schools were in free fall a decade ago, with a dysfunctional school committee, a series of short-term superintendents, and a rudderless education program. Notwithstanding the venerable Boston Latin School, the district’s image was defined by the chaotic Jeremiah Burke School, which lost its accreditation as Payzant was walking in the door. Payzant established order and stability. Under his unwavering leadership, the district turned its focus to improving the quality and consistency of instruction. His forthright support of state graduation standards, at a time when other superintendents were praying for a reprieve, was critical to the success of the Massachusetts education-reform efforts.

Although Payzant was open to stretching the boundaries of the established order (as his push for Pilot Schools demonstrates), he was primarily concerned with getting the most out of the existing system. To a very great degree, he succeeded. Through his persistence, skill, and thoughtfulness, Payzant achieved as much as any superintendent could have, given the constraints. Indeed, compared to most other urban school districts, Boston is a major success story. And that’s the fundamental problem.

After ten years of exemplary leadership, Boston’s students are still struggling. Today close to 70 percent of Boston students are performing below grade level in English or math (that is, below proficient on the state assessment). That’s down from almost 85 percent in 1998, but only slightly better than the 75 percent rate in 2001. While further incremental improvement is likely, the trend line seems to be flattening out. Indeed, the proficiency rate went down slightly in 2005. As for the achievement gap, the story is much the same. The aggregate proficiency rate of black students in Boston today is about 35 percentage points below that of white students, almost unchanged since 2001.

The implications of this are not that Payzant’s initiatives should be abandoned, but that they should be complemented by a much more aggressive effort to address the structural barriers that plague Boston and virtually all other urban districts, in order to open the district up to new talent and effective school models.

Despite being home to some of the best charter schools in the country, Boston has lost many of its most entrepreneurial and successful charter leaders to other states because of persistent opposition to charter schools. This is both a shame and a scandal. There is no excuse for not offering these proven schools and school leaders the opportunity to expand and replicate—in district buildings and with the whole-hearted support of the central office. If this can happen in New York, Chicago, Philadelphia, and Oakland, it can and should happen in Boston.

Absent a willingness to be bold and take risks, I’m afraid there is little hope that Boston public schools will realize the level of excellence that Tom Payzant has worked so hard and well to achieve.

James A. Peyser
Chairman
Massachusetts Board of Education

No doubt Tom Payzant has done a good job in Boston. With a revolving door of superintendents being the norm for large city school systems, as well as dissension among community groups and low or stagnant student performance, the adjective “outstanding” is warranted in Payzant’s case. Those who wanted faster change and larger improvement in achievement may prefer the term “modest,” but in a period of faltering confidence in educators, it is reassuring to see a consummate professional have a long tenure and success, whether it is termed good, outstanding, or modest.

The Boston success story is about raising student achievement. But the Russo piece does not address the school completion rate, and it is low. To learn the lesson of Boston schools, we also need to look at what the city and its constituencies achieved. Discord has run many good educators out of big city school systems. There were disagreements in Boston, but the various organizations and interest groups shared enough of a common goal, acted with restraint, and achieved sufficient accord to keep a superintendent in place long enough to stay a course and reap positive results.

Paul E. Barton
Senior Associate
Educational Testing Service

Unions and Politics

It’s hard to disagree with the analysis by Frederick Hess and Martin West (“Strike Phobia,” features, Summer 2006) detailing how standard union contracts stifle education innovation, management flexibility, and results. The real debate is over what to do about these well-documented problems.

School board members, by and large, are not gripped by “strike phobia,” but rather reflect a very rational fear of the political power of teacher unions. They also approach contract negotiations asymmetrically weaker. Their relative inexperience, high turnover, and part-time service constitute no match for the experienced, long-term, full-time union negotiators.

The remedies outlined by Hess and West (transparency, rallying the public, and increasing capacity of board members) are necessary, but not sufficient. Let me suggest a few others.

First, we need more models of reasonable union contracts. Charter schools are one outlet for trying out different collective-bargaining arrangements. Since charter school boards typically are not elected, they have greater freedom to negotiate more reasonable agreements.

Second, more parents need a meaningful “right of exit.” School districts, especially urban districts, will not feel the public pressure to change unless a large segment of students are actually able to leave. Since most parents in urban districts are poor, we need a plentiful supply of well-funded vouchers, education tax credits, and tuition-free charter schools. Yet in most urban communities the number of available “choice” seats is very small when stacked up against the number of kids in failing district schools. Out of thousands of school districts, only three—Dayton, D.C., and Milwaukee—are currently on the cusp of offering sufficient scale to make a real impact.

Third, particularly in urban districts, shifting authority from school boards to an elected mayor may be a more effective reform strategy than trying to get school boards to step up. Mayoral control, which has shaken up the education establishment in Chicago and New York City, for example, needs to be expanded all over the nation. Mayors are not impervious to union politics, but their visibility makes them much more accountable than a multi-member, largely unknown school board.

Thomas W. Carroll
President
Foundation for Education Reform & Accountability

Frederick Hess and Martin West do not pull any punches with “Strike Phobia.” As they say, school boards, superintendents, taxpayers, and politicians need to be less anxious about provoking teacher work actions in order to restore the balance of power in American public education.

Yes, the majority of our nation’s teachers are passionate, professional educators who work daily to find the effective pedagogical formula needed to increase student achievement. But the majority of our unions, by their nature, exist to serve the needs of adults rather than those of students, and ultimately work to maintain the status quo of collective bargaining agreements that all too often serve as barriers to innovation, efficiency, and common sense. The struggle between management and teachers unions therefore plays itself out politically by pitting the “system” against the “teachers.” This is a false dichotomy. In reality, the struggle is between the status quo perpetuated by collective bargaining agreements and the conditions needed to increase student achievement for all students.

Matthew H. Malone
Superintendent of Schools
Swampscott, Massachusetts

Parsing Partisanship

The Summer 2006 issue of Education Next contains accusations about the research done by the Center on Education Policy (“Donkey in Disguise,” check the facts). The work by the Center on Education Policy (CEP) on the No Child Left Behind Act, high-school exit examinations, and other education policies uses exactly the same research methodologies as those employed by the U.S. Department of Education, state legislatures (controlled by both political parties), and other entities.

The article also contends that the CEP is in reality a partisan organization. Although I worked for the Democrats on Capitol Hill for many years, I have always thought that education is too important an issue to be partisan. Therefore, when I crafted legislation in the three decades I was on the Hill, I tried to be bipartisan. Almost every meeting that I convened was for both Democrats and Republicans, and the results were that nearly every law I helped to write was passed by large bipartisan majorities.

When I established CEP, I carried that same policy of nonpartisanship into this work. The first chair of our board of directors, Christopher Cross, was a former Republican staff director on Capitol Hill and was also a political appointee in the George H. W. Bush administration. In the last several years, as we have tracked No Child Left Behind, we have been contacted by both Republican and Democratic members of Congress. We have happily helped all. This year, the Republican and Democratic leaders of the Senate and House education committees asked CEP to brief staff members on our organization’s latest NCLB report. Members of Congress do not sponsor such bipartisan events if they believe you have a partisan agenda.

Jack Jennings
President
Center on Education Policy

When Jack Jennings created the Center on Education Policy (CEP) as a free-standing organization, he asked me, a clearly identified Republican who had been his nemesis on the Hill for six years and a presidential appointee in the administration of George H.W. Bush, to serve as chair of the board. I did so with the clear understanding that CEP would pursue an agenda that was not partisan.

The fieldwork for CEP has been undertaken by organizations with a reputation for scientific rigor and independent analysis. CEP cannot be responsible for how the media have played some of the findings. While the reporting by the media may not have been as balanced and thorough as we all would have liked, CEP did report the positive aspects of what it found. Unfortunately, positive results rarely get a great deal of media attention.

Christopher T. Cross
Chairman, Cross & Joftus, LLC

Greg Forster replies:

Jennings points out that the Department of Education and state legislatures use “exactly the same research methodologies” as CEP. Sadly, this is sometimes true; I said the same thing in my article. Neither the Department of Education nor state legislatures (even Republican-controlled ones!) are exempt from the realities of politics. Junk science is junk science no matter who sponsors it.

Cross says CEP’s research is scientifically sound because CEP hires prestigious organizations to carry out its surveys, which is like saying that a letter is truthful because it was delivered by a reliable courier. I’m sure CEP’s surveys are conducted with the most meticulous care; my article criticized the way CEP analyzes the  results of those surveys, a subject on which neither Jennings nor Cross offers any defense.

It’s admirable that CEP has a Republican board chair and sometimes works with Republicans, but this hardly proves nonpartisanship. If CEP’s research adhered to the generally accepted standards of empirical science, the mere fact that CEP also has policy preferences would not be a legitimate reason to doubt its findings. But when CEP uses faulty research methods that are rigged to support its agenda, other researchers have a responsibility to point this out.

High School

I read David Ferrero’s review essay “Tales from the Inside: Five Books about High School” (book reviews, Spring 2006) with great interest. I grew up in a suburban community that went through a “population explosion” in the early 1960s and was fortunate to go to grade school and high school in newer facilities, like many of the kids interviewed in the books Mr. Ferrero reviewed.

My senior year in high school was marked by a teacher strike. The strike made me realize that while kids go to school, teachers go to work. Our teachers wanted better pay and benefits; a fairer process for tenure review; and fewer noneducational “babysitting” tasks. Today, I don’t blame my teachers for their requests; as Mr. Ferrero points out, they are inherent to the dynamics between teachers and school boards and their full-time administrators.

But I agree with Mr. Ferrero that these dynamics must change.

Teacher development programs and partnerships between union and management could help new teachers succeed. It is in no one’s best interest to see a new teacher fail.

We need a new approach to Advanced Placement. Why not consider tax credits for parents to send a bright child to college for a couple of classes, instead of placing the burden for instruction on public schools?

We need more flexible schedules. Summer school could help kids gain advanced standing and graduate early, just as it is used to help stragglers keep up.

Organizational change happens with leadership. I do not believe a superintendent must be an educator. A superintendent’s skill set is more like that of a municipal business administrator: manage people with varied skills; negotiate contracts; arrange financing; develop facilities; direct budgets; and answer to voters.

Stuart Nachbar
Princeton, New Jersey

Keeping Out the Christians

Naomi Schaefer Riley claims that the University of California admitted only 8 students through its “admission by exception” policy last year, when the number was actually more than 1,000 students (“Keeping Out the Christians,” features, Summer 2006). She also wrongly asserts that students from the Calvary Christian school would need to score in the top 4 percent of the SAT II (now called SAT Subject Tests) to gain admittance based on test scores. In fact, students can fulfill individual course requirements by attaining relatively modest scores—ranging from 530 to 550 in science and social science subjects—on the SAT subject examinations.

Moreover, Riley fails to note that a large number of Christian schools, including Calvary, offer a full list of college preparatory courses that have been approved by the University of California (UC) system. Calvary has 60 such courses. In fact, all nine students from Calvary who applied to UC this year were accepted for admission, and well over 75 percent of applicants have been admitted over the last four years.

Perhaps more objectionable than the factual errors is the unfounded notion that Christians are being kept out of the University of California based upon their religious beliefs. Even the most perfunctory research will show UC campuses host literally hundreds of Christian student organizations. UC believes enrolling students from many different faiths and backgrounds enriches the university’s community and the learning experience of our students. High-school courses are evaluated on the basis of academic criteria. As a result, the university sometimes must decline to approve courses from all types of high schools, not just Christian schools. The percentage of courses approved from Christian schools has been basically identical to the percentage approved from all schools. Christian schools are treated no differently than any other type of school.

Christopher M. Patti
University Counsel
University of California

Naomi Schaefer Riley replies:

Mr. Patti is correct that the total number of admissions by exception is not 8. According to public records recently obtained by the lawyers for the Association for Christian Schools International (ACSI), the number was 871 for the 2004-2005 school year. About a third of those exceptions were used for athletes who did not qualify for admission under the regular rules. Many others were admitted, I gather, for outstanding artistic talents, or because there were other special circumstances involved (they may be veterans, for example). Students admitted by exception still make up a tiny percentage of the approximately 50,000 freshmen allowed in each year. And one doubts that UC will be giving any of the slots of its prize athletes to well-qualified graduates of Christian schools. The number 8 is the number of homeschoolers who were admitted by exception, and it is still significant in this sense. These homeschooled students are in the situation most similar to graduates of ACSI schools because they generally have a rigorous academic courseload, but it is one that does not have UC’s stamp of approval.

Mr. Patti and I can quibble over the numbers, but the bottom line is this: the counsel for a public university is trying to defend a policy of “admission by exception” for students who take high-school classes taught from a Christian perspective. He has not offered any explanation for why these students should have to go through an admissions process that is different from the one entered into by students who take classes in secular private schools or public schools or other religious schools. Indeed, there is no moral or legal justification for this policy.

The fact that the percentage of students admitted from Christian schools and secular schools is fairly similar is irrelevant, because the UC only launched these discriminatory policies in the last year. The fact that most of Calvary’s classes are still counted for credit is also irrelevant. UC has changed its rules about the new classes it reviews and there’s no reason that, with one pen stroke from a UC bureaucrat, the rules about existing classes couldn’t change tomorrow.

Finally, I did not write that the University of California doesn’t like Christians, but rather that the UC administration believes that Christian ideas are backward and water down academic subjects. As long as Christian schools in California are offering academically rigorous and substantive courses—which, from the looks of the curricula they submitted and my interviews with faculty, students, and parents, they are—there is no reason they should be subjected to a different standard.

RAND Responds

Eric Hanushek’s critique of our RAND study was rather one-sided (“Deconstructing RAND,” Check the Facts, Spring 2001). The case for the author’s long-held interpretation that there isn’t “any consistent, positive relationship between increased resources and student learning” is far less airtight than he suggests.

We propose a new hypothesis: Additional resources yield few benefits for nondisadvantaged white students but do raise the achievement of minority and disadvantaged students.

Literature reviews by scholars Alan Krueger, Larry Hedges, and Rob Greenwald have arrived at different conclusions than Hanushek’s concerning the effects of resources on student achievement. A deeper investigation than Hanushek’s also reveals that the “real” increase in resources over time was much less than “threefold.” The author unfairly compares resource increases from 1960 to 1995 to National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) scores from 1971 to 1996. Comparing apples to apples shows a twofold gain in resources from 1971 to 1996. Moreover, Richard Rothstein and Karen Hawley Miles of the Economic Policy Institute have shown that adjusting the inflation rate for the labor-intensive nature of education reduces the real increase to 60 percent. A significant share of this increase, Rothstein and Miles show, went toward special education-the benefits of which would not appear in NAEP data.

In addition, much of this new spending went toward compensatory programs for minority and disadvantaged students, for whom there have been substantial score gains over time.
The aggregate NAEP results cited by the author hide achievement gains of 0.5-0.7 standard deviation for black students and 0.3-0.4 standard deviation for Hispanic students. Disadvantaged white students account for most of the 0.05-0.10 standard-deviation gains of white students generally.

Also supporting my hypothesis is the evidence from class-size reduction experiments in Tennessee and Wisconsin. Both showed significant gains in achievement for students in smaller classes, with larger gains among minority and disadvantaged students. Hanushek, however, suggests that Tennessee’s STAR experiment may have been flawed.

Barbara Nye and her colleagues and Alan Krueger have tested the Tennessee data, searching for evidence of unbalanced attrition out of the control and treatment groups, leakage between the groups, and nonrandom assignment of teachers. They separately found either no flaws or flaws that did not affect the results in any significant way. Despite years of analysis, no one has uncovered evidence that the randomized experiment was flawed.

Hanushek also claims that the class-size results show that reducing class sizes only in kindergarten can raise student achievement. The experiment provided no direct empirical evidence that small classes in kindergarten followed by large classes in succeeding grades would produce sustained effects. However, there is evidence that those students who had only one to two years of small classes in grades K-3 did not sustain their achievement gains through grade 8, while those who had three to four years of small classes were able to sustain their achievement gains.

Our analysis of state NAEP scores also supports our hypothesis. Hanushek raises legitimate methodological concerns about the study. In the end, however, these concerns are empirical issues. Raising a potential area of concern is not the same as proof that results are biased. There are significant unresolved issues in all studies-about the adequacy of controls for family background, the possibility of differential bias at different levels of aggregation, and the use of weak measures of achievement and spending. Future research must address these unresolved issues in order to ensure more consistency in our experimental and nonexperimental measurements.

Regarding our study, Hanushek raises two issues that are simply wrong. Our sample size was 271 test scores across 44 states, not just 44 as Hanushek implies. Furthermore, estimates from our equations show that modest increases in resources (of $500-$750 per student) can lead to significant score gains (one-third of a standard deviation) among disadvantaged students.

David Grissmer
RAND Corporation
Santa Monica, Calif.

To be useful, debates about the strengths and weaknesses of research, especially when it involves important policy questions, need to adhere to the facts. Eric Hanushek’s critique of our study of test scores and the accountability system in Texas does not meet this standard (“RAND versus RAND,” Check the Facts, Spring 2001).

Hanushek says that our analysis “ignored student background,” but we controlled for students’ racial and ethnic backgrounds by analyzing results for each group separately. Racial and ethnic background typically accounts for a majority of the variance in test scores owing to family background. Controlling for this allowed us to study whether the narrowing of the gaps among racial and ethnic groups on the Texas Assessment of Academic Skills (TAAS) was comparable to changes on the highly regarded NAEP exams.

Hanushek suggests that our finding that Texas students showed dramatically more improvement on TAAS than on NAEP should be dismissed because TAAS was aligned with Texas’ own curriculum, whereas NAEP is a “generic test of subject matter” derived from national content standards. This ration-ale implies that the skills needed to read and do math in Texas are fundamentally different from those needed in the rest of the country. We doubt that most Texans would agree. Indeed, President George W. Bush’s education plan calls for using NAEP to check the validity of gains on every state’s tests.

Hanushek says our results “should be heavily discounted” because they were based on “small amounts of imperfect data.” Our major findings were based on analyses of TAAS results for all the schools in Texas plus all the 1992-1998 data from NAEP’s large and carefully constructed samples for Texas and the nation.
Hanushek claims that our research would not hold up to a “modicum of scrutiny” and that it used an “impotent” research design. Two of the preeminent scholars in the field served as external peer reviewers for our paper. Both strongly encouraged its publication and endorsed its methodology.

Hanushek suggests that RAND bends its standards when “the sponsor pressures are high.” We received no pressure, and there was no external sponsor for our study. Hanushek acknowledges RAND’s “undeniable history of producing solid research.” Nothing in his critique suggests that our study departed from this tradition.

Stephen P. Klein
Laura S. Hamilton
Daniel F. McCaffrey
Brian M. Stecher
RAND Corporation
Santa Monica, Calif.

Eric A. Hanushek replies: The most interesting aspect of David Grissmer’s letter is that he makes no effort to defend his own study but refers instead to others’ findings on the relationship between resources and achievement. I take Grissmer’s silence as an acceptance of my conclusions that the RAND study shows a weak relationship between spending and student achievement and cannot be used to identify good policy choices.

The argument that new spending was aimed primarily at minorities and disadvantaged students is similar to other arguments in the RAND study: it bears some relationship to fact but lacks evidence and convincing analysis. It is true that the test-score gap between black and white students narrowed during the 1980s, only to stagnate in the ’90s. However, no evidence shows a parallel shifting of resources to disadvantaged students just in the ’80s. More to the point, the RAND report did not even attempt to analyze racial differences in the way resources affect achievement, even though the NAEP data would have permitted such an analysis. If such differential sensitivity to resources is truly important, RAND’s neglect to analyze racial differences in the way resources affect achievement would bias its results even further.

Grissmer’s reintroduction of highly selective evidence on the effects of extra resources and reductions in class size provides no more support of his work here than it did in the original RAND report.
Stephen Klein et al. surely know better than to claim that separating scores by race adequately adjusts for students’ background. Such stereotyping belies the important heterogeneity within and across each population. To illustrate, the chance that the income of a random black male would exceed that of a random white male approached 40 percent during the mid-1990s. Moreover, the relationship between race and other family characteristics varies from one school district to the next, further complicating Klein et al.’s attempt to reduce the complexity of social life to a single racial dimension.

The researchers claim to have used “all of the schools in Texas” and “all of the 1992-1998 data from NAEP,” as if their inferences come from more than a few averages. Their entire database consists of gains in average scores in math and reading from three specific tests-TAAS, the Texas NAEP, and the national NAEP-for three racial groups. In other words, they have only 27 data points. Such limited data do not provide a sound scientific basis for an informed debate on testing. Had they really used all Texas schools in the second part of their analysis, they would have seen the expected negative relationship between TAAS scores and students’ level of disadvantage-a relationship they did not see with their nonrepresentative sample of 20 schools.

Their testing and peer-review points are, of course, assertions, not facts. If it were known that all of the states’ mandated curricula are well tested by NAEP, it would save considerable money in test development and would quell some intense political debate. Moreover, the quality of the underlying peer-review process should be judged by the outcome.

Correction: The printed version of Figure 1 in Eric Hanushek’s “Deconstructing RAND” (Check the Facts, Spring 2001) contains an error that occurred in the production process and is not to be attributed to the author. A corrected graph, along with its interpretation, appears in the electronic version of the article available at www.educationnext.org and, in more extended form, at www.edmattersmore.org.

Educational McCarthyism

In his article “Cheating to the Test” (Features, Spring 2001), Gregory Cizek refers to allegations about a cheating scandal in New York City, supposedly the largest such scandal ever reported. Cizek cites December 1999 charges by Edward Stancik, the city’s special commissioner of investigation for the public schools, that 52 teachers and administrators had assisted students in cheating on standardized tests.

Former New York City schools chancellor Rudy Crew’s response was to discipline all those named in the report; some were fired, others assigned to desk jobs. All were publicly humiliated and had permanent stains on their reputations.

The United Federation of Teachers subsequently commissioned an independent investigation of Stancik’s allegations by private investigator Thomas Thacher, who previously served as inspector general of the School Construction Authority.

Thacher found that Stancik’s office bypassed basic procedural rights of those accused. The special investigator’s team, Thacher said, pressured children to say their teachers acted wrongly and ignored evidence that pointed toward the educators’ innocence. Accused teachers’ requests to have a union representative present for their interrogations were denied by Stancik’s investigators. Some of the accused were never interviewed at all.

In short, according to the Thacher report, Stancik acted as prosecutor, judge, and jury. The accused teachers and principals had no hearing before an impartial judge to respond to the charges. They were not allowed to confront their accusers or review any of the evidence against them. Thacher concluded that many of those who were named and disciplined were entirely innocent of any cheating; some were reinstated before Thacher’s inquiry.

Stancik also relied heavily on interviews with young children, many of whom were asked to recall testing circumstances two or more years after the events. In some cases, Stancik’s staff never interviewed other adults who were in the classrooms on testing day. Thacher found that many children apparently confused practice tests with the real test.

The Stancik investigation combined some of the excesses of McCarthyism, where the accused were subject to public humiliation without a chance to defend themselves, with the now-discredited practice of relying on children’s memories to destroy the reputations of adult caregivers.

Cheating was not as widespread in New York City’s public schools as the Stancik report suggested in 1999. The true scandal was the readiness of public officials and editorialists to condemn these educators without according them a presumption of innocence and a fair hearing.

Diane Ravitch
Brookings Institution
Washington, D.C.

Gregory J. Cizek replies: Diane Ravitch herself acknowledges that it was Rudy Crew, not Edward Stancik, who acted as judge and jury. Furthermore, knowing that it was funded by the New York City teachers union, it is impossible to cast the Thacher report as unbiased. It hypocritically criticizes the Stancik report for being one-sided, yet did not present even one conclusion in support of Stancik’s findings. One has to believe that an unbiased report would have had at least one positive finding.

The Thacher report ultimately reduces to complaints about Stancik’s process, not his findings. I share with Ravitch (and presumably with Thacher and Stancik) an abhorrence for instances of people being railroaded, falsely convicted, or wrongly impugned. We may also agree that, as with any large-scale investigation, better procedures could have been in place, more evidence could have been uncovered, more time spent investigating, and more carefully crafted conclusions proffered. The true scandal is that the message heard by many parents and their children is that cheating is easily excused, argued away on procedural grounds.

Evidence on Integration

Terry Moe finds that inner-city white parents who are opposed to diversity are especially interested in switching to private schools (“Hidden Demand,” Research, Spring 2001). This could lead to the conclusion, says Moe, that inner-city whites “see private schools as a way to avoid integration with minorities.” But Moe is careful to note that a more “benign” interpretation exists: that inner-city whites who choose private schools simply don’t value diversity as much as do whites who see diversity as a strong reason to stay in the public schools.

For some parents, race has been and will continue to be a significant factor in the decision to go private. However, as Moe found and recent research suggests, the prevailing effect of school choice can be to reduce, rather than to increase, racial segregation. This appears to be true in voucher programs targeted primarily at low-income urban families.

Jay Greene, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, found that 19 percent of the students participating in Cleveland’s publicly funded voucher program attended a private school with a racial makeup similar to the Cleveland metropolitan area population, compared with only 5 percent of Cleveland-area public-school students. Fifty percent of voucher students attended racially isolated schools, compared with 61 percent of public-school students in the Cleveland metropolitan area.

In Milwaukee, home to the nation’s oldest and largest voucher program, racial integration is significantly greater in participating private schools than it is in Milwaukee’s public schools. Only 30 percent of students in religious voucher schools attend racially isolated schools, compared with 50 percent of Milwaukee public-school students. This comparative advantage resulted directly from the 1998 expansion of the voucher program to include religious schools, according to my research with George Mitchell.

Howard Fuller
Marquette University
Milwaukee, Wisc.

A-Plus for vouchers?

In “The Looming Shadow“ (Research, Winter 2001), Jay P. Greene of the Manhattan Institute examines whether the threat of vouchers under Florida’s A-Plus program forced the state’s failing schools to improve. The A-Plus program is essentially a top-down accountability system with a voucher add-on. The state grades schools from A to F based on their test-score performance. If schools labeled F fail to improve, their students become eligible for vouchers.

Greene found that the test scores of failing schools did increase. This leads him to jump to the conclusion that the threat of vouchers was the primary reason. However, how Greene can distinguish, based on Florida data alone, the effect of the voucher threat from the effect of being designated a failing school escapes me.

Greene makes an attempt at distinguishing between these two effects by narrowing the comparison to the highest-performing F schools and the lowest-performing D schools (so that the only real difference between the schools was whether they faced the threat of vouchers or not). He notes that the F schools were provided with $600 more per pupil than the D schools, but he finds that taking those resources into account would not change the conclusion. The basic problem remains, however. Given the increased public scrutiny and the stigma associated with being labeled a failing school, we should expect such schools to work hard at improving regardless of whether their students are given the option of a voucher.

North Carolina has a similar accountability system, in that low-performing schools are publicly identified as failing. My Duke University colleague Beth Glennie and I have found that schools that were designated as failing increased their performance the following year more than all the other categories of schools. Moreover, using Greene’s methodology of narrowing the comparison to the highest performing schools in the failing group and the lowest-performing in the next group, we still find that failing schools improved more. In other words, schools in North Carolina exhibited the same pattern of improvement, yet they faced no threat of vouchers. Instead their performance reflected the response of failing schools to some combination of increased scrutiny, the shame of being labeled a failure, and intervention from state assistance teams.

Given that similar factors are at work in Florida’s accountability system, I suspect that most, if not all, of the improvements in school performance in that state’s failing schools are attributable to the state’s administered accountability system, not to the voucher component of that program.

Helen F. Ladd
Duke University
Durham, North Carolina

Jay P. Greene Responds: Helen Ladd is correct in saying that the Florida A-Plus program is an “accountability system with a voucher add-on,” or, as I put it more forcefully in my article, “an accountability system with teeth.” She questions whether vouchers were the real “teeth” of the A-Plus program, contending that public shame or the threat of reconstitution may have been just as effective, if not more so, as the prospect of vouchers.

Ladd bolsters her claim with evidence from North Carolina that schools labeled as failing exhibited similar patterns of improvement, but without the threat of vouchers. However, her study and others like it neglect to establish that the gains realized by failing schools facing alternative sanctions represent real improvement in student learning. By contrast, my study validated the state test by correlating the state test results with the results of low-stakes national test results. Without establishing the validity of state testing results, it is impossible to know whether the gains made by failing schools in other states were as large as those realized by failing schools that faced the prospect of vouchers in Florida.

Even if sanctions other than vouchers inspired school improvement, my study’s findings would not be undermined in the least. The point of my study was not that vouchers are the only effective sanction. My point was that vouchers were an effective sanction in Florida and that schools needed to have incentives in addition to resources in order to improve. Helen Ladd seems to agree that sanctions are effective at inspiring school improvement, suggesting that we agree on my fundamental point about the crucial role of incentives in school reform.

Old choices

A common shortcoming in research and commentary on school choice is the failure to recognize the extent to which school choice already exists. As a result, a typical theme is that there is “little evidence” on school choice, so that only “preliminary” and “tentative” conclusions can be reached.

This assumption underlies each of the articles in your “When Schools Compete” Forum (Winter 2001). The contributors discuss two limited forms of choice in K-12 education-vouchers and charter schools-when in fact a large share of the population has always exercised one or another form of choice. As Richard Elmore and Bruce Fuller explain in Who Chooses? Who Loses? “Choice is everywhere in American education. It is manifest in the residential choices made by families . . . [and] when families, sometimes at great financial sacrifice, decide to send their children to private schools. . . . In all instances, these choices . . . are strongly shaped by the wealth, ethnicity, and social status of parents and their neighborhoods.”

Furthermore, for decades, higher education in America has flourished as a wide-open system of tax-supported educational choice involving all manner of public and private institutions. Indeed, many failing K-12 public school systems exist side-by-side with networks of thriving public and private universities. Is this not evidence of competition’s long-term success in the education sphere?

Given the widespread existence of choice and competition in K-12 education, it is demonstrably wrong to suppose, as Forum contributor Frederick M. Hess does (“The Work Ahead“), that “Efforts to cultivate competition may thus foster a culture of schooling that is alien to our educational heritage and may create an incentive structure that distorts educational priorities.”

Likewise, in “Finishing Touches,” Robert Maranto states, “The animating theory of school choice has always been that it will not only serve as an escape hatch from dysfunctional public schools but also will spark public schools to improve. Thus far this theory remains mostly untested.” For many low-income parents, choice always has been about equity, about having what other parents take for granted. The idea that the effect of choice is “mostly untested” again highlights the core problem with these three articles.

Howard Fuller
George A. Mitchell
Marquette University
Milwaukee, Wisconsin

Ripple effect

As the articles by Caroline Minter Hoxby (“Rising Tide,” Research, Winter 2001), Robert Maranto, and Jay P. Greene show, incentives have the power to change behavior in ways that improve both private and public schools.

When Milwaukee was only a few years into its choice program, the school board did something it had never done before-it enacted standards for children to attain in math and reading.

Likewise, a group of parents in Minnesota tell a story of how they long wanted a Montessori elementary school in their community. They tried to cajole, petition, and urge local officials into creating such a program, without success. Then came Minnesota’s charter school law, the nation’s first, in 1991. Lo and behold, as these parents were putting the finishing touches on their proposal, the school district offered them the opportunity to create a new Montessori elementary school.

Ask the superintendents and school boards about the changes they enacted, and they’ll tell you they were planning to do it anyway. That’s what the principals and school leaders said in Florida, when they reacted to the state’s voucher program with an unprecedented campaign to turn around long-failing schools and introduced new reading programs.

Jeanne Allen
Center for Education Reform
Washington, D.C.

Cloning Houston

Praise for the Houston school district comes at the expense of cities that have taken similar steps forward. Paul T. Hill (“Digging Deeper,” Feature, Fall 2001) gives a passing nod to Chicago and Community District 2 in New York, but the progress in Houston is becoming less rare than Hill suggests. New data from Charlotte and Sacramento indicate comparable advances. A second tier of cities-including Fort Worth, Long Beach, Norfolk, Boston, Indianapolis, Louisville, San Diego, and Minneapolis-are posting gains that may be short of Houston’s, but are exceeding their respective state averages. Moreover, cities like Baltimore and Cleveland are transforming themselves and have shown impressive spikes on state tests in recent years.

Hill should also know that urban schools are not governed by gypsy superintendents who wander the nation in search of leadership positions. In fact, only nine of the superintendents in the nation’s largest urban school systems have ever been superintendents in another major city (which is less than the number of nontraditional superintendents now running major school systems, of which there are 11). Only one-Boston superintendent Thomas Payzant-has headed two other major systems, and he can hardly be described as nomadic.

Michael Casserly
Council of the Great City Schools
Washington, D.C.

Civic education

David Campbell argues that one of the primary goals of a public education is to teach children “the ability to deliberate” in a setting of “mutual respect among persons.” But fostering mutual respect for persons of different ethnic, racial, and cultural backgrounds is not part of our secular concept of American democracy. Moral tolerance is a normative, private virtue, not a public good. Perhaps this explains why students at religious schools score higher on measures of civic participation (volunteering in the community) than public school children. The more fruitful avenue of research, based on what Campbell has told us, is to look at how private secular schools are serving our political system.

Rachel M. McCleary
Harvard University
Cambridge, Massachusetts

David Campbell’s article “Bowling Together” (Research, Fall 2001) struck a chord with me as both an educator and a father. For 15 years as a college president, I watched each incoming freshman class exhibit less civic engagement and more cynicism toward political processes. Campbell’s conclusion, that religious schools, and Catholic schools especially, have a favorable effect on developing civic participation, came as no surprise to me. With my own children in both public and religious schools, I have seen significantly more emphasis on understanding and being active in government in the religious schools, including yearlong studies in preparation for major trips to Washington, D.C., and the state capital.

It is a shame that the pendulum has swung so far toward the separation of church and state that we have difficulty acknowledging the role church-related schools might play in strengthening education in America. As president of Pepperdine University, when I was asked whether I thought there was something “artificial” about having a religious emphasis in an academic environment, I generally responded that it seemed more artificial to me to look at subjects from every conceivable point of view except the spiritual. The big difference in most religious schools is not that they indoctrinate, but that they raise topics such as moral, ethical, civic, and spiritual matters that teachers in public schools cannot or dare not address.

Nevertheless, I’m not certain that Campbell’s use of community service as a measure of civic participation is a good predictor for voting patterns and other forms of adult civic engagement. The current pattern on college campuses, where students can both volunteer and vote, is that they do the former and not the latter. Community service is at all-time highs on college campuses, voting at all-time lows. As the old bumper sticker says, we need citizens who will think globally as well as act locally.

David Davenport
Hoover Institution
Palo Alto, California

Promoting patriotism

Diane Ravitch’s lament that public schools no longer teach a common culture (see “Ex Uno Plures,” Forum, Fall 2001) is even more relevant after the events of September 11.
Our greatest challenge is to prevent more terrorism, but our greatest opportunity is to harness the renewed sense of civic pride to make our country permanently stronger. This will not be easy. Robert Putnam, author of Bowling Alone, says that national tragedies have often been followed by an upward spike in civic engagement. Only in the case of Pearl Harbor did it last. Americans who lived through December 7, 1941, changed their way of living; they grew victory gardens, bought war bonds, rationed gas, and even welcomed hitchhiking servicemen, getting them where they needed to go. World War II, building as it did on the suffering of the Great Depression, created a new civic mindedness.

One way that public schools can make the changes of September 11 more lasting is to start each school day with the Pledge of Allegiance, followed by a student or faculty member explaining “what it means to be an American” for three minutes. A student of Kurdish descent might talk about why Americans don’t persecute all Muslims just because some Muslims are terrorists. A teacher might explain why we say “In God We Trust,” but we don’t trust government with God. A principal might discuss why some civil liberties extend even to people who try to kill us. Ravitch reminds us that the historical mission of the common school included helping children learn what it means to be an American. Teaching American values in the context of reciting the pledge would honor the victims and heroes of September 11 as well as honor the reason why public schools exist in the first place.

The American Federation of Teachers’ report Do Charter Schools Measure Up? has been sharply criticized by special-interest groups advocating on behalf of charter schools. In “Lobbying in Disguise” (Check the Facts, Winter 2003), Robert Maranto joins this discordant chorus. But Maranto and the AFT agree on a number of points:

• Charter schools are no panacea, and legitimate concerns exist about the effectiveness of for-profit education.

• Charter schools generally do not cream off brighter students.

• The achievement of students in charter schools has not lived up to expectations.

• Charter schools are not hothouses of innovation. Instead, they modify and disseminate existing reform practices to a greater degree than other public schools.

• Charter schools employ many inexperienced teachers at pay that is competitive with other public schools. However, senior charter school teachers often are paid less than their public school counterparts. Virtually all are at-will employees.

• Charter schools are somewhat more likely to use merit pay, although the practice is fairly limited. Most use a traditional salary schedule.

The AFT report states that charter schools do spend less money than other public schools. However, Maranto implies that we think charter schools are underfunded. In fact, the AFT study finds “general funding comparability,” even though charter schools receive less funding for facilities. Public schools spend more than charter schools because public schools do more. School districts bear higher costs for special education, low-income students, transportation, and food services, as well as activities not typically found in charter schools, such as community outreach, services to private schools, and adult education.

Despite our many areas of agreement regarding charter schools, three fundamental differences remain.

First, the evidence does not suggest that parental choice and market competition necessarily lead to improved student achievement. In November 2002 the Texas Education Agency ordered the shutdown of five charter schools (all open for at least three years), citing persistent low academic performance. Despite the poor track record of these schools, large numbers of students were still enrolled.

Second, the AFT does not believe that parental satisfaction surveys are a substitute for student achievement. Surveys do not include the large number of families who leave charter schools-some of whom are presumably dissatisfied. Furthermore, as the surveys performed by Phi Delta Kappa reveal, parents consistently give high ratings to the public schools their children attend.

Third, Maranto is not persuaded by the research cited in our report showing that charter schools have had only a limited competitive effect on other public schools. Yet in “Small Districts in Big Trouble: How Four Arizona School Systems Responded to Charter Competition,” a study cited in the AFT report, Maranto and his colleagues found “that market competition varies depending on local environments.” Our review of the research revealed few examples of charter schools’ having an impact on districts that could be attributed to market forces.

Finally, we are attacked for our recommendation that policymakers “should not expand charter school activities until more convincing evidence of their effectiveness and viability is presented.” Is this an extreme position taken because of union politics? We don’t think so. It doesn’t differ from the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation’s decision, regarding its investment of more than $1 million in charter schools in Dayton, Ohio, to shift “our efforts from starting charter schools to ensuring that they are effective. We intend to develop outside services that will help struggling schools improve their business management operations, their delivery of special education, and, we hope, their academic results.”

Joan Baratz-Snowden
Joan Devlin
American Federation of Teachers
Washington, D.C.

Robert Maranto responds: Alas, the AFT still seems to be spinning the facts. They cite the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation in support of their proposed moratorium on the opening of new charter schools, yet the foundation strongly favors further national expansion of charter schools. There is a world of difference between one organization’s decisions to focus on its existing investments and a decision to place a nationwide moratorium on the opening of new schools. In fact, foundation president Chester E. Finn Jr. wrote that the AFT’s report “reeks of error, distortion, and untruth about charter schools.”

Further belying the AFT’s logic is the fact that 18 percent of Dayton public school children now attend charters, about 15 times the national average. Would the AFT agree that charter growth should slow only when they enroll 18 percent of American public school students?

The AFT seems to have misinterpreted my own work. My team of researchers did in fact find that “market competition varies depending on local environments.” But this is a long way from saying that charters have had no effect. The point was that competition was most effective in areas where a fair number of charter schools had sprouted up. Arizona school districts where a significant number of children left for charter schools responded with leadership changes and other attempts to draw students back to the district.

Whether charters are hothouses of innovation depends on definitions. If innovation means inventing something never before seen on Earth, then few schools of any kind innovate. Yet charters do make “innovative” options available to parents who want them. Montessori education is 100 years old, yet public school officials have told me that “not in 100 years” will my local school system (which spends more than $19,000 per child) offer a Montessori option-it’s too innovative for us. I wish I had a charter option!

NCATE responds

Sandra Vergari and Frederick M. Hess (“The Accreditation Game,” Feature, Fall 2002) make some inaccurate claims about the National Council for Accreditation of Teacher Education (NCATE). They are simply mistaken in saying that NCATE’s standards are “mainly input driven.” NCATE’s standards focus on results. Does the teacher know his or her subject matter, and can the teacher teach effectively? That is the evidence that NCATE demands of its accredited institutions.

The authors question “whether any form of accreditation is useful or appropriate in a context of widespread disagreement about what skills, dispositions, and methods are essential to good teaching.” But there can never be consensus about the one right way to teach a unique group of individuals. Vergari and Hess mention discipline, desk arrangement, spelling and grammar, and other areas where “one best way” has not been decided. Let’s hope it never will be! Children are individuals, and individuals learn differently. Some strategies work with some children better than with others-hence, different outcomes with different children. The competent teacher, with a base of knowledge about teaching and learning, makes the decision about what works best with her group of students.

Common sense and experience indicate that there is nothing unique about teaching that suggests its practitioners should be prepared differently from other licensed professionals such as doctors, engineers, accountants, and pilots. Teachers should know how children learn, should be aware of the available research in their specialties, and should be able to apply that research to their practice.
Vergari and Hess also deride the largest national study ever done on teachers’ qualifications, completed in 1999 by the Educational Testing Service. The study examined the Praxis II scores of 270,000 test takers and found that 91 percent of graduates of NCATE-accredited institutions pass state licensing exams across the nation-18 percentage points higher than graduates of non-NCATE institutions. These are exams of subject matter knowledge, proving that content knowledge is at the top of the agenda at NCATE-accredited institutions. ETS concluded, “NCATE-accredited institutions appear to increase the likelihood that candidates will meet state licensing requirements.”

Arthur E. Wise
President, NCATE
Washington, D.C.

School finance

There is no question that, as Michael Heise argues, the accountability and standards movement is threatened by school finance litigation (“Educational Jujitsu,” Feature, Fall 2002). Plaintiffs in these lawsuits say they favor high standards and accountability and then point to data showing that large numbers of students in urban districts fail to meet heightened standards. Then they cite statements like “all students can meet the standards,” issued by state departments of education, to support their demands for more money from the courts.

How, then, can states pursue and implement a reform agenda if they are also involved in school finance litigation? The answer is for states to vigorously defend such cases in order to avoid ceding control over education policy to plaintiffs and the courts. All too often these important cases are given little attention by states until it is too late.

These cases can be won if they are properly defended. The recent New York City school finance case is a prime example. Despite tremendous political pressure, New York governor George Pataki defended the case and ultimately prevailed at the appeals-court level (full disclosure: my firm served as co-counsel with the New York attorney general’s office in the trial of the Campaign for Fiscal Equity lawsuit). Although the plaintiffs have appealed the decision, for now the governor and legislature have retained their ability to set education policy and to determine spending priorities. And the New York City public schools, rather than extracting and then wasting more of the taxpayers’ money, may be forced to finally move beyond “lack of money” excuses and attempt to implement real, research-based reforms.

In too many places, public officials do not appreciate the stakes in school finance litigation or erroneously believe that such litigation will hasten reform efforts. Heise makes a compelling case that such litigation does not hasten reform, but hampers it.

Rocco E. Testani
Sutherland Asbill & Brennan LLP
Atlanta, Georgia

Social factors

David Murray’s critique (“Waiting for Utopia,” Check the Facts, Summer 2002) of scholar Richard Rothstein’s writings stimulates an important question: To what degree can formal education mitigate the debilitating social and physical conditions that accompany low-income students to school?

Rothstein continually asks whether schooling is the most effective way to elevate students from poverty and launch them on a road to higher academic achievement.
Answers to this question can be tightly linked to values and, thus, heavily freighted with political rhetoric. This is the manner in which Murray has chosen to treat the topic. He attacks Rothstein’s writings as though they were part of a political campaign.

Here is the broad context in which the issue can be nested. Europe has long seen fit to invest heavily in income maintenance, public housing, universal medical coverage, prenatal care, and preschool and childcare policies in an effort to compensate for deficiencies in the family and community environments of students.

The United States has opted to rely more heavily on schooling as a means for promoting individual fulfillment, enhancing social justice, and countering unearned privilege.

Which strategy is more effective? In western Europe, it has resulted in fewer citizens residing at the extremes of wealth and poverty. Hence, if the standard is equality, western Europe wins.
However, if greater economic dynamism, more powerful incentives for creativity, cultural innovation, greater opportunity for material comfort, greater acceptance of diversity, and greater personal liberty are taken as measures of societal well-being, then the United States might be better.

The United States presently spends approximately $3 billion each operating day to support its schools and colleges. On an annualized basis, this is more than the cost of America’s national defense.
If, under the best of conditions, schools are still incapable of adding anything but a few fractions of a standard deviation to the academic achievement of students or to their lifetime earning trajectories, might it not make sense to freeze school spending and explore supplementary policy instruments? Might it not make sense to focus on other social interventions that might have a more powerful effect on students’ cognitive skills?

James W. Guthrie
Vanderbilt University
Nashville, Tennessee

Vouchers in the courts

James E. Ryan provides a balanced and comprehensive description of the next round in the legal fight over vouchers (“The Neutrality Principle,” Feature, Fall 2003). State constitutional provisions serve as the most immediate impediment to voucher programs that include religious schools. The assumption had long been that state courts are free to interpret their constitutions differently from the federal provisions, even if those interpretations diverge from federal holdings.

Zelman arguably undermines this presumption by intimating that there is no longer any justification for treating religious schools differently from their secular counterparts in indirect funding programs. However, one point that is missing from Ryan’s otherwise comprehensive article is how a conservative court would reconcile its federalist inclinations with a holding that states cannot provide a “more spacious” conception of church-state separation. Only if the Establishment Clause represents both the floor and the ceiling of church-state relationships should states be barred from alternative approaches. A holding that states must march in lockstep with the federal experiment would have implications for other federalism issues, a point likely to be on the minds of the justices.

As Ryan notes, the most popular line of attack on these comprehensive state provisions is that they are based on the much-maligned Blaine amendment of 1876. Pro-funding groups argue that the federal Blaine amendment-which sought to prohibit public funding of sectarian schools-was nothing more than an exercise in Catholic bigotry. Because many state provisions were modeled after the failed amendment, the argument goes, they too are suspect in origin and effect.

Ryan’s historical argument fails in two respects. First, the Blaine amendment was the capstone of a much larger controversy over the future of American public education. Funding of sectarian schools was only one aspect of the controversy, and anti-Catholicism a subset thereof. While anti-Catholicism and opposition to parochial school funding motivated many Blaine amendment supporters, other people were motivated by a variety of concerns, not the least of which was whether there should be a federal role in education. Second, many state constitutional provisions were enacted for reasons that had nothing to do with anti-Catholicism. Several midwestern states enacted their constitutions with provisions preventing the funding of religious schools before the rise of organized nativism and long before the Blaine amendment. A recent review of the state constitutional conventions in Oregon (1857) and Washington (1889) for an amicus brief in Locke v. Davey revealed no evidence of anti-Catholic animus. As Ryan correctly concludes, the road to challenging these state provisions may be long and arduous, requiring a state-by-state review.

STEVEN K. GREEN
Willamette University College of Law
Salem, Oregon

The SAT

I was one of the two psychometricians on the panel that advised the College Board on the issue of whether the SAT scores of disabled students who take the test with accommodations should be “flagged” (see Miriam Kurtzig Freedman, “Disabling the SAT,” Feature, Fall 2003). In my opinion, the decision to end the practice of flagging was the right one.

Standard testing conditions are problematic for many people with disabilities. This is why the College Board grants testing accommodations, such as extended time to finish the test. However, many people with disabilities do not want others to know about their disability. The practice of flagging SAT scores essentially informs college-admissions officers that the applicant has a disability. The opportunity for bias against the student is obvious.

There are two arguments in favor of flagging. The first is that providing an accommodation may give students with disabilities an unfair advantage. The second is that scores from accommodated test administrations are less valid than scores from standard administrations.

As Freedman argues, the current version of the Standards for Educational and Psychological Testing can be interpreted to support the practice of flagging when information on the comparability of scores across standard and nonstandard test administrations is lacking. However, these standards also state: “If a modification is provided for which there is no reasonable basis for believing that the modification would affect score comparability, there is no need for a flag.” Furthermore, the Standards are silent on the issue of where to draw the line between “comparability” and “noncomparability.”

The College Board has sponsored more research on the effects of testing accommodations than any other organization in the world. The findings for the SAT show that students with disabilities perform much better when given accommodations such as extended time. Meanwhile, students without disabilities score only a little better when given an accommodation. The only evidence in support of “noncomparability” was for male students with learning disabilities who had extended time. Their first-year college GPAs were lower than the SAT predicted. However, this finding did not hold for females with learning disabilities, and it was reduced when males’ high-school grades were factored in. When evaluating the size of this “overprediction” for learning-disabled males, the majority panel noted that it was smaller than the overprediction for other groups of students, such as African-American males. The practice of flagging could not be supported by the relatively small effect noted just for learning-disabled males.

STEPHEN G. SIRECI
University of Massachusetts
Amherst, Massachusetts

Miriam Kurtzig Freedman responds: I thank Stephen Sireci for his thoughtful letter. Nevertheless, I am not prepared to assume that college-admissions officers will be biased against applicants with disabilities. Neither the panel that voted to end flagging nor the College Board has presented any evidence to support this assumption.

Sireci writes that the only evidence of noncomparability is the “relatively small effect noted just for learning-disabled males” and concludes that this could not support the continued practice of flagging. Yet when the panel’s two psychometricians asked themselves the key question-Are the scores from standard and nonstandard administrations of the test comparable?-one answered, “No,” and Sireci answered, “Not sure.” We still have no “reasonable basis” to believe the scores are comparable. Thus the College Board’s decision to end flagging is difficult to reconcile with the evidence and the panel’s own deliberations.

Licensing leaders

Frederick M. Hess seems obsessed with the need to establish a “deregulation” route to identify and prepare school leaders (“Lifting the Barrier,” Forum, Fall 2003). His model seems to suggest that just about anyone with a master’s degree, preferably in business administration, can provide leadership to schools and districts. This is truly a flawed concept in that a business executive, while having the requisite management and financial skills, has basically no knowledge of the learning process, adolescent psychology, curricular programs, and instructional strategies. Schools need leaders of instruction who have a broad repertoire of pedagogical skills that have been built through extensive school-based experiences.

GERALD N. TIROZZI
Executive Director
National Association of
Secondary School Principals
Reston, Virginia

University-based programs in educational administration have been far too unselective in whom they admit and “train” for leadership roles. Those same programs, it should be pointed out, are too often undercapitalized and are expected to generate credit hours without many of the resources needed to foster quality programs. I agree that far too many programs in educational administration are disconnected from the real world of education practice. One simple illustration is the absence, in many programs, of any substantive work on assessment and accountability and of helping administrators learn how, in Marc Tucker’s words, to “recognize the elements of sound standards-based classroom organization and practice.”

Frederick Hess, however, sounds like far too many critics who suggest that the free-market approach is the answer. It seems so right to suggest that if you deregulate credentialing for administrators, they (the bright, the better educated, and the managerially savvy) will come. The authors even have anecdotal evidence to prove their point from places like Seattle and San Diego. But basing public policy on a broad deregulatory idea ignores the important difference between the education of our children and other public pursuits. Deregulation of such things as the telephone industry has brought more options, but has also engendered lots of problems. The consequences of broad deregulation of education are potentially more deleterious and far-reaching than may be evidenced in other public- and private-sector endeavors. I am convinced that the byproduct of deregulation via the Hess route will be further mediocrity with instances of excellence, which we already have.

THOMAS J. LASLEY II
Dean, School of Education
University of Dayton
Dayton, Ohio

Frederick M. Hess responds: Neither I nor any responsible reformer imagines that private-sector candidates are saviors or in possession of unique skills. The point is only that they ought to be judged on their ability and not blocked out by statutes or regulations. Gerald Tirozzi asserts the continued need for traditional courses in educational administration, despite the absence of evidence that these courses teach useful or necessary skills. He acknowledges the promise of performance-based licensure, but then calls for a continued regime of mandatory coursework. Such required seat time, of course, is the antithesis of licensure based on how well administrators serve children.

If we agree that educational administration programs don’t provide the leaders we need, and if three decades of reform haven’t made much difference, why is Thomas Lasley so confident that minor adjustments in courses or programs will produce substantial change? If potential new applicants are less suited to school leadership positions than current leaders or are likely to “do harm,” why does Lasley presume that they will be hired over conventional candidates? If he believes that district hiring officials are unwilling or unable to gauge ability, then we have identified a need for much more fundamental change in educational administration.

Teacher pay

Richard Vedder points out that teachers are not paid as badly as everyone thinks (“Comparable Worth,” Forum, Summer 2003). Unions like to use measures of annual salary, while Vedder suggests that hourly wages provide a more accurate gauge of teachers’ pay. But neither is a very good unit of measure.

Teachers commonly work many more hours than the official time they spend in school because they typically prepare for class, grade exams, and perform other tasks outside the formally defined school day. In my experience, most teachers work as much as other professionals, about 50 hours per week.
The best unit is the number of contractual work days, which for teachers is typically about 182 days per year. The work year for most workers is 238 days. In other words, a teacher’s annual salary is based on about 76 percent of a standard work year. Thus a teacher’s salary of $45,000 translates into a full-year salary of $59,000.

T. ALLEN LAMBERT
Ithaca, New York

The Asian-white gap

Jens Ludwig (“The Great Unknown,” Check the Facts, Summer 2003) raises a number of important questions about the U.S. Department of Education’s study of the black-white test-score gap. But he ignores entirely the fact that their analysis and virtually all other studies on this matter are limited by the fact that the test scores of African-Americans were measured only against whites. Asian-Americans are a smaller minority than blacks, but outperform both whites and blacks in school. Asians should be included in the data to ascertain why this group has such a great academic advantage; one reason is perhaps their tight-knit traditional family structure.

STEVE FELLOWS
Seattle, Washington

In the article “Exploring the Costs of Accountability” (Feature, Spring 2004), James Peyser and RobertCostrell discuss the critical question in  K–12 education finance today: How much will it cost for a school with a particular set of student needs to meet a state’s expectations for performance?

Over the past several years our firm has estimated the cost of an “adequate” education in several states; most of these analyses were completed before the federal No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act became operational. We are currently helping a state estimate the costs that can be attributed directly to NCLB. The authors conclude that NCLB’s critics “greatly exaggerate the shortfall of federal resources.”To make that conclusion, however, requires a full accounting of the costs likely to be incurred, including the expense of building accountability systems, undertaking school improvement, providing supplemental services, hiring highly qualified personnel, making schools safe, and managing information. The authors’ suggestion that states could use a “triage” approach to focus resources on the most needy schools confuses what is likely to happen, based on the available resources, with what needs to happen in order to meet state and federal standards. Where we disagree most with the authors is about how best to estimate the indirect costs of NCLB—the costs associated with meeting targets for adequate yearly progress.

The authors reject two widely used approaches to making such estimates despite the acceptance of these strategies by state legislatures and courts. The dismissal of the “professional judgment”approach eliminates a rational way of thinking about a hypothetical situation when research and statistics have not addressed the issue with any definitive conclusions.The authors are more supportive of the “successful schools”approach because it is based on some evidence of relative performance. While they prefer to focus on academic growth rather than on absolute levels of achievement, they choose to consider only the aggregate improvement in test scores. Aggregate improvement is one useful piece of evidence in the absence of full value-added information, but it is subject to error when used in isolation. Given that every approach has limitations, it makes sense to us to gather information based on as many approaches as data will support and use the results to ensure that school districts have adequate resources.

JOHN AUGENBLICK
ROBERT PALAICH
Augenblick, Palaich, and Associates, Inc.
Denver, Colorado

The photographs accompanying the article “A Board’s Eye View” in the Spring 2004 issue were takenby Patrick Harbron, www.patrickharbron.com. The editors regret the omission.

The new Head Start
Ron Haskins asks whether Democrats should go along with the Bush administration’s new vision for the Head Start program (“Competing Visions,” Feature, Winter 2004).

I am one Democrat who will concede that the administration is on the right track in pushing Head Start to pay more attention to children’s cognitive skills. My own and other studies show that children from low-income families enter kindergarten a year to a year and a half, on average, behind middle-class children in their language and many other cognitive skills.This is a gigantic lag considering that they are only five to six years old. Moreover, children’s early skills are the strongest predictor of their long-term achievement. Anything short of a serious effort to give disadvantaged children a better chance of succeeding in school is irresponsible. As Haskins points out, the early childhood education community has resisted a focus on academic skills in Head Start, concerned that attention to academic skills will dilute efforts to promote positive social and emotional development and that the comprehensive health services that Head Start currently provides will be abandoned. The community is also concerned that the teaching strategies that will be implemented to improve academic skills will not be appropriate for young children. These are legitimate concerns. Closing the achievement gap will require more than teaching young children basic pre-reading and math skills. Social skills and emotional adjustment are strong predictors of students’ academic performance and their effective functioning as adults. Physical health and well-being also affect learning, and have value in their own right.But there is no reason why Head Start can’t give more attention to cognitive development while still keeping its commitment to comprehensive services and other aspects of development.

Now to the issue of how. My own and others’ research suggests that some strategies for teaching children academic skills may do more harm than good. Middle-class children do not achieve their academic advantage by writing the letters of the alphabet and counting to ten over and over. Children learn best, and enjoy learning most,when they are actively involved in authentic activities—being read to, telling and discussing stories, identifying and sounding out the letters in their names, counting and grouping objects, measuring ingredients, and so on. The teacher’s role is to structure activities, ask questions, guide children’s explorations, and assess their skills and understanding to ensure that well-articulated learning goals are being achieved. We don’t need to make children ready to learn.They are born ready to learn, and most are quite eager learners. We can, however, easily squash that eagerness. I hope the Bush administration will provide the resources needed to prepare teachers to implement effective teaching practices and develop an accountability approach that will promote effective teaching rather than teaching that will turn children off from learning before they even start school.

DEBORAH STIPEK
Dean, Stanford University
School of Education
Palo Alto, California

Inventing an ideology
Jonathan Burack argues that a “global education ideology”has “captivated” social studies experts in recent years, resulting in a curriculum that is “deeply suspicious”of both American institutions and our role in the world (“The Sun Sets on the West,” Feature, Spring 2004).

Like many previous critics of social studies, Mr. Burack relies on a few quotes taken out of context to shock his readers into concern that an “antiwestern” bias has taken over the education of our youth. The “global education ideology”described by Burack is largely his own creation. Though there are a number of scholars in the field of social studies education who focus on global studies or global education, they are an intellectually diverse lot and are far from unified on questions of curriculum content and ideology. While Burack argues that global education’s believers “exercise a strong degree of influence among textbook publishers,” many of the problems he describes with the treatment of global diversity are a reflection of the textbook production and marketing process rather than the result of a conspiracy among educators. Burack seems to suggest that we should deemphasize criticism of western hegemony in global affairs. He forgets the powerful role that western and U.S. militarism and economic clout have played in world affairs and in the domination and subjugation of many of the world’s peoples and material resources over recent centuries. Historically, our schools have imparted what amounts to a white studies curriculum via the glorification of western leaders, institutions, and traditions. If Burack has his way, schools will regress to a 19th-century focus on traditional history and the concomitant aversion to asking deep questions.

RONALD W. EVANS
San Diego State University
San Diego, California

Benefits of the C-minus
It was a pleasure to read “The Gentleman’s A” (David N. Figlio and Maurice E. Lucas, Research, Spring 2004), in part because it accords with common sense. The teacher you remember from your youth is not the easy grader who let you get away with a weak performance; it is the tough one who gave you a challenge and was not easy to please. I know that researchers usually prefer “counterintuitive” results, but in matters like these it is often the case that science is better judged by common sense than common sense by science.

It would be interesting to learn the authors’ view of the importance of sustaining students’ self-esteem. Is it better for less able students to receive high or low grades? Do high grades encourage them to do better than they otherwise would do, or do such students do worse because they live in a fool’s paradise, ignorant of their true capacities?

It would also be nice to know the characteristics of tough graders. Are their IQs higher or lower than those of easy graders? Are they more likely to be liberal or conservative? And what about sex, religion, and union affiliation? What do they think they are accom-plishing with tough grades? A fine study is one that raises more questions than it answers.

HARVEY C. MANSFIELD
Harvard University
Cambridge, Massachusetts

Why not choose teachers?

Paul E. Peterson and William G. Howell’s article,“Voucher Research Controversy” (Check the Facts, Spring 2004), was informative regarding the academic debate over school choice. I am struck, however, by how the debate has focused on parental choice of schools.

Previous research has shown that teacher quality contributes more to student achievement than anything else a school does. So why not allow parents to choose their children’s teachers as well?

Enabling teacher choice in a formal way could yield a number of benefits. For one thing, the prevailing method of compensating public school teachers— higher pay for additional years of experience and schooling—has not been shown to correlate consistently with improved test scores. By contrast, teacher choice would identify which teachers are most “in demand” among parents and therefore deserving of increased compensation.Those in the least demand could be replaced.

The practical obstacles to such a system are formidable, not the least of which is the teacher unions’ contention that all teachers are equal and thus deserve equal pay. Nevertheless, as a vision for change, it deserves consideration.

Imagine what the power of choice might do for public education if consumers were to scrutinize test scores as intensely in choosing teachers as they do when buying real estate.

BEN RARICK
University of Washington
Seattle, Washington

Daniel Willingham’s critique of Howard Gardner’s theory of multiple intelligences (“Reframing the Mind,” Check the Facts, Summer 2004) is yet another attempt by a psychometric supremacist to quash other views of intelligence.

Psychometric diehards assume that the correct model of intelligence can be generated by investigating how people think in highly atypical situations. It is true, as Willingham writes, that data from 130,000 individuals enabled John Carroll to produce a three-tiered model of intellect-with g (general intelligence) atop it all. But it is also true that those 130,000 individuals were largely plopped into isolated rows where they frenetically addressed peculiar puzzles and bubble-in answer sheets.

Rather than investigating bubble-sheet results, Gardner sought to illuminate the mental abilities that underlie actual human accomplishments found across cultures. What makes people capable mathematicians and writers as well as teachers, historians, farmers, artists, and even comedians? Gardner tackled this question by drawing on a wide array of evidence from the sciences and social sciences. Since statistical techniques for analyzing this diversity of evidence do not exist, Gardner could not simply use traditional methods. Therefore, he laid out his evidence, criteria, and reasoning-just as, for instance, Charles Darwin did.

Does this mean that all uses of Gardner’s theory are effective? No. Gardner, who had not anticipated the wide use of his theory in schools, initially encouraged broad experimentation with it. Hence there were brilliant and stupid uses. My recently published investigation of 41 schools that use multiple intelligences theory has identified those practices that enable educators to use the theory, not for its own sake, but to enable students to produce high-level work. It remains highly questionable whether psychometric theories, which are neither the whole story of human intelligence nor terribly useful to teachers, can do anything similar.

Mindy L. Kornhaber
Pennsylvania State University
University Park, Pennsylvania

The school that I lead, the New City School, has been implementing multiple intelligences theory since 1988. Our experiences with using Gardner’s theory have been very positive. Multiple intelligences theory is a tool that can be used to enable more children to learn and to enable children to learn more. By considering all of the intelligences as they plan and teach, teachers become student-centered rather than curriculum-focused. Too often, schooling is designed so that the only students who succeed are those who are strong in the scholastic intelligences (linguistic and logical-mathematical). In a multiple intelligences school, all of the intelligences are used as tools to facilitate and support students as they learn the requisite curriculum and skills. Our program is no less rigorous because of our use of Gardner’s theory; instead, our use of multiple intelligences gives our students richer and wider ways to learn.

Thomas R. Hoerr
New City School
St. Louis, Missouri

Many educators object to the unitary view of intelligence because it tends to narrowly circumscribe the measurement of intelligence and to emphasize verbal and mathematical (and related) skills. It is assumed that even if one could measure a broader range of abilities, the results would not alter any particular child’s standing on a combined intelligence scale. Verbal and math skills have traditionally been the focus of intelligence tests because these skills were the focus of schools; hence inquiry into understanding children’s intelligence was limited to those skills viewed as essential to learning. As Willingham says, “If it was important in school, it was important on the intelligence test.”
Educators have good reasons for seeking alternative views. If by reconstructing our views of children’s intelligence we can successfully teach a wider range of students, teachers should not be accused of being confused for doing just that.

Laura Rogers
Francis W. Parker Charter School
Devens, Massachusetts

Worcester responds

William G. Howell concludes that the federal No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) has had “little impact at all” on the Worcester Public Schools (“One Child at a Time,” Feature, Summer 2004). He bases this conclusion solely on the fact that few parents in Worcester chose to exercise their rights to switch schools or to choose a for-profit vendor for after-school tutoring-options they possess under the federal law’s school choice and supplemental services provisions.

But should we be surprised that few parents chose to move their children to other schools? Howell reports that 80 percent of the Worcester parents he surveyed indicated that they were satisfied with their child’s school. Satisfied parents do not transfer their children out of a school.

Howell neglects to mention that among the 14 largest urban districts in Massachusetts, Worcester had the second highest percentage (68 percent) of schools meeting state targets for making “adequate yearly progress” under the law; the statewide average was 48 percent. As a district, we met adequate yearly progress targets in English for all economic and ethnic subgroups of students.

Howell also downplays the fact that the Worcester school district is a state-approved provider of tutoring services to more than 800 students. Competing against for-profit tutoring firms, our highly qualified teachers have offered more services to more children for less money.

The major problem with No Child Left Behind lies with the accountability system and the definition of adequate yearly progress. Adequate yearly progress is an Enron-like mess based on different students in different years and different state cut-offs regarding when students are deemed “proficient.” Rather than focus on the real problem, Howell pursues the red herrings of choice and supplemental services.

James Caradonio
Superintendent, Worcester Public Schools
Worcester, Massachusetts

William Howell responds: In Worcester, one child has taken advantage of the choice provisions of NCLB in order to seek supplemental tutoring services from a private provider, and one other child switched out of a school deemed in need of improvement in order to attend a higher-performing public school. Yet thousands of students qualified for both educational options. The purpose of my essay was to explain how this happened.

I identified numerous factors that contributed to the low take-up rates in Worcester, ranging from the district’s practices and students’ demographics to parents’ interests in alternative schooling options. Nothing in Caradonio’s response rebuts any particular observation. Instead, Caradonio highlights those that compliment his district and dismisses the rest. By his account, it is immaterial that few parents even knew about their options; that the district created a cumbersome process for exercising those options; or that private providers had few means by which to communicate directly with eligible students.

Abolish school boards?

The continuing battle for control of the New York City schools shows why school boards are a valuable part of public education (see “The Future of School Boards,” Forum, Summer 2004). In 2002, the state legislature eliminated the school board and gave total control of the school system to Mayor Michael Bloomberg. Over the past two years, however, many who wanted to see the board abolished have grown unhappy with Bloomberg’s handling of the public schools.

Brookings Institution scholar Diane Ravitch and United Federation of Teachers president Randi Weingarten, both of whom supported mayoral control, wrote recently in the New York Times that Bloomberg’s powers are “unchecked” and the city’s education department operates in secrecy, denying “the right of the public to have a say in important decisions.” In their words, it is time to allow a “board of respected citizens to set policy for the schools” and to “reestablish the role of the public in public education.”

This sounds like Ravitch and Weingarten want a local school board.

In Canada, the government of New Brunswick abolished elected school boards in 1996 in favor of a corporate governance structure that gave absolute power to the Minister of Education. Four years later, the parents, the public, and school administrators were frustrated at being left out of the decisionmaking process. They vented their anger at the polls and voted out the ruling party. The new government immediately reinstated elected school boards.

That’s because school board members are the public’s voice in public education. For generations, the public has trusted school boards to balance community goals and values with the needs of children. School board members are accessible to parents, advocates for children, and accountable for student performance. They are an essential component of the future of public education.

Anne Bryant
Executive Director, National School Boards Association
Alexandria, Virginia

In arguing for the elimination of the local school board, Chester Finn and Lisa Keegan (“Lost at Sea“) state, “[State-level child-centered funding] would create not only a more equitable system, but also more effective schools.”

I agree that a child-centered funding system would be more equitable. I also agree that our large city school districts are examples of monopolies at their worst. Yet it is not clear that a complete move to a state-funded, child-centered funding system would lead to more effective schools. For one thing, taxpayers might be less likely to support the current high levels of education funding if such funding were completely centralized.

In researching the effects of school-finance centralization in California, Harvard economist Caroline Hoxby found that increased centralization of school financing led to lowered per-pupil spending. This isn’t surprising given that many individuals support local school taxes because doing so will increase the resale value of their home. No such incentive exists in a world of centralized funding.

Joshua Hall
The Buckeye Institute
Columbus, Ohio

Reform in Britain

No doubt readers of Christopher Woodhead’s article (“The British Experience,” Feature, Summer 2004) will have figured out that this is a polemic rather than a balanced discussion of the pros and cons of recent education reforms in England. For instance, Woodhead’s claim that the examination agencies in England lack real independence has never been substantiated by any of the many independent investigations carried out from time to time in response to accusations of the “dumbing down” of exams.
The “exhaustion and anger of teachers” referred to in the article is seldom directed at the “educational establishment” but more often at policymakers-and most frequently at those who offer unbalanced and poorly substantiated criticism of the education system and whose own policy ideas are so obviously ideologically driven.

Peter Robinson
Institute for Public Policy Research
London, England

Consequences of Brown

Thomas Dee’s finding (“The Race Connection,” Research, Spring 2004) that both white and black students learned more when taught by teachers of the same race has implications that go far beyond his discussion.

One of the unfortunate results of Brown v. Board of Education was that many black teachers and principals throughout the nation lost their jobs, as white administrators refused to hire them for the newly integrated schools. As a result, most black and Hispanic students still have white teachers. In 2000, 38 percent of public schools had not a single teacher of color; nationally, only 6 percent of teachers are black. Even in large urban school districts, where the student body is largely minority, only about 18 percent of teachers are black and 9 percent Hispanic.

To some extent, then, the racial disparity in the teaching force that has been an unfortunate consequence of Brown has probably contributed to the survival of the achievement gap that integration was meant to solve.

Leonie Haimson
Class Size Matters
New York, New York

NCLB is, without question, the most comprehensive and complex piece of legislation concerning education in the history of our country. But it had an implementation date of six months after it was signed (January 2002). This impossibly short timeline created tension between school districts and tutorial providers right from the start. The federal government did not have all the guidelines for implementation ready in July of 2002, nor did states even have their lists of state-approved providers ready by that date. This bumpy start led some providers to suspect that school districts were avoiding implementation so they could use the set-aside Title I dollars for other purposes.

The Supplemental Educational Services section of NCLB was a compromise agreed to by Congress when the voucher plan failed. It almost appears as though some in what Gorman calls “the popular crowd” believe if they can convince all the right people that school districts are bullies, are weighed down by conflicts of interest, and have no incentives to implement the program, school districts will be excluded as approved providers. Supplemental Educational Services is an attempt to privatize public education by using public funds for private vendors.

No Child Left Behind is the right thing to do. It may have its flaws and need some modifications, but it is seeking to put the resources in the right places. I believe in the Supplemental Educational Services program, and I welcome outside vendor partners. However, we all should be represented at the table when critical issues or concerns are discussed, not just the popular crowd.

John Liechty
Associate Superintendent
Extended Day Programs
Los Angeles Unified School District

Keeping Good Teachers

If more governors had exhibited Mark Warner’s excellent grasp for what it would take to improve the teaching profession, terms such as “Highly Qualified Teachers” and “High Objective Uniform State Standard of Evaluation” might not have entered our lexicon (“Netting an Elusive Breed,” Feature, Fall 2004). Not only does the Virginia governor understand what needs to be done, but he also shows, with program initiatives, what’s possible.

One key point of Warner’s template, however, needs a word of caution. Warner proposes that states need to champion more high-quality mentoring programs to reduce teacher attrition. But like many sweeping fixes to education woes, such mentoring programs can bear little resemblance to what inspired them. Our high-poverty schools, for instance, may provide the rhetorical urgency to stop these schools from bleeding new teachers every year, but the remedies tend to be spread too thin across too many schools.

The Public Education Network surveyed teachers in West Virginia who were required by their states to get a visit from a mentor every week. The survey revealed that many of them were lucky to see their mentors once or twice a semester. Not the state’s fault? Absolutely not, but mentoring has always had severe shortcomings of this nature. Caveat emptor.

Mentoring also is most likely to be mishandled and work least effectively in the most dysfunctional schools, the schools that have the hardest time holding on to new teachers. There are good reasons why teachers leave these schools in droves, and it usually has more to do with their peers and the principal than with the kids they teach. It may well be that the schools that Governor Warner wants to help most will solve their dysfunction only with significant and simultaneous infusions of new staff as well as the kinds of turnaround principals that Warner so aptly observes are needed.

If states didn’t insist on helping all schools equally, they could afford the Cadillac versions that high-poverty dysfunctional schools need.

Kate Walsh
President, National Council on Teacher Quality

Governor Warner is to be applauded for recognizing that retention of teachers is the real crisis in school staffing. The conventional wisdom is that we can’t find enough teachers to do the job-but the truth is that we can’t keep them. A third of all new teachers leave the classroom after three years, and close to half leave after five years. More than a quarter of a million teachers stop teaching every year.

The student achievement gap won’t be closed until we close the teaching quality gap, and to do that every school must attract and retain highly qualified teachers. High attrition rates undermine the teaching continuity, coherence, and community that are so essential to good schools. Typically, urban and rural schools serving poor and minority students have the highest turnover rates, and as a result they have the highest percentages of first-year teachers, the highest percentages of teachers with fewer than five years of teaching experience, the lowest paid teachers, and the lowest percentages of accomplished teachers. These conditions create a vicious cycle in high-need schools that undercuts the ability of those schools to attract and retain well-qualified teachers.

As a nation we have attempted to improve teaching quality by increasing the supply of teachers for hard-to-staff schools. However, the heavy emphasis on keeping these schools supplied with teachers is focusing the energy for improvement on recruitment rather than on the need to change the conditions that make these schools so hard to staff in the first place. This strategy has protected the status quo in dysfunctional schools.

As a former business executive, Governor Warner understands that when an organization is losing valuable human resources it is because someone else is offering them better conditions and more rewarding career opportunities. Three components of his program are particularly significant.

First, he begins in the right place: rewarding teachers for performance and modifying the current teaching incentive structure to pay teachers more for taking on the most challenging assignments.
Second, Governor Warner’s mentoring initiative is noteworthy for requiring districts to show that their mentoring programs are improving retention. It is unacceptable to hold students accountable for meeting standards that their schools are not staffed to help them meet. It is time to hold school leaders accountable for reducing the turnover and attrition that undermine teaching quality in high-need schools.

Third, the governor’s initiative also calls for changing state and district incentive structures that drain quality teachers and resources from the schools that need them the most. It is time to establish formulas to ensure adequate funding that are based on per-pupil needs in lieu of per-pupil averages. School financing policies should be driven by an analysis of what it costs to raise the bar and close the gap in student achievement, bringing teaching and learning opportunities in all schools up to a high standard.

Tom Carroll
President, National Commission on Teaching and America’s Future

Multiple Intelligences

It is a shame that Daniel T. Willingham is unable to link empathy and imagination with his commitment to the science of psychometrics in his stinging critique of multiple intelligences theory (“Reframing the Mind,” Check The Facts, Summer 2004).

If he could, then he might be able to see a completely different scenario when the child comes home from school enthusiastically explaining how he finally learned all of the vowel letters by forming their shapes with twigs he gathered on one of his many rambles in his backyard woods. I suspect that a parent’s mind would not be as closed as Mr. Willingham’s as he senses his child’s newfound joy in learning because he is respected for his unique intellectual gifts and not “left behind” like he was by all the other teachers whose primary focus was the test scores and not the child.

I share Mr. Willingham’s concern that multiple intelligences (MI) theory be tested for its scientific validity. I have spent the past 17 years investigating the validity and reliability of an MI assessment that provides both quantitative and qualitative data. My recent work includes a 12-nation cross-cultural study and factor analyses studies of 20,000 North American adults and teenagers. These extensive and rigorous analyses support the essential structure of MI theory.

It is telling that Willingham does not argue against the existence of human abilities outside the academic domains, such as kinesthetic skill, musical talent, and social insight. The question is whether we dare to call them “intelligences.” If we do, then it means that they should be included in the hallowed realm of the school curriculum and not slighted as “mere” talents or aptitudes to be exercised only during extracurricular activities.

Howard Gardner’s definition goes beyond the convergent problem-solving abilities associated with IQ to include “the fashioning of products” and providing of services that are valued within a community. This stretching of the cognitive envelope means that we must value creative thinking and practical problem solving and interpersonal skill as on par with math and reading.

Branton Shearer
Chair, Multiple Intelligence Special Interest Group
American Educational Research Association

Daniel Willingham replies:
Shearer confuses several issues. First, Gardner proposed Multiple Intelligences (MI) as a theory of mind, not as a method to instill joy of learning. I therefore evaluated it as a theory of mind. Second, as a theory of mind, its essential structure has never been in question because, as noted in my article, Gardner’s theory included factors of human ability similar to those of many theories that preceded his. What was new in Gardner’s theory was (1) his proposal of how those abilities are related; (2) his criteria for identifying intelligences; and (3) his labeling as intelligences what others have called abilities. I argued that his characterization of the relationships among abilities is known to be incorrect and that the criteria are flawed. Third, I tried to shed light on why “daring” to relabel abilities as intelligences has led to applications Gardner did not intend, one of which Shearer advocates. Shearer asserts that status as an intelligence “means [it] should be included in the hallowed realm of the school curriculum.” Gardner disagrees, arguing that matters of curriculum are independent of the structure of intelligence.

Small Schools

The findings in Christopher Berry’s “School Inflation” (Research, Fall 2004) add to an impressive mound of evidence documenting the advantages of small schools.

Early-20th-century advocates of large and consolidated schools, such as James Conant and Ellwood Cubberley, never dreamed that someday three out of five high-school students would attend schools comprising more than 1,000 students, with some schools having over 4,000 students. Conant’s idea of a large school was 400 students, and the schools Cubberley wanted to consolidate were mostly rural one-room schoolhouses with an average size of well under 100 students.

Recent studies have found that students in schools with about 100 students per grade generally score higher on tests, pass more courses, and are more likely to stay in school, graduate, and go on to college. Hundreds of these high-quality small schools already exist around the country, with 250 more scheduled to open in the fall of 2004. Many of these schools are graduating at least 80 percent of their students and sending them off to college, even while facing significant challenges, such as serving high levels of low-income, minority, and special-needs students.

It is important to remember that small size is not a solution in and of itself. But it does create an environment that fosters success. Our own evaluation studies have shown that in small schools students say their teachers know them better, care about them more, and have higher expectations of them. As a result, students are challenged and focus on achieving. Additionally, teachers are better able to collaborate and develop a common vision.

While the achievement gap between white students and their low-income, minority counterparts on tests has received a great deal of attention, the gap in high-school graduation rates is even more critical. Nearly half of our nation’s African-American and Hispanic students drop out of high school, and fewer than a fifth graduate ready for college. This graduation gap is the most important economic, civic, and social problem of our time. As research points out, small schools improve life outcomes by helping more students graduate, thus providing them with the opportunities to attend college, find meaningful employment, and become productive citizens.

Small schools can also help boost graduation rates among these underserved students by providing them with a new version of the three Rs-rigorous academic coursework, meaningful relationships with instructors who can help them meet high standards, and relevant learning opportunities through internships, community partnerships, and real-world tasks.

To help more students attend these more effective schools, our foundation is investing in community-based efforts to create new high-quality small schools and smaller learning communities within larger schools. But our goal is not to create more small schools; it is to help more low-income and minority students graduate ready for college, work, and citizenship.

Tom Vander Ark
Executive Director of Education
Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation

I just finished reading “The Accidental Principal” by Frederick Hess and Andrew Kelly (Features, Summer 2005), with great interest and agreement. I have been in public education for 33 years, 4 of them as an adjunct professor in education administration. When I’d had all I could take of exactly what Hess and Kelly described in their article, I quit. I felt there were better ways to affect the system.

It had become painfully clear that teacher colleges were more concerned with covering everything required by the National Council for Accreditation of Teacher Education (NCATE) than with preparing good school administrators. Many times I saw the great frustration of other professors who were interrupting good learning to “cover” NCATE standards.

It’s exactly what I see in all our schools, where administrators are more concerned with jumping through all the hoops than with educating kids. Perhaps it’s time to admit that central planning isn’t working any better in education than it did in the Soviet Union.

Dr. Steve Wyckoff
Educational Services and
Staff Development Association
of Central Kansas
Hutchinson, Kansas

Unflagged and Unequal

When the College Board stopped flagging the SAT scores of students who took the tests with accommodations (most commonly, extended time) in 2004, it instituted a tightened eligibility process to offset the new stigma-free advantage.

In his examination of the 2003 and 2004 SAT I results, both flagged and unflagged (“Unflagged SATs,” Features, Summer 2005), Samuel J. Abrams found that the eligibility process became a hidden advantage for students whose parents and schools were more skilled at meeting tightened eligibility requirements—documentation from therapists and psychologists—than families “less savvy and less financially endowed.”

Indeed, the increase in the scores of students with accommodations in the District of Columbia is dramatic, and Abrams attributes the anomaly to the division between extremes of wealth within the District. But he is not quite correct. The extremes are there, but they are within the entire metropolitan area, including the Maryland and Virginia suburbs. Many of the students living in these richer areas attend private schools in D.C. and contribute to the high scores in the city.

More significantly, on these schools’ college counseling web pages there are links to the College Board’s “site for students with disabilities” as well as other disability sources. The web site of Georgetown Day School has a four-page Learning Disabilities section that includes a detailed list of the categories of professionals who can diagnose LD and ADHD.

By contrast, many of the public high schools don’t even have web sites.

Unflagging the scores in 2004 tilted the playing field to the advantage of parents most skilled at working the system; the high number of flagged scores in 2003 suggests that the College Board saw stigma where sophisticated parents saw advantage. The stiffened eligibility process increased their advantage at the expense of the less skilled, when it created a de facto double standard.

Erich Martel
Teacher, World History and AP U.S. history
Woodrow Wilson H.S.
Washington, D.C.

Mel Levine’s Brain

It is unfortunate that Dr. Daniel Willingham took a rather superficial view of our work in reviewing Dr. Mel Levine’s most recent popular press books for his article “Mind over Matter” (Check the Facts, Spring 2005). Both books, A Mind at a Time and The Myth of Laziness, were intended to describe Dr. Levine’s neurodevelopmental framework for a general audience and provide examples from his clinical cases; they were not intended to describe the research base on which Dr. Levine’s neurodevelopmental framework is founded.

Those who read Dr. Levine’s entire body of work carefully will find that it is rooted in rigorous scientific research as well as sound clinical judgment and experience. Dr. Levine has developed and refined an accurate and usable framework of the mind and its functions. His 1992 book, Developmental Variation and Learning Disorders, was written for a more academic audience and includes citations of the research, theory, and clinical experience on which his framework is based. Dr. Levine’s theoretical framework is based on existing research from across a variety of scientific and academic disciplines as well as the convergence of clinical evidence and experience. Some of Dr. Willingham’s misunderstanding may be the inevitable result of the wide gap that often separates clinical studies and frontline experience from research in a field like cognitive psychology. In addition, different disciplines that study learning vary significantly in their terminology and conceptual models.

At All Kinds of Minds [a research organization established by Dr. Levine] our continual goal is to use our theoretical framework to help those who have an immediate need: the students who struggle to learn and the parents, teachers, and clinicians who strive to help them achieve success in school and in life. Many critical clinical problems have not been rigorously researched. Nevertheless, they need to be addressed vigorously using the best possible judgment by educators and clinicians. To date, the feedback we have received from thousands of teachers and parents is that our programs make a dramatic difference in their lives.

The All Kinds of Minds Institute is committed to rigorous, high-quality research. Over the past three years, All Kinds of Minds has made a multi­million-dollar investment in building our research infrastructure and fielding three national independent research studies. In addition, several small-scale independent studies have already found that the Schools Attuned program has a positive impact on student and teacher outcomes. In the coming years we will continue to solicit input from the scientific, clinical, and education communities to inform the further development of our programs. We invite the academic research community to study our framework and programs thoroughly. We will carefully vet and incorporate all appropriate emerging research into our theoretical framework and programs.

Ann E. Harman
Director of Research
All Kinds of Minds Institute

Daniel Willingham replies: Harman suggests that Levine’s popular press books are reader-friendly versions of a much more substantial scientific theory. That is a misrepresentation; Levine’s “scientific” work is not better supported than his popular books. As I noted in my article, I called the All Kinds of Minds Institute specifically to ask for more research-oriented publications and was directed to (among others) Developmental Variation and Learning Disorders, to which Harman refers (although I read the 1999 second edition, not the first edition she mentions). I pointed out that these works do indeed have more references to the scientific literature, but only for well-accepted ideas (which I did not criticize), and none for the particular views Levine espouses (which I did). The second edition also happens to be the source of Levine’s complete misinterpretation of research by Richard McKee and Larry Squire that I discussed.

Harman’s second point is that cognitive psychologists might view the mind differently than clinicians. It is not clear to me how that point absolves clinicians from providing data to support their views, particularly when their views conflict with existing data.

Finally, Harman notes that several small studies have found that the Schools Attuned program “has a positive effect on student and teacher outcomes.” She might have added that these studies have not undergone expert peer review, nor do they compare Schools Attuned with competitor methods. To the extent that they show student effects, they show that Schools Attuned is better than nothing. I applaud the interest All Kinds of Minds has taken in evaluating the program, but I dispute that existing research has shown much of anything, least of all that the program is ready for statewide support.

Charter School Melee

Ted Sizer and Michael Petrilli illustrate what makes education policy such an interesting field (“Identity Crisis,” Forum, Summer 2005). The fellow writing for the “right” (Petrilli) argues for state involvement, while the fellow representing the “left” (Sizer) objects to a strong exercise of federal power.

It’s a compelling discussion that avoids two of the more frustrating positions in debates about these issues: testing is all that matters or there are not actually serious problems in American education.

But even this debate seems to obscure the potential for reasonable compromise. Sizer is right about the possible excesses of No Child Left Behind—style accountability, though it’s worth noting that these issues predate the law. However, is Petrilli’s plea for basic literacy and numeracy standards too much to ask? And, even in practice, is it really at odds with the rich notion of education that Sizer has long championed and in fact not something of a predicate for it?

The problem with the direction Sizer wants is that, for a variety of reasons, good intentions and localized accountability have proved an insufficient guarantee of equity for underserved students. In many walks of life, people are held accountable to external standards. Is education really so exceptional among American endeavors that it needs no such outside accountability?

Within both the traditional public and charter sectors there are schools that serve niche populations and do not lend themselves to the mainstream accountability system. However, these schools are a minority. Instead of arguing whether charter schools should be included in No Child Left Behind, a more fruitful question is how to ensure that state accountability schemes allow enough flexibility for boutique programs within the public system while not opening up loopholes that low-quality schools can slip through. That’s a key issue for Congress to consider during the next reauthorization of No Child.

Apart from giving new start-ups an initial period of time to establish themselves, it is appropriate to hold the average charter school, serving similar students, to the same standards as other public schools in that community. If those standards are overly prescriptive or otherwise unreasonable, that’s an issue for all schools, not a reason to carve out exceptions for charters. Rhetorically, charter foes consistently fail to note that charters are public schools; charter proponents should not substantively make the same omission.

Andrew J. Rotherham
Director of Education Policy
and Senior Fellow
Progressive Policy Institute

The Inequity of Adequacy

Much appreciated is Joe Williams’s excellent account of the fiscal-equity juggernaut that has rolled through New York State (“The Legal Cash Machine,” Features, Summer 2005). The depressing results that are sure to follow from this ill-advised lawsuit will be equally unwelcome.

The tragedy of the Campaign for Fiscal Equity (CFE) lawsuit is that it has resulted in mindless simplification of all debate surrounding education. By making more spending the only path to better results, we forgo the more important discussions of how, for instance, better pedagogy might improve outcomes, or how better management can direct more money to classrooms by creating transportation and procurement efficiencies.

The promise of what seems to be unlimited funds on the horizon has also created a “we can have it all” mentality. We can pay teachers more and also have more teachers (even though the number of qualified teachers in the job pool is a very finite commodity). We can build new schoolhouses rather than more efficiently use the ones we already have. We can increase available technology regardless of the capacity of the schools, their staff, and their students to absorb it. The sky is the limit. Don’t worry. The new money will be here soon.

As recounted by Mr. Williams, the lawsuit began during a period when city schools were indeed being shortchanged in the allocation of state funds. But the shortchanging of the city by about $400 per student 15 years ago is ancient history. Both the state’s and the city’s share of education funding in New York City have skyrocketed. Education outcomes are still mixed.

Finally, in New York City, as Williams made clear, the drumbeat continues for the State of New York to assume the full $5.6 billion annual school funding increase. But few in Gotham seem to realize that beyond the sphere of economic influence and affluence of the city is a world of dire economic crisis: boarded-up strip malls lining the upstate highways and byways and devastated cities with crippled economies, unable to support their own schools, much less subsidize ours. At the same time, these are the districts that are already eyeing the CFE lawsuit as a model for their own fiscal ambitions. All will discover that there is no pot of gold buried outside Albany.

Andrew Wolf
Columnist
The New York Sun