Educational Edges
Monday, December 15, 2003
Paying for schools: State could take lessons from Maryland
By Deb Kollars -- Bee Staff Writer
Published 2:15 a.m. PST Monday, December 15, 2003
The small state of Maryland offers some big lessons for California on what it takes to overhaul a school funding machine:
Take your time. Bring in outside experts and listen intently. Never underestimate the force of a personality. Count on compromising at the very last minute.
"We knew we had to do something different," said Barbara Hoffman of Baltimore, a former Democratic state senator viewed as the driving force behind the effort, which was completed last year. "We were spending over $2 billion a year on education and not getting a good product."
Compared with the $41 billion California spends on public education, Maryland's school bill looks tiny. Yet in many ways, Maryland's reform experience was born of the same problems faced by California.
The state was wrestling with funding inequities among districts. School after school was begging for more money. Cash was going out based on special-interest politics. State leaders felt they were blindly pumping money into schools that were failing to educate children, especially the most disadvantaged.
Maryland had some things going for it that made reform easier than it would be in California. It has just 24 school districts. California has nearly a thousand. And it has had a long tradition of providing all districts the same basic per-student allotments, while California doles out a different per-student amount for every district.
By the end of the 1990s, three factors had converged to bring Maryland to its fork in the funding road: Special "categorical" programs had run amok. Student achievement was not up to standards. And a lawsuit was being threatened by citizens concerned that school funding was inadequate.
Maryland's categorical mess was akin to that of California, where a tangle of more than 100 special funding streams for schools exists. Over the space of a decade, assorted governors and legislators in Maryland had set up one special pot of money after another, all designated for separate purposes close to their political hearts: Class-size reduction. Grants for new technology. A popular boost in teacher pay. Special dollars for Baltimore city schools. More money exclusively for Prince Georges County.
Soon, there were more than 50 of these individual money sources, many with elected officials' names attached. It led to more and more competition among officials of districts -- urban, rural, suburban -- who kept score of who was getting what and kept pleading for more money for their particular causes.
In many cases, the categoricals were set up for limited periods of time. As the 1990s ended, they started expiring, creating an anxious stir among legislators.
"There was such a proliferation of categoricals," recalled John Rohrer, coordinator of fiscal and policy analysis for Maryland's Department of Legislative Services. "A lot of the sunset dates were coming up. The Legislature started realizing, 'We need to address this.' "
At the same time, Maryland, like California and other states across the nation, had spent the decade pushing for stronger academic standards and greater accountability in public schools. State leaders were watching test scores closely and were not happy. Every year, in nearly every community, the numbers showed that poor and minority children were not achieving at acceptable levels.
Nancy Grasmick, Maryland's superintendent, was among those putting two and two together.
"It hit me: This is serious," Grasmick said. "The data was telling us that the same kids weren't making it, year after year after year. And it didn't matter if it was a district getting high funding or low funding."
"There was no consistency in the categoricals," she said. "This was about figuring out how to get more money to those kids, wherever they lived."
Finally, there was the specter of a new school-funding lawsuit. The state had gone through a rough one 20 years earlier over funding equity. This time people were talking about the need for adequate spending.
"We didn't want another lawsuit," Hoffman said. "The only people who win are the lawyers."
In 1999, Hoffman and several other key legislators joined forces to create a body with a lofty and hopeful name: The Commission on Education Finance, Equity and Excellence. Over time, it became known as the Thornton Commission, after the chairman of the group. It had 27 members, including legislators, college professors, business leaders and school board members, plus 13 staffers from the Legislature and the Maryland State Department of Education.
The group was charged with determining what an adequate amount of funding for schools should be, ensuring equity in the way it was distributed, streamlining the categorical maze and finding a way to tie the school finance system to the goal of higher student achievement.
"With the old formula, we had just been adding on and adding on to it," Hoffman said. "It was going to collapse of its own weight."
Superintendent Grasmick agreed.
"We were determined to take a slow, measured, professional approach," she said. "We didn't want it to be corrupted by politics."
The two women made a formidable pair. Hoffman had been in the Legislature for almost two decades. Grasmick had been superintendent since 1991. Each is small of stature but commanding in presence. Each holds the other in high regard.
"Nancy Grasmick is the original iron hand in the velvet glove," Hoffman said. "She's very feminine, but tough as nails. She is a blonde, blue-eyed, petite person who talks very quietly and slowly, and can tell you to your face how rotten you are."
"Barbara? She's a dynamo," the superintendent said of Hoffman. "She's very small, but she takes no prisoners. People greatly respected her knowledge base and her dedication."
Over the next two years, the Thornton Commission held hearings across the state. Members brought in a nationally respected school-finance consulting firm, Augenblick & Myers Inc. of Denver. The consultants studied data, applied established research methods, and came up with a model for what a prototypical quality education would cost in Maryland. Other national consultants also weighed in.
The Thornton Commission's final report came out in January 2002. It recommended many significant changes. Among them:
* That the state's basic "foundation" amount for each student be increased significantly to meet the newly established threshold for an "adequate" education.
* That the majority of categoricals be eliminated and the money be redistributed to districts to spend as they saw fit.
* That three major categorical programs be retained for the state's most vulnerable children: the poor, those with disabilities, and those with limited English skills.
* That education funding be linked to performance by requiring each local school system to create a master plan for improving student achievement, which would then be submitted to the state and closely monitored.
* That districts be required to do two new things: Offer full-day kindergarten to all children and pre-kindergarten programs to economically disadvantaged 4-year-olds.
The commission also addressed many other matters, including transportation funding and technical issues related to inequities in the state and local breakdown of school funding.
"We have had some wealth-related disparities, though they were not enormous," Rohrer said.
In all, the plan called for adding about $1 billion to the $2.9 billion the state was already spending for schools -- though not all at once. The commission recommended phasing in the increase over a five-year period.
In the spring of 2002, Hoffman, who had been Senate budget chairwoman for eight years, signed on as the primary sponsor of a bill that fully embraced the Thornton Commission's many recommendations. It came as the state was running out of money in a severe budget crisis.
Hoffman recalled the many who shook their heads: "People would say, 'How can you put this through when you don't know how to pay for it?' I'd say, 'Tell me how you're going to pay for all the juvenile delinquents in six or seven years if we don't do this.' "
As the 90-day legislative session neared its end, Hoffman struggled in her Senate Budget Committee to gather enough votes to move the bill. Two of the 13 committee members were holding out for more money for their schools in Montgomery County -- a large, wealthy suburban area.
One tense afternoon, the committee recessed and reconvened -- several times -- as the two sides wrestled toward a deal. Finally, Hoffman and others gave in and offered Montgomery County what it wanted: About $180 million extra.
"To get the votes, I had to make a compromise," Hoffman said.
From there, the bill passed the full Senate and House and became law. In the end, legislators decided to stretch the funding increases out over six years, rather than five. To cover the first year's cost, they increased the state's tobacco tax.
Before the phase-in began, schools were receiving about $4,300 in basic "foundation" funding per student. This year, the foundation amount grew to $4,766. It is scheduled to rise to $6,124 by 2008.
The state eliminated about 30 categoricals, including class-size reduction, gifted education, library books, environmental education and grants for magnet schools. It built into the basic foundation formula the money to cover such things as gifted education but now leaves it up to local districts to decide how best to spend these dollars. Killing the 30 categoricals freed up about $350 million that the state was able to apply to the foundation formula and other programs.
The state kept about 20 categoricals intact, including transportation, teacher retirement, adult education, food services and a program for failing schools.
Three key categoricals were kept to address the needs of three groups of children. For each special education student, schools receive $1,023 on top of their basic allotments. For students with limited English proficiency, schools receive $1,268 more. And for those in poverty, they get $1,341 more.
The figures were based on research rather than history or politics. The money follows the individual students, wherever they live, rather than going to districts in uneven annual lump sums, as do some categoricals for poor and minority children in California. The per-child allotments for the three special needs categoricals in Maryland are scheduled to more than double by 2008.
Rohrer said some people were upset by the loss of particular categorical programs, but a huge outcry did not materialize.
"The adequacy approach was so logical that it helped appease the loss of the categoricals," he said.
At this point, Maryland remains in a budget crisis, and it is unclear how the remaining years' increases will be covered.
But the good news, Rohrer said, is that the difficult years of study and decision-making are behind everyone. The state has a plan, people believe in it, he said, and somehow they intend to make it work.
Paying for schools: State isn't alone in school-finance quandary
By Deb Kollars -- Bee Staff Writer
Published 2:15 a.m. PST Sunday, December 14, 2003
As California's top leaders wade into the huge job of creating a more fair and straightforward school financing system, they won't be going it alone.
In a number of states across the nation, lawmakers and school leaders are challenging the status quo and reforming the way they pay for their schools.
Their approaches vary. But their goals are the same: Simplify the process. Make it more efficient and fair. Find a sensible way to get more resources to those children with the greatest needs.
Last week, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's education secretary, Richard Riordan, called for a complete overhaul of California's system, including the creation of a "weighted" student funding formula. After New Year's Day, a new panel, the Quality Education Commission, will begin tackling the numbers and the issues.
If California succeeds in a transformation, it would make for the ultimate reform story. No other state has as many children or schools -- or an education finance system as big or convoluted.
California spends a staggering $41 billion a year to educate more than 6 million children from Mount Shasta to the Mexican border. A yearlong investigation by The Bee has found that from every angle, it is a funding system in need of repair.
The in-depth review focused on three significant areas of school finance that touch every school in the state. The three areas are loaded with serious problems, though not all are insurmountable, judging by what other states are doing.
The largest piece of the puzzle, at $29 billion, is called "revenue limits." Through this process, schools receive per-student dollar allotments that not only range widely, but also are wrapped in enough red tape and confusion to send the most stoic accountants into despair. Revenue limits pay for basic educational needs, such as teacher salaries, electricity bills and report cards. The revenue limit system also pays extra for some small rural schools.
Another $11 billion a year goes out through "categoricals," a web of special pots of money so numerous and muddled the state can't even keep track of how all the dollars are spent. Categoricals cover specific purposes, such as teaching English-language learners, preventing violence or buying library books.
Finally, there is the only-in-California world of "mandates." In this process, the state pays districts, after the fact, for such routine things as teaching the Gettysburg Address and preparing kids for earthquakes. Over the past five years, nearly a billion public dollars have gone out through this highly manipulated funding stream.
Under each of these three areas, The Bee came across enough obtuse formulas, political maneuverings, hidden histories and revealing public records to fill several dozen notebooks, a couple of hundred file folders and countless computer spreadsheets.
"No state is as complicated as California," said Allan Odden, a former University of Southern California professor of education now at the University of Wisconsin at Madison. "It is time to redraw the system."
Odden and others pointed to numerous states that are searching for solutions or already have simpler approaches in place. Many of the reform efforts have been triggered by lawsuits and court decisions demanding greater spending equity.
In a growing number of places, the idea of simple equity has been replaced by a more sophisticated notion: adequacy. Under this approach, states are putting less emphasis on simply dividing existing public dollars equally, and instead are trying to calculate what it costs to give a child a full and thorough education.
Nationally, there is no single recipe that would solve all of California's problems. But here are some strategies being tried in other states:
Maryland
Cutting categoricals
The state of Maryland went through an exhaustive two-year process, guided by outside experts, to streamline the way it pays for schools. A new system was adopted last year that called for increasing basic per-child "foundation" amounts over a six-year period, from about $4,300 to more than $6,100.
One of the most significant changes in Maryland involved getting rid of state categorical programs.
Like many states, Maryland had seen a proliferation of categoricals during the 1990s as politicians tried to put their mark on public education. The small state wound up with about 50 categoricals -- half the number in California.
"Deep down, people knew this wasn't the best way to fund schools. It was so piecemeal and ad hoc," said John Rohrer, coordinator of fiscal and policy analysis for the Maryland Legislature.
Maryland got rid of about 30 of its categoricals, including class size reduction, gifted education, environmental programs and grants for library books. For some, such as gifted education, the state built into the basic foundation formula an allowance to cover these costs.
Maryland kept intact about 20 of the special pots, including bus transportation, teacher retirement, adult education and food services.
Three key categoricals were retained to help the state's most vulnerable children: those in special education, English learners and those living in poverty.
Allocations from these three pots come on top of the standard foundation amount for each child. Special education students each currently trigger an added $1,023; English learners, $1,368; and poor children, $1,341. The figures were based on research and designed to be simple, in contrast to California where extra money for such children goes out through complicated and often inequitable formulas.
The elimination of the 30 Maryland categoricals freed up more than $300 million a year that helped boost foundation funding for all students.
Wyoming
Studying small schools
Like California, Wyoming calls its tiny, remote schools "Necessary Small Schools." But while California relies on old, clumsy formulas and special political deals to pay for the schools, Wyoming is trying to establish a more sensible approach.
In 1995, Wyoming's Supreme Court directed the state to come up with a "cost-based" system for public education, based on models of average prototype schools. The formula, launched in 1998, included an upward adjustment for small schools to cover their higher costs.
Three years later, Wyoming was ordered by the courts to improve the small schools adjustment. Schools complained that the amounts varied and were not equitable. The state, in turn, was concerned that districts were opening new small schools not because children needed them, but to capture more money from the state.
"It went in a direction that didn't work," said Dave Nelson, school finance director for Wyoming's Legislative Services Office. "So we're redoing the adjustment now."
Wyoming spent the past two years gathering precise cost data from every small school in the state -- 257 of them -- on the number of teachers and staff, salary levels, transportation budgets, special education and other expenses. Eventually, each small school will be assigned a separate adjustment, based on its unique characteristics.
Florida
Adjusting by region
When people talk about equalizing basic student funding across a state, a concern often arises: What about differing costs of living in different areas of the state?
Florida for years has recognized -- and addressed -- such differences through its student funding formula. This is in stark contrast to California, where basic per-student funding amounts vary widely, yet have nothing to do with actual student needs or regional cost differences.
For 30 years, Florida has used an elaborate funding formula that starts with a uniform base allotment for each student. It was $3,537 in 2002-03. From there, the state adjusts for many factors, including grade levels, safety programs, English learners, and sparse enrollments.
A key adjustment is the "District Cost Differential." Every year, the state surveys the prices of goods, services and housing in every county in Florida. Each county, which also constitutes a single school district, then is assigned a cost differential that is applied to the base allotment. For example, heavily populated Miami-Dade County's price differential was 1.0543 last year, which raised the base student funding amount by nearly $200 a child.
"So you get more money if you live in an expensive county and less in a lower-cost rural area," said R. Craig Wood, professor of education finance at the University of Florida, Gainesville.
Florida's system is neither new nor universally loved. Some critics find it overly complex. Others complain the amounts are inadequate. But according to Wood, "It's a pretty good system in terms of equity."
Texas
Playing Robin Hood
In Texas, they do something that has long been considered impossible in California: The state takes from the rich and gives to the poor.
Like California, Texas has about a thousand school districts and a complicated -- and controversial -- system of paying for schools. Like states across the nation, Texas is being sued by several school districts over funding issues, with more contemplating signing on to the lawsuits.
Texas currently sets a base amount, called the "basic allotment," of $2,537 per student. The number gets adjusted by geographic price differences, district size and the number of children who are poor, non-English speaking, disabled, gifted or enrolled in vocational programs.
The money comes from a combination of state and local taxing sources, with the state providing financial incentives for communities that tax themselves more heavily for education.
Since 1993, Texas has required those districts with the highest levels of property wealth per pupil to turn over some of their locally generated money to the state, which then redistributes it to districts struggling with lower property values.
In California, the only equalization attempts have involved the state providing extra dollars to bring lower districts up.
Next year, 134 Texas districts will face the Robin Hood-style dues.
"They don't like it, but we still do it," said Harrison Keller, senior policy analyst for education for the speaker of the House in Texas.
Oregon
Weighting allotments
For the past decade, Oregon has used an easy-to-understand weighted formula to distribute money to public schools.
For the average student, the state provides $5,280 a year. Six other groups of children with special needs generate additional sums for their districts.
A special education student with an individualized learning plan receives an additional weight of 1 -- meaning he or she triggers twice the standard allotment. A student who is not proficient in English generates an additional weight of .50 -- meaning the child brings an extra $2,640 to a district.
Among the other add-on weights:
* Pregnant and/or parenting students: 1.0
* Students in poverty: .25
* Neglected or delinquent children: .25
* Children in foster homes: .25
Certain weights also are applied to different grade levels. High school students in high-school-only districts receive a .20 increase to the standard allotment, while kindergartners get just half of the standard allotment to reflect their shorter school days.
The dollar amounts follow each type of child to the district where he or she attends school. Districts can spend the money as they see fit.
The weighted student allotments weren't determined through hard research in Oregon, but rather through a combination of political haggling and national studies, said Brian Reeder, financial analyst for the Oregon Department of Education.
"The system in Oregon is fairly straightforward," Reeder said. "The level of funding is inadequate, but it's considered by most people to be fair."
Missouri
Increasing efficiency
To strengthen its school funding system, Missouri is looking at many options, including the politically unpopular possibility of consolidating its many small districts.
The state is facing an any-day-now lawsuit over both equity and adequacy in school funding. Leaders want to do a better job in both areas, but a state budget crisis limits their options.
Recently, the Legislature formed a joint interim committee to study the problem. University of Florida professor R. Craig Wood is weighing in with school financing advice. A preliminary study is due Feb. 15.
For a fairly small state, Missouri has a lot of separate districts -- 75 serving grades kindergarten through eight and another 450 for grades K-12. Wood has pointed out that tax dollars might go further if small districts merged, reducing administrative overhead and increasing buying power. Wood also has suggested that money might be used more efficiently if the state's two big districts -- St. Louis and Kansas City -- split into smaller units.
Missourians love their independent districts, and many politicians won't even say the word "C-word" -- consolidation -- out loud. But Wood and others want to at least explore the option.
"We are looking at expenditure patterns, achievement levels and district size," he said. "We want to determine: At what size do districts tend to achieve the most?"
Other options being discussed in Missouri include doing more centralized purchasing of supplies at the state level and encouraging small districts that want to retain their separate identities to merge their administrations.
Saturday, December 06, 2003
Schools will need only a headteacher and classroom assistants, say civil servants
By Richard Garner, Education Editor
06 December 2003
The school of the future will not need teachers, education civil servants have told union leaders. A discussion document from the Department for Education and Skills says they would require only one qualified teacher - the head - and the rest of the work could be done by classroom assistants.
The paper, entitled Workforce Reform - Blue Skies, looks at how the national agreement on reducing teachers' workload could be developed after 2006. It says: "The legal position ... is that a maintained school must have a head with qualified teacher status but beyond that the position is very much deregulated.
"The school need not employ anyone else; other staff need not have QTS [qualified teacher status] and staff could be brought in from agencies or come in on secondment. Gone are the days of every school having to have a full 'complement' of directly employed QTS teachers." It adds that the next comprehensive spending review round for 2005 to 2008 was likely to be "very tight". Hiring more assistants and cutting the number of teachers would ease budget pressures.
The paper acknowledges that where support staff are used to teach, regulations say they must be supervised by a qualified teacher.
"But," it says, "that teacher might of course be the head". It went on to say that this would "take us into essential but presentationally uncomfortable areas, like the case for reducing overall teacher numbers to pay for a better adult-pupil ratio".
Ministers at the education department distanced themselves from the paper yesterday, saying it had been written by junior civil servants and its recommendations would not be acted upon.
But Britain's biggest teachers' union - the National Union of Teachers - cited the paper's existence as proof of the union's claim that the Government was about to deskill teaching by allowing unqualified staff to take control of classes.
The NUT is alone among teachers' unions in refusing to sign the workload agreement because it allows classroom assistants to take lessons. Doug McAvoy, the general secretary of the NUT, said: "Behind the fatuous denials that they knew nothing about civil servants' proposals to slash teacher numbers, ministers clearly want to achieve such an objective. This is a government which is engaged in deceiving parents and the teaching profession. Its manifesto promised increases in teacher numbers while it works hard to reduce them."
But one of the union general secretaries involved in the talks over workload said the paper had emerged because civil servants were being allowed to float ideas before clearing them with ministers.
David Miliband, the Minister for School Standards, has written to all the signatories of the agreement saying the paper is not government policy. John Dunford, general secretary of the Secondary Heads Association, said the idea was "daft" and would have no support from secondary school heads.
Eamonn O'Kane, general secretary of the National Association of Schoolmasters Union of Women Teachers, said it was "grey skies thinking" and the idea schools could get by with fewer teachers was "idiotic".
Wednesday, December 03, 2003
by James Ridgeway
Leftover Democracy
Our Plan for Iraq Vote? Kind of Like Florida.
December 2nd, 2003 12:00 PM
Mondo Washington this week:
# Leftover Democracy Our Plan for Iraq Vote? Kind of Like Florida.
# Neil Finally Makes It Dubya's Struggling Brother Is Back in Court
# Intrigue in Gaza Was Ahmed Working for Al Qaeda or Israel?
# Rumsfeld Watch The Defense Secretary on the 'Old' Europe: Who Needs It?
hen asked for his long-term plan for Iraq, President Bush recently said, "In terms of security we will do whatever it takes. . . . We will find Saddam Hussein."
But "finding Saddam is like looking for a needle in a haystack," said Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. "When someone has a billion dollars and pampered his supporters during his rule," he told Paris Match in its current issue, "it's not surprising he finds help."
"We are going to stay with the Iraqi people through that transition period," said General Peter Pace. "To put a date on that would be wrong, to put a number on it would be wrong. We're going to do what it takes to get that job done."
Truth be told, Iraq is too good to be true—for Bush. The policy of the Bush administration is "No Exit." Iraq works miracles for Bush. In one stroke, the war can shove aside bad economic news such as the jobless recovery in the recession that never was, or last weekend's reports that the dollar has sunk to new lows against the euro, now worth an amazing $1.20. It provides the rationale for a rapidly expanding defense budget, inflating the already sky-high deficit. It gives Ashcroft wider and wider authority to perform his Christian mission across the country by invoking the Patriot Act almost everywhere and for everything from strip-club money laundering in Las Vegas to setting police provocateurs among anti-war demonstrators in California to investigating food stamp fraud. The attorney general now even has the power to browse around in the records of eBay and Internet providers without having to show probable cause.
Why should Bush want to give up Iraq when it can become a war without end waged for political gain at home?
The press described the president's brief visit to the troops in Iraq as an uplifting moment as well as a shrewd photo op for his re-election campaign. But little attention was given to Bush's meeting with four members of the Iraq Interim Governing Council while at the airport. He gave one of them a kiss-ass letter to be delivered to the powerful Shiite leader Ayatollah Sistani, who is objecting to the American plan for Iraq on grounds it doesn't call for true elections. (We're all for democracy except when it might lead to bottom-up democracy for Muslims.) Instead, local officials, some elected, some not, will appoint members to a parliament. In his letter Bush affirmed that "we share with one another a basic goal, which is to make the Iraqi people happy, to return liberty to it, and to build democracy and achieve economic prosperity for it."
Raja' al-Khuza'i, a woman doctor and also a member of the governing council, told the London Arab paper Al-Sharq al-Awsat that Bush agreed in the letter that elections must ultimately be held, but that the U.S. was determined to stick to the June transition date, which, by inference, she took to mean that there would be no direct elections at the outset of Iraqi self-rule. She quoted Bush as saying, "It is your country. You are responsible for it. You must work hard to respect the agreement"—by which he meant the November 15 deal.
Click here!
washingtonpost.com
Md. Seniors Face New Graduation Requirements
Plan Creates Five-Diploma System, Requires Students Pass Standardized Tests
By Ylan Q. Mui
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, December 3, 2003; 5:11 PM
High school seniors in Maryland will have to pass standardized tests to receive a diploma starting in 2009, the state Board of Education voted today, despite concerns over how the plan would be structured and its effect on dropout rates, especially among poor and minority students.
Under the system proposed by State Schools Superintendent Nancy S. Grasmick, students could receive one of five diplomas, depending on how many of the state's four High School Assessments they have passed and whether they have a disability. Several board members criticized the plan, saying they were afraid the alternate diplomas could become a "dumping ground."
But Grasmick said her proposal was merely a starting point; a final version of the plan will come before the board in May. The important thing, she said, was to let students and teachers know that the high-stakes testing is finally coming to Maryland after nearly a decade of debate and delays.
"We just couldn't speak esoterically anymore because we weren't making any progress," Grasmick said.
The idea was first floated in 1993, and two years later a state task force recommended developing nearly a dozen standardized tests for high school students that would be required for graduation. The plan was supposed to take effect by 2005.
But Maryland has been wary of adopting the controversial measure, delaying the implementation three times over concerns about costs and whether students and teachers would have enough time to adjust to the new system.
Grasmick said schools have now reached "a tipping point." A voluntary state curriculum has been crafted to match what is tested in the High School Assessments. And the state has promised to spend an extra $1.3 billion on education by 2008.
The move puts Maryland among 19 states -- including Virginia -- that have mandated tough standardized exit exams to improve the worth of a high school diploma and better prepare students for a demanding job market. By 2009, about 30 states are expected to use such high-stakes testing, according to Education Trust, a nonprofit group promoting student achievement.
A growing number of states are backing away from such high-stakes exams after large percentages of students failed. In Nevada, for example, 12 percent of seniors who finished all of their coursework did not receive diplomas this year because they did not pass the state's math test. In Florida, residents protested and threatened boycotts when nearly 13,000 students did not graduate when passing the state's tests became mandatory this year.
This school year is the first time that Virginia's exams, known as the Standards of Learning, are required for graduation. So far, nearly 3,000 of the more than 20,000 high school seniors in Northern Virginia have not passed all of the tests they need. Students still have several chances to retake the tests. The District does not have an exit exam.
Right now, students in Maryland must pass the state's three functional tests in reading, writing and math to graduate, but the tests are considered so basic that most students take them in middle school.
Under the new plan, students would have to pass the more rigorous High School Assessments in algebra, English, government and biology to get a full-fledged Maryland diploma. The tests would be given at the end of the course, usually between eighth and 10th grades. Students who fail could get extra tutoring or remedial courses and could retake the tests about 10 times.
By senior year, those who pass only three of the exams would receive a local diploma. Special education students also must take the state tests, but those who do not pass at least three would receive yet another alternate diploma. Severely disabled students, some of whom may be exempted from the regular state tests, could work toward a certificate of completion. A final diploma would be created for students who drop out of school but get their GED.
Grasmick said the multiple diplomas provide "a backup opportunity" for students, especially those with disabilities or who speak little English. But board members worried that the tiered system could result in schools tracking students toward specific diplomas, diminishing their value. They also questioned whether students who fail the tests may be discouraged from seeking a diploma and simply drop out.
"We've never generated the reality of what will happen when we do this," said JoAnn T. Bell, vice president of the state board. "We are going to lose kids."
Kati Haycock, director of Education Trust, said that while states normally see a slight increase in their dropout rate the first year the exit exams are in place, there is no long-term link to the number of students who leave school. However, a report by the Center for Education Policy, showed that the students who do dropout are disproportionately poor, black or Latino.
In Maryland, roughly half the students who took the High School Assessments when they were first given last year passed each of the tests.
Students performed best on the government test, with about 57 percent passing, and worst on the English test, with only 45 percent passing. Results from this spring's tests will not be available for several weeks, a state spokesman said.
But Grasmick said that the data may be skewed because students knew that the tests would not count toward a diploma, even though their scores appeared on their transcripts. Haycock said scores on average improve 30 points once students know the importance of the tests.
"When you attach deadlines . . . you really get a very quick movement in terms of student achievement gains," she said. "When you look at the numbers, what you see unequivocally is that the kids can do this."
© 2003 The Washington Post Company
The New York Times In America
December 3, 2003
Judge Strikes Down Colorado's School Voucher Law
By TAMAR LEWIN
A Denver judge struck down Colorado's new school voucher law today, ruling that it violated the state constitution by stripping local school boards of their control over education.
"The goals of the voucher program are laudable," wrote Judge Joseph E. Meyer III of Denver District Court. "However, even great ideas must be implemented within the framework of the Colorado Constitution. By stripping all discretion from the local district over the instruction to be provided in the voucher program, the General Assembly has violated article IX, section 15."
The Colorado voucher law, enacted in April and scheduled to take effect with the next school year, would have made vouchers available to low-income, low-achieving students in school districts with eight or more low-performing schools. Other districts would have had the choice of participating or not. But the ruling blocked implementation of the plan, known officially as the Colorado Opportunity Contract Pilot Program.
Gov. Bill Owens, a Republican, said he would appeal the ruling.
"Securing school choice for the children of Colorado was a long legislative struggle and there was always the likelihood the struggle would extend to the courts as well," Mr. Owens said in a statement. "Children from low-income families should not be facing a dead end if they are in a school that is below par. They deserve a choice and that is why we will appeal the court's decision."
The lead plaintiff in the challenge to the voucher plan was the Colorado Congress of Parents, Teachers and Students, also known as the Colorado PTA. The organization was represented by lawyers from the Colorado Education Association and the National Education Association. Other religious and advocacy groups were also plaintiffs, along with several individuals.
Opponents of the voucher plan, which budget officials estimated would ultimately take $90 million a year out of the participating districts, argue that the loss of that money and the departure of so many students would undermine the public schools.
The Colorado Education Association, which represents 37,000 teachers in the state, hailed the ruling as an important victory for local control.
"Today's decision reinforces our long held belief that our statewide system of public education is rightly founded on the principle of local control," the association said in a statement. "We will continue to reject all attempts to bring vouchers to Colorado. They are an unproven scheme that diverts attention energy and resources from efforts to provide every child with a great public educaiton."
Most previous voucher litigation has centered on the constitutionality of using public money to pay for students to go to religious schools. But in June 2002, the United States Supreme Court upheld Cleveland's voucher program, by a 5-to-4 vote, even though the overwhelming majority of the nearly 4,000 students in the program used their money to attend parochial schools.
The Colorado challenge raised religious questions under the state constitution, but the religious issues were separated before the case went to trial last month, and had been scheduled for trial later this month.
In today's ruling, the judge addressed only the issue of local control, and a claim, which he rejected, that because the voucher plan would have required the participation of only 11 districts in the state, it was illegal "special legislation."
"Colorado's one of only six states with this kind of local-control provision in its constitution, said Chip Mellor, president of the Institute for Justice, the conservative public-interest group based in Washington, D.C., that intervened on behalf of parents who wanted vouchers, "and even though Florida, which has a voucher plan, is another of those six, the issue hasn't been raised anywhere else."
He added, "The state's role in setting the agenda for education has expanded so much in recent years that there's been all kinds of intrusion on the old idea of local control."
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Education Week
American Education's Newspaper of Record
December 3, 2003
Teachers Travel the Globe
For Professional Development
By Bess Keller
Education Week
Jana Sackman Eaton's résumé might inspire any educator who wants to know how to beef up a school's international content or perspective.
World Learning Starting in 1997, when her younger child was in college, the veteran teacher began globe-trotting for the sake of her classes at Unionville High School in Kennett Square, Pa. In six years, she has squeezed in eight intensive professional-development activities, half of them overseas, not to mention playing host to a school group from abroad.
That burst of activity has led both to a doctorate in comparative education and the 2003 Becker Award for Global Education, which was bestowed last month at the National Council for the Social Studies' annual meeting.
Ms. Eaton and other experts in global education say that plenty of opportunities are available for teachers to expand their knowledge of the world, whether the instructors are beginners or veterans, or whether they teach at the elementary or secondary level. But, they acknowledge, it might take some looking to find the programs and resources and then match them to individual situations.
A good place to start, according to Merry M. Merryfield, an education professor at Ohio State University in Columbus, is to subscribe to a series of global education updates, such as those provided online by Global TeachNet, which was started by former Peace Corps volunteers.
Professional Development Resources
For International Studies
Information:
# Federation of Alliances Françaises, USA Inc.
# Global TeachNet, a professional- development network. International and Intercultural E-mail Parternships:
# Intercultural E-Mail Classroom Connections
Study:
# Dar al Islam Teachers Institute (Understanding and Teaching About Islam courses), Abiquiu, N.M.
# Marvin Wachman Fund for International Education, Foreign Policy Research Institute, Philadelphia.
# Program for Teaching East Asia, University of Colorado at Boulder.
Travel/Study:
# Fulbright-Hays Seminars Abroad Program, travel to various countries.
# Japan Society, New York City.
# Keizai Koho Center Fellowships, travel to Japan.
# Korea Society Exchange:
# Fulbright Teacher and Administrator Exchange Program, various countries.
"The only problem is getting that first connection," said the educator, who is a prominent name in international and multicultural education. "There was a time when you had to look far and wide, but now there's so much, anybody can do it anywhere."
For instance, Ms. Merryfield is offering an online graduate course on teaching world cultures and global issues this semester. Students do not have to be previously enrolled at Ohio State, and, in fact, they live in a number of states and in Europe. The medium allows Ms. Merryfield to call on teachers from Japan, Ghana, and Russia to comment on how their areas of the world should be taught.
Personal Experience
She and others feel strongly that there is no substitute for person-to-person contact across national and cultural borders, whether that is the product of living abroad, travel in a study group, hosting those from other countries, or communication by letter or, better yet, e-mail.
"It's critical for American teachers, who typically do not travel, to develop interpersonal relationships [beyond the United States] to bring something of the insider's perspective back to their classrooms," said Kenneth Cushner, the education school's dean for student service and intercultural affairs at Kent State University in Ohio.
There's nothing to top the experience of cultural immersion, argues Mr. Cushner, an American who has lived in Australia, New Zealand, Switzerland, and Sierra Leone.
Educators who win positions in the Fulbright Teacher and Administrator Exchange, sponsored by the U.S. Department of State, for example, get almost unparalleled access to another society. They trade places with foreign teachers and administrators for six weeks, a semester, or a full academic year, living abroad and working in a school in the host country.
But even teachers unable to leave the United States can cultivate their own cross-cultural knowledge by working as counselors at international camps, for instance, or helping immigrant children.
For those who are able to travel but have only the summer or a week or two during a break, opportunities abound. Jana Eaton's first professional trip abroad took her to Japan on a study-travel fellowship sponsored by the Keizai Koho Center of the Japan Institute for Social and Economic Affairs. The monthlong trips cover transportation, accommodations, and food.
In subsequent summers and the fall of 1999, thanks to other fellowships, Ms. Eaton visited and did research in China, Russia, and South Korea. "Not only does it broaden your horizons," she said, "there are so many hands-on opportunities, such as interviewing leaders in China and education moms in Japan."
Many Kinds of Courses
For teachers who are willing to pay their own way or who work in districts that will underwrite at least part of the cost, additional possibilities are open.
Next summer, for instance, Kent State's Reed Center for International and Intercultural Education plans to take science and social studies teachers to Kenya for three weeks. There, the teachers will look at the "intersection of culture and conservation" in certain communities. Asia- Pacific Education, a program of the East-West Center in Hawaii, sponsors four- week travel seminars to countries in Southeast Asia, including Thailand and Vietnam.
The summer also offers a spread of short courses, some in the form of residential seminars, others around the corner for some teachers.
A year and a half ago, for instance, New York City English teacher Kathryn Munnell saw a flier for a course in early-Japanese literature for teachers sponsored by the Japan Society, which has its headquarters in New York. A former development worker in Vietnam, Ms. Munnell was eager to teach a course in Asian literature, but she didn't yet know enough.
"Taking a course there is such a treat," she said of the Japan Society, adding that three graduate credits were available to teachers who signed up. "They gave us traditional Japanese lunches and all kinds of materials." Later, she interviewed officials of the China Society and the Indian consulate, who also were glad to help.
Even teachers who don't have the time for a course or local travel can expand their knowledge of the world in their own classroom along with their students.
"Teachers can now connect their classrooms to classrooms all over the world, and they can also find a partner classroom," said R. Michael Paige, an education professor at the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities, who is spending his sabbatical as a visiting professor at Noguye University in Japan. Even a foreign-exchange student can be an important resource in building knowledge of the world, Mr. Paige said.
"I think it's going to take time and a commitment," he said. "But I also think teachers can get hooked and want to do more and more [global education]. It's enormously rewarding."
Coverage of cultural understanding and international issues in education is supported in part by the Atlantic Philanthropies.
PHOTOS: Jana Sackman Eaton displays a student's artwork in Togliatti, Russia, during a fellowship in 1999. The Pennsylvania teacher has been abroad four times in recent years. She's also taken part in other professional- development opportunities to expand her knowledge of other countries and cultures.
—Courtesy of Jana Sackman Eaton
© 2003 Editorial Projects in Education Vol. 23, number 14, page 8
Education Week
American Education's Newspaper of Record
December 3, 2003
E.D. Steers Grants to
Pro-Privatization Groups,
Report Charges
By John Gehring
Education Week
The Department of Education is providing millions of dollars in grants to a handful of pro-voucher and privatization groups at the same time the Bush administration has underfunded the No Child Left Behind Act, the advocacy group People for the American Way charges in a report.
For More Information
The report, "Funding a Movement: U.S. Department of Education Pours Millions into Groups Advocating School Vouchers and Education Privatization," is available from People for the American Way. (Requires Adobe's Acrobat Reader.)
The Washington-based liberal organization, which opposes the use of public money for private school tuition, distributed a Nov. 18 analysis written by its president, Ralph G. Neas, titled "Funding a Movement: U.S. Department of Education Pours Millions Into Groups Advocating School Vouchers and Education Privatization."
The report says the department has doled out $77 million over the past three years to eight groups that it calls "far-right organizations" that promote an "education privatization agenda."
Groups cited as receiving both solicited and unsolicited grants are: the American Board for Certification of Teacher Excellence; the Black Alliance for Educational Options; the Center for Education Reform; the Education Leaders Council; the Greater Educational Opportunities Foundation; the Hispanic Council for Reform and Education Options; and K12, an online education company founded by former Secretary of Education William J. Bennett.
This year, the American Board for Certification of Teacher Excellence received a multiyear grant from Secretary of Education Rod Paige worth $35 million, the report notes, to develop a "fast-tracked route" for alternative teacher certification.
The Education Leaders Council, a conservative-leaning national organization of school leaders and policy experts founded in 1995 as an alternative to the Council of Chief State School Officers, has received $15.9 million from the federal department under President Bush, the report says.
The analysis notes that Lisa Graham Keegan, the president of the ELC, formerly served as state superintendent in Arizona, where she helped establish "privatization efforts" such as tuition tax credits.
Hickok Responds
"This torrent of public funding appears to benefit and strengthen the advocacy infrastructure created by a network of right-wing foundations dedicated to the privatization of public education," the report says.
That funding, it says, has come even as the Bush administration has "consistently underfunded" the No Child Left Behind law, which passed with bipartisan support.
According to People for the American Way, the education appropriations bill that was pending in Congress last week would underfund the school improvement law by more than $8 billion in the current fiscal year, 2004. The fiscal 2003 appropriation underfunded the law by nearly $6 billion, the group says.
Eugene W. Hickok, the Education Department's acting deputy secretary, dismissed the report as an ideological broadside.
"Consider the source," Mr. Hickock said in an interview last week. "[People for the American Way] has its own agenda and obviously is very critical of this administration generally. The organizations that are mentioned have all been given money to support NCLB. We feel good about the activities they are engaged in, and that's why we support them."
Mr. Hickock described the claim that the No Child Left Behind Act has been underfunded as "tired, old rhetoric."
© 2003 Editorial Projects in Education Vol. 23, number 14, page 22
Posted on Mon, Dec. 01, 2003
Louisville's school-voucher program gains national attention
ASSOCIATED PRESS
LOUISVILLE - Despite criticism from public-school supporters, Kentucky's only privately funded school-voucher program has quietly grown into one of the largest in the nation.
The Louisville School Choice Scholarship program has given 1,100 scholarships worth $3 million to low-income children to attend private schools.
The program has an annual waiting list of 400 students, and organizers say they will continue raising money to pay up to 60 percent of tuition per student or $1,000 each year for three years.
They say the program could grow faster if parents abandon public schools labeled as low-performing by the federal No Child Left Behind law.
"Our demand grows every year," said Diane Cowne, director of School Choice Scholarships. "And that may increase."
Some studies indicate that transferring to a private school does not guarantee better academic results for all students. With public-school budgets increasingly strained, critics contend that the millions of dollars donated for the voucher program by local businesses and individuals take resources and good students from public schools.
"They're effectively giving up on public schools," said Brent McKim, president of the Jefferson County Teachers Association. "If they focused that money on public schools, I think they could make a bigger difference for kids."
Supporters of the Louisville program, created in 1998, say its unanticipated popularity speaks for itself and they dismiss criticism that it hurts public schools. They say competition, not more money, will make public schools better.
Although state law forbids the voucher program from using public tax money, the criticism of it reflects a larger, national debate over school choice.
Some Republicans favor giving families tax credits or tax-funded vouchers to spend at private schools if they are dissatisfied with public schools. Democrats want to use that money to help public schools improve.
Last year, a divided U.S. Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of an Ohio school-voucher program, ruling for the first time that governments may give financial aid to parents so they can send their children to religious or private schools.
Former Rep. Bob Heleringer, R-Louisville, sponsored unsuccessful legislation in 1998 and 2000 that would have provided $500 tax credits to families choosing to send children to private schools. Republican Governor-elect Ernie Fletcher was criticized during the fall campaign for voting in Congress to spend federal money on vouchers for students in the District of Columbia.
Louisville's School Choice Scholarship program has slowly grown to join the largest voucher programs in the nation, measured by the number of scholarships given, according to organizers and Matthew Ladner, vice president for policy research of Children First America, a Texas-based voucher organization.
Eligible families must live in Jefferson County and qualify for federally subsidized lunches, and 85 percent of families served make less than $12,000 a year. Three-year scholarships worth a total of $3,000 are available to children from kindergarten through eighth grade.
Each year, about 600 children apply, but only 200 receive vouchers through a lottery. Parents get scholarships for all their children if one is accepted.
Choice officials said they are continuing to seek more funds and are hoping to reduce waiting lists. Ultimately, Cowne said, the goal is not to undercut public schools, but to offer alternatives.
She said, "We'd be happy if there was no need for our services."
© 2003 Lexington Herald-Leader and wire service sources. All Rights Reserved.
http://www.kentucky.com
Monday, November 24, 2003
At its most basic and uncontroversial, school choice is a reform movement focused on affording parents the right to choose which school their child attends. That said, the concept and the issues surrounding choice are anything but uncontroversial.
Private school choice—which allows parents to use government-funded vouchers to send their children to private schools—touches on an array of tough questions about parents’ and students’ rights, church-state separation, and, as some people see it, the very survival of public schools. By comparison, public school choice, in its various forms (see sidebar), gives parents the option of transferring their children out of lower-performing public schools to higher-performing public schools.
Today, many people are looking to research to clarify the positives and negatives of choice.
From the Archives
Requires Registration
"Panel Says Choice's Benefits Worth Risks," Nov. 19, 2003.
"Doing Choice Right," Commentary, Nov. 19, 2003.
"Agitator for Choice Leaves Her Mark," Nov. 12, 2003.
"Integration by Income Proving Unpopular," Nov. 12, 2003.
"Report Offers Caution on Costs of Operating Voucher ," Nov. 5, 2003.
"Wis. Lawmakers Pass Measures to Widen School Voucher Program," Nov. 5, 2003.
"Federal Grants to Publicize Parents' School Choice Options," Oct. 29, 2003.
"Group to Press for School Choice for Hispanics," Oct. 15, 2003.
"D.C. Voucher Proposal Pulled From Senate," Oct. 8, 2003.
"D.C. Voucher Fight Waged Beyond Beltway ," Sept. 24, 2003.
"Fla. Vouchers Move Toward Tighter Rules," Sept. 17, 2003.
"Amid Wrangling, House Approves D.C. Vouchers ," Sept. 17, 2003.
"No More Vouchers for Florida Islamic School," Aug. 6, 2003.
"DC Voucher Bill Stalls After Committee Vote," Aug. 6, 2003.
"Cleveland Voucher Aid No Panacea for Hard-Pressed Catholic Schools," June 18, 2003.
"Survey Says Parents Using Fla. 'McKay' Vouchers Satisfied," June 18, 2003.
"Researcher Insists N.Y.C. Vouchers Benefit Black Students," June 18, 2003.
"Court Takes Case Seen as Voucher Sequel," May 28, 2003.
"Civil Rights Groups Challene Colo. Vouchers," May 28, 2003.
"Pre-K Vouchers Are A Hit With La. Parents," May 14, 2003.
"D.C. Mayor Backs Bush Plan for Vouchers in Capital City," May 7, 2003.
"Study of Cleveland Voucher Plan Finds No Notable Academic Gain," April 23, 2003.
"Pro-Voucher Bloc Loses in Milwaukee Vote," April 9, 2003.
"Study: No Academic Gains From Vouchers for Black Students," April 9, 2003.
"Gov. Owens Pledges to Sign Colorado Voucher Bill," April 9, 2003.
"Colorado Voucher Measure Appears Certain," April 2, 2003.
"Study: Choice Benefits Florida Special Ed. Students," April 2, 2003.
"Add Texas to States with Voucher Proposals," March 26, 2003.
Minn. Poll Finds Support for Public School Choice March 26, 2003.
"Public-Spirited Choice," Commentary, March 26, 2003.
"Democrats Write to Bush Denouncing Voucher Plan," Feb. 19, 2003.
"Department Releases Guidelines on Choice," Dec. 11, 2002.
"Election Results Boost Special Ed. Vouchers," Dec. 4, 2002.
"School Choice Where None Exists," Commentary, Dec. 4, 2002.
"Paper: Many Voucher Pupils Return to Fla. Public Schools ," Nov. 13, 2002.
"Miami-Dade Will Launch Choice Plan ," Nov. 6, 2002.
School choice advocates contend that giving parents choice creates healthy competition among schools, giving them an incentive to improve. Based on the ideal of the free market, the school must meet the needs of the consumer [parents and students] in order to stay in business. Following that theory, if a school does not meet the needs of its students, parents and students should have the option of seeking better education opportunities elsewhere. Researchers at the Center for Education reform, which supports school choice and vouchers, suggest that competition from choice sparks widespread public school reform (2002).
Types
Of School Choice (Cookson, 1994)
Intradistrict choice: Allows parents to select among schools within their home districts.
Interdistrict choice: Allows parents to select from schools not only in their home districts but also schools across district lines.
Controlled choice: Requires families to choose a school within a community but choices can be restricted so as to ensure the racial, gender, and socioeconomic balance of each school.
Magnet schools: Public schools that offer specialized programs, often deliberately designed and located so as to attract students to otherwise unpopular areas or schools.
Charter schools: Publicly sponsored schools that are substantially free of direct administrative control by the government, but are held accountable for achieving certain levels of student performance.
Voucher plans: Federal funds that enable public school students to attend schools of their choice, public or private.
Competition between schools, choice supporters also say, will lead to increased school accountability. And, increased school accountability, in turn, will encourage individual schools to experiment with different educational approaches in order to find those that work best for the students they serve (Raywid, 1992). As a result of experimentation, advocates say, schools will step away from a one-size-fits-all education model. They also contend that offering parents the right to choose increases parental involvement in schools (Aguirre, 2000).
In addition, school choice supporters contend that it helps low-income students. As Howard Fuller, the current chairman of the Black Alliance for Educational Options and a supporter of school vouchers, puts it: “The only people who are trapped in schools that don't work for them or their parents are the poor. We've got to create a way where the poorest parents have some of the options” (Garrett, 2001).
Unlike more affluent families, poor families cannot choose to buy homes in communities that have good schools, and two recent studies have found that choice programs have positive effects on low-income families (Greene, 2000; Witte, 1999).
But while promoters of school choice herald the autonomy it affords parents, opponents question which families will be in the position to make informed decisions about their children’s educations. Some researchers are concerned that certain types of parents are more likely to exercise choice and leave their neighborhood schools, reinforcing social-class inequality (Fuller, Elmore, and Orfield, 1996).
While proponents tout increased school accountability as a byproduct of school choice reform, opponents find the economic-based free-market theory to be problematic in the public education realm (Henig, 1997). Essentially, they do not believe that allowing schools to fail will help the system overall.
As one critic of school choice, Peter Cookson of Columbia University, argues, choice will cause the system to fail the children who are not lucky enough to remove themselves from a low-performing school and will therefore “pit student against student and family against family in the struggle for educational survival” (1992).
Opponents also worry about the potential loss of financial support for failing schools. If students move from a failing school in one district to a school in another district, the original district will lose valuable per-pupil funding. The loss of funding at the district level can hurt the already struggling school, one study found (Lyons, 1995).
Some opponents of school choice also question whether it can be successfully implemented, especially in urban systems. “A student’s leap from one sinking school will (not) culminate automatically in a safe landing somewhere else,” wrote Randy Ross, the chairman of the Cross-City Campaign for Urban School Reform in Los Angeles. In many large urban school districts, students who want to opt out of failing schools will have few other choices (Ross, 2002).
Although debate on the merits of private school choice rages on, proponents can claim a recent victory. A June 2002 landmark ruling of the U.S. Supreme Court held that a state-enacted voucher program in Cleveland did not violate the U.S. Constitution’s prohibition against government establishment of religion (Zelman v. Simmons-Harris, 2002).
Another recent victory touted by choice advocates centers on public school choice. The January 2002 passage of the “No Child Left Behind” Act of 2001 officially introduced public school choice into federal law. Specifically, the regulation states that parents with a child enrolled in a school identified as in need of improvement can transfer him or her to a better-performing public school or public charter school (No Child Left Behind Act, 2002).
Public school choice is gaining popularity at the state level. Education Week’s Quality Counts 2003 report found that 32 states have an open-enrollment program, and 40 states allow charter schools. However, while the No Child Left Behind Act orders that school choice be made available to students in failing schools, as of fall 2002, few students had taken advantage of the option. Officials attribute the lack of participation to the fact that urban districts have few available spaces in higher-performing schools and rural districts often have no alternatives at all for students in low-performing schools (Robelen, 2002).
—Susan Ansell
Aguirre, R., “The Power to Choose: Horizon Scholarship Program Second Annual Report,” Children First America, 2000.
Center for Education Reform, “Groundbreaking Report Shows Competition From School Choice Sparks Widespread Public School Reform,” 2002.
Cookson, P.W., School Choice: The Struggle for the Soul of American Education, pp. 14-16, New Haven, Connecticut: Yale University Press, 1994.
Cookson, P. W., “The Ideology of Consumership and the Coming Deregulation of the Public School System,” In Peter Cookson, Jr. The Choice Controversy, pp. 83-99, Newbury Park, California: Corwin Press, Inc., 1992.
Fuller B., Elmore, R.F. and Orfield, G., “Policy Making in the Dark: Illuminating the School Choice Debate,” In Bruce Fuller and Richard F. Elmore (Eds.) Who Chooses? Who Loses?: Culture, Institutions, and the Unequal Effects of School Choice, pp. 1-21, New York, NY: Teachers College Press, 1996.
Garrett, J.,
Sunday, November 16, 2003
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Bush Flunks Schools
by SUSAN OHANIAN
[from the December 1, 2003 issue]
The ESEA [No Child Left Behind Act] is like a Russian novel. That's because it's long, it's complicated, and in the end, everybody gets killed. --Scott Howard, former superintendent, Perry, Ohio, public schools
The Ohio Business Roundtable strongly supports the No Child Left Behind Act. --Richard Stoff, president, Ohio Business Roundtable
At first, many people liked the sound of "No Child Left Behind," President Bush's education plan. Who could object? The press and the public responded positively to the sentiment--until the failure-to-measure-up labels started rolling in. But now, New York Times education columnist Michael Winerip says NCLB (pronounced "nicklebee") "may go down in history as the most unpopular piece of education legislation ever created."
Across the country, thousands of federal scarlet letters have been posted on schoolhouse doors. According to a Machiavellian federal formula, many schools well respected in their communities didn't make Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP). In Florida, only 22 percent of the schools earning A's under the state's ranking system received the NCLB imprimatur; overall, 87 percent of Florida's public schools were judged inadequate. NCLB wonks are quick to point out that nowhere in the law is the word failure used. True. But everybody reads the "in need of improvement" tag as a euphemism for failure. And schools "in need of improvement" are penalized, so the distinction is a sham.
Note that these labels apply only to public schools. Private and parochial schools are exempt from the same requirements--even when they receive vouchers paid for with public funds.
Under what is termed disaggregation, a scheme central to NCLB, kids are divided into subgroups, every one of which must show 95 percent test participation (and progress). Here are Minnesota's: All Students, American Indian/Alaskan Native, Asian/Pacific Islander, Hispanic, Black, White, Limited English Proficient, Special Education, Free/Reduced Priced Meals. It's true that in the past, schools could hide poor performance of, say, special-ed students by averaging it in with that of excellent students. Pulling out the subgroups creates what is called transparency. And that's fine, as far as it goes. But under NCLB, transparency is transmuted into school-bashing. In the words of the North Carolina State Board of Education, "A school's making AYP is an all or nothing prospect. A school will either have 'Yes' or 'No' in this field." One of Palo Alto's top high schools received a scarlet letter because some students skipped the test to study for AP exams.
And remember, this is all based on how some squirrely kids perform on a standardized test that neither the public nor the educators have a right to examine. In some states a teacher is subject to reprimand or dismissal if she even glances at it. Or tries to comfort a child sobbing over the test.
Multiply the subgroups by two, since all subgroups have to measure up in both reading and math, with science waiting in the wings. Every category must have 95 percent test-taker participation and show adequate yearly progress. In a small rural district, a couple of kids having an off day can cook a school's goose. In a large urban school, it doesn't take many more. A school can meet as many as seventeen out of eighteen target goals, and because this game is all or nothing, still be labeled failing. Ninety-four percent--and failing.
If No Child Left Behind meant what it says, it would help schools concentrate on that 6 percent, not cripple the whole school with an ugly label and crushing financial consequences. If even 6 percent of the bombast supporting NCLB was in touch with reality, they'd take heed of the American Society of Civil Engineers Report Card for America's Infrastructure, where public school buildings are ranked in worse shape than our bridges, transit systems and hazardous-waste disposal systems. Where's the Congressional breast-beating about this D-?
Of late, some Democrats have been saying they wouldn't have voted for NCLB if they'd known the Administration was going to skimp on funding. But to educators, this fiat for perfection looks like a gotcha setup; money or no, everybody will fail. As respected researcher Gerald Bracey puts it, NCLB is "a weapon of mass destruction, and the target is the public school system." Vermont Senator James Jeffords sees NCLB as "a back door to anything that will let the private sector take over public education."
If a school doesn't meet its AYP for two consecutive years, then it has to offer students the opportunity to go to a school with better scores, paying for the transportation costs. The Feds call this capacity-building; schools trying to meet already depleted budgets call it a crisis. Students with the lowest scores get first choice for moving, so consider this scenario: A receiving school's AYP is endangered by the incoming students, and the sending school's AYP improves just because they left. Then the bus can reverse direction, with the sending school becoming the recipient. Such a scheme looks at schools not as social institutions but as skill delivery systems. Already, there have been ugly incidents of cities not wanting to accept Somali refugees because they're worried about AYPs.
States must come up with a plan for achieving 100 percent proficiency by 2013-14, so they set up a grid: Oregon is typical, promising 40 percent proficiency in English/Language Arts in 2002-03, jumping to 60 percent by 2007-08, 80 percent by 2011-12 and 100 percent by 2013-14. Note that they're putting off the utterly fantastic gains until the last years. Maybe they're counting on NCLB's self-destructing by then.
A July press release from the Business Roundtable quotes Joseph Tucci, chairman of the Roundtable's Education and the Workforce Task Force: "You can't manage what you don't measure. No executive can run a business without accurate, granular data that explains what's working and what's not. Our school systems should be no different." Keep those 8-year-old widgets rolling along the conveyor belt! But man does not live by granular data alone. Neither should children, though everywhere music, art and recess are being cut--to make room for more test prep.
Consider this: A Steinway grand has more than 12,000 parts, and a third grader's brain has about 100 billion neurons; but it's the Steinway that's acknowledged as unique, differing not only from all other piano brands but from all other Steinways. In an article celebrating the Steinway, James Barron says, "Perhaps it is the wood. No matter how carefully Steinway selects or prepares each batch, some trees get more sunlight than others in the forest, and some get more water. Certain piano technicians say uncontrollable factors make the difference." Uncontrollable factors. These days, piano makers may talk about uncontrollable factors, but no teacher or principal had better try it. With test-score numbers passing for accountability, "No Excuses" is the mantra for schools.
Ask any teacher and she will tell you how different is each third grader in her classroom. But the corporate-politico-media alliance long ago abandoned teacher judgments as "anecdotal," putting all their eggs in that granular data basket. Because the governor of Florida holds firm to a magic test score for every third grader--disregarding the kind of work they have done all year in class--he called on God, who has given children "the ability to gain this power and they haven't learned it," to justify holding back 43,000 of them. Maybe God was listening; this number was later reduced to 32,000. In the short term, retaining kids this year will make next year's AYP scores look better. But what about the long-term consequences? The relationships between retention, race and dropout rates are amply documented in research on retention. Hold ten students back a grade and only three will be around on graduation day; hold those students back twice and none will complete school. None. And African-American and Latino students are retained at twice the rate of white students.
Holding back third graders a year in school is said to be in the nation's self-interest. The hysterical tone harks back to the cold war rhetoric found in 1983's A Nation at Risk: "If an unfriendly foreign power had attempted to impose on America the mediocre educational performance that exists today, we might well have viewed it as an act of war." Refusing to acknowledge evidence to the contrary, Business Roundtable bullies still talk this way about schools, and the national press lets them get away with it.
People are so used to thinking of issues as right wing and left wing that they often miss the business wing. Go to the Business Roundtable (BRT) website and you can download the NCLB Business Leaders Toolkit. In the name of preparing students for "the 21st century workplace," CEOs are urged to deliver the BRT-crafted messages to public officials, taking advantage of this "exceptional window of opportunity...[to] act strategically and with a common voice." The Roundtable cannot have missed the fact that this law, which will declare nearly all public schools failures, greases the skids for vouchers and privatization (though that danger appears to have escaped the law's Democratic supporters). NCLB also paves the way for school-to-work plans that have been sitting on the back burner ever since Clinton failed to get the national test he wanted. When school-to-work, which is a technology-based learning model training students for their place in the global economy (meaning school ends for some kids after tenth grade), is combined with NCLB-type open enrollment (in which kids revolve constantly from school to school), a marketplace model determines the relationship of people to schools. Which is exactly what business wanted in the first place.
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Published on Sunday, November 16, 2003 by the Observer/UK
Death of Community Spirit
Whether It's the School-Run Mum or the Conniving Business Boss, Putting Self Before Society Harms Us All
by Will Hutton
The Girls' Schools Association and the Confederation of British Industry may seem as different as chalk and cheese, but as the former's conference ends and the latter's begins, it is more obvious than ever that they are linked by the same question.
How far are we are prepared to allow every nook and cranny of our society to be governed by the values of the market? How far are we prepared to allow the view that every relationship is essentially transactional, only valid and efficient if it suits our self-interest? And how far are we prepared to allow that the values that govern social relationships - trust, empathy, mutual regard, altruism, conscience - are economically inefficient and thus second rate?
It was Mary Steel, headmistress of St Mary and St Anne, a private school in Staffordshire which charges its boarders £16,899 a year, who set the cat among the pigeons at the GSA conference last week. Depending on the very wealthy to provide her income, she none the less deplored the values-vacuum they had created for their children.
'Everyone in society now only seems to be concerned with their own achievements and ambitions,' she declared. 'We are in danger of creating a rootless generation.' Parents routinely lied to excuse their children from speech days or sports events if they weren't participating; there was no loyalty to the school as a social institution or pleasure in the achievements of others.
She spoke of one father dropping off his three daughters to school by helicopter, girls who had never had a story read to them. His relationship with the school and his daughters was essentially transactional; he wanted to buy the school's values but would not support them with his actions. The signal to his children could not be clearer: invest no time in your relationships or value your school - think only of number one.
Mary Steel is not alone in her concern. Both the Headmasters' and Headmistresses' Conference and the National Association of Schoolmasters Union of Women Teachers have recently warned that the culture of self-interest and self-gratification has invaded every family to a greater or lesser degree. They add that pupils have become less controllable and more prone to violence than ever before, with ever less support from parents in attempting to instill loyalty to social norms or promotion of the common good.
Even solving the calamity of the school run is close to impossible; parents will not act together to support school buses or public transport. Rather, they continue to act individually, sitting in the gridlock they create, a preference for self over the social that their kids cannot fail to ape.
Yet tomorrow, at the CBI conference, what will be on parade is the loud assertion that Britain cannot afford concern for the common interest or any initiative that might promote it, so laying an insufferable burden on business. Taxation to fund public services will be denounced as illegitimate, because public services do not, allegedly, match private-sector efficiency. Anyway, choice in markets is better than collectively provided services.
Regulation of the labor market from the European Union or Whitehall - in this, the least regulated lab our market in the industrialized world - will be portrayed as constraining the necessary autonomy of business if it is to compete. The valiant wealth-creating businessman and woman will be characterized as trying to deliver jobs and prosperity in the face of red tape, statist obstruction and irrational preoccupation with worker rights.
This has always been the business gripe, but what is different today is this is no longer just one party to the national conversation - it defines the national conversation. Thus, when Digby Jones, the director-general of the CBI, rattles the Government's cage, he does so not merely as a business lobbyist but as a spokesman representing unchallengeable economic truths that rank the highest in the moral league table.
He speaks in a culture that now accepts that individual self-interest takes priority over the social and that a transactional view of the universe is economically and morally superior to the idea that what counts are relationships and society. He further entrenches, although personally he would deplore them, the values Mary Steel so decries.
Jones would - if he had more leeway, the wider culture were different and the Government were more self-confident - be party to a more sophisticated exchange over the relationship between economy and society. He has, after all, accommodated the CBI to the minimum wage, and criticizes an education system that still fails so many of its pupils. He refuses to defend excessive rewards for executive failure. He insists on keeping relationships with trade unions alive.
Business has proper concerns; the question is where to draw the line. Jones is right to make these concessions to the social, partnership and fairness. As an apostle of 'socially inclusive wealth creation', he would go further if he were pushed. The pity is that no one does. The truth is that both wealth generation and the health of our wider society require a much more generous definition of the role of the social than the national conversation acknowledges.
Even the idea of the company - in its original conception, literally a group of companions who shared a common cause and applied for a licence to trade, accepting social obligations along with the right to make profits - was profoundly rooted in society.
It is only over the last 20 years that this notion has been abandoned, and 'wealth generation' cast as only possible if companies are the creatures of their shareholders ceaselessly trying to maximize short-term profits in unregulated markets, the maxim of the so-called American Business Model.
This cannot be allowed to pass as a general principle; not only does it not work in describing how companies actually function, it is too destructive. In television, for example, it is legitimizing, as Roger Mosey, head of BBC TV News said last week, an industry that, with the advent of digitalization and a multiplicity of channels, is delivering a 'poisonous cocktail' of smut and populist crap - and ratchets up by another notch the kind of behavior our school leaders deplore.
In a market society, who is the fool who champions integrity of purpose, vocation and the importance of values other than self-interest? Should we wonder at how overpaid footballers behave, where relationships with club and even country are seen as transactions on the way to the most important thing of all - personal wealth?
We have lost our collective compass and are paying a heavy price; the worst of it is that we know it. The tragedy of New Labour is that it has been too frightened to offer the lead we crave. But we get the leadership we deserve. Reform starts in our souls.
Wednesday, November 05, 2003
Real Test Is, Did the Kids Learn to Think?
By Roger H. Weaver
Roger H. Weaver is headmaster of Crossroads School for Arts and Sciences in Santa Monica.
November 5, 2003
Everyone is painfully aware that the educational infrastructure of this country is hurting. Teachers are underpaid. Education budgets, with few exceptions, continue to be slashed. Arts, athletics and other "frills" are being cut back, if they still exist. Student dropout rates, particularly in the largest urban areas, continue to climb. And so much of the school experience is for so many children impersonal and not relevant at best, and frustrating and alienating at worst.
Politicians routinely cite education as their absolute top concern, no doubt because the polls tell them it should be. But when government entities finally get around to focusing on education, they always seem to come up with variations on the same solutions that have not worked for years: a frenzy of "testing and accountability" programs.
Principals, teachers and parents give it their best and try to make it work. But each time we look for a payoff for the kids, the promise has disappeared. It doesn't work.
Like so many reforms before it, the Bush administration's No Child Left Behind Act was loudly trumpeted as the solution to our problems. But thanks to its unimaginative approach, the extent to which pedagogy and curriculum are now driven by testing in California is almost total. We are faced with a dizzying combination of testing programs, such as STAR (Standardized Testing and Reporting, which aligns with the state standards), CAT/6 (California Achievement Test, which indexes to national norms) and CAPA (California Alternate Performance Assessment, for students with "the most significant cognitive disabilities"). These requirements, often accompanied by additional district assessments, have created an instructional culture that is almost entirely test-driven.
It is astounding to me that American policymakers have been so consistently duped by one of the most long-running and durable scams ever perpetrated on the public: the ridiculous notion that the kinds of things that can be tested by filling in a sheet of bubbles with a No. 2 pencil are what is most important when it comes to education, that high-stakes testing gives us useful, relevant and helpful information about teaching and learning. The fact of the matter is that precisely the opposite is true. The real goals of education cannot be easily quantified: creativity and original thinking, imagination and adaptability, flexibility and innovation, insight and the capacity to apply knowledge and understanding in unfamiliar circumstances, appreciation of the complexities of context, genuine respect for the views and beliefs of others. Such things cannot — not now, not ever — be measured by a multiple-choice test.
Educators are among the hardest-working, most dedicated people in our society, doing the most important work there is. But the testing mania that consumes our schools puts teachers and students in a forced march to the April test dates. The consequence of this is not only that all the spontaneity and all the opportunities to explore the "teachable moment" are eliminated but also that more kids get left behind. And if schools are classified as underperforming, they can lose funding and all but basic curricula and suffer the imposition of more testing. The academic casualties of such a test-driven system constitute staggering losses of human potential and will play out in our communities in sad and painful ways for years.
There are better options. Adequate funding, manageable class sizes, a demanding, balanced curriculum that nurtures not only cognitive skills but also the creative, expressive, imaginative and personal lives of kids — these will provide results that no lock-step, test-driven curriculum can ever achieve. Every teacher understands the importance of meeting learners where they are, yet this mandatory "teaching to a test calendar" approach forecloses the options.
There is something terribly wrong with such a picture. The public must send a message to policymakers that the same old game just cannot be played any longer. There is far too much at stake.
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Copyright 2003 Los Angeles Times
Sunday, October 19, 2003
Revealed: what your degree is truly worth
By Roger Dobson
19 October 2003
One of the great questions the educated classes ask themselves - how much are my qualifications worth? - can at last be answered. A report by Bradford University shows that a professional qualification, such as accountancy or law, adds infinitely more to a person's earnings than an academic one.
For women especially, a professional qualification far outweighs the salary benefits of a higher degree, or even a first degree, boosting earnings by 41 per cent compared to a woman with no qualifications. For men the salary bonus of professional qualifications is 35 per cent.
A degree is second in value, worth an extra 28 per cent in the pocket for men. The increase of 28 per cent is an average figure, with degrees from some institutions worth more than others. GCSEs are in third place, adding 21 per cent to the pay packet.
The data support the contention of the Education Secretary, Charles Clarke, that qualifications are worth the debts acquired to earn them, but some may question whether the value of an ordinary university degree is worth the cost of student loans, with or without top-up fees.
One of the surprises of the report, by Professor Irena Grugulis of Bradford University and published in the British Journal of Industrial Relations, is that a higher degree adds only 8 per cent to the average income.
But the report contains bad news for those with one of the most widely held qualifications in Britain. The National Vocational Qualification (NVQ), says the report, is so poor it should be scrapped. Holding an NVQ adds nothing to the pay packet and is largely ignored by employers.
