Educational Edges

2003-12-15T20:55:00.000-08:00

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.

2003-12-15T20:51:00.000-08:00

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.

2003-12-06T20:56:00.000-08:00

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".

2003-12-03T20:19:00.000-08:00

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.

2003-12-03T19:14:00.000-08:00

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

2003-12-03T19:10:00.000-08:00

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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2003-12-03T05:18:00.000-08:00

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

2003-12-03T05:16:00.000-08:00

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

2003-12-03T05:07:00.000-08:00

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

2003-11-24T19:04:00.000-08:00

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.,

2003-11-16T15:54:00.000-08:00

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http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml?i=20031201&s=ohanian
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.

2003-11-16T13:01:00.000-08:00

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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.

2003-11-05T10:07:00.000-08:00

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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2003-10-19T16:15:00.000-07:00

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.

2003-10-18T12:53:00.000-07:00

O.C. District May Enlarge Class Size
Santa Ana Unified is trying to cut $30 million as enrollment tapers off. Kindergarten classes and campus security could be affected.
By Jennifer Mena
Times Staff Writer

October 18, 2003

With student enrollment leveling off after years of growth, the Santa Ana Unified School District is scrambling to cut expenses by nearly $30 million over the next three years.

Cost-saving measures under discussion include increasing the size of kindergarten classes, eliminating middle school interscholastic sports, reducing school security and giving teachers less paid time to prepare for the school year.

The district's plight has been of such concern that a state fiscal crisis management team has been reviewing the district's finances for the last month, at the request of the Orange County Department of Education.

School districts are required by state law to maintain balanced budgets. Those that do not are assigned trustees who make the necessary cuts unilaterally, Supt. Al Mijares said.

School board members say they are uncomfortable with the options.

"If we don't do this, someone else will," school board member Rob Richardson said at a recent board meeting. "So it behooves us to be serious. This is not a real rosy situation."

The deficit, the worst experienced by the district in the last decade, comes as school systems throughout the state are grappling with budget shortfalls. The situation in Santa Ana is exacerbated by the flattening enrollment, which largely determines the state funding the district receives.

The system's enrollment could rise by about 100 students or fall by as much as 500 under various estimates.

"Most districts are having to make very difficult decisions," said Wendy Margarita, Orange County assistant superintendent of business services. "Santa Ana is not alone. The only difference is that Santa Ana is losing enrollment."

The problems began last year when school districts faced $2.6 billion in cuts statewide. As a result, Santa Ana's school administrative departments cut their costs by 25%.

Now, with enrollment leveling off and no additional state money coming in, the district is taking harsher measures, Mijares said.

District enrollment had been increasing relatively consistently for years, but as the economy has soured, fewer people are moving to Santa Ana, school board President Rosemarie Avila said. The pace of growth began to slow about three years ago.

"We are used to growing about 2,000 students per year and that's not happening [anymore]," Avila said. With state budget cuts, "it's a double whammy."

Mijares said he wants the school board to identify cuts by Oct. 31 so he can give notices to employees who might be cut from the payroll.

The school district plans to provide the Orange County Department of Education with a three-year spending plan, including cuts, by Oct. 31.

To that end, the school board has met several times in recent weeks to discuss paring its $525-million budget, about half of which includes funds that are allocated to specific programs and cannot be touched.

The board is scheduled to vote on the plan Oct. 28.

Among the cuts under consideration:

• Increasing kindergarten class sizes to 30 students from 20 while adding a second part-time teacher in each class. The district would lose some state funding it receives for classes with fewer than 21 students, but the increased class sizes will eliminate the need for about 80 teachers and save about $2.8 million.

• Eliminating interschool sports at intermediate schools, saving about $60,000 in bus transportation costs.

• Renegotiating union contracts so employees who chose more expensive health insurance plans would contribute to the added cost.

• With union approval, cutting the five days that teachers are paid to prepare for the school year and instead offering them two unpaid leave days.

• Eliminating administrators at smaller schools, and shifting their work to administrators at other schools, for a saving of $400,000.

• Limiting overtime for school security officers and deploying them more sparingly, to save $900,000.

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2003-10-13T07:04:00.000-07:00

washingtonpost.com

Education Law May Hurt Bush
No Child Left Behind's Funding Problems Could Be '04 Liability

By Jim VandeHei
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, October 13, 2003; Page A01

FAIRLEA, W.Va. -- President Bush's No Child Left Behind education program -- acclaimed as a policy and political breakthrough by the Republicans in January 2002 -- is threatening to backfire on Bush and his party in the 2004 elections.

The signature education plan is pledged to improve the performance of students, teachers and schools with yearly tests and serious penalties for failure. Although many Republicans and Democrats are confident the system will work in the long run, Bush is being criticized in swing states such as West Virginia for not adequately funding programs to help administrators and teachers meet the new, and critics say unreasonable, standards.

Bush hoped to enhance his image as a compassionate conservative by making this education program one of the first and highest priorities of his administration. But he could find the law complicating his reelection effort, political strategists from both parties say, as some states report that as many as half or more of schools are failing to make the new grade and lack the money to turn things around promptly.

"It's way too soon to judge, but unfortunately in politics, people do judge, and that's why we have to keep pushing the message that we think" the law will greatly improve education, "but not overnight," said Republican Conference Chairman Deborah Pryce (Ohio), the top communications strategist for House Republicans.

David Winston, a pollster for congressional Republicans, said Bush and the GOP trail Democrats 50 percent to 36 percent on the education issue, a 14-point drop since the measure was signed in January 2002. The Democratic presidential candidates are criticizing the law on the campaign trail and are getting supportive responses.

On Capitol Hill, the fight over funding for No Child Left Behind is becoming a significant issue of the upcoming congressional elections, as Democrats blame Bush and congressional Republicans for shortchanging the law by billions of dollars.

The issue has particular resonance in such key states in the presidential election as Florida, Tennessee, Missouri and West Virginia, where nearly half or more of schools are not meeting the new benchmarks and where a few thousand votes could decide which presidential candidate wins each state in 2004. Swing voters, particularly married mothers, frequently cite education as among their chief concerns when deciding whom to support in presidential elections.

Since Democrats have championed Head Start and the Elementary and Secondary Education Act in the 1960s, voters have trusted them to do a better job of promoting education, mostly by pushing for a bigger federal role in education and greater funding for it. Democratic dominance on the issue came in the mid-1990s when Republicans, who considered education best handled at the local level, tried to abolish the Education Department, a huge political loser for the party.

In 1996, President Bill Clinton defeated Republican Robert J. Dole 78 percent to 16 percent among voters who considered education the most important issue of the day, exit polls showed.

As governor of Texas, candidate and then president, Bush has sought to change the party's image and fortunes on education policies by pushing for changes, tough standards, school choice and stiff penalties for failing schools and teachers. In 2000, he improved GOP standing with voters on education by touting this agenda, losing by eight points to Democrat Al Gore among those who cared most about education. By the time he signed No Child Left Behind last year, Bush had done the once-unthinkable: erased the Democrats' historical advantage on education, said Winston and many others who conduct polling on the topic.

"It's no surprise to me [Democrats are] taking their shots at this," said Rep. John A. Boehner (R-Ohio), a chief sponsor of the new law. "They owned this issue for decades and they refuse to accept [that] Republicans draw even with them among the electorate." Republicans say Bush has provided ample money to help states adopt new standards, devise new tests and help train teachers and administrators to adapt to the myriad changes.

But, Republicans also acknowledge that Bush and the GOP are losing their momentum on the issue, as the White House and Congress focus most of their attention on Iraq, the economy and jobs. "If we let [education] be defined by the opposing party, yeah, it will be a problem," said Winston, who attributed the falling poll numbers to the GOP's relative silence on the topic in recent months.

Republican National Committee Chairman Ed Gillespie said: "The Democrats are still the default party in this setting, unless we are out there pushing our message." He said he is not surprised the GOP is starting "to slide" on the issue because Bush is focused on other matters, but he predicted education would rebound into a "political" winner when the president and others start contrasting their plans for accountability and standards with the Democrats' demand for more money.

In recent memos, GOP leaders pleaded with House and Senate Republicans to spend more time discussing the benefits of the new education law. Bush has highlighted education at recent stops, but it was swamped by news reports about deaths in Iraq and job losses at home. He could face some potentially rough terrain next year, too.

While many governors praise the law's goals, budgetary problems at the state and federal levels make it highly likely the situation will worsen for Bush in 2004. For starters, the law requires states to raise the bar for success over the next 11 years, so each year it gets harder for schools to succeed.

With federal budget deficits nearing all-time highs and the tab for Iraq expected to grow, Bush and Congress are unlikely to provide the states with the billions of dollars they seek to quickly adapt to the new system.

Many states, including West Virginia, anticipate cutting spending on other programs next year to meet the law's demands, which will draw more attention to funding shortfalls right before the elections. Moreover, just as the campaign is heating up next year, states will be releasing second-year data on how many students and schools are making the grade.

Bush's tax cuts could complicate education issues, too. Many states, including West Virginia, link their tax rates to the federal government's, so Bush's recent rounds of cuts drained revenue from state coffers that otherwise would have helped fund education. Former Vermont governor Howard Dean, a leader in the race for the Democratic presidential nomination, frequently explains to voters that some local governments also were forced to raise property taxes to pay for education and to account for the domino effect of the Bush tax cuts.

Consequently, Bush is being blamed for what Republicans railed against for years: slapping unfunded mandates on states that cannot afford them.

Bush and Republicans may try to share any blame with congressional Democrats, who generally supported the bill in the House and Senate. But Sen. Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.), whose support for the measure was crucial to its bipartisan passage, said it is up to Republicans now.

"The law made proven, effective reform a priority for all schools," Kennedy said. "To make it a reality, we must fund it."

House and Senate Democrats have tried unsuccessfully to provide billions of dollars in additional funding for programs that help states meet the new requirements. Republicans say states are getting more money than ever.

A quick tour of the problems facing West Virginia, a state Bush narrowly won, brings the national picture and looming problems into clearer focus.

About 45 percent of the state's 728 schools did not meet the new standards this year, according to recently released figures. In an interview, Gov. Robert E. Wise Jr. (D) blamed the Bush administration for denying the state tens of millions of dollars it needs to develop and implement the new test, build a new computer system to crunch and monitor the data, hire and train teachers and improve failing schools.

"I find it ironic . . . the party that talks about being opposed to unfunded mandates is giving us a very significant unfunded mandate," said Wise, whose state spends about 70 percent of its budget on education.

He added: "We are the poster child for trying to do it the Bush way." The state won quick approval of its new testing plan, shifted money around to help fund it and "gave our citizens full advantage of the Bush tax cuts even though the state took a hit."

The state's revenue dropped by about $60 million for this fiscal year, state officials said, as it adjusted its code to reflect changes such as a reduction in estate taxes enacted by Bush. Now administrators, teachers and parents are wondering why more is not being done to fix the more than 300 schools that missed their targets.

"This is a massive public relations effort on the federal level that, in truth, is creating a crisis of confidence" in classrooms nationwide, West Virginia's Education Secretary Kay Goodwin, a Democrat, said in an interview. "In many ways, the process is onerous, and, it seems to me, in many ways quite unfair."

Staff writer Juliet Eilperin in Washington contributed to this report.

© 2003 The Washington Post Company

2003-10-13T06:09:00.000-07:00

Attack on education is continuous and will be until there are vouchers and the partial and then total destruction of access to well funded education by the disenfranchised.
October 13, 2003 | Daily Mislead Archive
Bush Tried to Take Funds from Military School Kids to Pay for Iraqi-Afghan Policies

President Bush attempted to slash money from the program that pays to educate the children of military money and women even while saying, "Our men and women in uniform give America their best and we owe them our support."1

At the same time the President lauded the "great courage"2 of the soldiers he sent to Iraq he requested major cuts in the Impact Aid3 program that provides funds for the schooling of the 900,0004 children of military families. Bush tried to take $172 million from Impact Aid5 and shortchange by $583 million full funding for the No Child Left Behind Act. The cutbacks would have directly affected children of troops currently deployed in Iraq.6

The cutbacks were part of Bush's budgetary effort to find $87 billion for his policies in Iraq and Afghanistan, which include $40 million for school programs to benefit Iraqi children.7

Congress defied the President on his cutbacks, however. The House added $223 million to Impact Aid, and the Senate slightly less. Apparently Bush will accept the funding rather than resort to a veto.

Sources:
1. Address of the President to the Joint Session of Congress, February 27, 2001
2. Remarks by the President on the Wartime Supplemental Budget, March 25, 2003
3. Passed in 1950, Impact Aid is intended to offset the revenue lost to local schools as a result of the tax-exempt status of federal property, i.e. a military base. In other words, the federal government acts as the local taxpayer through funding the Impact Aid program.
4. Officials: Cuts Unlikely For Impact Aid; Bush Proposal Gets A Chilly Reception, Editorial, The Honolulu Advertiser, April 14, 2003
5. Support for Troops Questioned; Democrats Detail Bush's Cuts in Military Family Benefits, The Washington Post, June 17, 2003
6. GOP Funding Bill Shortchanges America's Children By Underfunding Key Education Priorities, A state-by-State Analysis, July 9, 2003
6. Rebuilding Iraq: What U.S. Taxpayers are Paying For, Rep. Rahm Emanuel
7. Department Of Education Fiscal Year 2004 Congressional Action, 9/16/03

2003-09-27T21:41:00.000-07:00

U.S. Government To Discontinue Long-Term, Low-Yield Investment In Nation's Youth

Advertisement

WASHINGTON, DC—In an effort to streamline federal financial holdings and spur growth, Treasury Secretary John Snow announced Monday that the federal government will discontinue its long-term, low-yield investment in the nation's youth.
President Bush explains the nation's new investment strategy at an inner-city school in Baltimore.
Above: President Bush explains the nation's new investment strategy at an inner-city school in Baltimore.

"For generations, we've viewed spending on our nation's young people as an investment in the future," Snow said. "Unfortunately, investments of this type take a minimum of 18 years to mature, and even then, there's no guarantee of a profit. It's just not good business."

Snow compared funneling money into public schools, youth programs, and child health-care clinics to letting the nation's money languish in a low-interest savings account.

"This is taxpayer money we're talking about," Snow said. "We can't keep pouring it into slow-growth ventures, speculating on a minuscule payout some time in the future."

"Federal expenditures are recouped when a child grows up and becomes a productive, taxpaying member of society," Snow said. "But we don't see a sizable return on our investment unless a child invents something profitable, or cures a costly disease, like cancer. The wisdom of making such long-range, long-shot investments is questionable at best, especially when you consider inflation. America would do better to invest in profitable business ventures. It's just that simple."

In the first quarter of 2004, the U.S. will scale back such youth-market investments as Head Start, a federal preschool program for the poor, and D.A.R.E., a drug-use prevention program for minors. Snow said such programs focus on preparing tomorrow's leaders at the expense of turning a profit today. The extensive federal public-education system will also experience major cutbacks.

"With the economy showing signs of recovery, now is the time to cut away the dead wood," Snow said. "As the stock market turns around, we have a real opportunity to make some money. But that's only if we shift the nation's funds into high-yield, short-term investments."

Snow said he plans to support the private sector with corporate subsidies, and to invest overseas.

"This nation needs something really big to turn it around, something like the '90s tech bubble," Snow said. "We need a winning business model, something that after-school art workshops and inner-city basketball programs simply do not offer."

Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan expressed cautious support for the divestments.

"Investments in our nation's young people have never yielded very impressive gains," Greenspan said. "On the other hand, as the market improves, disinflation is a major concern for future quarters. The education system is a huge employer in this country, and consumer spending could be affected."

Jack Carpenter, a financial consultant for Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu, said he is excited by the prospects for the nation's financial future.

"In such tough markets, the federal government should be putting its money in fliers, but instead, it's wasting it all on crawlers," Carpenter said. "Right now, we should focus on high-growth industries. Professional and technical services, finance and insurance, and information management are hot right now. Inner-city community youth programs—not so much."

Carpenter noted that not all investments in America's youth are low-yield, pointing to several youth-targeted efforts in the private sector that have generated immense returns.
An advertisement that supports divestment of our stake in the nation's youth.
Above: An advertisement that supports divestment of our stake in the nation's youth.

"Coca-Cola and Microsoft," Carpenter said. "Both organizations have done very well in the youth market. Coke markets their beverages largely to children and young adults, showing steady gains. And Microsoft, maker of the X-Box, has increased profits and beat earnings expectations in each of the past eight quarters. The federal government has a lot to learn from these businesses."

In spite of an outcry from teachers and union leaders, Snow insisted that the divestment will be a boon for all Americans.

"Taking a student through high school costs the federal government nearly $100,000 in taxpayer money," Snow said. "If that figure upsets you, then think about the times that we invest in a child and then he pulls out of the program before he matures."

Secretary of Education Rod Paige, whose post has historically been strongly committed to investment in youth and the bridges from one century to the next, surprised many when he came out in favor of the controversial plan. Paige said data collected over the past five years shows that there is reason to divest our stake in the nation's youth.

"Look at our recent graduates," Paige said. "So many recipients of years of federal investments are laying around in a state of unemployment. It's just not reasonable to continue to invest billions of dollars in such risky ventures."

Paige was quick to add that the new investment strategy doesn't involve dismantling the public school system, just restructuring it.

"The proposed plan actually includes increased investments in vouchers for private schools," Paige said. "Through the years, we've seen consistent returns from blue-chip schools."

In addition, Paige said Republican leaders are investing record levels of federal money in support of President Bush's No Child Left Behind program, which calls for expanded testing, higher-quality teachers, and greater achievement among students, particularly those in poor districts.

"Testing is exactly the sort of research the government should do before making spending decisions," Paige said. "How else will we know which individuals are sound investments and which are likely to waste our time and money?

2003-09-15T20:29:00.000-07:00

Nat Hentoff
Testing to Create Dropouts?
Playing the Numbers Game for Kids' Futures
September 12th, 2003 3:00 PM

Franklin K. Lane High School: lost dreams
(photo: Melissa Regan)

nthony Alvarado was a New York City schools chancellor who knew a lot about how to motivate a student to learn how to learn so that it becomes a lifelong adventure. During his tenure, I visited Alvarado's office at the old Board of Education Livingston Street building in Brooklyn. The citywide reading scores had just come in, and there had been a significant rise.

But Tony seemed down, and I asked him why. "When," he said, "do you teach them how to think?" He knew the false positives of collective high test scores in a school or district or in the system. As Andrew Wolf wrote in The New York Sun (October 4-6, 2002): "The best schools are not necessarily those that score highest, but rather those that achieve the greatest improvement of their individual students."

Wolf continued: "Only if we look at the schools by this measure can we evaluate the efficacy of the curriculum and teaching methods they employ."

In the October 25, 2002, Voice, I wrote about disturbing early signs of educational dysfunction in the new chancellor, Joel Klein. In a September 25 front-page story in The New York Times, Klein had been quoted as saying briskly: "Raising test scores should be the paramount goal of city educators." That alone was an ominous augury for the future, but then Klein actually said that he had no objections to teachers "teaching to the test. . . . It is the way our system is measured. This is a system of accountability and we need to conform our efforts."

It was then that Mayor Bloomberg, had he known anything about education, would have realized that his choice for chancellor could well deny him re-election because of the even worse state the city schools would be in by that time.

In The New York Times' invaluable series (July 31 and August 1) on the many thousands of public school students being pushed out of school because their test scores would reflect poorly on principals and superintendents, Tamar Lewin and Jennifer Medina omitted Klein's specific contribution to the growing number of push-outs.

Writing in the October 25 Voice ("The High-Stakes Testing Trap"), I noted that Klein was "already making a significant mistake by deciding to give superintendents bonuses of up to $40,000 based on improved test scores in their districts. Before that [with Klein's support] principals have been getting $15,000 bonuses for higher test scores in their schools. But what of the many kids who will still fail the tests? The only bonuses should be for individual teachers who actually make a difference. The United Federation of Teachers opposes this." (Rudy Giuliani had started the bonuses.)

Of course, the high-stakes-tests pressures on principals and superintendents began before Joel Klein joined the clueless cheerleaders of that obsession. New York State's commissioner of education, Richard Mills, is a leading perpetrator of dropouts by this method, as is George W. Bush, whose "No Child Left Behind" legislation, based on repeated collective testing, will in fact leave behind many children for whom college will be merely a mirage.

In the series on New York City push-outs in the Times, Don Freeman, who retired last year as principal of Fannie Lou Hamer Freedom High School in the Bronx, said something Joel Klein should have heard before he assumed he was knowledgeable enough to run the city's school system:

"Ten years ago you could focus on the kids. The pressures were not the same, and you could take some risks. Now you're supposed to focus on the numbers."

Now, finally acknowledging how many students have been told that, in essence, they're too dumb to stay in school, Klein has told principals:

"It is a disservice to students and ourselves . . . to rely on shortcuts or play numbers games in order to make things look better than they really are." He says he is now monitoring that "disservice." With what punishment for the perpetrators?

But Klein has shown no indication that he is recovering from his addiction to high-stakes tests. At least he owes the parents of the disappeared students an honest report on how many youngsters, by name, were pushed out and by whom. As the Times series showed, it's difficult to know the exact numbers because there are so many different codes in the lost students' records to disguise which were pushed out of their schools rather than having moved away or transferred to parochial or other private schools.

And there's probably no way to find out how many were told by their teachers and principals that they were "too old" to keep on keeping on—and were not informed that state law gives them the legal right to stay in school until they are 21.

The Times revealed that when the Advocates for Children class-action suit on push-out began in January, Federal District Court Judge Jack Weinstein—who should have been on the United States Supreme Court years ago—"ordered the Department of Education to send out hundreds of letters to students who had been discharged from [Franklin K.] Lane [High School] since January 2000." The letter told them their rights to stay in school, asked how and why they stopped attending Lane, and what they've been doing since.

More than 100 students answered, and some joined the lawsuit, but not all the responses to the judge's letter have yet been tallied. Has Klein seen Weinstein's letter and the responses so far?

New York City high schools discharged more than 55,000 students from high schools during the 2000-01 school year. Is Klein going to send out letters to those students and ask how many were pushed out, by whom, and where they are now? Are any of the teachers and principals going to be made accountable for not telling these "undesirables" their legal right to not be thrown out of school?

And specifically, what kind of system is Klein putting in place to check on whether the push-outs are continuing, and where?

In the August 7 Daily News, Elisa Hyman, deputy director of Advocates for Children of New York and the lawyer in charge of the class-action suit, advocates "better funding for instruction, remedial help, truancy-prevention services and facilities such as science labs." Also attention to kids with disabilities, including, I would add, hearing and vision problems.

But how about bringing back Tony Alvarado as chancellor? And will the state board of regents replace Richard Mills with a commissioner to whom high-stakes testing is not a fundamental religion? And what's happening to the Franklin K. Lane students abandoned by the school system?

2003-09-07T07:18:00.000-07:00

Table 5

The California State University First-Time Freshmen
from California Public and Private High Schools
English Proficiency by Institution of Origin
Regular Admits, Fall 2001

Downey Senior High
Downey

Downey Senior High All California High Schools
English Proficiency Number Percent* Percent*

Total Assessed 50
Exempt from EPT 11 22 29
Scored 151 or above on EPT 16 32 24

Not Proficient in English 23 46 47

EPT Mean Scores

Essay Subtest Mean 8 8
Reading Subtest Mean 144 142
Composing Subtest Mean 147 145
Total EPT Mean 148 146

* The percent proficient is calculated by dividing the sum of the number of exempt plus the number scoring 151 or above by the sum of the number exempt plus the number tested.

Definitions
Exempt: Number of fall first-time freshmen who were exempt from the EPT.
Tested: Number of fall first-time freshmen who took the EPT.
Scoring 151+: Number tested scoring 151 or greater (proficient). The EPT is scored on a scale of 120-180, with 151 indicating proficiency.
Proficient: Number and percent of first-time freshmen who complied with the English Placement Test requirement, and who were found proficient either by exemption from the requirement or by scoring 151 or higher on the EPT.

Explanation of EPT

BACK

2003-09-07T07:14:00.000-07:00

The California State University
Mathematics Proficiency for CSU First-Time Freshmen
from California Public and Private High Schools
Regular Admits, Fall 2001

Downey Senior High
Downey

Downey Senior High All California High Schools
Mathematics Proficiency Number Percent* Percent*

Total Assessed 45

Exempt from ELM 12 27 39
Scored 550 or above 8 18 13

Not Proficient in Mathematics 25 56 48

ELM Mean 469 464

* The percent proficient is calculated by dividing the sum of the number of exempt plus the number scoring 550 or above by the sum of the number exempt plus the number tested.

Definitions

Exempt: The number of fall first-time freshmen who were exempt from the ELM.

Tested: The number of fall first-time freshmen who took the ELM.

Scoring 550+: The number tested scoring 550 or higher on the ELM. The ELM is scored on a 100-700 scale, with 550 and above a passing score.

Proficient: The number and percent of fall first-time freshmen who complied with the ELM requirement and were found to be proficient either by exemption or by achieving a scaled score of 550 or higher.

2003-09-07T07:05:00.000-07:00

LBReport.com

Grading LBUSD

See Percentage of LB Grads, Sorted By LB High Schools, Rated Unprepared For College By CSU

(Sept. 6, 2003) -- What percentage of students graduating from a LBUSD high school does California State University (CSU) rate as unprepared for its college work?

CSU requires that new students be tested in English and mathematics to determine if they're prepared for college work. If they're not exempt by having scored well on other tests or completing other courses, they either pass the tests or end up in remediation courses or activities.

The CSU web site says if at least five students from a CA high school enroll at CSU as regularly-admitted first-time freshmen in fall 2002, it has data indicating the percentage of students from that high school not proficient in mathematics and English (and other data, see web page link below.) CSU posts comparable data for all new students from CA schools.

In the public interest, LBReport.com posts data below (available on CSU's web site) for new CSU admittees in 2001 from LBUSD high schools, along with a few others.

The statewide proficient percentage for math was 48%.

The statewide proficient percentage for English was 47%.

School Percentage not proficient
Poly/Math 39%
Poly/Engl 52%
Cabillo/Math 100%
Cabillo/Engl 90%
Jordan/Math 72%
Jordan/Engl 82%
Lakewood/Math 10%
Lakewood/Engl 42%
Millikan/Math 53%
Millikan/Engl 60%
Wilson/Math 39%
Wilson/Engl 52%
Avalon/Math 29%
Avalon/Engl 29%
CA Acad Math-Sci/Math 13%
CA Acad Math-Sch/Engl 13%
St. Anthony-Math 65%
St. Anthony-Engl 58%
Cerritos-Math 08%
Cerritos-Engl 36%
* The percent proficient is calculated by dividing the sum of the number of exempt plus the number scoring 550 or above by the sum of the number exempt plus the number tested.

We also provide the following background information from the CSU web site:

English Placement Text

[From APR pages]

The EPT is designed to assess the level of reading and writing skills of entering undergraduate students so that they can be placed in appropriate baccalaureate courses. Those undergraduate students who do not demonstrate college-level skills will be enrolled in courses or programs designed to help them attain these skills. The test is not a condition for admission to the CSU, but it is a condition of enrollment. Students may take the EPT only once. It may not be repeated. There is no charge to take the EPT...

The CSU English Placement Test (EPT) must be completed by all entering undergraduates, with the exception of those who present proof of one of the following:

# A score of 550 or above on the verbal section of the College Board SAT I: Reasoning Test taken April 1995 or after
# A score of 24 or above on the enhanced ACT English Test taken October 1989 or later
# A score of 680 or above on the and adjusted College Board SAT II: Writing Test taken May 1998 or after
# A score of 3, 4, or 5 on either the Language and Composition or Literature and Composition examination of the College Board Advanced Placement Program
# Completion and transfer to the CSU of a college course that satisfies the General Education-Breadth requirement or the Intersegmental General Education Transfer Curriculum requirement in English Composition, provided such a course was completed with a grade of C or better...

Mathematics

Entry Level Mathematics (ELM) Exam - The ELM examination tests for entry level mathematics skills acquired through three years of rigorous college preparatory mathematics course work (normally Algebra I, Algebra II, and Geometry). All undergraduate students must take the test or be exempt from it prior to placement in appropriate university mathematics course work. Specific policies regarding re-testing and placement will be determined by the campus.

Exemptions from the test are given only to those students who can present proof of one of the following:

# A score of 550 or above on the mathematics section of the College Board SAT I Reasoning test or on the College Board SAT II Mathematics Tests Level I, IC (Calculator), II, or IIC (Calculator).
# A score of 23 or above on the American College Testing Mathematics Test. A score of 3 or above on the College Board Advanced Placement mathematics examination (AB or BC).
# A score of 3 or above on the College Board Advanced Placement Statistics examination.
# Completion and transfer of a course that satisfies the General Education-Breadth or
# Intersegmental General Education Transfer Curriculum (IGETC) quantitative reasoning, provided such course was completed with a grade of C or better.

...One important fact to remember is that the range of scores for the Modified ELM test is 0-80 [passing is 50], whereas the range for the old test is 100-700.

Detailed data can be found at CSU proficiency data.

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2003-09-01T21:55:00.000-07:00

washingtonpost.com

Genes' Sway Over IQ May Vary With Class
Study: Poor More Affected by Environment

By Rick Weiss
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, September 2, 2003; Page A01

Back-to-school pop quiz: Why do poor children, and especially black poor children, score lower on average than their middle-class and white counterparts on IQ tests and other measures of cognitive performance?

It is an old and politically sensitive question, and one that has long fueled claims of racism. As highlighted in the controversial 1994 book "The Bell Curve," studies have repeatedly found that people's genes -- and not their environment -- explain most of the differences in IQ among individuals. That has led a few scholars to advance the hotly disputed notion that minorities' lower scores are evidence of genetic inferiority.

Now a groundbreaking study of the interaction among genes, environment and IQ finds that the influence of genes on intelligence is dependent on class. Genes do explain the vast majority of IQ differences among children in wealthier families, the new work shows. But environmental factors -- not genetic deficits -- explain IQ differences among poor minorities.

The results suggest that early childhood assistance programs such as Head Start can help the poor and are worthy of public support. They also suggest that middle-class and wealthy parents need not feel guilty if they don't purchase the latest Lamaze mobile or other expensive gadgets that are pitched as being so important to their children's development.

"How many books are in the home and how good the teacher is may be questions to consider for a middle-class child, but those questions are much more important when we're talking about children raised in abject poverty," said lead researcher Eric Turkheimer, a psychologist at the University of Virginia.

The work, to be published in the November issue of the journal Psychological Science, is part of a new wave of research that embraces a more dynamic view of the relationship between genes and environment. Although older research treated nature and nurture as largely independent and additive factors, and saw people as the sum of their genetic endowments and environmental experiences, the emerging view allows that genes can influence the impact of experiences and experiences can influence the "expression," or activity levels, of genes.

In Turkheimer's study, the impact of genes on IQ varied depending on a child's socioeconomic status (SES), a sociological measure that includes household income and other elements of class and social status.

Until recently, Turkheimer and others said, research had indicated that the "heritability" of IQ -- that is, the degree to which genes can explain the differences in IQ scores -- completely dominated environmental influences. That led some to call into question the value of programs such as Head Start, which are based on the assumption that by improving the childhood environment through extra attention, nutrition and care, a child's intellectual future could be improved.

But it turned out that virtually all those studies on the heritability of IQ had been done on middle-class and wealthy families. Only when Turkheimer tested that assumption in a population of poor and mostly black children did it become clear that, in fact, the influence of genes on IQ was significantly lower in conditions of poverty, where environmental deficits overwhelm genetic potential.

"This paper shows how relevant social class is" to children's ability to reach their genetic potential, said Sandra Scarr, a professor emerita of psychology now living in Hawaii, who did seminal work in behavioral genetics at the University of Virginia.

Specifically, the heritability of IQ at the low end of the wealth spectrum was just 0.10 on a scale of zero to one, while it was 0.72 for families of high socioeconomic status. Conversely, the importance of environmental influences on IQ was four times stronger in the poorest families than in the higher status families.

"This says that above a certain level, where you have a wide array of opportunities, it doesn't get much better" by adding environmental enhancements, Scarr said. "But below a certain level, additional opportunities can have big impacts."

The principle is straightforward and has long been recognized in plants and other simpler organisms. In one famous example, often repeated by evolutionary biologist Richard Lewontin, two genetically identical seeds of corn, planted in very different soil conditions, will grow to very different heights.

Some social psychologists and behavior geneticists have hypothesized that the same must hold true for the relationships linking human genes, socioeconomic status and IQ. Like corn in depleted soil, the thinking goes, minorities and the poor (two categories with so much overlap that researchers find it difficult to tease apart their effects) perform worse not because of their genes but because they are raised in an environment lacking in resources and poisoned by racist attitudes.

"It's a hypothesis that makes a great deal of sense on its face, but has been difficult to study," Scarr said. Difficult, she said, because the best way to study the relative contributions of genes and environment to a human trait is to conduct studies on twins or, in some cases, adopted children. And almost all the twins and adoptees who have been available for study over the years have come from middle-class or higher-class families.

Turkheimer got around that shortage by tapping into data from the now defunct National Collaborative Perinatal Project, which started in the late 1960s. That study, funded by the National Institutes of Health, enrolled nearly 50,000 pregnant women, most of them black and quite poor, in several major U.S. cities. Researchers collected loads of data on the families and gave the children IQ tests seven years later.

Although the study was not designed to study twins, it was so big that many twins were born -- 623 pairs, to be exact, 320 of whom were successfully located by the original researchers and tested for IQ at age 7 in the 1970s. By culling through those test scores and the data on the families' socioeconomic status, Turkheimer was able to conduct one of the first analyses of the role of genes in IQ among the poor.

Twin studies are useful because there are two kinds of twins -- identical twins, which are 100 percent genetically identical, and fraternal twins, which (like other siblings) are 50 percent genetically identical.

Whether twins are identical or fraternal, they share identical prenatal conditions in the womb as they gestate together and they are raised in virtually identical environmental circumstances. That cuts out a major share of environmental differences between the two in any pair.

So when scientists find traits that are more commonly shared between identical twins than between fraternal twins, that suggests the trait is one with a strong genetic basis.

Taking advantage not only of that unique population of children but also of new statistical methods that allowed them to measure complex interactions, Turkheimer and his colleagues -- including University of Minnesota behavioral geneticist Irving Gottesman -- found that the lower a child's socioeconomic status, the less impact genetic inheritance had on IQ.

"It gets away from the pessimistic conclusion that high heritability means you're wasting your money on Head Start," Gottesman said. He suggested that other interventions, including improved prenatal care, would raise IQ even more.

And although IQ remains a controversial measure, criticized by some as being racially biased in itself and a poor reflection of intelligence in the highest sense of the word, Gottesman and others noted that it remains the best predictor today of social and economic success in U.S. society.

Robert Plomin, a behavioral geneticist with the Institute of Psychiatry at King's College of London, who has been seeking genes linked specifically to intelligence, said the results do not undermine the importance of genes.

"In study after study, the evidence is overwhelming that there is a substantial genetic input to IQ," Plomin said. "This doesn't contradict that, but it leads to an interesting possibility that although it's true for the [middle- and upper-class] populations that have been studied . . . it's not going to mean much if you're in an impoverished environment."

Plomin said his own unpublished work involving 4,000 pairs of twins has not produced the same results as Turkheimer's. "We've looked at this for families unemployed, on state support and living in subsidized housing, and we still don't find it, even at that low level" of socioeconomic status, he said.

But, he said, that may simply mean that his population was not as poor as Turkheimer's -- or was benefiting from Britain's superior social safety net.

In fact, the families in Turkheimer's study were very poor, with a median income of $17,000 a year in 1997 dollars. One in five of the mothers was younger than 21, one-third of them were on public assistance, and more than one-third did not have a husband.

Marcus Feldman, a population geneticist at Stanford University who has studied gene-environment interactions, said the next big challenge is to find out what it is about socioeconomic status -- a measure that includes not only income but also parental education and occupational status -- that contributes to IQ, so social programs can more effectively boost those factors.

"SES is a surrogate for something that deserves further study," Feldman said. "A paper like this reemphasizes the importance of psychology and educational psychology and draws us somewhat away from genetics and back into the importance of the social sciences for understanding IQ. This says to me, let's spend the money and find out what it is about SES that makes the difference."

© 2003 The Washington Post Company

2003-09-01T20:29:00.000-07:00

Headless worker' ads anger unions as teachers lose jobs

Rebecca Smithers, education correspondent
Tuesday September 2, 2003
The Guardian

Bizarre images of people walking around with no heads form the centrepiece of a new £10m advertising campaign to recruit teachers.

The adverts, seen by the Guardian ahead of their launch on television on Friday, will tell viewers to "use your head" and give up humdrum office jobs to join a more challenging and creative profession.

But the timing and content of the advertisements have provoked teaching unions, which are furious that they are being launched as hundreds of existing members of the profession are losing their jobs at the start of the new school year.

The first advert, which will be broadcast on Channel 4, shows a man leaving his head on the pillow as he gets up in the morning and goes to work.

Everywhere, he encounters other headless people - even headless car drivers and a headless person dressed as a promotional chicken.

A nationwide survey published yesterday by the Guardian showed that at least 1,000 teaching posts had been lost and more than 800 teachers made redundant across England and Wales.

Ralph Tabberer, chief executive of the teacher training agency, which handles teacher recruitment for the government, said he thought the campaign was "extremely powerful". The longer-term drive to recruit more teachers has to continue, he says today in an interview in Guardian Education.

"There is what looks like a rather odd coincidence of recruitment and redundancies happening at the same time. But we have over 30,000 people leaving the profession because of retirement, promotion or switching to another job completely and we have to deal with that."

Mr Tabberer said he wanted to sign up a new generation of teachers by offering a job that is different from most occupations, and certainly more rewarding and stimulating than the office "daily grind".

The new campaign is aimed at graduates as well as career changers. Mr Tabberer said there had been a change of approach from the last advertising campaign after research showed that the image of self-sacrifice attached to the profession was deterring would-be recruits.

"What we really want are self-interested idealists," he said. "The shorthand for what we've learned [from the research] is that you shouldn't underestimate the importance of David Brent and The Office.

"People want a job which is creative and challenging, a job in which they're doing something worthwhile, but where there is also something for them."

The overall research find ings tie in with a survey carried out by the general teaching council for England with the Guardian earlier this year, which showed that only 2% of new entrants into teaching joined the profession because it was in the public sector.

But Doug McAvoy, general secretary of the National Union of Teachers, said: "The government's approach to education and teacher recruitment is typified by these adverts - it's a headless chicken running around while teachers across the country are losing their jobs. Teachers use their head all the time. It is a hard profession, but the government is simply trivialising and demeaning it with this kind of treatment."

David Hart, general secretary of the National Association of Head Teachers, said: "The teacher training agency must have taken leave of its senses. It seems to me it feels it must throw money around like confetti. I can't believe that images of headless people are going to encourage people to come into teaching."

Charles Clarke, the education secretary, said yesterday it was his "summer resolution" to ensure funding problems were not repeated. "The handling of school funding last [school] year was a good example of that which I am determined to put right this year."

2003-09-01T20:00:00.000-07:00

The New York Times Sponsored by Starbucks
September 2, 2003
Rising Demands for Testing Push Limits of Its Accuracy
By DIANA B. HENRIQUES

During a tutoring session last December, Jennifer Mueller, a high school student in Whitman, Mass., came up with a second correct answer for a question on the state's high school exit exam — an answer that the giant company that designed the test had never anticipated.

When statewide scores were adjusted to reflect Ms. Mueller's discovery, 95 dejected seniors who had failed the test by one point suddenly found they could graduate after all.

"I got flowers delivered to the school, and letters and thank you notes," said Ms. Mueller, 18, who wants to be an American Sign Language interpreter. "I was just wicked excited."

Her find was not the only testing flaw to surface recently. Indeed, it was the second problem reported last year in Massachusetts. In Nevada, a scoring error caused 736 juniors and sophomores to fail that state's high school exit exam. And in Georgia this spring, officials canceled statewide exams for more than 600,000 fifth graders when the third error in three years was discovered in the tests.

Testing is the buzzword of education these days, with state legislatures and the federal government demanding more of it than ever before. Everything from high school graduation to eligibility for transfers, tutoring and federal aid is tied to the results. But educators and some testing industry experts are warning that the new demands are pushing the limits of the testing industry's ability to provide fair and accurate tests.

When President Bush signed the No Child Left Behind Act in January 2002, calling for increased annual testing in grades three through eight by the 2005-06 school year, the testing industry — dominated by a handful of companies — had just weathered the three most error-plagued years in its history. Researchers at Boston College recently found that last year was hardly better, with at least 18 problems reported, almost matching the total reported between 1976 and 1996.

Many experts are warning that the increased testing and tight deadlines of the education law will trigger a spike in human errors unless greater attention is paid to quality control issues.

"I think preventing them entirely is impossible," said Prof. Mark L. Davison, an educational psychologist at the University of Minnesota, saying that the amount of testing is likely to double in the next few years. "As existing companies expand and new companies move into the field," Professor Davison said, "they're going to experience growing pains."

Executives at some of the largest testing companies say they can meet the demands of the law while improving the industry's recent track record. But even some of them fear that educators and politicians have unrealistic expectations.

"They want faster, better and cheaper — and we often tell them, pick two out of the three, because you can't have all three," said Stuart Kahl, the president of Measured Progress, a fast-growing testing company in Dover, N.H.

Because errors can have such life-altering consequences for students and schools, a few critics are even calling for federal oversight of the industry.

Secretary of Education Rod Paige, a staunch defender of the education law, said that was an issue for Congress to decide. "If, in their judgment, there is a need for some type of federal regulation, that's the role that Congress plays," Mr. Paige said in an interview.

In fact, it is very difficult to monitor the performance of the big testing companies, said Kathleen Rhoades, a co-author of "Errors in Standardized Tests: A Systemic Problem," a study released this summer by the National Board on Educational Testing and Public Policy at Boston College.

"They don't have to let you in, they don't have to answer your questions," said Ms. Rhoades, who worked on the study with Prof. George Madaus.

Indeed, Ms. Mueller's discovery was only possible because Massachusetts — hoping to catch errors early — makes all its test questions public after the tests are given. But the practice adds substantially to testing costs because each year's test must be built from scratch.

Beginning in 1999, Ms. Rhoades and Professor Madaus conducted a systematic search for reports of testing errors and found more than 100 in the United States, Britain and Canada from 1976 through 2002, a period that saw extraordinary growth in school testing. One major testing company, for example, had its revenues rise more than tenfold during those years.

The study confirmed the rising number of errors cited in a series of articles in The New York Times in May 2001. And more errors have been reported since the research for the study was completed, Ms. Rhoades said. All told, of the 103 reported errors and disputes over testing results, more than two-thirds occurred in the past four years. And only a quarter of those were detected by testing companies themselves, she said.

Several testing company executives said that the Boston College study reflected an "antitesting agenda" and that it did not distinguish between serious errors and trivial ones. But they agreed with the researchers that haste was the most common contributor to errors. Neal Kingston, the chief operating officer at Measured Progress, said his company had occasionally been asked to devise and deliver new statewide tests in three months — an utterly impossible task, he said.

Under the law, schools must show that all students — regardless of race, for instance — are showing improvement. But gathering accurate data to allow students to be placed into the appropriate racial group is a major problem for testing companies.

Many states still rely on information gathered at the district, school or even the classroom level. And when children fill in the demographic information themselves, it is riddled with errors, Mr. Kahl said. Children may simply not know which ethnic group they belong in, or even how their names are listed in school files.

Building these student information systems is an unappreciated part of the challenge, and expense, of complying with the law, Mr. Kahl added.

For schools, the school year that opens in September 2005 is "the crunch year," he said. Ideally, testing companies would already be at work on the new tests that will be administered then. But few states are that far along, he said.

The pressure does not ease when the tests are delivered. States want the tests scored quickly so they can give tests in May and have the results in time for summer school. "But giving a test, getting it right and getting it back in two weeks — you've just multiplied the odds for mistakes," said Mark Musick, the president of the Southern Regional Education Board.

Many of the largest testing companies are expanding to cope with the added work and compressed schedules built into the law. Pearson Education Measurement, which says it is the nation's largest school testing company, has increased its answer-sheet scanning equipment by two-thirds since 2000 and expanded the office space devoted to essay-scoring by more than 300 percent.

CTB/McGraw-Hill, another testing giant, said it had also added capacity and was upgrading its aging computer systems.

And Harcourt Educational Measurement, the third major full-service company in the market, said it had been adding professional staff and revising its procedures for detecting and preventing errors.

Mr. Paige, the education secretary, said that the opportunities created by the law would attract more companies to the testing business. But industry experts say it is hard for new companies to come in because of shortages of specialized personnel, especially the psychometricians who devise tests and monitor their validity. Moreover, newcomers need an expensive computer infrastructure, and states demand a proven track record.

"You're not going to be able to go to `Joe's Truck Stop and Testing Service' and get a test," Mr. Musick said. "You've got to go to a major provider that, in spite of its problems, is still respected."

Besides time, money can be a key factor in determining how error-prone a state's testing program is — as shown by a judge's findings in a lawsuit against the Pearson testing subsidiary after a large scoring error on Minnesota's high school exit exam in 2000.

Almost 8,000 students got incorrect scores as a result of the error, which was discovered when a parent demanded to see his daughter's test results and found that correct answers had been marked wrong. Initially, the trial judge refused to allow the students' lawyers to seek punitive damages against the subsidiary, then known as NCS Pearson.

But the judge later reversed himself in a scathing opinion that said the company "continually short-staffed the relatively unprofitable Minnesota project while maintaining adequate staffing on more profitable projects like the one it had in Texas."

The company settled the lawsuit in September 2002 on terms that prohibit it from commenting on it. But Steve Kromer, general manager of the Pearson testing unit, said that Pearson had made substantial improvements in its quality-control procedures in the past three years.

Harcourt, too, has had some widely publicized problems, including the one that Ms. Mueller discovered in Massachusetts. The company recently settled a class-action lawsuit filed after its testing error in Nevada.

Charging more for improved quality control services, however, is difficult when state finances are in such dismal shape and when the costs of complying with the law are so uncertain.

Concern about this rising tide of testing errors is reviving the long-dormant issue of industry regulation. "We regulate our pet food, and we don't regulate the tests which are making major decisions about the lives of our kids," said Monty Neill, executive director of FairTest, an advocacy group in Boston.

Others have called for an independent oversight panel that could monitor for quality in testing. Professor Madaus, the co-author of the Boston College study, said he preferred that approach to letting the federal government regulate the industry because he feared that politics would taint the professionalism of test evaluation.

Even some testing executives see merit in at least compiling a national database to track testing errors. "Researchers have to hunt and peck where they can to find the mistakes and compile them," said Dr. Kingston of Measured Progress. "A lot of mistakes, quite possibly, don't even get caught."

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2003-08-31T07:22:00.000-07:00

The New York Times Sponsored by Starbucks
August 31, 2003
Cuts Put Schools and Law to the Test
By SAM DILLON

OKLAHOMA CITY, Aug. 30 — Angela Houston, the principal of Eisenhower Elementary School, spent this week hunkered down in her office here phoning unemployed teachers, trying to rebuild her staff after a dozen instructors lost their jobs in a state budget crisis last spring.

But even if Ms. Houston can hire teachers for all her classrooms, she worries about her school's morale. "The layoffs brought a big letdown," she said.

Dozens of other Oklahoma City schools were also reeling from the financial turmoil that forced the closing of seven schools and the dismissal of 600 teachers at the end of the last school year.

As children return to classrooms, many of the nation's 90,000 public schools are, as in Oklahoma City, feeling battered and worn down. Most states have reacted to declining tax revenues by trimming education spending, setting the stage for one of the most austere school years in memory.

In Alabama, where a budget crisis has left 38 of the state's 129 school systems on the verge of bankruptcy, Birmingham closed nine schools before the fall term began this month. Boston closed five schools and eliminated 1,000 jobs, including 400 teaching positions. Teachers lost jobs in cities like Toledo, Ohio; Norwich, Conn.; and Vista, Calif. In New Port Richey, Fla., school officials closed a popular 29-year-old science field trip center.

"School finances across the country are teetering on horrendous," said Michael Griffith, an analyst for the Education Commission of the States, a research group in Denver.

Many schools are raising revenues in new ways, charging students to participate in sports, plays, band or other activities that were once free. The Los Alamitos District in Orange County, Calif., is urging parents to make a $40 donation for each day a student misses classes, to compensate for state aid forfeited through the absence, David Hatton, a spokesman, said.

If austerity is challenging parents and educators at schools across America, the new term also appears likely to pose a critical test for the education law, called No Child Left Behind, which President Bush has made a centerpiece of his domestic agenda. Mr. Bush developed its central concept — using standardized tests to hold schools accountable for student achievement — as governor of Texas in the 1990's, when the economy was booming. Flush with tax revenues, Texas sent squads of experts to schools labeled as failing to help them sort out their educational program.

But the education law, which seeks to replicate Mr. Bush's Texas experiment nationally, is taking force in an economic downturn, and a fierce debate is under way about whether the federal government will provide enough help to schools the law identifies as failing, or simply pass the costs of the law on to the states.

"We believe the law is amply funded," Dan Langan, a Department of Education spokesman, said. "There's more money than ever before to achieve the intent of the law."

But legislators in several states have introduced proposals for those states to opt out of the federal law if its costs are not fully financed by the federal government. By doing so, however, they would also lose all federal aid to low-income schools.

The National Education Association, the teachers union, said in an August newsletter that the nation's school districts were grappling with "the worst budget shortfalls since World War II."

"It will be impossible for our public schools to meet the strict demands of the new federal education law if vital school services continue to be cut across the country," the union said.

The N.E.A. is preparing a lawsuit against the Department of Education that will challenge what it terms "the gigantic financial gap" between the law's costs and its financing, Bob Chanin, the union's lawyer, said.

James Guthrie, a professor of public policy at Vanderbilt University, put the squeeze in historical perspective. Public school spending has risen constantly over recent decades, Professor Guthrie said, from a national yearly average of about $1,000 per pupil in 1970 to an average of about $4,000 today, expressed in 1970 dollars. "This is just a slowdown," Professor Guthrie said. "School spending has reached a plateau, but in a year or two the trajectory will continue upward."

Whether his forecast is accurate or not, school systems must now contend with the demands of the federal law, under which every racial and demographic group in each school must score higher on standardized English and math tests to make "adequate yearly progress."

If any group fails to advance for two consecutive years, a school is labeled "needing improvement," a euphemism for what educators used to call failing, and must offer parents the option of transferring students to higher-scoring schools or paying for tutoring if they stay. Schools labeled as needing improvement for several years face escalating sanctions that can include removal of the staff.

It is an accountability system with so many ways for disqualifying schools that many prominent educators fear the law will, within its first few years, subject the vast majority of public schools to sanctions. If that happens, these educators say, it may be impossible to provide so many schools with the special help they need.

These fears gained strength this month, when officials in many states identified large numbers of schools that had failed to make adequate yearly progress, or had already been labeled as needing improvement.

Chicago authorities said 365 of the city's 600 schools were labeled as needing improvement, obligating the city to offer transfers, and demonstrating the challenges awaiting cities with large numbers of failing schools. Superintendent Arne Duncan said there was limited alternative space, but the city still sent out letters to 240,000 parents offering a chance to compete for about 1,000 seats at higher-performing schools.

In California, about 3,200 of the 7,100 schools subject to the law failed to make adequate yearly progress, and 1,135 were "needing improvement." In Florida, about 2,500 of the state's 3,000 schools failed to make adequate yearly progress, and 48 were rated as needing improvement.

In Pennsylvania, about 1,250 of 2,800 schools failed to make adequate yearly progress, and 171 were labeled as needing improvement. Many schools were labeled as needing improvement in Delaware, Georgia and dozens of other states.

Here in Oklahoma City, the authorities said 37 of the city's 70 elementary and middle schools had failed to make adequate yearly progress, and 11 schools were labeled as needing improvement, including Eisenhower.

Bob Moore, the new superintendent, said one of his priorities would be to help schools like Eisenhower meet the law's requirements. He said he would draw on his experience as school superintendent in Amarillo, Tex., in the 1990's, where he participated in Governor Bush's drive to raise school achievement across Texas.

"I give George Bush credit for providing so much support to the Texas schools rated low-performing," Mr. Moore said. "Kids' needs were not being met, so we had to provide services, and that meant money. But today we're living different financial times."

The recent cuts in the Oklahoma City system have been hugely disruptive, he said.

"It's hard for us now just to keep the grass mowed and the floors shined at our schools," Mr. Moore said.

Nowhere, perhaps, was that clearer than at Eisenhower, a low-slung brick building on a barren prairie, many of whose students come from low-income apartments. The school was labeled as needing improvement three years ago, and in the last school year it received $161,000 in federal money for tutoring and other efforts to raise scores. Yet the chaos that accompanied the Oklahoma budget crisis obliterated whatever progress the federal money might have bought.

Last spring, Ms. Houston said, she worked with her staff to prepare the 562 students for standardized tests. But in the critical days before the tests were administered, the city sent layoff notices to half her teachers, provoking a crisis atmosphere that she said hurt student performance on the exams.

"The teachers tried," Ms. Houston said, "but when you've just been told you don't have a job, it plays on your psyche."

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2003-08-31T07:13:00.000-07:00

Proposed CA Law To Require Clean School Bathrooms Advances

(August 30, 2003) -- Legislation that would require CA public and private schools to provide students with clean, maintained and stocked bathrooms has advanced through the Assembly Appropriations Committee and could now head to the Assembly floor.

SB 892 by state Senator Kevin Murray (D., L.A./Culver City) would require "[e]very public and private school maintaining any combination of classes from kindergarten to grade 12, inclusive" to comply with the following:

"Every restroom shall at all times be maintained and cleaned regularly, fully operational and stocked at all times with toilet paper, soap, and paper towels or functional hand dryers" and "keep all restrooms open during school hours when pupils are not in classes, and shall keep a sufficient number of restrooms open during school hours when pupils are in classes."

The bill provides that "[a]ny school district that operates a public school that is in violation of this section as determined by the State Allocation Board is ineligible for state school facilities funding" under Greene School Facilities Act of 1998.

SB 892, which followed revelations of slumlord type conditions at some southland schools by CBS2 news reporter Randy Paige, passed the CA Senate in June on a 39-0 vote. It is now in the Assembly and has been amended to apply to both public and private schools.

SB 892 was supported by the CA School Boards Association, CA Teachers Association and L.A. County Board of Supervisors. (Source: legislative analysis for July Assembly Education Committee hearing.)

At the August 29 Assembly Appropriations Committee hearing, SB 892 was opposed by the L.A. Unified School District (which also opposed the bill at its July hearing), the Association of CA School Administrators (said bill would require teachers to patrol bathrooms or districts to hire more people), representatives of some private schools (objecting to inclusion of private schools after SB 892 cleared the Senate) and the Davis administration's Dept. of Finance (contending the bill might be construed to require state reimbursement to school districts for their expenses as a new state mandate.)

SB 892's supporters note that state taxpayers are already giving school districts money for maintenance and that money should be used to keep school bathrooms clean and in proper order. The Davis administration's Dept. of Finance says it believes local school districts will seek reimbursement from Sacramento for the costs of complying with SB 892, and a state board might construe SB 892 as a new state mandate requiring Sacramento to reimburse local school districts. (State legislators in deficit don't want that.)

At the hearing, SB 892's author Sen. Murray said legislative counsel told him the bill was not a state mandate. Committee chair, Darrell Steinberg (D., Sacramento) said a Democrat analysis also concluded the bill was not a state mandate (viewed it as a general requirement applicable to public and private schools).

LAUSD and an association of school administrators raised other objections to SB 892. Clicking the hyperlinks below will launch newsworthy sound clips (monitored from the Assembly web audio server), some of which are longer than the printed text.

* LAUSD's representative: "We are not opposed to clean bathrooms...The problem with the bill is that the hammer that is employed to keep us in line is incredibly extreme. What it does say is that if the State Allocation Board finds that if there is a violation in a school district like LAUSD that has hundreds of facilities, that all of our bond money is, that we are ineligible..."

* Association of CA School Administrators: "We too are in opposition, and it's not because we're trying to say we shouldn't have clean bathrooms...The problem is to enforce this bill, to keep it so that we don't have this hammer, we're going to either open up collective bargaining agreements to require teachers to go in and become bathroom monitors...[or] hire people to do it, to be the bathroom monitors...[I]t's going to require an adult to have to be there to enforce that some kid doesn't put a cherry bomb down the toilet."

Assemblyman Fabian Nunez (D., Boyle Hts/ELA) challenged the Davis administration's Dept. of Finance position that SB 892 might require Sacramento to reimburse school districts for a new state mandate for all bathroom cleaning costs:

Assemblyman Nunez: "[I]t seems to me if you're getting [state] money for maintenance, that that would include making sure that the health and safety of the children who go to the restroom in some of these schools, where there's urine on the floor, where kids are exposing themselves to really dangerous conditions, oftentimes we've heard of stories of children getting bladder infections because they can't go to the restrooms. And you're telling me that the money that we provide schools for maintenance doesn't include cleanliness of restrooms? I think it's ridiculous..."

Assemblyman Nunez then declared that he wanted to be added as a co-author to SB 892.

In firm, measured tones, Assemblyman Mark Ridley-Thomas (D., L.A.) stressed:

"The indignity to which students are subjected on a day to day basis in the schools that are funded and supported and advocated for by many of us who sit here today in dialogue about this issue is just simply indefensible...[The issue is not] simply in my mind the cleanliness of these restrooms, but the indignity to which the students are routinely subjected when they have to ensure what they do in these facilities."

Assemblywoman Jackie Goldberg (D., L.A.), who was part of the LAUSD School Board before being elected to the state legislature, said she supported SB 892 but told SB 892's author, Sen. Murray, "I would like to talk to you before this goes to the floor of the Assembly because let's say you have an inept administrator, no offense meant, but one in a district of 700 schools...I'm a little concerned that it holds an entire district responsible for what may turn out to be an individual's shortcomings."

Senator Murray shot back that he was willing to have a discussion with Assemblywoman Goldberg, and said that when SB 892 was in the Education Committee he was willing "to take away all of the penalties if the school districts would say that this [clean bathrooms] is a basic requirement and they would not request mandates. They turned me down flat. I am happy to find any hammer or any penalty that the Education Committee deems appropriate. I ask for an "aye" vote."

Picking up on Sen. Murray's comment, Assembly Appropriations Committee chair Steinberg asked rhetorically why not trade away the penalties for basically agreeing to the public policy that this is a basic right of students?

SB 892 eventually cleared the Appropriations Committee on a 15-8 vote, with Dems (except OC Dem. Lou Correa) voting yes and Repubs voting no.

The sole "no" Democrat Committee vote was Assemblyman Lou Correa (D., Anaheim/Santa Ana), who said, "I'm for clean restrooms for my children, but at the same time I think this is an issue that I think you solve by checking the bathrooms a little more often and [if you] continue to have this problem, just fire the principal, fire him away."

LBReport.com posts the bill's full text (as of Aug. 29), the Committee's recorded vote and the Appropriations Committee legislative analysis later in this article.

Simultaneous developments

The issue of clean school bathrooms separately arose as one of LB-PV-SP Assemblyman Alan Lowenthal's "there oughta be a law" proposals. Lowenthal introduced a bill (AB 1395, details below) that his office said in a February 2003 press release was "proposed by a group of students from [LB] Poly High School. 'When I heard from the Poly students about the state of their school restrooms, I was shocked and extremely concerned,' said Lowenthal. 'School can be hard enough without needing to worry about non-functioning bathrooms.'"

Assemblyman Lowenthal's AB 1395 was considerably tamer than SB 892, simply requiring school districts by January 1, 2005 to develop "a plan" (the "Restroom Facilities Improvement and Maintenance (RFIM) Plan") to address problems with school restrooms to meet minimum standards and to "report" on the progress of implementing the plan on a biannual basis at designated school board meetings.

Lowenthal's bill was held under submission in the Assembly Appropriations in late May...and he joined as a co-author of AB 1124 by Assemblyman Fabian Nunez (D., Boyle Hts/ELA). (Assemblyman Nunez strongly supported SB 892 in the Appropriations Committee's Aug. 29 hearing and announced he wants to be added as a co-author of SB 892.)

Assemblyman Nunez's AB 1124 is tamer than SB 892. It labels a "priority" that state school maintenance funds be used to ensure that facilities (including restroom facilities) are functional and meet local hygiene standards generally applicable to public facilities.

Assemblyman Nunez's bill cleared the Assembly in April...and was watered down when it hit the Senate. In July, AB 1124 was amended to remove reference to restroom maintenance as a "first" priority; now it's simply a "priority" (effectively giving local authorities discretion). A reference to "state" hygiene standards was also removed, making the reference to "local" standards only. And in August, the bill was further diluted by recasting it as "point" sections rather than amendments to existing law.

The bottom line: in the coming days, the stronger SB 892 could be sent to the Assembly floor vote, and the less than binding AB 1124 is headed for the Senate floor.

LBReport.com will report what happens. Below are:

* Text of SB 892 (as of Aug. 29)
* Recorded Aug. 29 vote in Assembly Appropriations Committee.
* Most recent legislative analysis (Assem. Appropriations Committee

2003-08-20T12:03:00.000-07:00

The New York Times
August 20, 2003
Florida Board Backs Retreat on Class Size
By ABBY GOODNOUGH

MIAMI, Aug. 19 — Florida's top education officials are seeking a partial repeal of a disputed plan to lower class size, a move that could cost state taxpayers billions of dollars.

The State Board of Education voted unanimously today to advocate sharply scaling back the plan, which voters approved as a constitutional amendment last fall. All seven board members are appointees of Gov. Jeb Bush, who fought the amendment on grounds that it was too expensive and not educationally sound.

The plan would impose the most restrictive limits in the nation on class sizes in public schools, capping them at 18 students in kindergarten through third grade, 22 in the fourth through eighth grades and 25 in high school, by 2010. School districts have scrambled to meet the first-year requirement of the amendment — lowering the average districtwide class size by at least two students. Among other problems, that has meant frenzied hiring — Palm Beach County needed 570 new teachers — and a run on portable classrooms.

The board wants to eliminate the new requirements for all grades but kindergarten through third, which research suggests benefit the most from small class size. Its vote was symbolic, because only the public can repeal the measure through a second referendum. But the board action puts pressure on the State Legislature, which could place a repeal question on the ballot in the November 2004 election with a three-fifths vote from each house.

Some lawmakers said today that such a vote was unlikely, because many Democrats and even some Republicans support the original plan.

"I think probably a lot of members, both Democrat and Republican, don't want to insult voters, as some of the leading elected officials are doing right now," said Ron Klein, Democratic leader of the Republican-controlled State Senate. "We've got to give this thing a chance and see if it works."

But James E. King Jr., a Republican who is president of the Senate, said legislators would probably embrace the idea of a partial repeal.

"All but the most doubting of doubting Thomases would say that in the sixth, seventh, eighth years of this thing, we don't know where you get enough money to do it," Mr. King said.

Mr. Bush has said the amendment would cost $27 billion over eight years. Democrats have predicted that it would be closer to $8 billion.

The Board of Education decided to seek a repeal a day after Education Commissioner Jim Horne told it that the measure would cost nearly $1.6 billion in the first two years. Mr. Horne, also an appointee of Mr. Bush, told a board meeting here that the expense was "a hurricane that will swamp the boat," according to The Associated Press.

The experiment is under a microscope, because overcrowded classrooms are a persistent plague in urban and suburban schools. The plan figured prominently in the race for governor last year, with Mr. Bush's Democratic opponent, Bill McBride, attacking him for opposing it. Mr. Bush won in a landslide, but the amendment passed narrowly; 52 percent of voters supported it.

In his campaign, Mr. Bush, unaware that a reporter with a tape recorder was present, said in a private meeting with backers that he had "a couple of devious plans if this thing passes." But in a televised debate later, he said he would carry out the plan, raising taxes if necessary. Today, Mr. Bush released a statement saying, "In light of the tremendous cost and minimal return on investment for students, the best solution is to allow voters a chance to repeal this obstacle to quality education in Florida."

The statement also said, "Repealing this amendment before the 2004-2005 school year" could free up hundreds of millions of dollars in education money. That suggests that the governor does not want to wait until November 2004, when his brother, President Bush, faces re-election, to put the question to voters.

An alternative would be to hold a special election this year. That would require a three-fourths vote from each chamber of the Legislature.

The Board of Education member who proposed the vote today, William Proctor, said in an interview that the plan would diminish the quality of instruction, not improve it.

"With pre-K to third grade, it may be worth doing," Mr. Proctor, a former teacher and school superintendent, said. "But to have 25 people instead of 28 in a high school chemistry course, I don't think is worth spending that much money."

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2003-08-14T08:32:00.000-07:00

ON EDUCATION
The 'Zero Dropout' Miracle: Alas! Alack! A Texas Tall Tale
By MICHAEL WINERIP

HOUSTON

ROBERT KIMBALL, an assistant principal at Sharpstown High School, sat smack in the middle of the "Texas miracle." His poor, mostly minority high school of 1,650 students had a freshman class of 1,000 that dwindled to fewer than 300 students by senior year. And yet — and this is the miracle — not one dropout to report!

Nor was zero an unusual dropout rate in this school district that both President Bush and Secretary of Education Rod Paige have held up as the national showcase for accountability and the model for the federal No Child Left Behind law. Westside High here had 2,308 students and no reported dropouts; Wheatley High 731 students, no dropouts. A dozen of the city's poorest schools reported dropout rates under 1 percent.

Now, Dr. Kimball has witnessed many amazing things in his 58 years. Before he was an educator, he spent 24 years in the Army, fighting in Vietnam, rising to the rank of lieutenant colonel and touring the world. But never had he seen an urban high school with no dropouts. "Impossible," he said. "Someone will get pregnant, go to jail, get killed." Elsewhere in the nation, urban high schools report dropout rates of 20 percent to 40 percent.

A miracle? "A fantasy land," said Dr. Kimball. "They want the data to look wonderful and exciting. They don't tell you how to do it; they just say, 'Do it.' " In February, with the help of Dr. Kimball, the local television station KHOU broke the news that Sharpstown High had falsified its dropout data. That led to a state audit of 16 Houston schools, which found that of 5,500 teenagers surveyed who had left school, 3,000 should have been counted as dropouts but were not. Last week, the state appointed a monitor to oversee the district's data collection and downgraded 14 audited schools to the state's lowest rating.

Not very miraculous sounding, but here is the intriguing question: How did it get to the point that veteran principals felt they could actually claim zero dropouts? "You need to understand the atmosphere in Houston," Dr. Kimball said. "People are afraid. The superintendent has frequent meetings with principals. Before they go in, the principals are really, really scared. Panicky. They have to make their numbers."

Pressure? Some compare it to working under the old Soviet system of five-year plans. In January, just before the scandal broke, Abelardo Saavedra, deputy superintendent, unveiled Houston's latest mandates for the new year. "The districtwide student attendance rate will increase from 94.6 percent to 95 percent," he wrote. "The districtwide annual dropout rate will decrease from 1.5 percent to 1.3 percent."

Dropouts are notoriously difficult to track, particularly at a heavily Latino school like Sharpstown, with immigrants going back and forth to Mexico. Dr. Kimball said that Sharpstown shared one truant officer with several schools. Even so, Houston officials would not allow principals to write that the whereabouts of a departed student were "unknown." Last fall, Margaret Stroud, deputy superintendent, sent a memorandum warning principals to "make sure that you do not have any students coded `99,' whereabouts unknown." Too many "unknowns," she wrote, could prompt a state audit — the last thing Houston leaders wanted.

A shortage of resources to track departing students? No "unknowns" allowed? What to do? "Make it up," Dr. Kimball said. "The principals who survive are the yes men."

As for those who fail to make their numbers, it is termination time, one of many innovations championed by Dr. Paige as superintendent here from 1994 to 2001. He got rid of tenure for principals and mandated that they sign one-year contracts that allowed dismissal "without cause" and without a hearing.

On the other hand, for principals who make their numbers, it is bonus time. Principals can earn a $5,000 bonus, district administrators up to $20,000. At Sharpstown High alone, Dr. Kimball said, $75,000 in bonus money was issued last year, before the fictitious numbers were exposed.

Dr. Paige's spokesman, Dan Langan, referred dropout questions to Houston officials, but said that the secretary was proud of the accountability system he established here, that it got results and that principals freely signed those contracts.

Terry Abbott, a Houston district spokesman, agreed that both Dr. Paige and the current superintendent, Kaye Stripling, pressured principals to make district goals. "Secretary Paige said, and rightfully so, the public has a right to expect us to get this job done," Mr. Abbott said. The principals were not cowed, he said, declaring, "They thrive on it." Every administrator under Dr. Paige and Dr. Stripling, Mr. Abbott said, has understood "failure is not an option" and "that failure to do our jobs can mean that we could lose those jobs — and that's exactly the way it should be."

As for adequate resources for truant officers to verify dropouts, he said individual schools decided how to use their resources, but added, "Money is not the problem, and money by itself won't solve the issues we deal with every day."

To skeptics like Dr. Kimball, the parallels to No Child Left Behind are depressing. The federal law mandates that every child in America pass reading and math proficiency tests by 2014 — a goal many educators believe is as impossible as zero dropouts. And like Houston's dropout program, President Bush's education budget has been criticized as an underfinanced mandate, proposing $12 billion this year for Title 1, $6 billion below what the No Child Left Behind law permits. "This isn't about educating children," Dr. Kimball said. "It's about public relations."

If Houston officials were interested in accountability, he said, they would assign him to a high school to monitor the dropout data that he has come to understand so well. Instead, after he blew the whistle on Sharpstown High, he was reassigned, for four months, to sit in a windowless room with no work to do. More recently, he has been serving as the second assistant principal at a primary school, where, he said, he is not really needed. "I expect when my contract is up next January, I'll be fired," he said. "That's how it works here."

2003-08-03T21:00:00.000-07:00

Posted on Sun, Jun. 22, 2003
CARL HIAASEN

How many legislators could pass the FCAT?

Nothing is more frustrating to Florida parents than the idea that politicians are the ones deciding what it takes for a student to be properly educated.

The absurdity was underscored last week as state lawmakers once again ''debated'' the merits of the Florida Comprehensive Assessment Test, otherwise known as FCAT.

No deliberative body is manifestly less qualified to make decisions about public education than our state Legislature. With a few shining exceptions, most of these clowns don't read, can't write and clearly can't add. That's why lobbyists for special interests author so much of the legislation. Half the politicians in Tallahassee are too illiterate to type their own fund-raising letters.

Here's a fun idea for some mischievous state senator or representative: Propose a law requiring every elected official in Florida to pass the FCAT exam. It makes sense. Those who spend our taxes and write our laws ought to be at least as academically fit as the average high-school senior.

Dreading the embarrassment, many politicians wouldn't sit still for any sort of standardized test. Yet they've got no problem dictating to our kids how knowledge should be measured, and the price of failure.

The main cheerleader for the FCAT movement has been Gov. Jeb Bush, one politician who could actually pass the test. Just a few days ago, Bush was praising statewide improvements in FCAT scores, especially among children in school districts plagued by poverty and unemployment. No mother or father who saw those results wasn't cheered by the news, and thrilled for his or her children. But it's only part of the story.

Another side is the roughly 12,000 high-school seniors in Florida who failed the FCATs, and by law weren't allowed to collect their diplomas. Some people said tough luck -- a test is a test. You either pass or flunk.

And certainly it was unsettling to see students and parents taking to the streets to protest the results. Attacking the test isn't attacking the problem, which is much larger and more systemic. Only a handful of states spend less money per pupil than Florida, an abominable statistic. While Bush has consistently pushed to increase education funding, the money hasn't kept pace with the state's rampaging population growth.

Students are packed like sardines into classrooms, teachers remain overworked and underpaid and parents are perpetually ticked off -- even parents whose children sailed through the FCATs. The schools are in crisis, and everybody knows it. That's why the amendment to cap class sizes passed so thunderously last fall.

Bush and Republican legislative leaders assert that the state can't afford to build all the new schools needed to meet the proscribed caps on class size. Yet they're the ones who have been cutting taxes for businesses and stock investors, reducing state revenues at a time of dire budget shortfalls.

Lawmakers dealt with the FCAT uproar in a predictable, slapdash way. Facing the wrath of disappointed parents and a threatened economic boycott by blacks, the Legislature last week tossed a life preserver to high-school seniors who failed the test. About 400 who met all scholastic requirements and attained a marginal score in a college entrance exam will be cleared for graduation. The remaining 11,000-plus students must complete all coursework and eventually pass the FCAT, or score high enough on SAT or ACT college tests.

Some seniors who didn't pass the FCATs and are recent immigrants to the United States will get a rush course in English this summer before they retake the test. Good luck.

The bill affects only this year's seniors, but it's still a political retreat for the governor. Obviously he didn't foresee the emotional and very public reaction of those whose kids came up short on the FCATs.

I've got no doubt that Bush is both serious and sincere in his quest to improve education, but far too much weight has been put on this single test. Because the FCAT is also used to rate and reward individual schools, teachers and administrators are also under pressure to produce high scores. It doesn't automatically mean they're producing the smartest, most well-rounded graduates.

In any case, the protests of this spring promise to become an annual event. Students will keep flunking the FCAT by the thousands as long as the Legislature continues to shortchange our schools in the budget.

All those lawmakers who tout the FCAT as the best academic yardstick should demonstrate their faith in the test by taking it themselves. Their scores would be most instructive to the rest of us, when we grade them at election time.

© 2003 The Miami Herald and wire service sources. All Rights Reserved.
http://www.miami.com

2003-08-03T20:59:00.000-07:00

2003-08-03T20:50:00.000-07:00

Boston Globe Online: Print it!

THIS STORY HAS BEEN FORMATTED FOR EASY PRINTING

Schools chief fails must-pass test

By Associated Press, 8/3/2003 20:01

LAWRENCE, Mass. (AP) Superintendent of Schools Wilfredo T. Laboy, who recently put two dozen teachers on unpaid leave for failing a basic English proficiency test, has himself flunked a required literacy test three times, The Eagle-Tribune reported Sunday.

Laboy, who called his failing scores ''frustrating'' and ''emotional,'' blamed a lack of preparation and concentration, and his lack of English skills. Spanish is his first language.

''It bothers me because I'm trying to understand the congruence of what I do here every day and this stupid test,'' said Laboy. ''That's what, emotionally, I'm so upset about.''

State Education Commissioner David P. Driscoll said he is aware of Laboy's troubles with the test, but would not say how many chances Laboy would be given to pass or what the consequences of another failure could be.

He commended Laboy on an ''excellent job'' leading the district, but said ''he's going to have to pass.''

''He told me he needs more time to prepare for the test. I told him, 'Fine.' ... The situation will only get serious if he goes much longer without passing,'' Driscoll said.

Since 1998, all educators from teachers to superintendents have had to pass the Communications and Literacy Skills Test, which measures basic reading and writing skills, including vocabulary, punctuation, grammar, spelling and capitalization.

Laboy barely passed the reading section on his second attempt, scoring the minimum required grade, he said this week.

He also failed the writing portion three times, and a section requiring test-takers to transcribe a passage read over an audiotape, using proper punctuation and spelling.

Candidates must pass all sections of the test in a single sitting, and may not appeal their scores, according to the state education department Web site.

''What brought me down was the rules of grammar and punctuation,'' Laboy said. ''English being a second language for me, I didn't do well in writing. If you're not an English teacher, you don't look at the rules on a regular basis.''

Laboy, who receives a 3 percent pay hike this month that will raise his salary to $156,560, recently put 24 teachers on unpaid administrative leave because they failed a basic English test, which has been required since voters passed a law last fall requiring English-only classrooms.

Driscoll said he is willing to give Laboy more time to prepare for another retest.

''He's not a native language speaker, so a formal test is something he needs to prepare for,'' Driscoll said. ''It doesn't mean anything now. It will mean more as time goes on because there's an expectation that he'll pass.''

2003-07-26T09:11:00.000-07:00

The New York Times
July 26, 2003
Education Secretary Defends School System He Once Led
By DIANA JEAN SCHEMO

Rod Paige, the secretary of education, yesterday defended the record of the public schools in Houston, where he was superintendent before joining the Bush administration. Advances in student achievement, Dr. Paige said, were genuine and "still standing," though he said "there probably was" a dropout problem.

In an interview with the editorial board of The New York Times, Dr. Paige addressed questions about the dropout problem in Houston and about No Child Left Behind, the federal education act largely modeled on changes first adopted in Texas. He said he had not responded earlier to reports about dropouts in Houston to avoid interfering with his successors there, "not because I have any concern addressing the issue."

In recent months, Houston has come under increasing scrutiny by the Texas Education Agency, state politicians and the news media. Earlier this year, KHOU, a television station in Houston, reported that Sharpstown High School there had falsely told district and state education agencies that it had no dropouts, even after a school employee had contacted 30 students who left and found that the majority had, indeed, dropped out.

A later state investigation tarnished the reputation of Houston, once considered Exhibit A of a Texas "miracle" in education, which helped propel George Bush to the presidency.

The state audited 16 middle schools and high schools and found that of 5,500 teenagers who had left school in the 2000-1 school year, about 3,000, or 55 percent, should have been reported as dropouts. The audit recommended lowering the rankings of 14 of the 16 schools, and said Houston's school system should be ranked unacceptable.

Houston as a whole reported a 1.5 percent annual dropout rate, though education experts estimate that the true percentage of students who quit before graduation is nearer 40 percent. The city is appealing the recommendation, and contends that it may be guilty of shoddy record-keeping, but not fraud.

Dr. Paige had initially declined to comment on the underreporting of Houston's dropout figures, but agreed to discuss them after an editorial in The Times earlier this week said that he "owes it to the country to share his thoughts on how this happened and what it means."

Dr. Paige, who was Houston's superintendent from 1994 to 2001, said he effectively stopped running the Houston district in late December 2000, when President Bush nominated him as education secretary.

Yesterday, Dr. Paige called Houston "the most evaluated, the most looked at, the most open public school system in the history of the universe," and said he welcomed scrutiny, as superintendent of schools and as the nation's chief education official.

He contended that Houston deserved the prize it won this year from the Broad Foundation as the best urban school district in the United States, saying the award was not based on dropout data supplied by the district, but on a survey by the Manhattan Institute.

That survey, nevertheless, ranked Houston near the bottom of the country's 50 largest school districts, saying it had one of the lowest graduation rates, at 52 percent. In fact, 3 of the 10 worst school districts for high school graduation — Dallas, Houston and Fort Worth — were in Texas, the survey said.

In comparing the success of school districts for the prize, dropout rates did not figure prominently, said Brad Duggan, president of the National Center for Educational Accountability, an Austin group that evaluated the research on candidates for the prize. Mr. Duggan said his group considered an array of measures, from scores on standardized exams to success at closing the achievement gaps between black, Latino and white children.

Dr. Paige said: `'This system in Houston is still standing, it's vertical and it has been reviewed by some of the best. And the data can take it because it is earnest, it is open, it is objective, and it is there."

Asked whether he doubted, then, that there was a serious dropout problem in Houston, Dr. Paige said: "I didn't say that at all. I think there probably was."

He said he could not say whether the district masked the problem. "Because I have not been there since December 2000," he said, "I wasn't in a position to know the details."

He added, "I wouldn't doubt that in a system as large as Houston, where you have 300 schools and 13,000 students that you're going to have some problems."

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2003-06-28T19:49:00.000-07:00

washingtonpost.com
Define Mitosis, Maggot!
The case for educational boot camps -Militarization of the American Child

By Jay Mathews

Sunday, June 22, 2003; Page W09

I am not sure how much I learned in boot camp, but I am glad I went. The U.S. Army was a mystery to 22-year-old me. I had spent the previous four years in a comfortable college dormitory, sleeping and eating when I chose and not taking orders from anyone except my fiancee.

It was a very cold and wet eight weeks of basic training, that long-ago autumn at Fort Lewis, Wash. The mud on the obstacle course was loathsome. The other recruits were younger and stronger than I was. Getting up at 5:30 a.m. was hard, and keeping my equipment clean and orderly was torture. But after a while I saw the sense of it. In fact, I grew to love the scatological humor of our big-city drill sergeant and admire my company commander, who had so many wounds from Vietnam.

It was a cultural transformation, much like the one that American public schools are attempting as the No Child Left Behind law seeks to bring scholastic rigor to children who have not been asked to do much in school. Balderdash

Schools are trying to do this bit by bit in the normal course of the school year, but I wonder if that is enough. A few educators, noting how the Army manages to mold crumbly clay, as it did with me, think these summer months are a much better time for rapid retooling. Teachers can focus more clearly in July on those students most in need of a cultural change than they can in January, with all the interruptions and distractions of the regular school day.

I am not talking about the usual summer schools, which have grown in recent years but still lack the sharp focus needed to change lives. Summer school teachers build the skills of students who have not mastered their regular-year lessons. That is good, but we need more.

One of my favorite examples is the Banneker Summer Institute, a five-week, four-hour-a-day program that will begin in a week at the school's old brick building off Georgia Avenue NW across from Howard University. Patricia Tucker, principal of the D.C. academic magnet school, grimaces when people call her summer session a boot camp, but I think the term fits. She is running one of the city's most demanding public schools and needs to get her incoming ninth- and 10th-graders ready for the shock. Most, she says, are accustomed to getting A's in middle school or junior high for something less than their best work. They aren't required to attend the summer session, but they are strongly encouraged to do so. Most do, despite a certain teenage reluctance to give up sleeping in and lazing around.

From 8:30 a.m. to 12:30 p.m. each day the 100 or so adolescents work on biology, mathematics, Latin, grammar, study skills, fitness and two subjects not found in most new recruit training programs -- etiquette and ballroom dancing. There is some testing to see where each student is weak, and often an introduction to Banneker's programs in SAT preparation and Spanish.

Anita Berger, the summer institute coordinator, is a former physical education and health teacher who is now assistant principal at Banneker. She does not know of any other summer program like it. "The students work with some of the teachers that they will have in the fall," she says, "and become adjusted to our policies and rules as well as making new acquaintances and learning the facility." Tsjenna Daley, who just graduated from Banneker and will be attending Penn State University, says she remembers groaning about getting up so early in the summer before her 10th-grade year, "but I now realize it was well worth the time."

Shanelle Bowen, who will be a Banneker junior this fall, arrived at the summer institute perplexed by polynomials. Her middle school math teacher had not taught that part of the textbook. Banneker math department chair Cheryl Gooding made that a summer priority, twisting the X's and X-squareds every which way so that when Brown arrived at her first high school math class in September, "the polynomial section was familiar and much easier to understand," she says.

Some other schools have summer basic training courses, although few are as sophisticated as Banneker's. Catholic high schools have been particularly aggressive in getting at-risk students into summer classes before ninth grade. Some public schools in the area also do it, although money is a problem. Tucker says Banneker's institute costs $23,000 each summer -- money that comes from outside the school's annual budget. Fairfax County's Mount Vernon High School had to drop its summer prep program for ninth-graders because of budget cuts.

The programs do not work well unless the school, like Banneker, knows exactly what it wants to create -- literate adults who can handle college, or the workplace if they prefer. The school cannot be distracted by the latest testing systems or curricular fashions. A school that has a well-focused regular school program knows exactly what to do with its new recruits, just like my boot camp long ago.

I remember how miserable and lonely I was then, but those were growing pains, and eventually I understood that. I wish more schools would push themselves up to a level where, as at Banneker, their new students are given an intense dose of discipline and learning to prepare them for what they will find in the fall. Then more students would have the satisfaction of looking back, with some astonishment, at how much they learned in so little time.

Jay Mathews covers schools for The Post. His e-mail address is mathewsj@washpost.com.

© 2003 The Washington Post Company

2003-05-30T06:26:00.000-07:00

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

May 28, 2003
The Changes Unwelcome, a Model Teacher Moves On
By MICHAEL WINERIP

RLANDO, Fla.

MS. MacLEISH! Ms. MacLeish!" The door to Room 7 was still locked, but the kindergartners could not wait for the school day to begin. They were jumping up and down in the hallway, trying to peek through the high window and get Ms. MacLeish to let them in early.

From inside Room 7, Laurin MacLeish could see the tops of blond ponytails and brown cornrows bouncing in and out of view. She could hear the jiggling of the locked doorknob. At 8:25 precisely, with the first bell, she opened up.

"Ms. MacLeish, I found a roly-poly!" shouted Victoria Sibons.

"Ms. MacLeish, I caught a caterpillar!" yelled Marcus Maxwell.

"Ms. MacLeish, Marcus didn't catch that caterpillar!" said Ashley Ann Duncan. "This girl gave it to Marcus." Ms. MacLeish did not care; she told Mighty Marcus Maxwell that she had never seen a more perfect caterpillar, and, along with the roly-poly, it went right into the Room 7 terrarium.

"Precious darlings, we have a day that's bigger than big," said Ms. MacLeish. "I need attentive listeners." She explained that she had just gotten back the annual kindergarten highlights video she compiles each year. "Guess what I did when I saw it for the first time last night?"

"You cried!" they all shouted.

"Oh, yes," said Ms. MacLeish. "And what color were my tears, boys and girls? Pink or blue?"

"Pink!" (Happy tears.)

"Of course," said Ms. MacLeish. "To see how much you've grown and how we've come all the way to the merry month of May." Ms. MacLeish has been teaching kindergarten 32 years, and still this growing-up business never ceases to amaze her. When they start in August, their self-portraits have arms coming out of their ears, and by May they have necks, bellies, even lips.

Through it all, no one has a better time than Ms. MacLeish. In the video highlights, the person with the biggest smile at the field trip to the zoo, at the Halloween party ("Look at Ms. MacLeish! She's a butterfly!"), at the 100th-day-of-school celebration, is Ms. MacLeish.

When Lizzy Volcey raced in late, meaning everyone was now present, Ms. MacLeish was the first to break into a chorus of "Everyone Is Here Today" ("Let's give a hip hip hooray!").

Being in Ms. MacLeish's class is like living in a Broadway musical where people walking down the street routinely burst into song. Ethel Merman would have seemed normal in Room 7. If someone wears new shoes, they sing the New Shoe song. "Would you rather read this or sing it?" Ms. MacLeish asked, pointing to the board, and — with Ms. MacLeish leading on the autoharp — the children burst out singing "K Is for Kindergarten Hip Hip Hooray."

"You are the b-e-s-t — kiss your brains for being so smart," said Ms. MacLeish, whose great gift is creating so much fun that children forget they are learning. At one point, Ashley Ann looked up and complained, "It's going by way too fast." Indeed, Ms. MacLeish, of Lake Silver Elementary, has such magic that in 1998 she was named Orange County teacher of the year.

And so it is easy to imagine all the broken hearts this spring when Ms. MacLeish, 53, sent a letter home saying this would be her last year teaching kindergarten. It was no ordinary goodbye letter. Ms. MacLeish was m-a-d. Her tears were not pink. She fears that the kindergarten world she knows and has raised to a fine art is being destroyed. "A single high-stakes test score is now measuring Florida's children, leaving little time to devote to their character or potential or talents or depth of knowledge," she wrote. "Kindergarten teachers throughout the state have replaced valued learning centers (home center, art center, blocks, dramatic play) with paper and pencil tasks, dittos, coloring sheets, scripted lessons, workbook pages."

The breaking point for Ms. MacLeish was an article in the paper praising a kindergarten teacher who had eliminated her play centers and was doing reading drills, all part of a push to help her school get a higher grade on the annual state report card.

It's not that Ms. MacLeish is anti-academic. Please. Her room is crammed with books. Every morning the children print their first and last names on the attendance sheet. Sundays, Ms. MacLeish visits bookstores, and her room features baskets of books by her favorite authors. (The Robert Munsch basket includes a photo of the author meeting Ms. MacLeish, who is, of course, beaming.)

Ms. MacLeish knows she's been lucky to have a principal, Stephen Leggett, who hates the state testing as much as she does and has done his best to insulate his teachers. But she's never seen so much state and federal intrusion into the classroom and can watch the testing moving her way. The fourth-grade test used to be the big deal for Florida school report cards. Now it is the third-grade test, used to determine retention. This year, for the first time, Ms. MacLeish had to spend two days giving state tests to kindergartners to establish base-line scores. "The wolf is at the door," she said. "I must get out before it gets me."

After 32 years, this single woman, who may be the best kindergarten teacher in Florida, makes $51,000. She is not retiring. Instead, she'll be a resource support teacher. This way, she said, she'll have children for 90 minutes at most and won't feel so responsible for their future.

The last week of school, Ms. MacLeish was feted at every turn. Tuesday, at the class play, her kindergartners each handed her a rose with baby's breath, and Orlando's mayor, Buddy Dyer, proclaimed Laurin MacLeish Day. (His son Drew was in Ms. MacLeish's class two years ago.)

Friday the kindergartners got to visit Ms. MacLeish's house, a stunning moment for those who had assumed she lived in Room 7. They walked the half-mile from the school. When a dog barked, they sang. ("I know a dog. His name is Wags.") When they saw a house with an American flag, they stopped to recite the pledge. At Ms. MacLeish's, they played with her toys.

It was 6 p.m. on the last day by the time she turned off the light in Room 7. What a run, what a week, a thousand tears, pink and blue. She'd miss them, every one — she always did — but she was relieved too. To the end, Ms. MacLeish gave her all. (Never let her standards fall.)

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2003-05-22T19:33:00.000-07:00

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2 Rs Left in High School
Out of choice or fatigue, many teachers have abandoned the term paper, leaving a hole in college-bound students' education.
By Erika Hayasaki
Times Staff Writer

May 19, 2003

High school junior Dominique Houston is a straight-A student enrolled in honors and Advanced Placement classes at Northview High School in Covina. She is a candidate for class valedictorian and hopes to double-major in marine biology and political science in college, preferably UCLA or the University of San Diego.

But the 17-year-old said she has written only one research paper during her high school career. It was three pages long, examining the habits of beluga whales.

Houston frets over whether she will be able to handle assignments for long, footnoted research papers once she gets to college.

"Bibliographies? We don't really even know how to do those. I don't even know how I would write a 15-page paper. I don't even know how I would begin," she said.

Her experience appears to be increasingly common. Across the country, high school English and social studies teachers have cut back or simply abandoned the traditional term paper.

Although some students and critics contend that teachers are lazier than in the past, many educators say they can't grade piles of papers for overcrowded classes while trying to meet the increased demands of standardized testing, many of which involve multiple-choice questions. Other teachers believe that term papers are meaningless exercises, because the Internet has made plagiarism more common and difficult to spot. And many say long (10- to 15-page) research papers are pointless, because many students' basic writing skills are weak and are more likely to improve with shorter and more frequent assignments.

A report by the National Commission on Writing in America's Schools and Colleges, a panel of academics gathered by the College Board, found that 75% of high school seniors never receive writing assignments in history or social studies.

The study also found that a major research and writing project required in the senior year of high school "has become an educational curiosity, something rarely assigned." In addition, the report found that, by the first year of college, more than 50% of freshmen are unable to analyze or synthesize information or produce papers free of language errors.

Commission Chairman C. Peter Magrath blamed societal changes. "We don't write letters anymore, because we use telephone and e-mail and watch television. We communicate in all kinds of other ways," he said.

Teresa Humphreys, head counselor at Northview, said the school recognizes the problem and will start an intense writing plan next year, requiring papers in nearly every subject.

"We want them to get back to writing," Humphreys said. "We decided this will be the focus of our school."

All schools need to refocus that way, said Gary Orfield, a professor of education at Harvard University. During his public high school days, he wrote many research papers, including one on Shakespeare. Such assignments are rare today, he said, because "we're in such an idiotic period in education that we've simplified it into filling in this bubble."

"If we send students to college without being able to think, synthesize or write in a coherent way, students are going to be crippled, no matter what their test scores are," he said.

The result shows in the awful quality of many college term papers, said J. Martin Rochester, author of a book on failing education systems and a professor of political science at the University of Missouri-St. Louis.

"I read every paper line by line," he said of his students' research projects. "It's one of the most painful ordeals you can ever go through. Students today cannot write a complete sentence."

Eliana Seja, 18, a freshman at USC, said she rarely had to do research papers when she was an honors student at Chino High School. The longest assignment she remembers was three pages. During her senior year, the only writing assignment she completed was her personal essay required for college admittance, she said.

She struggled through her first college paper, six pages for her sociology class examining the role of families in the media.

"When I came here, I was so scared about writing papers, because I didn't have any experience," Seja said. "It was really a challenge. It was so hard for me. I had no idea about structure."

Dawn Damron, co-chairwoman of the English department at Chino High, said that students in almost all grades have to do some research, but that it is up to each teacher to decide the length and frequency of writing assignments. Most teachers concentrate on making sure students can "coherently write a five-paragraph essay," because that is the type of writing that students must complete on timed standardized tests, she said.

"I wouldn't say research papers have gone out the window," Damron said. But she said she thinks students "probably do write less because the focus of what they have to learn has changed. Standardized testing is a big deal. The scores are published in the paper. People make assumptions about a school based on one test."

At Roosevelt High School on Los Angeles' Eastside, finding a teacher willing to assign a long paper would be like "finding a dinosaur," said Aldo Parral, 32, who teaches social studies and Advanced Placement English.

When he was a student there, more than 15 years ago, he wrote a 12-page paper on the stock market crash of 1987. But in 10 years as a teacher at the school, Parral assigned no term papers because he thought journal entries and short essays provided enough writing experience.

This year, he decided to challenge students in his advanced classes with a four- to six-page research paper. He said most were receptive, because they knew such work would be expected in college. He added that Roosevelt's English and social studies departments are pushing to include more research papers next year.

Although many teachers say they have given up on term papers because of the hundreds of Web sites selling ready-written versions to cheaters, Donna Garner, an English teacher who taught for 27 years in central Texas public schools, has fought back.

She created and posted on the Internet a step-by-step process for teachers who assign and grade term papers. It requires students to document and update their research progress continuously, making it nearly impossible to plagiarize by downloading a research paper the night before class.

According to Garner's instructions, students must gather information from a variety of sources, including liberal and conservative magazines, newspapers and Web sites. They must type a series of informal outlines and rough drafts supporting each idea with labels and more background. They edit and re-edit.

Other teachers say plagiarism concerns are secondary to time constraints.

As a new teacher three years ago at Granger High School in West Valley City, Utah, Michelle Harper didn't foresee the stress of classes of 30 to 35 students. In her first year on the job, she assigned her English students a 10-page research paper.

"Wow, it took me a long time to correct. Every waking moment I had a paper in my hand, so that if I got a second I could read it," she said. "The next time around I decided that I shouldn't have to give up everything ... for research papers. We tried it a little smaller: five pages."

Now, they have been whittled down even more: "I don't assign more than a typewritten page anymore."

Most troublesome were her students' struggles to construct complete sentences and paragraphs.

"How can I expect a paper, if they can't make the first step?" Harper asked.

Some high school students and college professors, however, say the decline is simply a result of the unwillingness of a growing number of teachers to spend nights and weekends grading papers.

"Some wonderful teachers stay up until midnight grading," said Chester E. Finn Jr., a senior fellow with the Hoover Institution at Stanford University and a former assistant U.S. secretary of education. "But many more are told by unions that the school day ends at 2:50, and that's when they are done."

Kathleen Lyons, a spokeswoman for the National Education Assn. teachers union, said the average teacher works 48 hours a week, even though their contracts often require far less time. The decline of the term paper can be traced to swelling class sizes, she said.

"If a teacher has 30 students in each class and five periods in a day, that's 150 papers that have to be graded," she said. "That's a monumental amount of reading."

Stephen Miller, 17, a senior at Santa Monica High School enrolled in honors and AP classes, says he has never written a long term paper, even though teachers there say students receive plenty of writing and research assignments.

Miller, who is active in band, tennis, religious studies and political and youth groups, said there is no time for lengthy writing projects, especially with all of the required testing.

"To be accepted into a university, you have to be a stellar student, athletic, musically inclined and involved in the community," he said. "For students like me, if I was getting term and research papers, it would hinder my ability to perform well in other classes and continue all of the extracurricular activities I am involved in."

But Miller, who will attend Duke University next year, said he is not nervous about parachuting into a college atmosphere where five-, 10- and 15-page papers are due every few weeks.

He said he likes a challenge. Writing a term paper, he said, will "be a new experience for me."

Copyright 2003 Los Angeles Times

2003-05-10T16:12:00.000-07:00

Mike Bowler
Sun Staff
Originally published May 6, 2003

At a recent gathering of about 7,000 middle and high school students at Montgomery College celebrating Maryland History Day, young historians competed for the right to advance to the national high school history finals next month in College Park.

But many of the teachers and officials presiding over the event were in a somber mood. History and the other social studies, they fear, are on the public school chopping block -- just when students urgently need to understand American and world history, government, civics, economics and geography.

"People haven't been paying much attention," says Peggy Burke, executive director of the Maryland Humanities Council, "but social studies are being dramatically reduced. Some schools aren't teaching them at all."

A delegation of educators met 10 days ago with top officials of the Maryland Department of Education to plead for restoration of the social studies.

The new federal No Child Left Behind Act, they say, requires yearly testing in math, reading and (beginning in 2005) science. Left out by Congress, which spent a year drafting the legislation, was testing in social studies.

"If it ain't tested, it ain't taught. I hate to say it, but it's true," says Mark Stout, Howard County coordinator of secondary social studies.

All Maryland school systems are developing five-year plans for implementing No Child Left Behind, signed into law 16 months ago by President Bush.

Shift in studies

Those plans aren't due until October, but a Maryland Humanities Council survey found several districts already shifting class time from social studies to math and reading.

Anne Arundel has pared social studies instruction time by one-third in elementary and middle schools, the survey found.

Baltimore County's elementary program has been reduced from 90 days to 72 days, a 20 percent decrease.

Howard County supervisors report that less time is spent on social studies in elementary schools, and the instructional time is replaced by reading and math.

In Prince George's County, some schools are no longer teaching history or other social studies.
Some experts point to the irony of downgrading the social studies when the United States has been waging war in a foreign land that most American students can't find on a map.

The National Assessment of Educational Progress has tested students in civics, geography and U.S. history since 1998. In 2001, only two of 10 fourth-graders and three of 10 eighth-graders were proficient in geography.

The same year, only 26 percent of the nation's fourth-graders could tell which part of the federal government is responsible for passing laws. And 43 percent of the same group couldn't identify the cause of the Civil War.

"The nation's preoccupation with reading and math is eclipsing a bunch of other subjects, and the one that worries me most is history," says Chester E. "Checker" Finn Jr., president of the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation and a former federal education official in the Reagan administration.

When 13-year-old Bobby Keating returns to Severna Park Middle School in the fall, he will find eighth-grade social studies alternating semesters with science.

Learning history

"Social studies is my strongest subject," says Keating, whose geography instructor, Andre Jones, is this year's Anne Arundel Teacher of the Year. "It teaches you about other people around the world who aren't like you."

Of the new Arundel middle school schedule, Keating says, "A few kids say it's pretty cool, but a majority don't like it. I'd like to have social studies all year."

Eric J. Smith, the Anne Arundel superintendent, defends the middle school schedule, saying it was a success in Charlotte, N.C., where he was superintendent before moving to Maryland last summer. "We're trying to maximize the time and do justice to all subject areas," he says. "I do think we've found a good balance."

But leaders of the county Coalition for Balanced Excellence in Education disagree. "They're putting their money and their efforts where the testing is," says Sally H. Vanzandt of Millersville. "The result is a direct hit on social studies, particularly in the sixth, seventh and eighth grades."

State schools Superintendent Nancy S. Grasmick says she finds American students' lack of knowledge of history, geography and civics "alarming," but she denies the state has given up on subjects not tested under the No Child Left Behind Act.

History isn't history in the Free State, she insists, and passing a history test will be required for high school graduation.

'Best route'

"We're working hard on a voluntary statewide curriculum that gives heavy emphasis to the social studies ... from high school all the way back to kindergarten," says Grasmick. "It should be ready for use by June, and we expect most districts will adopt it. It's the best route we have."

But Bruce A. Lesh, a Franklin High School teacher and president of the Maryland Council for the Social Studies, says the drafting of the curriculum "has been a closed-door process. It was to be the solution, but it hasn't been completely written yet, and the state's timetables are dubious."

Nearly 40 organizations -- universities and colleges, museums, foundations and historical societies -- signed the humanities council's position statement on social studies.

The struggle isn't limited to Maryland. "No Child Left Behind mentions the desirability of the social studies," says Raymond V. "Buzz" Bartlett, a former Maryland state school board member who now heads the Council for Basic Education, a national group based in Washington.

"But the rewards and punishments in the act dictate against paying the social studies attention and resources."

John F. "Jack" Jennings, who heads the Center on Education Policy, a Washington think tank, says schools in high-poverty neighborhoods will be most likely to "suffer the consequences if they don't raise test scores in reading and math. So look for them to be the first to neglect the social studies."

Reading and math, Jennings adds, are "the galactic black hole that's going to suck up all the resources."

2003-05-10T13:47:00.000-07:00

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

May 10, 2003
Billions in Charity Money Could Be Saved, Study Says
By STEPHANIE STROM

hen he was in politics, Bill Bradley, the former senator from New Jersey, was known for proposing big ideas to shake up the established order and entrenched constituencies. So perhaps it should not be a surprise that he is now doing the same thing to the world of philanthropy.

As the "lead adviser" to the Institute for the Nonprofit Sector at McKinsey & Company, a management consulting firm better known for its work in the business world, he and two other consultants have rocked the nonprofit sector with a study estimating that charities could free up $100 billion each year, enough to give every high school graduate in the country a $40,000 scholarship.

The study, which nonprofit organizations say threatens their financial support by implying that they are wasting large sums of money through inept and sloppy management, has the philanthropic world buzzing like a swarm of indignant hornets — and fighting back hard.

One foundation executive went so far as to invoke the specter of the discredited Enron Corporation, which was lavishly praised by McKinsey consultants before it became the symbol of corporate excess and deceit.

"The last time McKinsey came into an industry to tell it to completely recalculate how it was doing its business was when Jeff Skilling went to Enron and told it that it wasn't an energy company," said Vincent Stehle, the program officer overseeing the nonprofit sector program at the Surdna Foundation.

Mr. Bradley, who pushed for major overhauls of the tax code, health care and campaign finance while in the Senate or on the campaign trail, seems undisturbed and even delighted by the hubbub he and his co-authors have caused.

"When you aim for big reform, part of it is putting things together in a way that people aren't used to hearing it," he said in an interview. "That may upset some people until they get used to what you're saying."

Mr. Bradley, who ran unsuccessfully for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2000, said that getting involved in the nonprofit sector was a way of continuing his commitment to public service without having to be in public office.

"I was in public life to change the world, and I still have that desire," Mr. Bradley said. "This happens to be a sector where you can take some very big steps toward that end."

The study, which appears in this month's Harvard Business Review, uses assessment techniques borrowed from the business world to suggest ways that nonprofit organizations might wring money out of their operations and plow it instead into programs and services.

The authors estimate, for instance, that $15 billion to $26 billion a year could be pared from fund-raising costs if organizations solicited more gifts through the Internet and focused on attracting fewer but larger grants and contributions.

Some $55 billion a year would materialize, they said, if nonprofits working to provide similar services reduced the gaps between more cost-efficient organizations and less-efficient ones. The study found, for instance, that even if the best and worst quarter of more than 300 local affiliates of three national youth-service organizations were excluded, some affiliates spent as much as 67 percent more per person served than others.

The authors said that if nonprofit institutions could find a way to cut just a fraction of a cent more out of each dollar they spend a year, it would free up $20 billion.

Mr. Bradley and his colleagues freely concede that the decision to put dollar estimates in the new study was partly intended to be provocative, but they insist they were conservative.

"Numbers have a way of capturing people's attention in a way that concepts that have been talked about for a long time don't," said Les Silverman, a McKinsey consultant who was an author of the study. "Some will quibble with them, but we think they will call attention to the real opportunities there are for improvement."

Some people in the nonprofit sector concede that the researchers have a point and that the study addresses an issue — efficiency — of paramount importance in an era when donors are demanding more accountability from charities.

"It's riding the wave of interest in nonprofit performance," said Alan Abramson, director of the nonprofit sector and philanthropy program at the Aspen Institute, "and they go beyond what some other folks have done by trying to quantify what could be saved if nonprofits were able to become more efficient and effective."

But Mr. Abramson and others argue that the study could harm nonprofit groups by making them look like spendthrifts.

Diana Aviv, president and chief executive of the Independent Sector, a trade association representing some 700 nonprofit organizations, said: "Its headline of saying there is $100 billion in savings to be achieved is unrealistic and unhelpful. When lawmakers and donors see a headline like that suggest charities are inefficient, ineffective and extravagant, they will use it to justify cutbacks in support for the sector."

Nonetheless, Ms. Aviv said, "There are any number of suggestions in there that we would be unwise not to examine, if only for partial value."

Ms. Aviv and other nonprofit executives also argue that each of the McKinsey recommendations comes with a cost of its own.

The business tool of setting benchmarks to improve performance increases administrative costs, for instance, and donors are particularly sensitive to increases in such costs.

"The whole benchmarking approach has so far been a little bit like chasing the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow," Mr. Abramson said. "True, it's worth the effort to get the bottom dwellers to improve their operations, but 20 years from now, there will still be a bottom half, no matter how much improvement is made."

Notably, the study's authors did not take aim at administrative costs, the favorite whipping boy of charity watchdogs and donors. Rather, they said nonprofits might even need to spend more on management.

"Because administrative costs are easy to measure, they're measured and people pay attention to them," said Paul Jansen, another author of the study. "It's going to take management capacity to capture the opportunities we've identified for improvements."

Mr. Bradley and Mr. Jansen are old hands at throwing bombs in the nonprofit arena. Last year, they raised hackles with an opinion piece in The New York Times that suggested foundations would do better to spend more today than to conserve their assets for perpetuity.

That debate was not new, but McKinsey, which published a more full-blown article on the issue by Mr. Jansen and his colleague David Katz, grabbed attention by using a standard business calculation to weigh the effectiveness of a dollar spent today against a dollar spent 20 years from now.

The authors revisit that study in the new one, saying $30 billion more would flow out of foundations and endowed institutions if they would simply increase the amount they pay out to 7 percent from the federally mandated 5 percent.

Mr. Bradley says the new study now puts the previous one in context.

"We're not jumping on the bandwagon again so much as simply showing how more money could flow into programs and services, not just from foundations and endowments, but from the entire sector," Mr. Bradley said.

Copyright 2003 The New York Times Company | Home | Privacy Policy | Search | Corrections | Help | Back to Top

2003-05-10T13:35:00.000-07:00

SSome schools aren't teaching them at all."

A delegation of educators met 10 days ago with top officials of the Maryland Department of Education to plead for restoration of the social studies.

The new federal No Child Left Behind Act, they say, requires yearly testing in math, reading and (beginning in 2005) science. Left out by Congress, which spent a year drafting the legislation, was testing in social studies.
By Mike Bowler
Sun Staff
Originally published May 6, 2003 Baltimore Sun

At a recent gathering of about 7,000 middle and high school students at Montgomery College celebrating Maryland History Day, young historians competed for the right to advance to the national high school history finals next month in College Park.

But many of the teachers and officials presiding over the event were in a somber mood. History and the other social studies, they fear, are on the public school chopping block -- just when students urgently need to understand American and world history, government, civics, economics and geography.

"People haven't been paying much attention," says Peggy Burke, executive director of the Maryland Humanities Council, "but social studies are being dramatically reduced. Some schools aren't teaching them at all."

A delegation of educators met 10 days ago with top officials of the Maryland Department of Education to plead for restoration of the social studies.

The new federal No Child Left Behind Act, they say, requires yearly testing in math, reading and (beginning in 2005) science. Left out by Congress, which spent a year drafting the legislation, was testing in social studies.

"If it ain't tested, it ain't taught. I hate to say it, but it's true," says Mark Stout, Howard County coordinator of secondary social studies.

All Maryland school systems are developing five-year plans for implementing No Child Left Behind, signed into law 16 months ago by President Bush.

Shift in studies

Those plans aren't due until October, but a Maryland Humanities Council survey found several districts already shifting class time from social studies to math and reading.

Anne Arundel has pared social studies instruction time by one-third in elementary and middle schools, the survey found.

Baltimore County's elementary program has been reduced from 90 days to 72 days, a 20 percent decrease.

Howard County supervisors report that less time is spent on social studies in elementary schools, and the instructional time is replaced by reading and math.

In Prince George's County, some schools are no longer teaching history or other social studies.
Some experts point to the irony of downgrading the social studies when the United States has been waging war in a foreign land that most American students can't find on a map.

The National Assessment of Educational Progress has tested students in civics, geography and U.S. history since 1998. In 2001, only two of 10 fourth-graders and three of 10 eighth-graders were proficient in geography.

The same year, only 26 percent of the nation's fourth-graders could tell which part of the federal government is responsible for passing laws. And 43 percent of the same group couldn't identify the cause of the Civil War.

"The nation's preoccupation with reading and math is eclipsing a bunch of other subjects, and the one that worries me most is history," says Chester E. "Checker" Finn Jr., president of the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation and a former federal education official in the Reagan administration.

When 13-year-old Bobby Keating returns to Severna Park Middle School in the fall, he will find eighth-grade social studies alternating semesters with science.

Learning history

"Social studies is my strongest subject," says Keating, whose geography instructor, Andre Jones, is this year's Anne Arundel Teacher of the Year. "It teaches you about other people around the world who aren't like you."

Of the new Arundel middle school schedule, Keating says, "A few kids say it's pretty cool, but a majority don't like it. I'd like to have social studies all year."

Eric J. Smith, the Anne Arundel superintendent, defends the middle school schedule, saying it was a success in Charlotte, N.C., where he was superintendent before moving to Maryland last summer. "We're trying to maximize the time and do justice to all subject areas," he says. "I do think we've found a good balance."

But leaders of the county Coalition for Balanced Excellence in Education disagree. "They're putting their money and their efforts where the testing is," says Sally H. Vanzandt of Millersville. "The result is a direct hit on social studies, particularly in the sixth, seventh and eighth grades."

State schools Superintendent Nancy S. Grasmick says she finds American students' lack of knowledge of history, geography and civics "alarming," but she denies the state has given up on subjects not tested under the No Child Left Behind Act.

History isn't history in the Free State, she insists, and passing a history test will be required for high school graduation.

'Best route'

"We're working hard on a voluntary statewide curriculum that gives heavy emphasis to the social studies ... from high school all the way back to kindergarten," says Grasmick. "It should be ready for use by June, and we expect most districts will adopt it. It's the best route we have."

But Bruce A. Lesh, a Franklin High School teacher and president of the Maryland Council for the Social Studies, says the drafting of the curriculum "has been a closed-door process. It was to be the solution, but it hasn't been completely written yet, and the state's timetables are dubious."

Nearly 40 organizations -- universities and colleges, museums, foundations and historical societies -- signed the humanities council's position statement on social studies.

The struggle isn't limited to Maryland. "No Child Left Behind mentions the desirability of the social studies," says Raymond V. "Buzz" Bartlett, a former Maryland state school board member who now heads the Council for Basic Education, a national group based in Washington.

"But the rewards and punishments in the act dictate against paying the social studies attention and resources."

John F. "Jack" Jennings, who heads the Center on Education Policy, a Washington think tank, says schools in high-poverty neighborhoods will be most likely to "suffer the consequences if they don't raise test scores in reading and math. So look for them to be the first to neglect the social studies."

Reading and math, Jennings adds, are "the galactic black hole that's going to suck up all the resources."

Copyright © 2003, The Baltimore Sun

2003-05-10T13:28:00.000-07:00

The beginning of getting the victims (teachers in this case) to participate in their own persecution. They cannot control the budget, the homelife, the kinds of kids selected for their classroom. The luck of the draw or an ever present ill-willed administrator that favors others will determine the victims not competency.
Education Week
American Education's Newspaper of Record

May 7, 2003

Tenn. Seeks to Use
Student Tests to Show
Teacher Quality
By Erik W. Robelen
Education Week

Washington

Tennessee is proposing a creative way to help teachers show they are "highly qualified" under federal law: using test-score data to reveal a teacher's effect on student learning.

Thanks to a sophisticated system in Tennessee, the state for years has been able to measure that effect as part of its so-called "value added" approach. Tennessee officials now hope the federal government will let the state apply the measurement tool to comply with the "No Child Left Behind" Act of 2001.

"It gives the teacher another option," said Keith D. Brewer, the deputy commissioner of the Tennessee Department of Education.

"The problem we have is that we may have a [certified] teacher who's had good [student] test scores," he said, but technically does not meet all the federal requirements to be deemed "highly qualified"—despite having taught the same subject and grade for many years.

"You've either got to go back to school ... or go back and take [a] test," Mr. Brewer said. "We're proposing another piece to that, [using] the teacher effect to prove that they're highly qualified."

The approach would be voluntary for teachers, who would have to sign waivers agreeing to allow the data to be used for that purpose. The test- score information would remain confidential, just as it currently is in Tennessee.

The state board of education was scheduled to take up Tennessee's overall plan for meeting the teacher and paraprofessional qualification requirements of the federal law on May 2. State officials last week were preparing to send that plan to the federal government.

Showing Competence
Under the No Child Left Behind Act, states must ensure that all teachers in the core academic subjects are highly qualified by the end of the 2005-06 school year. In general, the law, a reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, defines a teacher as "highly qualified" if he or she is fully licensed through a traditional or alternative route and has demonstrated subject-matter competency.

To show such competence, an elementary school teacher must pass a rigorous state test of knowledge and teaching skills in reading/language arts, writing, mathematics, and other areas of the basic curriculum. At the middle and high school levels, a teacher must pass a likewise rigorous test in each academic subject taught, or have a collegiate major or its equivalent in the subject.

The law also allows another approach to showing subject-matter competency for teachers who are not new to the profession. A state can develop a "high, objective, uniform state standard of evaluation," or HOUSE, according to federal regulations. Tennessee has seized upon that option as the basis for using the state's value- added data.

While stopping short of signing off on what Tennessee hopes to do, an official at the federal Department of Education suggested that the approach may well work.

"We want to provide flexibility for the states," said Gretchen C. Slease, who is advising Undersecretary Eugene W. Hickok on teacher-quality issues. "As long as [Tennessee] can justify that the [value- added data] would demonstrate that the teacher has sufficient content knowledge, they are welcome to do that."

She noted that the HOUSE provision would also allow a state to use a combination of factors to determine the competence of veteran teachers.

"HOUSE is almost like a menu of items that you could get credit for," Ms. Slease said. For example, she said, a state may take into consideration the teacher's experience as one factor. "Another could be quality professional development," she added.

Ms. Slease said she was not aware of any other state currently planning to use a system similar to Tennessee's to help meet the teacher-qualification requirements.

The Tennessee Value-Added Assessment System tracks the progress of individual students on state tests over time and seeks to tease out the effects of schools and classroom teachers on student performance. The approach was built around methods devised by William L. Sanders, a researcher who previously worked at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, and now operates out of SAS inSchool, part of the Cary, N.C.-based SAS Institute Software Co.

To gauge a teacher's effect, achievement from the teacher's students is aggregated over three years. The state compares the gains the teacher's students make from year to year against the gains made by a national sample of students, as well as state and district gains.

Tennessee uses the information to help teachers and school leaders improve instruction.

Now, the state has another use in mind.

Kati Haycock, the executive director of the Education Trust, a Washington- based research and advocacy group, said she likes the sound of what Tennessee hopes to do, though she was not familiar with any details of the plan.
"I think the idea is terrific," she said. "When you think about it, this [law] was really aimed at identifying teachers who were capable of raising student achievement."

She added: "It seems to me that it's actually a much more accurate measure of teacher effectiveness than the proxies that most states will use."

That said, Ms. Haycock cautioned that it would be critical to see where the state wants to draw the line on how much growth in student achievement would suffice for a teacher to be deemed highly qualified.

"If the kids grew one tiny little bit, obviously that's not adequate. ... But if they're saying sort of average or better [progress], that's quite fine," she said.

Tennessee has not yet set a benchmark for what would constitute sufficient teacher effect.

Mary Ann Blankenship, an assistant executive director of the Tennessee Education Association, said the state's plans were acceptable to the union.

"This seems to be an option that we could live with," she said, "as long as the test data remains confidential and is used only for ESEA purposes, and is not used in a broader way ... than Tennessee already uses [it]."
© 2002 Editorial Projects in Education Vol. 22, number 34, page 27

2003-05-05T19:39:00.000-07:00

Monday, May 5, 2003
©2003 San Francisco Chronicle | Feedback

Next year, a California judge will have to decide if all public school students are entitled to the same quality of textbooks, teachers and classrooms -- or not.

A "yes" answer could profoundly change the classroom experience for thousands of students as the state would be forced to redirect education dollars toward problems it now overlooks. A "no" would keep the status quo.

Deceptively simple, the question is prompting state officials and civil rights lawyers to amass experts on both sides of the issue, much of it at taxpayer expense.

Lawyers suing the state on behalf of California's low-income students have retained 14 experts from around the country to argue that children who are denied modern textbooks, qualified teachers and other basic resources suffer a permanent disadvantage in life.

Lawyers for Gov. Gray Davis have hired 13 other experts who say just the opposite -- that low-income students are unlikely to do any better in school even with the same educational benefits as middle-class students.

The battleground is Williams vs. California, a class-action lawsuit filed in San Francisco Superior Court in May 2000 on behalf of about 1 million pupils, or 1 in 6 California students. It's a case the state has spent almost $18 million to defend so far.

The students say they are fed up with an epidemic of poor textbooks, unqualified teachers and vermin-infested schools. They want Davis to set minimum standards of school quality as he has done for academic progress. Under the plan described in the suit, the state would do three things: track which schools lack "essential learning tools and conditions"; quickly provide those tools and repair poor conditions; and "provide basic educational necessities" to all students.

Anything less violates the California Constitution, the suit says.

STATE HIRES FIRM TO FIGHT PLAN
But the state has steadfastly opposed the plan, calling it too expensive and better suited for individual districts to tackle.

So far, Davis has paid $13 million in public funds to the Los Angeles law firm O'Melveny & Myers to fight the students. In addition, the state attorney general's office has spent almost $5 million defending the office of the state superintendent of schools in the case. Together, the $18 million is enough for a year of schooling for 2,700 students.

How the lawyers have spent the money is unclear. At one point, The Chronicle learned that O'Melveny attorneys had stayed at the posh Park Hyatt hotel in San Francisco, where the lowest corporate rate is $285 per night.

Despite repeated requests from The Chronicle for O'Melveny's bills for fees and expenses associated with the case, the state has refused to provide these records, calling all details about the attorneys' charges privileged information.

Lawyers are representing the students for free, although the public would pay their expenses and "reasonable fees" if they win. In Los Angeles, the American Civil Liberties Union represents the students, and in San Francisco, Public Advocates and Morrison & Foerster.

As The Chronicle previously reported, the state's lawyers already have taken the depositions of some students, one of whom was 8 years old. Now, in advance of a trial set for Aug. 30, 2004, both sides have lined up experts to testify for and against providing qualified teachers, up-to-date texts and clean classrooms to every child.

The state spent $305,808 on written reports by their experts, while the students spent $127,651 on theirs.

"Textbooks, curriculum materials and technology are fundamentally important to students' education everywhere, and the consequences of not having access to them are particularly harsh in California's high-stakes, standards-based education system," writes UCLA education Professor Jeanne Oakes, an author of the state's education Master Plan.

Oakes said most California students have such things, but thousands lack them.

Harvard economics Professor Caroline Hoxby, well known among academics for her support of tax-funded vouchers for private schools, takes a different view in her report for the state.

ROLE OF PARENTAL INFLUENCE
In a section titled "How Important Are Schools in Determining Achievement? How Important Is Parental and Local Involvement?" Hoxby argues that heaping too many benefits into schools can undermine parental influence.

"The vast majority of variation in students' achievement is explained not by their schools, but by what their parents do and how much their neighborhood supports education," Hoxby writes. "Parents' and neighborhood effects on students are so great compared to schools' that a policy that decreases parents' or neighborhood effects will almost certainly be harmful overall, even if it improves schools' effect on students."

Another contentious area in the case is whether the 1 in 4 students who are learning to speak English in California need specially trained teachers.

Education Professor Kenji Hakuta of Stanford University says they do. He writes that California "recognizes that 'English learner' teachers need specialized training" and offers two special credentials in that area.

He argues that a dearth of trained teachers is causing English learners to struggle more than is necessary in school, especially when trying to pass the high school exit exam -- soon to be a graduation requirement.

"Over 37,000 underprepared teachers-in-training are currently teaching (English learners) in California classrooms," he writes.

Not surprisingly, the state's expert in this area, education Professor Russell Gersten of the University of Oregon, calls Hakuta's report flawed.

"There is no reliable evidence showing that teachers holding (special credentials) have a greater positive impact on English learners than teachers that do not hold such certification," he writes.

Gersten says that California's recent emphasis on phonics, new academic standards and midcareer training for teachers "are likely to enhance the achievement of English learners."

AREAS OF DISAGREEMENT
Among other areas of disagreement are whether year-round schooling to ease overcrowding is harmful (experts for the state say no; experts for the students say yes); whether relying on voters to approve periodic bond measures best addresses school building problems (state says yes; students say no); and whether pouring more resources into schools is a waste.

It is a waste, says Eric Hanushek of the Hoover Institution, Stanford University's conservative think tank, because years of research show that doing so "is unlikely to improve student outcomes."

Yet to Stanford education Professor William Koski, such benefits are "the missing ingredient in California's recipe of high standards and strong accountability.

Deciding who is right may be what it all comes down to next year when Judge Peter Busch, who was appointed by Davis just after the suit was filed, makes a decision that could change the course of state schooling for years to come.

E-mail Nanette Asimov at nasimov@sfchronicle.com.

©2003 San Francisco Chronicle | Feedback

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2003-04-06T16:57:00.000-07:00

April 6, 2003 | home

THE THIN ENVELOPE
by LOUIS MENAND
Why college admissions has become unpredictable.
Issue of 2003-04-07
Posted 2003-03-31
In the spring semester of my senior year of high school, my father got a call from the headmaster of the school I was about to graduate from. The headmaster said that he was expecting to speak soon with the admissions office at the single Ivy League college to which, on the headmaster’s advice, I had applied. He was wondering whether my father planned to attend a local cocktail-party fund-raiser for my school that Sunday. My father (rightly, in my opinion) hung up on him, and a few weeks later I received a rejection letter from the Ivy League college. This was my introduction to the meritocracy.

Apart from the tactlessness (made grotesque by the circumstance that I was a scholarship student), this little episode was not entirely anomalous. My headmaster was not gaming the system; the system was already a game. He ran what is known as a feeder school: for many years, its most favored students had been admitted to the Ivy League college to which I had applied. More qualified students applied than the college could accept, of course, which is why it continued to seek my headmaster’s recommendations at the end of the admissions process. If the college could accommodate, say, six graduates (it was a small school), he could name them, and the college would not be disappointed. I expect that, as part of a tacit understanding, the best students were not encouraged to apply to the other Ivy League colleges, since most of them seemed, every year, to end up going to that one.

My headmaster assumed, therefore, that his school’s reputation for getting students into this particular college was one reason parents paid to send their children there. Why he thought that he could squeeze a few more dollars from my family, which did not have the money to give, is something I’ve never understood; but, in the calculation of which high-school bodies get directed where, dollars are part of the equation. Headmasters of expensive prep schools are no longer given the degree of carte blanche they once enjoyed at college admissions offices (their powers were fading even in my time), but college admissions offices do have long-term “informal” relations with guidance counsellors at feeder schools. Colleges are sometimes told by counsellors which of two equally attractive applicants has wealthier parents, since that might increase the chances for a donation; or which applicant is less likely to qualify for financial aid; or which is more likely, if accepted, to enroll. These considerations may or may not figure in the final decision. It is a mistake, though, to imagine that they are never on the table.

In the ongoing debate about affirmative action, with the Supreme Court expecting to decide a case involving admissions procedures at the University of Michigan, the term “meritocracy” is a canard. American education is not meritocratic, and it never has been. Merit, defined as quantifiable aptitude and achievement, is just one of the variables that decide educational outcomes. Success in college admissions, as in almost every sphere of life, is a function of some combination of ability, connections, persistence, wealth, and special markers—that is, attributes valued for the difference they make to “the mix.” Since 1978, the year of the Supreme Court decision in Regents of the University of California v. Bakke, race has been a judicially approved special marker in higher education. As Justice Lewis Powell pointed out in the majority opinion, quoting from the amici curiae brief filed jointly for Columbia, Harvard, Stanford, and Penn, college admissions offices have always given preference to various types of candidates whose grades and standardized-test scores may be below average. They have done so because they have other institutional needs besides putting scholars in the classrooms. They have football teams to field, orchestras and marching bands to staff, student organizations to be led, alumni to be kept in a giving mood, and feeder schools to be kept in a feeding mood. They have a gender balance to preserve. They can’t have ten times as many poets as physicists, or thirty students from Exeter and none from the local high school. Racial diversity, Powell concluded, is just another institutional need. What the Bakke decision basically said to universities was: Stop talking about redressing the effects of past discrimination and start talking about the educational benefits of mixed-race student bodies, and you’ll be on the safe side of the law. It preserved the practice by changing the rationale.

How admissions offices contrive to meet all these institutional needs—how they manage to enroll pre-meds, painters, children of alumni (“legacies”), soccer players, Exeter grads, and African-Americans in roughly the same proportions, year after year—while maintaining (or improving) the college’s median S.A.T. score is a good story, and it’s made better by the understandable reluctance of most colleges to speak frankly about the process. In 1999, Jacques Steinberg, a reporter at the Times, was permitted to observe the selection of the class of 2004 at Wesleyan. “The Gatekeepers: Inside the Admissions Process of a Premier College” (Viking; $25.95) is his account. In 2001, James Fallows published an influential article in The Atlantic Monthly on the use of early admissions (the system that allows students who apply early to receive a quick decision), which drew on work done by Christopher Avery, Andrew Fairbanks, and Richard Zeckhauser; their book, “The Early Admissions Game: Joining the Elite” (Harvard; $29.95), has just been published. “The Gatekeepers” is mostly case studies of a small number of Wesleyan applicants; “The Early Admissions Game” is mostly statistical analyses of admissions rates at élite colleges. Together, they will pretty much scare the daylights out of people with children approaching college age (not to mention the children themselves). They do not show the admissions process to be unfair or corrupt; it is not—although Avery and his co-writers think that it is less transparent than it should be. They do show it to be, as psychiatrists say, highly overdetermined, affected by so many variables that it has become, for most intents and purposes, unpredictable. Avery and his colleagues describe college admissions as a casino on Mars: you have to guess the rules of the game you are playing, and the rules can change while you are playing it.

There are many reasons that college admission has become so complex, but the main one is demand. In 1932, 1,330 people applied for admission to Yale. Seventy-two per cent—nine hundred and fifty-nine—were accepted. Eight hundred and eighty-four students enrolled; twenty-seven per cent of them were the sons of Yale graduates. Last year, Yale had 15,466 applicants and accepted 2,009, or thirteen per cent. Thirteen hundred enrolled; sixteen per cent were legacies. In 1999-2000, the eight Ivy League colleges together received 121,948 applications and rejected more than eighty per cent. This means that colleges like Harvard and Yale can cherry-pick their classes. If Harvard needs an outside linebacker, it can probably choose between an All-Division player with 1450 combined S.A.T. scores and an All-State with 1350. Yale can choose between a legacy, a Latina, and a national-science-competition finalist, depending on which hole needs another pigeon, each applicant with two 800s on the S.A.T.s (a credential known as “dialling toll-free”). Ivy League colleges can reach very deep into their pools before they start coming up with underqualified applicants.

Most colleges cannot go so deep. There are more than two thousand four-year colleges in the United States. Only about two hundred reject more students than they accept. The vast majority of American colleges accept eighty per cent or more of those who apply. But among the top fifty there is a constant Darwinian struggle to improve selectivity. These colleges want two things from their admissions offices: a low acceptance rate and a high matriculation rate (that is, a high percentage of admits who actually enroll—the “yield”). Both these numbers—the acceptance rate and the yield—figure in U.S. News and World Report’s annual rankings of American colleges.

The U.S. News rankings began in 1983, and they drive colleges nuts, because they are based on notoriously unstable and sometimes incomparable categories, but they have a demonstrated effect on both applications and donations. They can make a college “hot” overnight. The factors that, this year, make Pomona fifth among liberal-arts colleges (tied with Carleton) and Middlebury seventh (tied with Bowdoin)—things like class size, alumni donations, and faculty salaries—are so prone to change that the rankings can flip during the summer, so that next year Middlebury might be able to begin its fund-raising letter with the good news that it has leapfrogged from seventh to fifth in the national rankings, while Pomona’s letter must boast of other things.

One of the colleges aggrieved by the U.S. News rankings is Cornell, which has several peculiarities that throw its numbers out of alignment with those of other Ivy League universities; it is cheaper to live in Ithaca than in Boston or New York, for example, so the average faculty salary is lower at Cornell, and this counts against it in the rankings. Ronald Ehrenberg, a Cornell economist frustrated with the rankings obsession, points out, in “Tuition Rising: Why College Costs So Much” (Harvard; $18.95), that the figures colleges send to U.S. News can, hypothetically, be massaged in any number of ways to yield a better ranking. If, for example, one alumna gives a million dollars and the rest of her class gives nothing, what U.S. News calls the “alumni giving rank” (total dollars) will be high, but the “alumni giving rate” (total participation) will be low. If you divide up the million dollars and send some to every member of the class, with the request that it be donated right back to Cornell, the rank will stay the same and the rate will shoot up to a hundred per cent. Similarly, the category “percentage of classes with fifty or more students” (the lower the percentage the better) leaves no room for a distinction between classes with sixty students and classes with six hundred. One class with six hundred will count much less against a college than ten classes with sixty.

The effect of the ranking system on admissions has been that colleges encourage as many applications as possible, even from students who are unlikely to be accepted, since this increases selectivity, and they place a premium on accepting students who are very likely to enroll, since this increases the yield. This is one of the reasons, according to the authors of “The Early Admissions Game,” that so many selective colleges have instituted early-admissions programs. There are two types. Early Action programs allow students to submit applications before the regular deadline with the promise of a quick decision—accept, reject, or defer. Accepted students are still free to apply elsewhere. Early Decision programs, though, are binding on the applicants. If they are accepted, they are honor-bound (there is no legal penalty) to withdraw their applications to other colleges. Around twenty-five per cent of American colleges offer one or the other program, and a few have both. Among the Ivies, Harvard offers Early Action; the rest offer Early Decision.

The chief finding reached by the authors of “The Early Admissions Game” is that applying early significantly increases the chances of acceptance. Their conclusions are based on data from the admissions offices at fourteen élite colleges and on a survey of three thousand high-school seniors.The average student in their sample who applied Early Action increased his or her chances of admission by 18.9 percentage points; an Early Decision application increased the chances of the average applicant in the sample by 34.8 points. The authors calculate that the advantage is the equivalent of a hundred additional points on the combined S.A.T. scores. An Early Decision application doubled the average applicant’s chances at Brown and nearly tripled them at Princeton. An Early Action application nearly tripled the chances at Harvard. Half of all current Harvard students were early applicants; only ten per cent of the regular applicants to Harvard were accepted. This suggests that unless an applicant is what admissions officers call “hooked”—unless he or she is a legacy, a recruited athlete, or a “clear priority” (Wesleyan’s label for nonwhite applicants)—the chances for acceptance in the regular pool are very reduced. As the college counsellor at the Collegiate School, in New York, told Avery and his co-authors, “If you’re an ‘unhooked’ white male applying regular to Harvard or Princeton, might as well just stick a fork in you, because you’re done.”

Colleges argue that the early-admissions pool is stronger than the regular pool, and that this accounts for the higher acceptance rate, but the authors of “The Early Admissions Game” dispute that claim. They find that Early Decision applicants at Princeton are admitted at close to three times the rate of regular applicants (fifty-five per cent versus nineteen per cent), but have lower average S.A.T. scores. In general, they conclude that Early Action applicants are slightly stronger on average than regular applicants, but that Early Decision applicants are weaker. “The Early Admissions Game” is intended as an exposé, for high-school students and their parents, of the realities of college admissions, but it is also a protest against the practice of early admissions. The authors believe that these programs benefit privileged students, who are more likely to get informed guidance about how the “game” is played; that they cheat disadvantaged students who do use them, because with Early Decision the students have to accept whatever aid package they are awarded under the standard formula; and that they entice students to choose a college before they have intelligently explored their options.

So why do colleges do it? There are several theories, not all compatible but probably all relevant in one way or another. Early Decision programs obviously enhance the yield, since the ratio of admits to matricks in those programs is close to one. For some colleges, early admissions is a way of plucking a candidate from the pools of higher-ranked colleges. The comfort of knowing in January that you have been accepted by Wesleyan may outweigh the attractions of Yale, where the slope is somewhat steeper. But there are other considerations at work. For one thing, colleges do not always accept their strongest applicants. A shoo-in at Yale—an applicant who, in admissions talk, can “walk on water”—may be rejected at Wesleyan, on the theory that she will just be lowering the yield when she turns Wesleyan down to go to Yale. Admissions officers are wary of what they call “scalp-hunters,” hot shots out to rack up acceptances. When they spot them, they mail them the thin envelope. Early Decision programs guarantee the commitment of the stellar applicant—which is one reason their admission rate is so high. At the same time, a college can defer an Early Action applicant, if it thinks it is being used as a backup, and still have a chance to get him or her in the regular pool. Early admissions gives colleges more control over the process.

As Avery and his co-authors point out, though, early-admissions applicants are not necessarily stronger than regular applicants, and this points to another theory, which is that colleges use early admissions, particularly Early Decision, to select not the best students in the class but the weakest. There will be a bottom tier in every class, and early admissions is a way of handpicking it, making sure of getting students who really want to attend, and who satisfy one or another institutional need as well. It is also a way of taking care of the athletes and the legacies and the “clear priorities” right at the start. Knowing in January the makeup of a third of the incoming class gives admissions committees greater flexibility down the road. A lot of poets in the early round makes it easier to pick the physicist later on (and is bad news for the poet who applies late). A high median S.A.T. in the group accepted by January—something that is more likely in the case of a college with Early Action admissions—opens the door for the president’s godson, whose hitherto undiagnosed allergy to No. 2 pencils probably explains his unusual test scores.

Finally, Avery and his colleagues think that there is a dollars issue. All the Ivies now have needs-blind admissions. Because candidates for early admission are more likely to be from affluent schools with well-informed guidance counsellors, they are also more likely to be “full pay” students. The odds are, therefore, that the more students a college takes in the early round, the less financial aid it is going to have to shell out in the end. And, as “The Early Admissions Game” points out, Early Decision prevents students who do need aid from using another offer to negotiate a better deal. They are not allowed to get another offer.

Is early admissions unfair, though? One of the effects of the increase in demand from the days when headmasters could chauffeur their preferred students into élite colleges is a shift in emphasis from what some admissions officers refer to as B.W.R.K.s—bright well-rounded kids—to what are known as “well-lopsided” students. It’s no longer the students who are well-rounded, in other words; it’s the class. This is why an applicant’s special markers matter so much: differentiation is what colleges are looking for. Harvard rejects twenty-five per cent of its “toll free” candidates. It is not looking for the perfect student; it is looking for the perfect class. In effect, the admissions office has a dozen mini-quotas to fill. If it waits until March, it is leaving a lot to chance. But increasing the predictability for the college is precisely what reduces the predictability for the applicant. Applicants have no idea which niche they are competing for, and at each college it’s likely to be a different niche, anyway.

Most people feel that a heterogeneous class is better than a homogeneous one, and the fact that this makes it harder to get in does not mean that the process is unjust. It’s just a supply-side system: excess demand gives the colleges the advantage in deciding what they want their student demographics to look like. And the truth is that anything that reduces the power of the S.A.T. is a good thing. It is absurd to believe that a test taken when a person is sixteen can predict how well that person will be performing when she is twenty-two. In fact, S.A.T. scores claim to predict academic performance only for the first year of college, and, even then, they explain less of the variation in grades than does high-school class rank or parents’ education. They have little correlation with performance in the last two years, which is when students start to specialize. There seems to be a developmental jump that people make when they are nineteen or twenty which can render past measures of merit irrelevant. When you’re suddenly publishing your stuff in Poetry, that 500 on the math S.A.T. seems pretty insignificant.

Still, the process can go haywire in interesting ways. Steinberg’s book, on admissions at Wesleyan, makes it clear that a personal relationship with the school college counsellor and, either through the counsellor or directly, with an officer on the college’s admissions committee can make a big difference for what might be called the average exceptional student, the applicant who is fully qualified, and even well-lopsided, but who happens not to walk on water. There are moments when the counsellor or the admissions officer can administer a crucial nudge to the application of a student he or she has a personal interest in. But then comes the one moment when the applicant has control: the moment he or she gets to decide whether to accept the acceptance.

At this point, a variable that is generally masked, or cosmetically altered, during the courtship ritual of admissions suddenly comes into play. This is the nature of college life itself. As Steinberg shows, admissions officers are not usually academics themselves. Their backgrounds tend to be in service work: they are people who have devoted their lives to helping people. Cornell is one of the few colleges where faculty play a regular role in admissions. At Wesleyan, the previous occupations of members of the admissions committee included (in 1999-2000) food-stamp interviewer, resident administrator in a psychiatric halfway house, high-school English teacher, and management trainee at Sears. Admissions officers therefore tend to be highly interested in, and experienced judges of, character. At the same time, they may be a step removed from the realities of campus life. Their ideas about college can be a little purer than the situation merits.

One of the applicants Steinberg chose to track through the admissions process was Becca, a student at Harvard-Westlake, which is an élite private school near Los Angeles. Becca had been involved in a small scandal at Harvard-Westlake. On the way to class one day, she took a bite of a pot brownie another student was handing around. The student was caught (she had become ill), and Becca turned herself in. She was the only one of the several students who had eaten a piece of the brownie who did so, and though she was disciplined, she was also praised by the school administration for her integrity and maturity. The following year, she was elected president of the student government, and she became the chair of the honor board.

Becca and her college counsellor debated about what to do with this incident when she applied to college; they decided to make it a selling point, as a story about accepting responsibility and rising above past mistakes. Becca used the pot-brownie story as the subject of her application essay, and was turned down by all the top colleges to which she applied. At Wesleyan, the committee could not see the wisdom of admitting a student who had confessed to using drugs. The Wesleyan admissions officer whose district included Harvard-Westlake, though, believed the accept-responsibility-and-rise-above-past-mistakes line, and he contrived to get Becca onto the waiting list and then, surreptitiously, to the top of that list. A visit to Wesleyan was arranged for her. When she arrived, a student escort took her to the dorm where she would be staying. As soon as she entered the building, Becca could smell marijuana everywhere. Her visit turned out to coincide with what is known at Wesleyan as Zonker Harris Day, a day devoted to the celebration of pot smoking. Becca was later accepted at Wesleyan, but she was also accepted off the waiting list at Cornell. She went to Cornell.

One of Becca’s classmates at Harvard-Westlake was among the most heavily recruited high-school students in the country in 1999-2000. Her name was Julianna. She had missed only one question on her P.S.A.T.s, she was an accomplished dancer, and her father was black and Brazilian. She was wooed by dozens of colleges, and was accepted everywhere she applied, including Stanford, Texas, Chicago, Michigan, Swarthmore, Harvard, Wesleyan, and Yale. Wesleyan had been courting Julianna for several years, and believed that it had a chance to get her. A visit was arranged. Again, a student escort showed up to take her around. The escort asked whether she would like to attend a meeting of a student club. Julianna said she would, and soon found herself sitting in a conference room with a dozen other students. One of them opened a bag and took out a collection of vibrators and other sex toys. It was a meeting of the Wesleyan University Cunt Club. Julianna went to Yale. It was a good thing for Yale, probably, that she did not visit the campus during the seven days of lectures, films, panels, concerts, and parties known as Campus-Wide Sex Week.

2003-03-01T15:13:00.000-08:00

Eating tomatoes 'turns kids into criminals'

Pioneering clinic will bring new hope to disruptive youngsters, reports Jean West

Sunday February 23, 2003
The Observer

Tomatoes don't agree with John. He is sick within an hour of eating them and becomes sweaty and panicky. But worse than this, they also make him irritable and aggressive and liable to commit violent crimes.
Jason has a similar reaction to bread. He has always loved doorsteps smothered in butter for breakfast. But it gives him diarrhoea and a weird kind of depressed 'hangover'. This makes him crave the heroin that once put his life on the skids.

It may sound implausible, but a controversial theory is gathering momentum: that one explanation for crime may be found on our dinner plates. The premise is that the brain needs the right fuel to function properly - otherwise it will misbehave.

This week, the first clinic in Britain to tackle juvenile delinquency by studying what children eat, then treating them with nutritional medicine and psychotherapy, will open its doors. Its consultant will be Peter Bennett, a former officer with West Yorkshire police.

The Cactus Clinic, at Teesside University in Middlesbrough, sprang from the work of the late Professor Steve Baldwin, who died in the Selby rail disaster, and Janice Hill, who runs the Overload Network, an Edinburgh-based charity for children with behavioural disorders.

Disturbed by a lack of alternatives to the throw-away-the-key approach to delinquency and the over-prescription of psychiatric drugs for children, they forged ahead with their maverick idea. The nutritional approach was based on a wealth of global research into the effects of vitamins, minerals and other compounds such as amino acids on brain chemistry.

Last year a study in the British Journal of Psychiatry suggested that reoffending by juvenile delinquents could be slashed by a quarter if they improved their diets. Some 230 inmates at the young offenders' institution in Aylesbury, Bucks, were assessed over 18 months by researchers from Oxford University. Half were given pills containing vitamins, minerals and essential fatty acids, and the other half placebo capsules in a double-blind, randomised trial.

The first group committed 25 per cent fewer offences than the second. The greatest reduction was for serious offences, including violence, where there was a fall of nearly 40 per cent. There was no decline in reoffending for those taking dummy compounds.

But despite evidence that alternative treatments may work, society, mainstream medicine and the prison authorities remain unimpressed. 'It's a crazy notion that we can accept that 10 pints of beer - which, after all, is derived from wheat - can affect behaviour, but not other foodstuffs,' said Hill.

She said nutritional intervention was not a quick fix that promised a speedy improvement in mood, like the new generation of anti-depressants. It took weeks to build up a malnourished brain and programmes had to be tailor-made.

In many cases, it is difficult to pinpoint the offending food type. John, who became more aggressive after eating tomatoes, lacked an enzyme that detoxifies a compound found in tomatoes, consisting of salicylates. It is believed these caused a chemical reaction in his brain, which then affected his behaviour.

'The children we see have psychological problems linked to physical problems, often caused by nutritional deficiencies. Children should have access to basic tests that can quickly establish nutritional status rather than having their knuckles perpetually rapped,' said Hill.

Hill came across Peter Bennett when she saw a QED documentary about his work with young criminals in Yorkshire. They were assessed for nutritional shortfalls and food allergies and put on individual programmes to address their problems. Bennett was astonished by the changes he witnessed.

He stumbled upon the work of a number of nutritionists during a study sabbatical at Oxford University. Disappointed that the force did not take his findings more seriously, he quit his job and trained as a nutritionist. He continues to get remarkable results from his patients. 'One child has just been accepted back into mainstream school, which is significant because, once you are excluded, you are usually excluded for good,' he said.

Other possible explanations for violent outbursts that Bennett has investigated include blood sugar imbalances, often attributed to over-reliance on refined sugar. He has studied the effect of fluctuating blood sugar on women who have used the defence of PMT in murder trials. He says that, a few days before menstruation, the release of female hormones can wreak havoc with blood sugar.

'If women then eat something like a bar of chocolate or drink an alcoholic drink, it will boost them up very rapidly, but then they go crash because the blood sugar rush is quickly used up. This can provoke rage and violent outbursts.'

The problem is not confined to pre-menstrual women - teenagers of both sexes weaned on junk food diets whose hormones are just kicking in are prime candidates for hypoglycaemia (low blood sugar). Swapping simple sugars for more complex carbohydrates, such as bread, rice and pasta that don't spark the same glucose rush, offers a solution.

Hill, whose charity offers support to children with ADHD (attention deficit hyperactivity disorder) insists that many of their restless, agitated symptoms can be traced back to the foods they have eaten, and not just sugars and additives.

Her own daughter, Debbie, now 17, has suffered from ADHD since childhood and was both disruptive and aggressive. Hill swiftly identified the foods that knocked her off balance, which included apples and strawberries, and introduced a raft of supplements including high doses of vitamin C, B6 and zinc and essential fatty acids into her diet. She calmed down significantly.

Eat your way out of trouble

Zinc, found mainly in shellfish and green leafy vegetables, has a calming effect on the central nervous system. Deficiencies are common after the consumption of food and drinks containing tartrazine, a colouring known to disturb behaviour in some youngsters.

Essential fatty acids (EFAs) are well-known mood regulators and are especially calming for women with PMT. Their ability to balance hormones makes them particularly useful for teenagers.

B6 (pyridoxine) is important for normal brain function and is found in broccoli, lentils, bananas and nuts. Deficiency symptoms include hyper- irritability, depression, fatigue and learning difficulties.

Calcium and magnesium are natural tranquillisers. They help to relieve anxiety and nervousness, tantrums and depression and have been used to combat aggression. They are found in dairy foods, fish and green leafy vegetables.

B5 (pantothenic acid) is known as the anti-stress vitamin and is involved in the production of neurotransmitters in the brain that regulate mood. It is found in eggs, kidneys, mushrooms and pork.

· The Cactus Clinic can be contacted on 0131 555 4967.

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2003-03-01T14:47:00.000-08:00

Unhappy Meals
School lunches are loaded with fat -- and the beef and dairy industries are making sure it stays that way.

Barry Yeoman
January 6, 2003

Every weekday at lunch, courtesy of the federal government, more than 27 million schoolchildren sit down to the nation's largest mass feeding. If we took a giant snapshot of their trays on a typical day -- say, Tuesday, September 24 -- here's what the continent-wide photo would look like:

In Lynnwood, Washington, we would see kids eating sausage with Belgian waffle sticks and syrup. In Clovis, California, bacon cheeseburgers. In La Quinta, California, Canadian bacon and cheese rolls. In Rexburg, Idaho, cheese nachos and waffles. In Fort Collins, Colorado, "homemade" pigs in a blanket. In Bryan, Texas, cheeseburgers, chicken-fried steak, and pizza. In Hot Springs, Arkansas, country steak with creamed potatoes. In Cedar Falls, Iowa, mini-corndogs. In Lafayette, Indiana, beef ravioli with cheesy broccoli. In Columbus, Ohio, egg rolls with tater tots. In Kingstree, South Carolina, sloppy joes with onion rings. In Richmond, Virginia, chili cheese nachos. In Gatesville, North Carolina, three-meat subs with Fritos. In Orwigsburg, Pennsylvania, cheese steak on rolls with buttered pasta. And in Fitchburg, Massachusetts, pretzels with cheese sauce.

Here and there, we'd also see baked chicken and salads. But by and large, school cafeterias coast to coast offer an artery-clogging menu of beef, pork, cheese, and grease. "Whenever I see children clinically, I ask them if they buy lunch at school or bring it from home," says Patricia Froberg, a nutritionist at Connecticut Children's Medical Center in Hartford. "If they say, 'I get it at school,' I cringe."

At a time when weight-related illnesses in children are escalating, schools are serving kids the very foods that lead to obesity, diabetes, and heart disease. That's because the National School Lunch Program, which gives schools more than $6 billion each year to offer low-cost meals to students, has conflicting missions. Enacted in 1946, the program is supposed to provide healthy meals to children, regardless of income. At the same time, however, it's designed to subsidize agribusiness, shoring up demand for beef and milk even as the public's taste for these foods declines.

Under the program, the federal government buys up more than $800 million worth of farm products each year and turns them over to schools to serve their students. The U.S. Department of Agriculture, which administers the system, calls this a win-win situation: Schools get free ingredients while farmers are guaranteed a steady income. The trouble is, most of the commodities provided to schools are meat and dairy products, often laden with saturated fat. In 2001, the USDA spent a total of $350 million on surplus beef and cheese for schools -- more than double the $161 million spent on all fruits and vegetables, most of which were canned or frozen. On top of its regular purchases, the USDA makes special purchases in direct response to industry lobbying. In November 2001, for example, the beef industry wrote to Agriculture Secretary Ann Veneman, complaining that a decline in travel after September 11, along with a lowered demand for beef in Japan, was suppressing sales of their product. The department responded two months later with a $30 million "bonus buy" of frozen beef roasts and ground beef for schools.

"Basically, it's a welfare program for suppliers of commodities," says Jennifer Raymond, a retired nutritionist in Northern California who has worked with schools to develop healthier menus. "It's a price support program for agricultural producers, and the schools are simply a way to get rid of the items that have been purchased."

The complete version of Unhappy Meals can be read in the January/February, 2003 issue of Mother Jones magazine.

This article has been made possible by the Foundation for National Progress, the Investigative Fund of Mother Jones, and gifts from generous readers like you.

© 2003 The Foundation for National Progress

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2003-03-01T14:41:00.000-08:00

February 26, 2003
Bush May Set Tougher School Lunch Rules
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 2:34 a.m. ET

WASHINGTON (AP) -- More than a fourth of the 28 million children who eat free or discounted school lunches might be ineligible, and the Bush administration is considering rules to reserve the meal programs for children of families who prove their low incomes.

The number of children enrolled in the program nationwide exceeds the number in low-income families who would be eligible for it, based on a comparison of the school lunch enrollment figures with an annual survey by the Census Bureau, said Jean Daniel, an Agriculture Department spokeswoman.

Officials have calculated that as many as 27 percent of children now getting free or reduced-price meals are ineligible, she said.

Should the estimate be correct, the government may have spent about $1.8 billion last year buying lunches for children whose family income would have disqualified them. The Agriculture Department spent $6.8 billion on school lunches last year.

Eric Bost, the department's undersecretary for food and nutrition, said he thinks the 27 percent estimate of ineligibility is too high, but that the problem is significant.

Advocates for the poor accuse the department of inflating the number of ineligibles to come up with new criteria that will result in removing children from the program.

Jim Weill, president of a Washington advocacy group, the Food Research and Action Center, said a tougher verification process would scare away families of children whose low incomes would qualify. He said he suspects the problem is that some children who qualify for discount-priced lunches are instead getting free ones.

``But you should not willy-nilly make it harder for schools to operate just because a minor number of kids are given free lunches instead of reduced-price lunches,'' he said.

Under current program guidelines, children in a family of four with an income of less than $23,530 a year qualify for free lunches. Children in a four-member family with a total annual income less than $33,485 qualify for reduced-price meals, costing up to 40 cents per lunch.

Many schools now approve children for free and reduced-price lunches based solely on applications in which parents self-report monthly income and household size. Some also use as criteria whether families are on food stamps or are on temporary assistance for needy families, a welfare program.

Bost acknowledged that his department is looking at establishing new criteria, leaning toward a method called ``direct certification'' that allows schools to approve automatically free and low-cost lunches for children whose families are getting food stamps or temporary assistance. Schools can verify the information by checking with local officials in charge of those assistance programs.

``We want to look at improving the integrity of the program,'' he said. ``We're not intent on doing anything that's going to prevent or prohibit children from participating.''

The Agriculture Department is spending $2 million on a study of 22 school districts in 16 states that are testing ways to screen their school lunch programs for children who don't qualify. The study began in the 2000-2001 school year and is to be completed in June.

Preliminary results in August showed schools in the study already are screening out ineligible children.

For example, the number of children eating free meals at schools in East Stroudsburg, Pa., dropped from an average of 811 to 633 in the first year of the study. The number of children eating reduced-price lunches also fell from 305 to 257. The schools were verifying eligibility by requiring families to prove their incomes or show they were on food stamps or temporary assistance when they applied, according to the report.

Bost said more preliminary results are expected to be released at the end of the month.

^------

On the Net: USDA Food and Nutrition Service: http://www.fns.usda.gov/fns/

Food Research and Action Center: http://www.frac.org

Copyright 2003 The Associated Press | Privacy Policy

2003-03-01T14:35:00.000-08:00

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

February 26, 2003
Bush May Set Tougher School Lunch Rules
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

Filed at 2:34 a.m. ET

WASHINGTON (AP) -- More than a fourth of the 28 million children who eat free or discounted school lunches might be ineligible, and the Bush administration is considering rules to reserve the meal programs for children of families who prove their low incomes.

The number of children enrolled in the program nationwide exceeds the number in low-income families who would be eligible for it, based on a comparison of the school lunch enrollment figures with an annual survey by the Census Bureau, said Jean Daniel, an Agriculture Department spokeswoman.

Officials have calculated that as many as 27 percent of children now getting free or reduced-price meals are ineligible, she said.

Should the estimate be correct, the government may have spent about $1.8 billion last year buying lunches for children whose family income would have disqualified them. The Agriculture Department spent $6.8 billion on school lunches last year.

Eric Bost, the department's undersecretary for food and nutrition, said he thinks the 27 percent estimate of ineligibility is too high, but that the problem is significant.

Advocates for the poor accuse the department of inflating the number of ineligibles to come up with new criteria that will result in removing children from the program.

Jim Weill, president of a Washington advocacy group, the Food Research and Action Center, said a tougher verification process would scare away families of children whose low incomes would qualify. He said he suspects the problem is that some children who qualify for discount-priced lunches are instead getting free ones.

``But you should not willy-nilly make it harder for schools to operate just because a minor number of kids are given free lunches instead of reduced-price lunches,'' he said.

Under current program guidelines, children in a family of four with an income of less than $23,530 a year qualify for free lunches. Children in a four-member family with a total annual income less than $33,485 qualify for reduced-price meals, costing up to 40 cents per lunch.

Many schools now approve children for free and reduced-price lunches based solely on applications in which parents self-report monthly income and household size. Some also use as criteria whether families are on food stamps or are on temporary assistance for needy families, a welfare program.

Bost acknowledged that his department is looking at establishing new criteria, leaning toward a method called ``direct certification'' that allows schools to approve automatically free and low-cost lunches for children whose families are getting food stamps or temporary assistance. Schools can verify the information by checking with local officials in charge of those assistance programs.

``We want to look at improving the integrity of the program,'' he said. ``We're not intent on doing anything that's going to prevent or prohibit children from participating.''

The Agriculture Department is spending $2 million on a study of 22 school districts in 16 states that are testing ways to screen their school lunch programs for children who don't qualify. The study began in the 2000-2001 school year and is to be completed in June.

Preliminary results in August showed schools in the study already are screening out ineligible children.

For example, the number of children eating free meals at schools in East Stroudsburg, Pa., dropped from an average of 811 to 633 in the first year of the study. The number of children eating reduced-price lunches also fell from 305 to 257. The schools were verifying eligibility by requiring families to prove their incomes or show they were on food stamps or temporary assistance when they applied, according to the report.

Bost said more preliminary results are expected to be released at the end of the month.

^------

On the Net: USDA Food and Nutrition Service: http://www.fns.usda.gov/fns/

Food Research and Action Center: http://www.frac.org

Copyright 2003 The Associated Press | Privacy Policy

2003-02-10T12:01:00.000-08:00

www.sfgate.com Return to regular view
Hurdles impede building schools
Process too slow to fix state's economic woes
James Sterngold, Chronicle Staff Writer
Monday, February 10, 2003
©2003 San Francisco Chronicle | Feedback
"...there are few structures anywhere more noble in purpose but more difficult to build than schools, given the thick stacks of state-mandated approvals that are required. "Los Angeles -- The Air and Space Gallery of the gleaming California Science Center is the sort of place where young imaginations soar. Just next door, behind a giant DC-8 that appears to be taking flight, workers are erecting the steel skeleton of another kind of dream factory: a badly needed elementary school for an inner-city neighborhood. But there is one sobering fact that brings the soaring image crashing back to earth: The 712-seat school was conceived 13 years ago and will not be completed until 2004.

The experience is a reminder that there are few structures anywhere more noble in purpose but more difficult to build than schools, given the thick stacks of state-mandated approvals that are required. That stark reality is something officials might bear in mind as California prepares for a state- financed construction binge focused largely on new schools.

When he delivered his budget address last month, Gov. Gray Davis altered the list of his top three priorities from education, education and education, as he used to love to put it, saying they are now jobs, jobs and jobs. His plan for energizing a listless economy relies heavily on accelerating the spending of $21 billion in bond money for construction projects, including roads, housing and, especially, schools.

In fact, more than $11 billion of the bond money would be spent on new and modernized schools around the state, creating, Davis estimated, more than 300, 000 jobs over the next few years and, not least, providing more classrooms in desperately overcrowded urban districts.

No district in the state needs new classrooms more than Los Angeles, which is suffering a shortage of about 200,000 seats. The city has been struggling for years to jump-start a construction program, and the many pitfalls it has run into provide a cautionary tale for the state as it begins to implement the governor's new plan.

Officials here said that under the best of circumstances -- and rarely are conditions ideal -- it takes from five to six years to conceive, design, get approvals for and construct a new school.

That means it may prove extremely difficult to get the majority of the state construction money flowing while the slumping economy still needs it.

'SO MANY HURDLES'
"The sound bites are a lot easier than the reality, believe me," said Kathi Littmann, until recently the deputy chief executive for new school construction at the Los Angeles Unified School District, the largest in the state. "School construction is radically different from any other public event.

There are so many regulations. They're not bad regulations, but there are so many hurdles you can't believe it."

Constance Rice, a civil rights attorney who sat on a commission that re- energized the school districts' construction system after years of lethargy, said the hurdles can defeat people not used to them.

"Even when you've got competent public school districts, there's nothing more difficult to build than a school," said Rice, who said her commission had counted 117 steps required in the process. "It makes your brain hurt. I don't know how you spend the kind of money the governor is talking about in an accelerated way."

Lori Morgan, a manager in the state's Office of Public School Construction, said one major plus is that many districts around the state had gotten an early jump in their planning, anticipating that the big bond issues would pass in the elections last November. As a result of the advance work, she said, more than $3 billion in school construction was expected to begin shortly. But she also acknowledged that most of the other projects could take far more time to grind through the process.

The steps in developing a public school include assessing where schools are needed, finding a site, condemning the land and acquiring it, commissioning a design, getting environmental approvals -- a potentially time-consuming process, mitigating any environmental problems, relocating existing residents or tenants, working with neighborhood associations, responding to any opposition, applying for and obtaining the state's matching funds, and then placing the contract out for bidding.

FIVE TO SIX YEARS
Guy Mehula, Los Angeles deputy chief for new construction and a former Navy construction officer, said that in general it takes about a year to locate and obtain a site, another year to win the needed approvals, and then perhaps three years to design, bid for and construct the school, for a total of five to six years -- assuming that the process does not get bogged down because of issues like environmental or traffic problems.

The state plays a critical role in the process. Not only does it set these regulations, vet applications and provide approvals, but it also provides matching funds for school construction. The formula can vary depending on the type of project, but usually the state matches construction spending by the local school district roughly on a dollar-for-dollar basis, officials say.

State officials say that, under the governor's plan, at least part of the process is being accelerated, although they added that none of the critical regulations can be circumvented.

Normally, the state, when it has bond money available, allocates about $150 million to $200 million a month, in response to applications from the districts. But under the accelerated plan, the state is starting to allocate about $300 million a month.

In addition, the state is sending officials out to work with the districts to teach them how to prepare and submit their applications so they can sail through more swiftly. And the state had pushed forward many projects in the expectation that the bond money would be available this year.

Morgan, of the Office of Public School Construction, said that even after money is allocated, it can take another 18 months for the funds to be actually sent to the district. Those delays are critical in the face of what all admit are vast needs for classrooms.

"These funds are only a drop in the bucket relative to the needs," Morgan said.

Nowhere is that more true than Los Angeles, where the last comprehensive high school was completed in the early 1970s.

Caprice Young, a member of the school board who has battled to get the cumbersome process rolling, said the long lull resulted from an almost complete breakdown. Officials were reluctant to push for bond measures because of anticipated voter resistance. After some neighborhoods fought, the board was reluctant to use eminent domain to take over good sites.

To get moving, she said, the district needed not just an influx of experts - - it hired several former Navy construction officers with great experience managing big projects -- but the ability to persuade the state to ease certain regulations.

The state requires more than 40 acres for a high school, for instance, but in Los Angeles finding a site that size has proved nearly impossible. So the city has managed to get approvals to build a few high schools on sites as small as 11 acres, saving space by constructing expensive underground parking garages and smaller playgrounds, some of them on rooftops.

WORST CASE
And then there was the expensive disaster when politics and inexperience met on one ill-fated project, the Belmont Learning Center. The high school was the most expensive ever conceived, at an expected cost of $200 million, and it was intended to relieve overcrowding in one of the worst-served neighborhoods in the city, near downtown. However, it was built on top of an old oil field, so construction was halted because of environmental concerns after an astounding $125 million was spent.

While the viability of the unfinished project is still being debated, Belmont is often cited as a painful example of what can go wrong.

But the Los Angeles district has finally overcome many of its problems and is now in the midst of one of the largest school-building programs ever undertaken. The district now has 159 projects under way, including 80 new schools and 79 additions or modernizations, at a total cost of $3.6 billion.

"Almost every other day we are opening bids for projects," said Mehula.

In a second phase, an additional 35,000 classroom seats will be built, in perhaps 40 more schools. The whole program is scheduled for completion in 2010,

and even that is on an accelerated schedule.

"Even if they can get the money moving, there's a question of whether there are enough tradesmen out there to build all those schools, and that could price you out of the market," said Littmann, the former construction official. "There are going to be lots of problems meeting the governor's goals."

E-mail James Sterngold at jsterngold@sfchronicle.com.

©2003 San Francisco Chronicle | Feedback

Page A - 1

2003-01-25T10:56:00.000-08:00

washingtonpost.com
FBI Taps Campus Police in Anti-Terror Operations
Student, Faculty Groups Fear a Return of Spying Abuses Against Activists, Foreign Nationals

By Dan Eggen
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, January 25, 2003; Page A01

Federal authorities have begun enlisting campus police officers in the domestic war on terror, renewing fears among some faculty and student groups of overzealous FBI spying at colleges and universities that led to scandals in decades past.

Since the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, the FBI has strengthened or established working relationships with hundreds of campus police departments, in part to gain better access to insular communities of Middle Eastern students, government officials said.

On at least a dozen campuses, the FBI has included collegiate police officers as members of local Joint Terrorism Task Forces, the regional entities that oversee counterterrorism investigations nationwide.

Some officers have been given federal security clearance, which allows them access to classified information. Their supervisors often do not know which cases these officers are working on because details cannot be shared, officials said.

The FBI and many campus police officers view the arrangements as a logical, effective way to help monitor potential terrorist threats and keep better tabs on the more than 200,000 foreign nationals studying in the United States. Several of the Sept. 11 hijackers were enrolled as students at American flight schools, and one entered the country on a student visa but never showed up at the school.

"Campus law enforcement is starting to get a lot more recognition from the FBI and other federal agencies now, because they're realizing we do have police departments and we can play a vital role in stopping terrorism," said H. Scott Doner, police chief at Valdosta State University in Georgia and president of the International Association of Campus Law Enforcement Administrators. "Everybody's got to have their eyes and ears open to make sure something doesn't happen again."

But the effort has touched a nerve among some faculty and student groups, as well as Muslim activists, who fear that the government is inching toward the kind of controversial spying tactics it used in the 1950s and 1960s. With few restrictions, the FBI at the time aggressively monitored, and often harassed, political groups, student activists and dissidents.

Faculty leaders and administrators argue that U.S. colleges and universities are unique places devoted to the exchange of ideas, and that even the hint of surveillance by government authorities taints that environment.

"This type of cooperation is perfectly valid if it's based on criminal activity, but the danger with the FBI is that it doesn't always limit itself to that," said Sarah Eltantawi, spokeswoman for the Muslim Public Affairs Council. "Given the FBI's history, there's a definite concern that they will go too far."

Closer ties between the FBI and campus police are the latest example of the government's determination to keep better tabs on foreign students and faculty in the United States. The efforts have met resistance at many colleges, which are accustomed to a fair amount of independence from government scrutiny and which often are home to activists suspicious of the FBI.

This month, the Immigration and Naturalization Service is launching a computerized tracking system for all foreign nationals studying in the United States, a program that was stalled for years, in part by university complaints. Some FBI field offices have also asked local universities and colleges for detailed lists of foreign students and faculty, prompting objections from academic groups and several U.S. senators.

"There is a concern on the part of universities to balance on this tightrope in the post-September 11 world," said A. John Bramley, provost at the University of Vermont. "On the one hand, no one wants to do anything that is not entirely supportive of national security. On the other hand, universities are open places that want to encourage dialogue and diversity."

Distrust of the FBI runs high among some faculty who remember the counterculture demonstrations of the 1960s. Under J. Edgar Hoover's 15-year COINTELPRO program, the bureau engaged in broad and questionable tactics aimed at monitoring and disrupting student activist groups.

FBI agents infiltrated leftist antiwar and civil rights groups with informants, tapped into radio frequencies to disrupt protest plans, stole membership rolls and compiled dossiers on student political leaders. The FBI even produced bogus student newspapers, one conservative and one liberal, to spread inaccurate information and sow dissension among student groups. The COINTELPRO program was halted in 1971.

The FBI has long had liaison relationships with police and security departments at some universities, particularly larger institutions with higher crime rates or heavy involvement in sensitive research areas, officials said. But the Sept. 11 attacks prompted the bureau to strengthen its links to local and state police departments, including those on college campuses.

Precise numbers are not available, but FBI estimates and interviews with campus police administrators indicate that at least a dozen departments have assigned officers to play significant roles in FBI anti-terrorism task forces.

The arrangements with the schools vary. At the University of Texas in Dallas, a campus police officer attends monthly task force meetings and is in regular communication with the FBI, but has not participated in active investigations, officials said. In Gainesville, Fla., a University of Florida officer is assigned to work full time alongside FBI agents and state police in terror investigations.

At the University of Toledo, police chief John A. Dauer said that one full-time and one part-time officer are assigned to the FBI terrorism task force based in Cleveland. Although he is not privy to the details of his officers' work with federal agents, Dauer said the arrangement gives him a better handle on possible terrorist threats on campus than he previously had.

"We have a large Arab population between here and Dearborn that they are concerned about, and a considerable international population on campus," Dauer said. "Having the detectives work with them helps us be more proactive in terms of information. Without that, we'd probably have very little information at all."

A similar arrangement has prompted controversy at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, where an FBI agent and a campus police detective showed up at the office of an Iraqi-born economics professor in November for an interview. The campus detective, Barry Flanders, was assigned to the local FBI task force and was working on federal terrorism investigations at least two days a week.

FBI officials and campus police said they were able to quickly discount the anonymous tip that led to the interview, and professor M.J. Alhabeeb told local media outlets that the meeting was brief and polite.

But the case prompted a wave of protests by students and faculty, who argued that the arrangement gave the FBI the ability to intrude on the privacy rights of foreign nationals. The local American Civil Liberties Union has filed a Freedom of Information Act request demanding details about the university's cooperation with the FBI.

"What we know about the FBI in the past is that it has engaged in a whole set of activities against people because they didn't like the views they expressed or the associations they had formed," said Dan Clawson, a sociology professor at the University of Massachusetts who helped arrange a faculty protest meeting on the topic. "It appears that we are likely to go back to that time. . . . Universities should take a principled stand saying we oppose these activities because they interfere with the free exchange of information and ideas."

University of Massachusetts police chief Barbara O'Connor said the modern FBI operates under tighter restrictions than it did decades ago. Letting one of her officers work alongside the bureau is a sensible way to guard against terrorist threats and to keep the campus involved in federal probes, she said.

"I think we have a responsibility as a major university to contribute to the safety of this region, despite the political pressure that's been brought to bear," O'Connor said. "I understand people's concerns about civil liberties, but this is part of making sure people aren't harming citizens."

Sheldon E. Steinbach, general counsel for the American Council on Education, said criticism of the FBI's heightened activity on U.S. campuses is overblown.

"Much of the concern expressed at the moment is speculative and anticipatory," he said. "It's ascribing sinister motives to the FBI before anything remotely akin to that has been proven."

Staff researcher Madonna Lebling contributed to this report.

© 2003 The Washington Post Company

2003-01-15T14:26:00.000-08:00

Criticism mounts of No Child Left Behind Act
By BRUNO MATARAZZO Jr.

Democrat Staff Writer

ROCHESTER — When President George W. Bush signed the $26.5 billion No Child Left Behind Act into law on Jan. 8, 2002, U.S. Secretary of Education Rod Paige said the education reform bill would "launch a new era of American education." One year later, many educators in the New Hampshire fear he was right.

While superintendents and school board members across the Seacoast applaud the intent of No Child Left Behind — accountability, quality teachers, statewide assessment tests — the fear of setting unreasonable standards and the findings from two prominent education associations in the state that the act will be another unfunded or underfunded mandate have many in the education field perplexed and worried.

Reaction to the law was by no means swift — possibly due to the bill’s massive size. At more than 1,200 pages, the bill is larger than Leo Tolstoy’s "War and Peace." Its vast size has one superintendent storing the bill on a CD-ROM and one education lawyer was forced to shrink the font to a "relatively small size" in order to reduce the pages to 375.

Months later, communities including Somersworth, Rollinsford, Newmarket, Barrington, Milton and Wakefield have followed the recommendations of the N.H. School Boards Association, which asked districts to place a nonbinding warrant article on ballots this March to oppose unfunded or underfunded mandates. Other superintendents are recommending their school boards follow suit.

And Somersworth and Durham have either written or are planning to write statements criticizing the law.

Because the articles are nonbinding, they would express an opinion about the law but would force no further action.

Financial burden

In an early December letter, the School Boards Association asked boards across the state to approve local warrant articles on the heels of a cost analysis study done by the N.H. School Administrators Association. The administrators’ group says the act’s will cost state taxpayers $575 per student, while the state stands to receive only an additional $77 per student from the federal government. Local taxpayers would have to make up the difference of $498 per student through property taxes.

Somersworth Superintendent Charles Ott worries the federal government will renege on its financial obligations to No Child Left Behind as they have done for almost 30 years with the special education legislation, known as the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act.

In 1975, the federal government passed landmark legislation calling for free and quality education for children with disabilities and for the government to fund 40 percent of those costs associated with special education.

"IDEA is indelibly printed in everyone’s mind," Ott said. "We’ve been through 30 years of an unfulfilled promise, so people are obviously concerned that No Child Left Behind could repeat that mistake."

Barrington Superintendent Michael Morgan concurs. "The federal government is supposed to fund (IDEA) at 40 percent and they don’t fund that at 40 percent, so why take on another whole challenge before solving the first one?"

Mounting financial criticism of No Child Left Behind has even forced one of the principal sponsors of the bill to rebuke claims by the school administrators association.

U.S. Sen. Judd Gregg, R-NH, who is likely to take over the reigns of the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pension committee, has come down hard on critics of the year-old bill.

In a letter sent to superintendents and school board members across the state, Gregg stated he wants to "clarify several provisions within the law and to address concerns that have been expressed regarding its impact on schools in New Hampshire."

The state is expected to receive a 21 percent increase in federal education funding, which equals to roughly $16 million — the largest increase the Granite State has ever seen, according to Gregg, who is up for re-election in 2004.

"Although the bulk of the increase in federal funding under the NCLBA is for Title I, assessments, Title II (teachers) and technology programs, the federal government is also providing a significant increase for reading programs, special education and rural programs," Gregg wrote in the Jan. 3 letter.

But superintendents and school board members, while skeptical, will take a wait-and-see approach to determine whether Gregg or the School Administrators Association is right.

The Undersecretary for Education, Eugene W. Hickok, is to appear in Concord this afternoon to discuss the act. The Department of Education identifies Hickok as the person responsible for implementation of No Child Left Behind.

Hidden costs

Like most educators, Barrington Superintendent Michael Morgan got his start in the field as a teacher. He has taught history, psychology and social studies in schools across northern New Hampshire.

But under the new law, Morgan, who holds a degree in sociology, will not be allowed to teach history — his favorite subject — again, only sociology, which is not offered in most public high schools.

Although Morgan has not intentions of returning to the classroom, he does point out the restriction as an aspect of No Child Left Behind that will increase school districts’ budgets for salaries and not provide enough federal funds to cover the costs.

The provision in question is an effort to get "highly qualified" teachers into the classroom by the 2005-2006 school year, but Morgan notes he would no longer meet the qualifications in history anymore.

Middle and secondary school teachers will soon be required to be certified in each subject area they teach, a costly prospect for smaller school districts where, for example, science teachers may teach biology, chemistry, physics and general science.

But Morgan points out that a such teacher may only be certified in one of those fields.

Another cost school districts are to see immediately is the new law’s requirement that paraprofessionals — teacher’s aides — have at least an associate’s degree.

The provision for paraprofessionals is currently required for Title 1 schools, but as the law matures, it will gradually expand to include all aides.

"Hiring people with a two-year degree is an added cost in salary — it’s an unfounded mandate," Morgan says. "We can move money around, but we’re going to be spending so much money on assessment that there will not be enough to go around."

Defining ‘adequate’ progress

High standards were the hallmark of Bush’s education reform act when he signed the bill into law in a cross-country tour that even included a stop at the University of New Hampshire.

The bill was touted as a symbol of Bush’s "compassionate conservatism" and his willingness to work alongside Democrats as well as Republicans, with Massachusetts Democratic Sen. Edward Kennedy one of the four legislative sponsors.

But now that the accolades have faded for the bipartisan legislation, educators fear the standards will be all but impossible to fulfill.

To explain fully the challenges of the "adequate yearly progress" requirement in the No Child Left Behind Act, Superintendent Raymond Yeagley offers an intriguing analogy: baseball.

With testing and accountability as the keystone of the federal education reform act, imagine the act was intended for baseball players who were required to make "adequate yearly progress" with their batting averages, Yeagley says.

In his example, the Boston Red Sox ended their last season with a .275 batting average for everyone on the team — pitchers, fielders and designated hitters. And all of those players would be required, by law, to increase their average .1875 points over the next 12 years in order to reach the federally-mandated .500 batting average — a figure never reached in baseball history.

And if one group falls below the required increase in the next 12 years, or if the team would slip slightly below the .500 batting average, then the Red Sox would be identified as a team in "need of improvement."

As absurd as the goals may be for professional baseball players, school districts across the country have been grappling with similar dilemmas, requiring adequate yearly progress for students in English and math that, some say, will ultimately lead to 80 percent of the school districts nationwide being labeled as schools in need of improvement.

Instead of reaching the .500 batting average in Yeagley’s analogy, 100 percent of public school students will be expected to become proficient in English and math over the next 12 years.

The federal government not only wants to monitor the entire school district population, but subgroups within districts varying in size along with a district’s population.

Under the new law, the government will require adequate yearly progress from the entire district and from all the subgroups. So, for example, if the subgroup consisting of special needs students or socially or economically disadvantaged students have a proficiency level of 28 percent, then over the next 12 years, those students will be expected to increase their proficiency levels by 6 percent each year until finally reaching 100 percent.

While those expectations may be admirable, educators feel they are not realistic.

"The way No Child Left Behind measures adequate yearly progress is a very serious concern," Yeagley said. "It is not measuring the growth of students, rather it is comparing one group of students with the next group of students who may have different needs, abilities and backgrounds."

Superintendents, under Yeagley’s guidance, are proposing the state take a value-added approach to measuring adequate yearly progress.

With value-added assessment, students who have averaged 8 months’ progress per school year in past performance are expected to make 8 months’ progress each year in the future.

The method more fairly measures students based on their abilities instead of comparing them to a hypothetical average student.

"We are arguing that adequate yearly progress would be based on part of aggregated students growth instead of a cohort comparison. In other words, if our students are making progress from year to year, that should count more than one group is better than another group of students," Yeagley said.

However, the superintendents’ approach is not in line with the requirements of No Child Left Behind since value-added assessment does not set a standard for the students to achieve.

Democrat Staff Writer Bruno Matarazzo can be reached at 332-2200, Ext. 5024, or bmatarazzo@fosters.com

2003-01-15T08:22:00.000-08:00

Ethics
(1) The study and philosophy of human conduct with emphasis on the determination of right and wrong. (2) A system of morals.
Moral
(1) Based on probability; generalized human behavior. (2) Conforming to group standards of conduct.
Justice
(1) The rendering of what is due or merited. (2) Being impartial. (3) Honest or equitable.
Truth
(1) Conformity to requirements. (2) Faith in a statement's logic. (3) Conforming to a system of rules.

2003-01-14T19:30:00.000-08:00

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January 14, 2003
Old Words on War Stirring a New Dispute at Berkeley
By DEAN E. MURPHY

ERKELEY, Calif., Jan. 13 — In her own day, the Russian-born anarchist Emma Goldman roused emotions including considerable fear with her advocacy of radical causes like organized labor, atheism, sexual freedom and opposition to military conscription.

"Emma Goldman is a woman of great ability and personal magnetism, and her persuasive powers are such to make her an exceedingly dangerous woman," Francis Caffey, the United States attorney in New York, wrote in 1917.

Goldman died in 1940, more than two decades after being deported to Russia with other anarchists in the United States who opposed World War I. Now her words are the source of deep consternation once again, this time at the University of California, which has housed Goldman's papers for the past 23 years.

In an unusual showdown over freedom of expression, university officials have refused to allow a fund-raising appeal for the Emma Goldman Papers Project to be mailed because it quoted Goldman on the subjects of suppression of free speech and her opposition to war. The university deemed the topics too political as the country prepares for possible military action against Iraq.

In one of the quotations, from 1915, Goldman called on people "not yet overcome by war madness to raise their voice of protest, to call the attention of the people to the crime and outrage which are about to be perpetrated on them." In the other, from 1902, she warned that free-speech advocates "shall soon be obliged to meet in cellars, or in darkened rooms with closed doors, and speak in whispers lest our next-door neighbors should hear that free-born citizens dare not speak in the open."

Berkeley officials said the quotations could be construed as a political statement by the university in opposition to United States policy toward Iraq. Candace S. Falk, the director of the project and author of the appeal, acknowledged that the excerpts were selected because of their present-day resonance. But Dr. Falk said they reflected Goldman's views, not the university's policies.

Robert M. Price, the associate vice chancellor for research, said, "It wasn't from nowhere that these quotes randomly happened to fall on the page." Dr. Falk "was making a political point, and that is inappropriate in an official university solicitation," he said.

Dr. Price edited the fund-raising appeal, striking the two quotations. A third quotation — "the most violent element in society is ignorance" — was not removed. "We didn't think that was political," Dr. Price said. About 400 of the altered solicitation letters were mailed late last month.

The university's action has infuriated Dr. Falk and her small staff, who work out of a cramped former dentist's office a few blocks from campus. It has also raised concerns among scholars at similar documentary editing projects about academic freedom and free speech.

It was at Berkeley in 1964 that the free speech movement got its start when the administration tried to limit the political activities of students.

"I feel this is not the way the university either should or wants to operate," said Robert H. Hirst, general editor of the Mark Twain Project, another documentary editing project at Berkeley. "We just got through creating the Free Speech Cafe on campus, and we have a free speech archive. How many times does this have to happen at Berkeley before they learn?"

Roger Bruns, the acting executive director at the National Historical Publications and Records Commission, which is part of the National Archives in Washington, said he had never heard of a university objecting to a documentary editing project using quotations from its subject. The commission provides financing for 40 such projects, including some for the Goldman Project.

"If it were repeated a number of times, it would have a chilling effect," Mr. Bruns said.

In protest, Dr. Falk withheld the revised solicitation from most people on the project's mailing list of 3,000. She then had an alternative mailing printed at her own expense.

"You can't work on the Emma Goldman Papers Project and fold on something like this," said Dr. Falk, who sent out 60 of the new solicitations last week. "We just had to find a way to get this out."

Since 1980, the project's annual mailing for donations had included at least one quotation from Goldman, often with current events in mind, Dr. Falk said. After Sept. 11, the project sent out a bookmark with a one from 1912: "Out of the chaos, the future emerges in harmony and beauty."

Dr. Falk called the university's editing censorship and said it violated the spirit of Goldman's work, which emphasized freedom of expression. During a time when many universities depend heavily on government grants and contracts, she accused the Berkeley officials of worrying too much about crossing the Bush administration.

"Sadly it is the politics of scarcity and fear, that instead of opening up they have shut down," Dr. Falk said. "We are a group with a lot of integrity on a campus that has a lot of financial problems. We are like the canary in the mine."

Robert Cohen, an associate professor at New York University and a co-editor of a new book about the free speech movement said the university's action reminded him of the 1950's. At that time, Professor Cohen said, professors were barred from identifying themselves as employees when they participated in outside activities deemed political.

"This strikes me as being a sign of the times, that something has changed in the political climate and people are more tense in the administration," said Professor Cohen, who worked at the Goldman Project while in graduate school at Berkeley and remains a consulting editor.

Last Wednesday, Dr. Falk hand-delivered a five-page letter to the office of Chancellor Robert M. Berdahl that detailed her concerns.

Dr. Falk said she received a telephone call from the chancellor on Thursday in which she said he sympathized with her viewpoint. Though nothing changed as a result of the conversation, Dr. Falk said the chancellor assured her that "there would be no retaliation" against the Goldman Project for speaking out against the university's action.

George Strait, an assistant vice chancellor for public affairs, said that the decision to remove the quotations "did not rise to the chancellor level," but that Dr. Berdahl was aware of the dispute.

"He doesn't necessarily feel the two quotes make a direct political statement, but he understands how someone can infer that they do," Mr. Strait said.

Mr. Strait said the dispute was not a free speech issue. "Clearly Ms. Falk had one opinion on the best way to raise money for the Emma Goldman Papers Project, and the person with direct responsibility for supervising that project had another," he said. "At best, what we are talking about here is a difference of opinion between two people who are valued members of the Berkeley community."

Leon F. Litwack, a professor of history who until recently was the liaison between the administration and the Goldman Project, said the university's explanations did not ring true. In purely scholarly terms, Professor Litwack said, the project had the right to quote any of Goldman's works, so long as the excerpts were not abridged in a manner that altered the meaning.

As such, he said, Goldman's views already appear in many forms associated with the university — from university publications to high-school curriculum materials prepared by the project to an Internet site (http://sunsite.berkeley.edu/Goldman/) — but no one has suggested that they are an endorsement of Goldman's views by the university.

"It seems the administration is mocking freedom of expression by limiting it," Professor Litwack said. "The First Amendment belongs to no single group or ideology, but that message is often difficult to implement even at the University of California, Berkeley."

Dr. Price, the associate vice chancellor, said the central issue was not the content of Goldman's quotations.

"We are not saying these quotes should never appear anywhere in the publications of the Emma Goldman Papers Project, but that they are not appropriate in the context that Candace Falk put them in," he said. "She can disagree with us, but it is not a matter of the First Amendment."

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2003-01-12T12:04:00.000-08:00

January 12, 2003
Schools Ending Year Early to Cut Costs
By SAM DILLON

PORTLAND, Ore., Jan. 10 — Linda Pattison, a fourth-grade teacher here, uses her fingers to check off the lessons that she usually teaches but will skip this spring. Her pupils will not study the metric system in arithmetic, nor electricity in science. Nor will they read Oregon history in social studies.

Ms. Pattison, who has taught for 28 years, looks a bit shattered as she reviews her recent efforts to gut her classes.

"I can only compare this to my divorce," she said, and she is not alone in her stress. Teachers across Oregon are queasily checking lesson plans, deciding what not to teach as half the school districts in the state prepare to slash anywhere from a few days to more than a month from the school year to cut costs.

Thousands of America's districts are grappling with extraordinary midyear budget cuts as state governments face deficits that stem from falling tax revenues. Most are laying off bus drivers and cutting art classes and field trips, and educators say the havoc will be worse next year.

In California, where the law bars districts from laying off teachers after the year begins, schools are planning mass dismissals of janitors, cooks and other support workers to cope with $700 million in budget cuts.

But nowhere except Oregon have so many districts announced plans to severely shorten the academic year. The superintendent here, James R. Scherzinger, has ordered administrators to prepare to cut 15 days from the calendar, and he said that unless voters approve a tax increase in a referendum on Jan. 28, a prospect pollsters say is quite unlikely, he will urge a cut that totals 24 days.

Educational historians said this would be the first time in 70 years that many districts are closing schools far ahead of schedule. In the Depression, millions of workers lost work, government revenues crashed and thousands of districts shut early, the historians said.

"I find it remarkable to see this happening now, because although economic times are hard, this is nothing like the Great Depression," said Jeffrey E. Mirel, a historian and an associate dean of the University of Michigan School of Education. "To see large numbers of districts cutting weeks off the school year in times of mild but not severe recession is just unprecedented."

Oregon law permits districts to apply for waivers from minimum classroom instruction requirements, which are measured in hours and vary by grade level but are equivalent to 175 days. That has led about half the superintendents to propose cutting days from the calendar.

In most states, laws require a minimum of 180 instructional days. So hard-pressed districts are saving money in other ways.

"They're cutting personnel through attrition, suspending building plans, eliminating sports and other extracurricular activities, not cleaning their buildings," said David Griffith, a spokesman for the National Association of State Boards of Education.

Oklahoma cut school financing $158 million this year, or more than 8 percent. That left 1,000 students in Oklahoma City without bus service and some schools without custodians, said Carolyn Crowder, president of the Oklahoma Education Association, the teachers' union. If authorities do not find new financing by the middle of April, 5,000 of the 44,000 teachers in the state will be laid off before next fall, Ms. Crowder said.

In Alabama, too, a fiscal crisis has forced authorities to lay off school workers and to pare programs this year. Officials expect deeper cuts in September.

"Next year, we're going to see the worst budget for public education in 30 years," said Susan Salter, a spokeswoman for the Alabama Association of School Boards.

In Oregon, the crisis is unfolding now, partly because districts depend on state aid for a higher proportion of their financing, about 70 percent, than in other states. Because Oregon has no sales tax, it relies almost entirely on an income tax whose revenues have plummeted.

Oregon is in the last semester of a two-year budget that had originally allotted $5.2 billion to public schools. But as revenues have fallen, the 198 districts have reduced spending by $418 million. If voters reject the tax increase on Jan. 28, the districts will lose an additional $95 million, said the Legislative Fiscal Office.

Tim Hibbitts, a pollster here, offered little hope for the tax increase, saying surveys last month showed 55 to 60 percent opposed it. "I expect it to lose," Mr. Hibbitts said. "I would be very surprised if it won."

Whatever the outcome on Jan. 28, officials said, they have no choice but to truncate the school year.

"What we're proposing is extraordinary," Mr. Scherzinger said. "I don't agree with it myself. It's very destructive. But we've run out of alternatives."

He is negotiating the cuts with the union, which is threatening to strike.

Half the 100 districts that responded to a survey last month reported plans to shorten the school year, and 25 said the cuts would run 10 to 20 days.

In Portland, the school board has adopted other measures, including dismissing the entire force of 330 unionized janitors in the summer and last month canceling a popular outdoor sixth-grade science camp, as well as all spring athletics.

Damon Stoudamire, a graduate of the Portland schools who is on the Portland Trail Blazers basketball team, stepped in to donate $200,000. Other sports enthusiasts pledged similar amounts, saving spring athletics for this year, at least.

The crisis has called forth a cottage industry of volunteerism, with parents seeking to scrape together money in bake sales and auctions to restore art and music programs.

Michael E. Rosen, an environmental manager whose son Elias is a fourth grader, said he had helped his PTA collect $30,000 to hire an art instructor for Elias's school. But the news that the school year is being cut at least 15 days led to canceling the art classes, Mr. Rosen said.

"How could we take time for art when math classes are being axed?" he asked.

At Benson High School, a magnet school in the city center, Gail Black was trying to decide last week which novel to cut from her senior English class. "Huckleberry Finn" might have to go, Ms. Black said, or perhaps she would skip Hermann Hesse's "Siddhartha."

"How do you just eliminate several weeks' class work?" she asked. "I've never faced anything like this."

Cutting 15 days from the calendar would mean a pay cut of $5,000 for the most experienced teachers here, the veterans with master's degrees and other advanced credits whose top salary is $56,700, according to the union.

Sitting in her classroom at Llewellyn Elementary School, Ms. Pattison said she was battling bouts of depression as she watched the schools erode around her.

"It's been death by a thousand cuts," she said.

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2003-01-10T10:12:00.000-08:00

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January 10, 2003
Schools' Internet Subsidies Are Called Fraud-Riddled
By JOHN SCHWARTZ

he $2.25 billion E-Rate program has helped connect thousands of schools and libraries to the Internet, but it may also be enriching unscrupulous contractors, according to a report released yesterday.

The program is ‘‘honeycombed with fraud and financial shenanigans,’’ said the report from the Center for Public Integrity in Washington.

The report is in large part based on investigations by the Federal Communications Commission. ‘‘They found problems everywhere they’ve looked, and they haven’t looked very hard at this point,’’ said Bob Williams, the author of the report.

E-Rate, created in 1996 by Congress, offers subsidies of 20 percent to 90 percent for buying telecommunications services like Internet connection fees and wiring classrooms.

Under the program, paid from fees on telephone bills, the highest rates go to the poorest schools. The Universal Service Administrative Company in Washington runs program for the F.C.C. The company also administers programs to develop phone service in rural areas and impoverished communities.

The Center for Public Integrity issued its report after the announcement of the first criminal case related to E-Rate. Last month, federal prosecutors in New York accused an Internet service on Staten Island and three employees with conspiring to steal millions of dollars. Prosecutors said the defendants, who worked for Connect2 Internet Networks Inc., offered free service and equipment to many poor schools by lying, saying the schools had paid their share of the costs when they had not.

In this way,’’ the complaint said, ‘‘the defendants were able to sell almost limitless quantities of E-Rate eligible goods and services to schools across the New York City area, with little or no control on the price they charged, and impose the entire cost on the government.’’

The prosecutors added that from 1998 to 2001, Connect2 received more than $9 million under E-Rate.

A report released last fall by the inspector general of the F.C.C. found that E-Rate was ‘‘subject to unacceptably high risk of malfeasance through noncompliance and program weakness’’ and called for more money for auditing and oversight.

The inspector general’s office assigns two full-time auditors to the program, the report stated, and although other auditors move in and out of assignments, ‘‘this staffing is hard pressed to support our current workload.’’

Previous efforts to audit E-Rate have uncovered problems, but those efforts were limited in scope. A review of 22 schools by the Arthur Andersen accounting firm in 2001 found several million dollars in ‘‘inappropriate’’ payments and unsupported costs. Efforts to formulate a more thorough review were hampered by the collapse of Andersen after the Enron scandal.

A spokesman for the communications commission said officials were taking the inspector general’s report seriously.

The F.C.C. is looking hard at the resource issue,’’ the spokesman said, ‘‘and is going to be taking all steps necessary to deal with any problems.’’ At Universal Service Administrative, a spokesman, Mel Blackwell, said problems were showing up precisely because the company and the commission had been reviewing contracts that they believed were high risk and that dated from the early days of the program.

Most people are honest,’’ Mr. Blackwell said. If someone is dishonest, he said, ‘‘do we look the other way? No.’’ From the beginning, E-Rate has been unpopular with many Republican lawmakers, who called it the ‘‘Gore tax,’’ and phone companies. Supporters of the program said scandals should be seen in the broader context.

Any waste or abuse should be thoroughly investigated and prosecuted to the fullest extent possible,’’ said Lynne Bradley, director of government relations for the American Library Association.

The program, Ms. Bradley added, has faced such exacting scrutiny from its critics that its rates of fraud and abuse would probably turn out to be less widespread than the Center for Public Integrity suggested.

The full picture isn’t going to look like this sampling,’’ she predicted. A commissioner of the Federal Communications Commission, Michael J. Copps, said: ‘‘If there is fraud and abuse, root it out. But let’s not ignore the benefits that this program has brought to our children, our communities and our nation.’’

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2002-12-30T12:33:00.000-08:00

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column left by Robert Scheer

Is She Dr. Laura or Dr. Strange Love?
[posted online on December 24, 2002]

Some family values. Your 77-year-old mother lies dead and decomposing for two months in a condominium not far from the radio complex where you sternly hector millions about how to live a moral life while attacking those who "deviate."

And you never bothered once to inquire how your own mom was doing? Maybe send a minion over to knock on the door once in a while? For two months, the mail piled up, the condo fees went unpaid, and you, successful syndicated radio advice guru "Dr. Laura" Schlessinger, never noticed these and other worrying signs that, as the police suggested, your mother may have been murdered?

Of course, when you finally found out, after the building manager called the police, you were "horrified by the tragic circumstances" of her death.

But was it really appropriate to add, self-servingly, that she "died as she chose to live, alone and isolated." You said, "My mother shut all her family out of her life over the years, though we made several futile attempts to stay connected."

Those are not kind words to speak of one's dead mother. Ties it all in a neat little bow, doesn't it? Italian-born Yolanda Schlessinger was "Sophia Loren-like," and you found her difficult. In a 1998 interview, you claim a childhood "that would curl your hair."

Welcome to reality: Good family values don't come easily. Problem is, you've made it sound as if they do. You are one of the leading conservative sloganeers who arrogantly claim a lock on the moral high ground while deriding those, such as homosexuals, who dare to "deviate" from your "norm." Using the title "doctor," earnedi n physiology rather than medicine or psychology, has lent a false credibility to your depictions of homosexuality as a "biological error," a "dysfunction" and a "deviancy"--words that encourage hate crimes.

Worse, honoring and caring for one's parents is at the heart of your philosophy, as spelled out in your own presumptuous 1998 book, The 10 Commandments: The Significance of God's Laws in Everyday Life. You wrote: "God's commandment of honoring parents is basically the message that parents are a conduit of God. Any profanity or harm to the parent is as if we've profaned God."

You wrote, "By honoring our parents, we learn to honor God. By honoring God we become decent human beings."

You obviously failed that test. "Even bad parents deserve to be honored if only at a minimal level," you wrote. Thus surely "honor thy father and thy mother" intends something more than letting a septuagenarian woman go months at a time without even a drive-by visit from her daughter.

You also wrote: "There is often a profound unwillingness to give anything to a parent perceived as being unloving or undeserving.... That avoidance is part of the mentality that says, 'If it doesn't obviously serve me, I won't do it and I shouldn't have to!' " Apparently, that is your mentality.

But you, whose shallow perceptions are laced with bursts of meanness and contempt for others, will no doubt continue as a hot media product and a darling of the religious conservatives. "A positive voice for positive values without equal in our time," gushed the Rev. Robert Schuller.

What can we draw from all this? That family relationships are exceedingly complicated and often painful. That maintaining true "family values" is not a matter simply of attending church, being heterosexual and mouthing platitudes, but demands humility, resiliency and deep compassion. That religious texts like the Bible can provide inspiring lessons in the hands of sincere teachers and also can be used as clubs by the cynical and ambitious.

And finally, that the "Dr. Laura" show typifies the dangerous hypocrisy of those who build profitable and politically potent empires on the basis of claiming a monopoly on simplistic answers to complex problems. The guilt and shame they induce in those who might resist their nostrums is loathsome, made more so when they themselves so casually ignore them.

2002-11-27T09:52:00.000-08:00

washingtonpost.com
New Education Rules Criticized
U.S. Inflexible on 'No Child Left Behind' Act, States Contend

By Michael A. Fletcher
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, November 27, 2002; Page A02

The Department of Education yesterday issued final regulations for the No Child Left Behind education law, but representatives of state school systems said the rules that will govern enforcement of the federal initiative still may result in far too many of the nation's public schools designated as failures.

State school boards and others have been lobbying federal education officials to build new flexibility into the regulations that accompany the law, which has been alternately hailed for setting a long-overdue national educational standard and criticized as the biggest federal intrusion ever into local education.

Critics said the new regulations do not significantly loosen provisions that require states to show consistent improvement in student achievement across racial, ethnic and socioeconomic categories. The law requires that all students make steady progress on state standardized reading and math tests until they reach proficiency. Schools have 12 years to bring all students up to the proficient level.

"There is a concern among states that this is really setting up a system where the states are going to be hard pressed not to fail, at least at the beginning of the law's implementation," said Kristen Tosh Cowan, a lawyer with Brustein and Manasevit, a Washington firm that represents scores of state education departments and large local school systems.

Cowan said the biggest concern among her clients is that student subgroups, including disabled students and those who speak English as a second language, may not be able to meet the initial proficiency goals set out in the law.

"I don't think there is enough flexibility there," said Reg Weaver, president of the National Education Association, the nation's largest teachers union. "This is something that will need monitoring and revising."

Schools that do not show steady progress toward the proficiency goals face serious consequences, including requirements that they offer students tutoring by private firms or allow them to attend other public schools. If schools fail to improve after several years, they can eventually be closed and reopened with new missions and staffs, or converted into charter schools.

Education officials said that demanding steady, across-the-board improvement in standardized test scores is the only way to preserve the intent of the measure, which President Bush signed into law in January.

"We know the goal of achieving genuine education reform will only be met with the insight gleaned from measurement of student and school progress toward high academic standards," Education Secretary Roderick R. Paige said in a statement. "Only if we hold schools and school districts accountable for the improved achievement of all students will we meet the goal of leaving no child behind."

The new regulations cover a wide range of provisions included in the law, including rules that govern how school systems must provide school choice opportunities to students who attend failing schools. The regulations make clear that private tutors must accommodate disabled students and students with limited English skills.

A provision that will allow states to report dropout rates as gross averages, rather than by racial and socioeconomic subgroups, was criticized by Rep. George Miller (Calif.), the senior Democrat on the House Education and Workforce Committee. He said that system will "mask" dropout rates of black and Hispanic students.

The No Child Left Behind Act was passed by Congress last year with bipartisan support, but that initial comity has deteriorated into a volley of charges and countercharges between Democrats and Republicans over the amount of money the federal government should invest to support school reform.

The bill was accompanied by a significant increase in federal education funding, but the proposed appropriation for the current federal fiscal year contemplates much smaller increases. Many Democrats have complained that the Bush administration is not living up to its commitment to provide new resources to help schools improve.

© 2002 The Washington Post Company

2002-11-27T08:56:00.000-08:00

Dan Walters: As budget crisis deepens, school spending is on the line
By Dan Walters -- Bee Columnist
Published 2:15 a.m. PDT Sunday, November 24, 2002
The Capitol was stunned when the Legislature's budget office this month forecast a staggering $21 billion deficit over the next 19 months.

Gov. Gray Davis upped the ante, at least rhetorically, on Thursday when he declared, after talking with legislative leaders: "We believe the $21 billion shortfall is on the low side. They can assume the $21 billion number will go up."

Publicly, Davis did not say how far up, but administration number crunchers, it has been learned, have concluded that with revenues continuing to decline and an economic upturn on hold, the state now faces a problem in the $30 billion range over the next 19 months, nearly 50 percent higher than the legislative figure.

Davis will publicly lay out the depth of the crisis early next month and propose to lawmakers a $5 billion spending reduction, aimed at getting a jump on this fiscal Armageddon. Davis, it's also been learned, will take that first bite largely out of the schools, proposing that the state take back a $1.9 billion "overappropriation" of funds under the state's law specifying how much of its revenue stream must go to education. As revenues decline, the state's legal obligation to schools also is falling.

Over the remainder of the current 2002-03 fiscal year and all of the 2003-04 year, recapturing the school money would save $3.8 billion, and an additional $700 million in school funds may also be on the block. Thus, public education, which has been the most sacrosanct of major budget categories, is likely to take the first hit -- illustrating both the worsening nature of the crisis and the complicated politics of dealing with it.

That Davis even talked with Republicans about the situation is, unto itself, an indication that the balance of power is shifting in the Capitol. During the campaign, the budget Davis signed in September was ridiculed by Republican challenger Bill Simon, who suggested that the state could face another $20 billion shortfall. Simon fell short of unseating Davis, but Republicans did pick up several seats in the Legislature, and several GOP lawmakers considered to be malleable on the budget, dubbed "squishes" by their more conservative colleagues, are retiring. Thus, the Republicans' hand on the budget has been strengthened.

Republicans are adopting, at least initially, a no-new-taxes posture and are content to allow Davis to propose budget solutions. He, in turn, is pleading for bipartisan cooperation. "This problem is so big that it behooves all of us to set aside our ideological preconceptions," he said.

If the deficit does, in fact, move into the $30 billion range, the conflict over spending cuts and possible new taxes will become even more intense -- and more complicated than simply Democrats vs. Republicans, because various interest groups will be fighting each other over whose allocations will be hit the hardest.

While the governor will not propose new taxes in December, it's likely that the Democrat-dominated Legislature will repeal the deep cuts in vehicle license fees that California motorists have enjoyed recently. It could be done without Republican votes. Full repeal would place $4 billion a year in the revenue pot and if it's done quickly, perhaps an additional billion dollars could be recaptured during the current fiscal year. The anticipated school spending whack and the vehicle license fee boost together would reduce the deficit by about $10 billion.

But what then? Democrats want higher cigarette taxes and income taxes on high-income Californians, but even their enactment -- by no means a certainty -- would reduce the problem by less than $5 billion. Would sales taxes be raised as well? A penny of sales tax would raise $4 billion a year. Could school money, nearly 50 percent of the state budget, be slashed even further? Would lawmakers roll back the generous pay raises and pensions they've given out to powerful public worker groups, such as correctional officers? Will college and university fees be raised sharply? Will local governments, which are weak politically, take another big hit as they did a decade ago? Can Democrats protect their new health programs for the working poor?

This is about as big a political headache as one could imagine, a perfect storm -- and could even get worse.

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2002-11-27T08:50:00.000-08:00

Dan Walters: Long budget crisis looms as big test for spending interests
By Dan Walters -- Bee Columnist
Published 2:15 a.m. PST Tuesday, November 26, 2002
There is, as someone once observed, nothing like imminent disaster to focus the mind. And with California facing budget deficits of almost incalculable proportions, those who depend on the state for sustenance -- local government and school officials, health-care providers, public workers, etc. -- are focusing on what promises to be years of gut-wrenching political infighting.

Even if proposed tax increases are enacted, and that's by no means certain, they will cover only a portion of the projected deficits -- upwards of $100 billion over the next half decade -- and inevitably, that will mean deep spending cuts. How deep is anyone's guess, but there's no doubt that tens of billions of dollars will have to be slashed, and that process will pit budgetary interest groups against one another.

Even schools, which have enjoyed high political standing and extraordinary legal protections, will be touched by the crisis -- and soon. Gov. Gray Davis' budget advisers have concluded that the state faces a whopping $30 billion deficit just in the next 19 months, and he's virtually certain to propose a $4 billion-plus slash in school spending as a down payment.

Members of the powerful education coalition -- unions, administrators and school boards -- are already discussing whether to simply oppose reducing school spending or accept some compromise that might include a loosening of state strings on how school money can be spent. And that, in turn, could produce a rare rupture within the coalition as unions try to protect salary money and job security, and school boards and administrators seek more flexibility to cut jobs, combine services and-or freeze salaries.

At the same time, the education coalition may be discovering that its overall political standing may have declined. Davis once described education as his "first, second and third priorities" and backed that with billions of dollars. Indeed, one of the reasons the state finds itself in trouble is the approximately $10 billion in extra money -- above the legally required floor -- that the schools received when the state was enjoying a windfall of revenues.

But Davis' relations with the huge, well-heeled California Teachers Association have eroded, and his evident willingness to make his initial budget cuts in the schools is one signal that education's untouchable status has faded. By word and deed, the liberal Democrats who dominate the Legislature have indicated that they consider health care and other forms of aid for the poor to be a higher priority than schools. There's little doubt that the state's health-care system is in big trouble, largely for financial reasons, and many providers, especially those serving the poor, could be propelled into bankruptcy by any significant reduction in state health spending.

K-12 schools, public higher education, prisons, and health and welfare services (most of which are operated by county governments) account for three-fourths of the state's general fund, and by definition, therefore, any serious spending reductions must touch those categories. Advocates of each will battle among themselves for pieces of the shrinking pie, and the outcome will, inevitably, hinge on which "community" does the most competent job of making its case to the public and lobbying the governor and the Legislature.

The education coalition's influence may be waning a bit, but it remains a very powerful political force due to its unity, its high public standing, its campaign money and its vigorous, well-connected corps of lobbyists. The medical-care community has been less unified, often squabbling within itself over money and other issues, but enjoys the emotional support of liberal legislators. The California Correctional Peace Officers Association, which represents prison correctional officers, has established itself as one of the Capitol's most potent interest groups, tirelessly and effectively getting more laws to lock up more felons, more prisons, more guards and, most recently, higher salaries. Politically, the most vulnerable are local governments and community colleges, both of which have taken major hits in state financing during past fiscal crises because of that weakness.

If nothing else, the worst state budget crisis of all time will prove conclusively who really counts in the Capitol and who doesn't.

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2002-11-27T08:45:00.000-08:00

November 27, 2002
New Federal Rule Tightens Demands on Failing SchoolsBy DIANA JEAN SCHEMO

ASHINGTON, Nov. 26 — Children attending public schools deemed failing under a new federal law have to be offered transfers to better schools, regardless of whether those schools are already full, according to final regulations released today by the federal Education Department.

The new regulations, which are more stringent than expected, could leave hundreds of districts scrambling for alternative places for children who want to transfer out of poorly functioning schools.

The new regulations do not oblige school districts to adopt specific solutions. At a news conference here today, Education Department officials said that schools might consider signing contracts with neighboring districts to accept students from failing schools, hiring more teachers or building new classrooms at more successful schools.

But critics suggested the administration was quietly paving the way for vouchers to private schools as the answer when districts could come up with nothing else. In earlier discussions of the new law, known as No Child Left Behind, officials had said there would be one acceptable reason for denying children transfers: lack of capacity in good schools. But in today's regulations, federal officials eliminated that excuse.

The federal government declares a school to be failing when students in any category — black, Latino, special education or those with limited English — fail to close the achievement gap on standardized tests two years in a row.

Taken together, the final regulations amount to a sweeping effort on the part of the government to change the way Americans think of education, acknowledged Eugene W. Hickok, the department's undersecretary.

"Public school choice and supplemental services should be part of how we see public education in America," Dr. Hickok said.

He denied, however that the regulations were meant to reintroduce vouchers, which President Bush pressed for briefly at the start of his administration. "That came off the table pretty quickly; it has not come back on the table," Dr. Hickok said. "The agenda is not hidden, it's obvious. It's producing better schools.

"The law creates this opportunity, and human nature being what it is, as more and more people understand it, there's going to be growing demand to take advantage of those opportunities and the response cannot be simply, `Sorry we don't have room,' " Dr. Hickok added. "That will produce real frustration."

Critics, however, contend that the Education Department's regulations are aimed at creating conditions that would make the case for private school vouchers, as school districts with many subpar schools and few empty seats at better schools fail to deliver on the law's promise.

"They're saying that parental choice is the supreme good, and everything has to give way to it," said Jack Jennings of the Center on Educational Policy. "It sends a signal that, hell or high water, the federal government's requirements override everything else, and it's not just what the Congress wrote, but what the Education Department thinks it should say."

The law, as signed by President Bush last January, was not entirely clear regarding school choice. It promised children in schools that failed to make adequate progress the option to transfer to a more successful school, but it also said priority should go to the poorest children in the worst performing schools.

Up to 20 percent of a school district's Title I money — earmarked for impoverished schools — would have to go for transportation out of failing schools and for private tutoring of the children who stayed in the struggling schools.

In discussions last summer, when some 8,600 schools around the country were identified as failing, Education Department officials said that the only valid reason for denying children transfers was a lack of capacity, which officials defined as physical limitations to comply with fire and safety regulations. Local initiatives to limit class sizes, as well as federal desegregation orders, would have to take a back seat to the new education law, officials said.

Today's regulations went further, saying that No Child Left Behind "does not permit" a local school district "to preclude choice options on the basis of capacity constraints," and that all children attending failing schools have the right to transfer out. Education Department officials contend that overcrowding at a school is a valid reason for denying a student admission to that school, but not for denying pupils the right to transfer to other successful schools.

Nevertheless, educators around the country were uncertain how the law would be carried out if many parents opted to move their children. Recent surveys have shown that roughly half of all parents have never heard of the new law, and many more are unaware of the specific promises it makes for children to escape failing schools.

Last September, few school districts offered all children in failing schools the option to transfer, and few parents sought it.

With time, the law is expected to result in vast numbers of schools being designated as failing. In a recent interview, Sandy Kress, a lawyer who represented the White House in drafting the law and who now advises states on carrying it out, predicted that 50 to 90 percent of the schools in some states might be found inadequate.

That is because schools must show that all kinds of students, including those in special education or with little English, have improved on standardized tests. The law also requires that schools make substantial progress toward closing the gap between racial minorities and white students to avoid failure.

One aspect of the new law that remains unclear is how school districts would finance the changes.

"It's totally unfair to expect schools to perform without adequate resources," said Reg Weaver, president of the National Education Association, the country's largest teachers union. "It's next to impossible."

Supporters of vouchers and charter school said they were pleased with the regulations.

Jeanne Allen, president of the Center for Education Reform, predicted that the regulations would produce "constructive chaos."

"You've got awareness of options, frustration that there aren't enough options, and more awareness of failing schools," she said. "That combined with the fact that in some states we have completely new legislatures that are more reform-minded may spark them to look into capacity as an issue, and creating more supply."

The final regulations also upheld an earlier draft that said teachers in fast-track alternative certification programs could be considered "highly qualified," even before they finished their training. Following criticism that these programs vary in quality, the regulations specify that the teacher programs must provide "sustained, intensive and classroom-focused" training to meet the law.

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2002-11-09T12:36:00.000-08:00

Story location: http://www.wired.com/news/business/0,1367,55686,00.html

02:00 AM Oct. 10, 2002 PT

The battered Argentine economy has spawned a new type of television game show: Instead of competing for frost-free refrigerators or Caribbean cruises, contestants vie for jobs.

In Argentina, where unemployment has jumped to a record 21.5 percent, Recursos Humanos (Human Resources) is aired every evening at 7 p.m. and gets twice the ratings as the soap opera it replaced.

It works like this: Two candidates are pre-selected to appear on the program, where they undergo a series of quizzes and interviews to determine their levels of skill and desperation. The jobs they compete for tend to be blue-collar positions, such as cashiers or mechanics, and home viewers call in to vote for their favorite candidates.

The winner gets a yearlong contract with benefits, and the runner-up gets free medical care for six months.

The international rights to the show were acquired earlier this week by Sony Pictures Television International, according to Variety. Sony did not return a call for comment.

The show is controversial. Some charge that winners are picked based on the merits of their sob stories or their physical appearance, and not on their qualifications. Contestants tell tales of being unemployed and forced to dig through trashcans to collect plastic bottles to turn in for cash at recycling facilities.

Others say that watching people grovel for low-paying jobs -– unemployment as entertainment -- is just plain undignified.

"I think it unjustly takes advantage of people's desperation," said Sergio Cossa, a computer systems analyst from Buenos Aires. "Seeing these people making money off the (economic) situation puts me in a bad mood, and I don't watch it."

But Argentina's Channel 13, which airs the program, says it's helping people overcome the economic crisis –- one job at a time.

"Recursos Humanos tries to bring solutions to one of the gravest problems confronting society: unemployment," a synopsis on Channel 13's website says.

2002-10-26T22:13:00.000-07:00

Nat Hentoff
The High-Stakes Testing Trap
Rising Standards, Rising Dropouts
October 25th, 2002 5:30 PM

The best schools are not necessarily those that score highest, but rather those that achieve the greatest improvement of their individual students. Only if we look at the schools by this measure can we evaluate the efficiency of the curriculum and teaching methods they employ. —Andrew Wolf, The New York Sun, October 4–6
The performance of the city's schools will determine whether a chasm separates a privileged elite from masses of underemployed and unemployed. —Richard Parsons, CEO, AOL Time Warner, The New York Times, December 30, 2001

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On January 10, 2001, New York State Supreme Court Justice Leland DeGrasse predicted what a new city schools chancellor would be facing:

"The majority of the city's public school students leave high school unprepared for more than low-paying work, unprepared for college, and unprepared for the duties placed upon them by a democratic society. The schools have broken a covenant with students and with society."

DeGrasse ruled in Campaign for Fiscal Equity v. State of New York that the state, in its inequitable financing of the school system, was violating the state constitution's requirement of a sound basic education. That decision was overruled by the Appellate Division of the state Supreme Court, to the public pleasure of Governor Pataki. Sometime next year, the Court of Appeals, our highest court, will decide whether Justice DeGrasse was whistling in the wind.

In March of this year, Raymond Domanico of the Industrial Areas Foundation (founded by legendary grassroots organizer Saul Alinsky) issued State of the New York City Public Schools 2002, published by the Manhattan Institute. Among the statistics: "Only 44 percent of black students, and only 39 percent of Hispanic students, complete high school within four years." (Actually, the Hispanic percentage is 41.3.)

The great majority of this city's public school students are either black (34.8 percent) or Hispanic (37.8 percent).

There is no question that the new chancellor, Joel Klein, is utterly committed to making the system work; but he, like more and more students, is falling into the high-stakes testing trap. On September 25, in a front-page story, The New York Times reported: "Raising test scores should be the paramount goal of city educators, Mr. Klein said, because they are the only uniform way of measuring student performance."

But students are not uniform, and neither are teachers.

Klein also told The New York Sun (September 25) that he wasn't worried about teachers' "teaching to the test. . . . It is the way our system is measured. This is a system of accountability and we need to conform our efforts."

On September 24, Klein's choice for deputy chancellor of instruction, Diana Lam, was quoted in the Daily News as saying that the new administration's goal was to give every child an "excellent" education, with every student meeting state and city standards on reading and math tests.

As more and more students fail these high-stakes tests in the lower grades, and are nonetheless "socially" promoted in large numbers to fail further high-stakes tests, the dropout rates keep rising. According the New York City Department of Education's Assessment and Accountability office, of the students who have been graduated in four years, these are the recent dropout percentages: 1998: 15.6; 1999: 17.5; 2000: 19.3; 2001: 20.4.

That last figure means 13,392 students. Of students who, for various reasons did not graduate in four years but are still tracked in the system, the dropout rate at the end of seven years is 30 percent.

Meanwhile, as The New York Times reported on October 2, "the academic standards [the state] imposes on students continue to climb. Seniors hoping to graduate next spring will have to pass five state Regents exams, not four. The year after that, they will have to pass three of the exams with a score of 65, instead of 55. By 2005, all five exams will have a passing grade of 65, even though more than 20 percent of seniors fell short of that benchmark in 2001, the last year for which data is available."

First of all, is Joel Klein going to finally end social promotion, which places more and more students in quicksand? Second, with looming state and city budget crises, where is the money coming from to bring students up to these higher promotion standards? And what are his detailed plans for intensive system-wide remedial classes that will have to be small to be effective? And are there enough teachers with the skills to make up for all the other teachers in the system who failed these students below?

Klein, however, is already making a significant mistake by deciding to give superintendents bonuses of up to $40,000 based on improved test scores in their districts. Before that, principals have been getting $15,000 bonuses for higher test scores in their schools. But what of those many kids who will still fail the tests? The only bonuses should be for individual teachers who actually make a difference. The United Federation of Teachers opposes this.

In the October 14 New York Post, Carl Campanile and Leah Haines report on 12 drastically failing schools in the State Education Department's ominous list of Schools Under Registration Review.

Among them: Junior High School 258 in Bedford-Stuyvesant: "a staggering 99 percent of eighth-graders flunked the math exam and 92 percent flunked the English test." And PS 92 in Harlem: "92 percent of students failed to meet math standards."

The Post notes that Klein has put in new administrators and programs since state visits to those schools in January and February. But with budget cuts coming, he remains subdued on the Court of Appeals case to raise financing standards for all the failing schools.

When kids in other dead-end schools become seniors—those who get that far—will there have been enough funds and enough exceptionally resourceful teachers throughout New York's system to significantly curb the dropout rates?

Klein sees the future as what he calls "Children First: A New Agenda for Public Education in New York City." He ought to read "Predictable Casualties" in the October 2 Education Week (edweek.org). Time is short, young lives are long.

2002-09-25T20:16:00.000-07:00

Business Financed Corporate Authoritarianism

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September 25, 2002
If Test Scores of Students Swell, So May Superintendents' Wallets
By ABBY GOODNOUGH

ew York City school superintendents will receive bonuses of up to $40,000 — about a quarter of their base salaries — if test scores in their districts significantly improve this year, Schools Chancellor Joel I. Klein said yesterday.

Raising test scores should be the paramount goal of city educators, Mr. Klein said, because they are the only uniform way of measuring student performance. He also left open the door for providing merit bonuses to teachers, an idea that former Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani had pushed hard but the teachers' union had attacked on the contention that it would create a divisive atmosphere.

"It's the way most systems of accountability and reward work in America," Mr. Klein said, "and we want to make sure that those rewards are here for people who really outperform and create the kinds of results that we really demand for our children."

Some critics expect, however, that the bonuses will be difficult to win, especially in the highest- and lowest-performing districts.

The pilot program, financed by a group of business executives, is the latest example of a troubled school system experimenting with a corporate approach, a practice that has spread as more business leaders take the helms of school systems. Mr. Klein, the former chief executive of Bertelsmann Inc., has suggested that he wants the school system to operate more like a private business. His predecessor, Harold O. Levy, a former lawyer for Citigroup, tried to do the same, although critics complain that Mr. Levy was ultimately too easy on the school bureaucracy.

Around the nation, school systems are experimenting with merit bonuses in hopes of motivating teachers and school administrators to improve student performance.

Denver introduced a form of merit pay for teachers in 1999, and experimental programs are under way in other states — California, Florida, North Carolina, Georgia and Iowa, to name a few. Some of the programs elsewhere reward principals and superintendents, and many are focused on providing bonuses to every teacher in a school whose test scores rise.

New York City already has a systemwide bonus program for principals, which their union agreed to in December 1999 as part of a landmark contract that gave principals a 33 percent raise, ended tenure and eliminated their traditional two-month summer vacation. The system gives bonuses to principals mainly on the basis of whether their schools place in the top 25 percent in student improvement on standardized tests among demographically similar schools across the city.

Last spring, the city awarded $13.5 million in merit pay to 1,368 principals, assistant principals and other administrators on the basis of their schools' test scores in 2000-01. The bonuses ranged from $2,750 to $15,000. The union representing the city's 1,200 principals has complained that the system is unfair, because principals of schools with abysmal scores can and sometimes do get higher bonuses than principals of high-performing schools, simply because there is less room for improvement at the top.

Mr. Klein acknowledged yesterday that the system for awarding principals' bonuses might be flawed, but he said he liked the underlying philosophy. Jill Levy, the president of the principals' union, said yesterday that she hoped Mr. Klein would change the formula.

"It's already in our contract, it's going to stay there unless something monumental happens, so it's a question of working out the process," Ms. Levy said. "We would rather see a model like what he's doing for the superintendents instead of this competitive process that pigeonholes people into cohorts that don't even make sense."

The New York City Partnership, a coalition of business executives, has donated $600,000 for the one-year pilot program, which Mr. Klein said he would continue if he liked the results. Mr. Klein said he approached the partnership with the idea. The group financed similar bonuses for principals and teachers in two Brooklyn school districts from 1998 to 2001.

Kathryn Wylde, the group's president, said student performance in both districts generally improved during the experiment, while test scores fell in some districts with similar student populations.

Ms. Wylde said corporate and individual donors had contributed $11 million for the Brooklyn experiment, which involved District 19 in East New York and District 23 in Ocean Hill-Brownsville. Only $4 million of that went into bonuses, she said, partly because the school system began picking up the tab for principals' and assistant principals' bonuses last year. Most of the money went toward training and recruiting teachers, she added.

Ms. Wylde said the New York City Partnership decided to end the program last year because principals systemwide had begun getting bonuses. She said that while her group would finance the first year of superintendent bonuses with leftover money from the Brooklyn experiment, the school system would have to pay for the program if it was made permanent.

Under the system that Mr. Klein has devised, the 32 district superintendents will be measured by the percentage of students in their schools moving to a higher performance level on standardized tests. (There are four levels, and most New York City districts have large numbers of students in the bottom two levels.) The base for comparison will be the district's average rate of improvement over the previous three years.

Superintendents will be eligible for bonuses of $6,000 to $32,000, depending on how steep and uniform their districts' improvements are, across the achievement levels. They can get an extra $8,000 if their districts meet targets in other areas, like attendance and recruitment.

For high school superintendents, the bonuses will be based on improvement in the number of students scoring 65 or higher on the Regents exams in English and math. If a district's dropout rate decreases by at least a fifth, the superintendent will be eligible for a higher bonus.

Randi Weingarten, president of the union representing the city's 80,000 teachers, issued a polite but decidedly lukewarm statement about the plan. She noted that the superintendents, most of whom earn $152,000 a year, were already the highest-paid people in the system besides the chancellor and some of his top aides.

Arthur Greenberg, a former superintendent in Queens, said it would be extremely hard for high-performing districts to improve enough to get the bonuses, since their students are already scoring near the top. Mr. Greenberg, now a New York University professor, also said the bonus plan gave the false impression that superintendents were not working hard enough.

"The problem is not that these people haven't been offered enough money," he said. "There are issues at work in some of those districts that go far beyond setting expectations and being clever."

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2002-09-23T09:02:00.000-07:00

Critical thinking banished from education - for ‘good’ reason
By Joanne Forman

Educere: Latin, ‘to lead out.’

And education should not only lead students through the learning of skills, but also expose them to the wide world in all its infinite variety. Education should encourage growth and critical thinking, and preparation for participation in citizenship.

But is that your memory of schlepping through the public school system?

Probably not. Like me you probably figured out long since that the real purpose, never stated, is to teach kids to grow up to tolerate boredom and authority. Anything else is extra. If students run into a teacher who cares passionately about English, history, science, carpentry, they’re fortunate.

Various pundits suggest various reforms. But few get down to the nitty-gritty: all education systems serve the needs of the ruling class – and that¹s not us.

One who gets it pretty much the way it is is John T. Gatto, a longtime teacher who resigned to become a lecturer and author. In “Dumbing Us Down: The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling,” he points out that “They¹re about creating a fit between the social order and the economy and the next generation.”

Goals of education have varied over the ages. For most of human history most humanity had no formal education. This ensured they would not be in a position to compete with their “betters.”

Females were guaranteed exclusion. That education might cause “uppiness” was well understood in the pre-Civil War South, where it was illegal to teach a slave to read.

However, no human system is a monolith, and education is no exception.

As the USA gained its independence and expanded, there was the growing notion that education should be available to the common man so he could become a responsible citizen.

Too, as the industrial system expanded, especially after the Civil War, new demands arose. Modern industry demanded people with new skills and new abilities – but not so educated that they¹d start thinking and asking uncomfortable questions. It was and is a nice problem for the bosses.

Gatto makes a persuasive case that the U.S. has, not surprisingly, imported useful elements of the British class system.

“There’s been a virtual recreation of the British class system here. There is no ‘we.’ This is a layered class society and the rewards are meted out mostly … according to your class position.”

Gatto goes on to provide some provocative information:

“Out of the 50 million or so school kids, about 42,000 of them go to 280 top-tier boarding schools…. In the 2000 presidential election, four of the finalists and the two winners of the major party nominations came from the top 20 of these elite private boarding schools…. George Bush went to Andover, Gore went to St. Alban’s, John McCain went to Episcopal, Steve Forbes went to Brooks…. [Earlier] both Roosevelts went to Groton, John Kennedy went to Choate.”

Of course, these prep schools and Ivy League colleges like Harvard, Yale, Princeton do not say, “We¹re teaching you how to rule and serve rulers.” They also allow enough scholarship students to slip in so the myth can be maintained that anyone can rise by individual effort out of his class and become a servant of the masters. Or even a master himself.

As for the rest of the population, various methods ebb and flow as the history of the nation wends on.

Even as far back as the time of educator Horace Mann (1796-1859) there was passionate discussion about which model should be chosen for the common schools arising in New England. The Prussian model won out, which, as one can imagine, was not exactly nonauthoritarian.

Since then, various methods of tracking, testing and (in higher education) admission policies have been worked out.

Today, any pretense of nurturing thoughtful citizens has been discarded. “Compete!” is the watchword, and the only word. The lone individual against every other human being, and the only path is over the bodies of everyone else.

But again, the system is not a monolith. In nursery school, kindergarten and primary school we¹re told, “Share. Work with others. Take your turn.”

But as students go on it¹s “Compete!” They must learn to spew out “correct” answers on tests or be doomed to “low” status and exclusion from the American Dream of going into debt to shop til you drop.

However well-meaning the educators are, the education system must always reflect the needs of the economic system. To achieve a people-centered education system we need a people-centered economic system.

Return to NUP Literature

2002-08-23T14:33:00.000-07:00

A Flow Chart is now a curriculum map? Why not call it a ladder of logic or a maybe a narrative. Huh? The mystification of the educational process continues as we pretend to be scientific and accountable. This like many educational fads has some substance, but mostly is designed to accomodate the command and control structure of a school district that has supervisors that can't teach, therefore can't help develop young teachers.
What is a Concept Map?

Similar to an outline or a flowchart, a concept map is a way of representing or organizing knowledge. However, a concept map goes beyond the typical outline in that concept maps show relationships between concepts, including bi-directional relationships. Usually, a concept map is divided into nodes and links. Nodes (often circles)represent various concepts; and links (lines) represent the relationships (propositions) between concepts (Lanzing, 1997 ). Words are used to label the links in order to more explicitly depict relationships (Anderson-Inman & Zeitz, 1994 ).

Once completed, the concept map is a visual graphic that represents how the creator(s) thinks about a subject, topic, etc. It illustrates how knowledge is organized for the individual. In sum, "concept maps are two-dimensional representations of cognitive structures showing the hierarchies and the interconnections of concepts involved in a discipline or a subdiscipline" ( Martin, 1994, p.11 ).

Concept maps were first used by Joseph D. Novak of Cornell University in the 1960s (Lanzing ). Concept maps have their origin in the learning movement called constructivism. In particular, constructivists hold that prior knowledge is used as a framework to learn new knowledge. In essence, how we think influences how and what we learn. Concept maps identify the way we think, the way we see relationships between knowledge. Concept maps can thus illustrate faulty views individuals may have and help us better understand how students may construe meanings from subject matter. The teacher who constructs concept maps for classes is interested in students understanding relationships between facts, not just "knowing" the facts.

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Concept Maps and Curriculum Design

Concept maps can be used as excellent planning devices for instruction. Edmondson, 1993 , describes the importance of using concept maps to develop the curriculum for a veterinarian program: "Concept maps are effective tools for making the structure of knowledge explicit, and our hope is that by using them in our planning...the material will be more accessible and more easily integrated by students" (p. 4). The type of curriculum described by Edmondson is based on constructivist principles. It is both problem-centered and student-centered. Extensive faculty planning using concept maps helps teachers to know what it is that they want students to be able to learn. Instead of asking, "what do I want to teach," the emphasis is on, "what do I want students to learn?"

Martin, 1994, conducted a study in which he taught education majors to use concept maps to make lesson plans. The teachers in the study found the maps quite useful for the development of course plans. "Our students view concept mapping as giving teachers a more comprehensive understanding of what they are preparing to teach, eliminating sequencing errors, and enabling teachers to develop lessons that are truly interdisciplinary" (p.27). The following list of advantages in using concept maps for curriculum design was composed from the work of Allen, Hoffman, Kompella, & Sticht (1992 ), Dyrud , Edmondson , and Martin.

By constructing a concept map, you can see areas that appear trivial, that you may want to drop from the course.
You can discover the themes you want to emphasize.
You can understand how students may see or organize knowledge differently from you, which will help you better relate to the students and to challenge their ways of thinking.
The mapping process can help you identify concepts that are key to more than one discipline, which helps you move beyond traditional disciplinary boundaries.
Concept maps help you select appropriate instructional materials. You can construct a map that incorporates teaching strategies as well as time and task allocations for various parts of the course.
You can visually explain the conceptual relationships used for your objectives in any course.
You can facilitate efforts to reconceptualize course content.
Rather than being a traditional course plan that assumes students will integrate learning, concept maps depict the intentions of faculty -- the integration you expect to occur.
You can use concept maps to provide a basis for discussion among students and to summarize general course concepts.
Concept maps support a holistic style of learning.
Mapping concepts can increase your ability to provide meaningfulness to students by integrating concepts.
Concept maps can increase your potential to see multiple ways of constructing meaning for students.
Mapping the concepts can help you develop courses that are well-integrated, logically sequenced, and have continuity.
Concept maps help "teachers design units of study that are meaningful, relevant, pedagogically sound, and interesting to students" ( Martin, p. 28).
Concept maps help "the teacher to explain why a particular concept is worth knowing and how it relates to theoretical and practical issues both within the discipline and without" (Allen, et al).

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Steps in Making a Concept Map

Write down major terms or concepts about a topic.
Identify the most general, intermediate, and specific concepts.
Begin drawing the concept map:
Concepts are circled
Place the most general concepts at the top
Place intermediate concepts below general concepts
Put specific concepts on bottom
Draw lines between related concepts.
Label the lines with "linking words" to indicate how the concepts are related.
Revise the map.

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Constructivism

As stated earlier, concept maps have their origins in constructivism. This section is design to provide some insight into the general principles of constructivism.

Constructivism is derived from the field of cognitive psychology. The constructivist paradigm is based on the work of Jean Piaget, Lev Vygotsky, Jerome Bruner, Howard Gardner, and Nelson Goodman (Fosnot, 1996 ).

The main assumption of constructivism is that knowledge does not exist "out there" in an objective reality. Knowledge is actively constructed from within by the learner (Hendry & King, 1994 ). Facts become facts because it is knowledge that is agreed upon by communities of learners. The learner comes into any new situation with prior knowledge based on past experiences. New knowledge is learned through integration with prior knowledge.

Several educational principles have been derived from constructivism:

Concept development and deep understanding are the goals of instruction, not behaviors or skills (Fosnot ).
Learning is a constructive activity that students have to carry out. Students are active learners. The educator's task is to provide students with opportunities to construct knowledge (Glaserfeld, 1996 ).
The teacher must provide meaningful, authentic activities to help students construct understanding relevant to solving problems ( Wilson, 1996 ).
Reflection of both content and the learning process is paramount.
Collaborative groups should be used so that students can test their understandings and expand understanding of particular issues ( Savery & Duffy, 1996 ).
Teachers need to "establish explicit linkages for students between new information taught in class and students' past and future experiences.... Teachers summarize, review, and link main concepts at critical points throughout and at the conclusion of units and lessons" (Ennis, 1994, p. 167 ).
"Conceptual understanding is influenced by the prior knowledge brought by students to learning situations. This prior knowledge is ... labeled as 'preconceptions', 'naive theories', 'alternative frameworks', or 'misconceptions'" (Kinnear, 1994, p. 6 ).
Teachers must challenge the learner's thinking (alternative frameworks, preconceptions).
Concept mapping fits well with the constructivist approach that learners "construct their own idiosyncratic understanding of concepts" ( Trowbridge and Wandersee, 1994, p. 460 ). The teacher can use a map as a basis for which to challenge student assumptions of how concepts are related. Russo, Scheurman, Harred, & Leubke (1995) maintain that most college faculty recognize that students will not remember specific facts from a course. What's more important is that students take away major themes or concepts and an understanding of how these concepts are related. Using a concept map to design a course can aid the teacher in guiding the students to learn relevant concepts rather than trivial facts. Also, in knowing that students may perceive instruction differently from the way an educator intended, it can be helpful for the teacher to "construct a hypothetical model of the particular conceptual world of the students they are facing" (Glaserfeld, p. 7 ).

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References

Allen, B. S., Hoffman, R. P., Kompella, J., & Sticht, T. G. (1993). Computer-based mapping for curriculum development. In: Proceedings of selected Research and Development Presentations Technology sponsored by the Research and Theory Division. New Orleans, LA. (Eric Document Reproduction Services No. ED 362 145)
Anderson-Inman, L., & Zeitz, L. (1994). Beyond notecards: Synthesizing information with electronic study tools. The Computing Teacher, 21(8), 21-25.
Dyrud, M. A.(1994). Mapping: A Collaborative Activity for fun or profit. The Bulletin of the Association for Business Communication, 57(2), 57-58.
Edmondson, K. M. (1993). Concept mapping for the development of medical curricula. Paper presented at the Annual Conference of the American Educational Research Association, Atlanta, GA. (Eric Document Reproduction Services No. ED 360 322)
Ennis, C. D. (1994). Knowledge and beliefs underlying curricular expertise. Quest, 46, 164-175.
Fosnot, C. T. (1996) Constructivism: A psychological theory of learning. In C. T. Fosnot (Ed.), Constructivism: Theory, perspectives, and practice. New York, NY: Teachers College Press
Glaserfeld, E. V.(1996). Introduction: Aspects of constructivism. In C. T. Fosnot (Ed.), Constructivism: Theory, perspectives, and practice. New York, NY: Teachers College Press.
Hendry, G. D., & King, R. C. (1994) On theory of learning and knowledge: Educational implications of advances in neuroscience. Science Education, 78(3), 223-253.
Kinnear, J. (1994). What science education really says about communication of science concepts. Paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the International Communication Association conference. Sydney, Australia. (Eric Document Reproduction Services No. ED 372 455)
Lanzing, J. W. A. (1997). The concept mapping homepage. [On-line]. Available HTTP: http://users.edte.utwente.nl/lanzing/cm_home.htm
Martin, D. J. (1994). Concept Mapping as an aid to lesson planning: A longitudinal study. Journal of Elementary Science Education, 6(2), 11-30.
Russo, T. J., Scheurman, G., Harred, L. D., & Leubke, S. R. (1995). Thinking about thinking: A constructivist approach to critical thinking in the college curriculum. River Falls, WI: Wisconsin University. (Eric Document Reproduction Services No. ED 390 353)
Savery, J. R. & Duffy, T. M. (1996). Problem based learning: An instructional model and its constructivist framework. In Brent G. Wilson (Ed.), Constructivist learning environments: Case studies in instructional design. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Educational Technology Publication.
Trowbridge, J. E., & Wandersee, J. H. (1994). Identifying critical junctures in learning a college course on evolution. Journal of Research in Science Teaching, 31, 459-473.
Wilson, B. G. (Ed.). (1996). Constructivist learning environments: Case studies in instructional design. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Educational Technology Publication.

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Other Reading

Herman, W. E. (1995). Humanistic influences on a constructivist approach to teaching and learning. Paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the American Educational Research Association, San Francisco, CA. (Eric Document Reproduction Services No. ED 393 814)
Reese, A. C., & Mobley, M. F. (1996). Academic success through quality managed course design. Innovative Higher Education, 20, 171-182.
Rogers, P. L., & Mack, M. (1996). A constructivist design and learning model: Time for a graphic. In: Proceedings of Selected Research and Development Presentations at the 1996 National Convention of the Association for Educational Communications and Technology. (Eric Document Reproduction Services No. ED 397 831)
Roth, M. W. (1994). Student views of collaborative concept mapping: An emancipatory research project. Science Education, 78(1), 1-34.

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On the Internet

Jonassen, D. H. & Marra, R. M. (No date). Concept mapping and other formalisms as mindtools for representing knowledge. [On-line], March 25, 1997. Available HTTP: http://www.icbl.hw.ac.uk/~granum/class/altdocs/dav_alt.htm
Lanzing, J. W. A. (1997). The concept mapping homepage. [On-line]. Available HTTP: http://users.edte.utwente.nl/lanzing/cm_home.htm
McCabe, D. (1995). The concept mapping workshop. [On-line]. Available HTTP: http://158.132.100.221/CMWkshp_folder/CncptMapp.Wkshop.html
Trochim, W. M. K. (No date). An introduction to concept mapping for planning and evaluation. [On-line], March 25, 1997. Available HTTP: http://trochim.human.cornell.edu/research/epp1/epp1.htm
Trochim, W. M. K. (No date). Concept mapping: Soft science or hard art? [On-line], March 25, 1997. Available HTTP: http://trochim.human.cornell.edu/research/epp2/epp2.htm
Send ideas for other virtual workshops to: Karen I. Adsit, EdD, Director