July 27, 2009
Do you know that an average employee is putting dozens of extra hours every week in his work just to stay on the job? Around 49% of employees have taken a pay cut or suffered a salary freeze since the onset of recession last year. But even though it might sound unfair towards the employees, but even the companies are helpless as they want to utilize every possible venue that saves them some money, in these troubled times.
As we all know that just like the rest of the world, United Kingdom is also suffering with job loss and unemployment in many sectors. Today, a huge question is present in front of those who are either looking for a career change or are just entering the work force. And the question is how to pursue their dream of becoming a successful professional in their field. Times are hard and the situation is not as easy and bright as it used to be.
That’s why; every aspiring candidate needs the help of a professional that can show him the right path towards his dreams. Career consultants are the best way to ensure that your each step is right and resourceful in your career. After all, you don’t want to leave anything on chance in today’s times. We all think that we know about our career and how to go ahead with it. But this notion is often wrong and we only realize this mistake when we see someone less talented than us getting ahead in his career.
Therefore, a career consultant is an important step when you are thinking about finding a new job or starting a new career altogether. There are many career consultants in UK that might help you in your career. Hire a qualified expert and see your career race ahead.
February 27, 2009
This recent NY Times article reports on a study that argues:
[If US] achievement gaps [of poor and minority students] were closed, the yearly gross domestic product of the United States would be trillions of dollars higher, or $3 billion to $5 billion more per day.
Looking at the actual study, however, it seems as if they are assuming a linear relationship between increase in education and increase in employment.
(See page 84 and 92 of their supporting documents. In their charts starting on page 88, they state that the outcomes they assume are “determined by assumptions about the ability to make use of higher skilled people and the quality of economic institutions.”)
As I noted earlier, there is a great deal of evidence that education does not create jobs. In other words, these increases may happen on the margins, for the first few kids, but will fall off drastically after that.
I’d be interested in other perspectives. But it seems to me like this report simply feeds the fantasy of schooling, that if we just made schools better, all of our economic (and then social) problems would be solved.
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December 31, 2008
Interesting article by Elizabeth Warren and Amelia Warren Tyagi argues that the idea that the middle class is overspending itself into debt is a myth. Instead, they try to show that a key reason so many middle-class folks are over-leveraged is because of home costs linked to good schools:
Why such a staggering increase in the cost of housing? That is a long, separate discussion, but one point is worth underlining here: when a family buys a house, it buys much more than shelter from the rain. It also buys a public-school system. Everyone has heard news stories about kids who can’t read, classrooms without textbooks, and drug dealers and gang violence in school corridors. Failing schools impose an enormous cost on the children who are forced to attend them, but they also impose an enormous cost on those who don’t. . . .
A 2000 study conducted in Fresno, California, (population 400,000) found that, for similar homes, school quality was the single most important determinant of neighborhood prices —more important than racial composition, commute distance, crime rate, or proximity to a hazardous-waste site. A 1999 study conducted in suburban Boston showed that two homes less than half a mile apart and similar in nearly every aspect would command significantly different prices if they were in different elementary-school zones. Schools that scored just five percent higher than other local schools on fourth-grade math and reading tests added a premium of nearly $4,000 to nearby homes. . . .
Perhaps the strongest evidence that parents’ concern for their children’s welfare has driven their spending is the relative changes in housing prices for parents and non-parents. The federal government has not reported the data for the full 30-year period we have been examining, but looking at the period from 1984 to 2001 we see that housing prices for families with at least one minor child at home grew at a rate three times that of other families.
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December 31, 2007
The debate over school choice now clearly needs to be expanded. Kevin Welner, an Associate Professor of Education at the University of Colorado and director of their The Education and the Public Interest Center (EPIC) is uniquely positioned to examine the material, holding both a Ph. D. in Educational Policy and a law degree. He thoroughly does so in a new book entitled NeoVouchers: The Emergence of Tuition Tax Credits for Private Schooling published last September by Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc. The book thoroughly covers a broad range of related topics, including examining research, the implications of policy including legal and financial implications. Most of all, it offers perhaps the first comprehensive examination of a new approach which he calls “neovouchers.” Unlike traditional vouchers, these do not represent a direct payment of government funds to individuals. Rather these are state policies that grant tax credits to individuals or businesses for donations they make to organizations that provide students with financial aid for private schools. Neovouchers represent an important phenomenon that is changing the shape of education. This book is an important tool in understanding that phenomenon.
It is important that while Welner thinks neovouchers are an important topic worthy of close examination, he is no necessarily totally opposed to every possible manifestation of neovouchers, even as he maintains a healthy amount of skepticism about what we have learned from current implementations. Thus we read in the introduction his rationale for writing about neovouchers especially as a means of broadening the opportunities to expand access to high-quality educational opportunities, especially to children in low-income households who are most at risk:
This book offers a comprehensive exploration of the record and potential of tuition tax credit policies, with regard to this goal and others. As compared to true voucher policies, tax credit policies are more pervasive and more likely to survive legal challenge. Yet these tuition tax credit policies - these neovouchers - have managed to fly under the voucher radar. A careful examination is overdue. p. 3
We can combine this with the final paragraph in the main text, from pp. 112-113, where after having mentioned how far neovouchers have come and that they have advantages and disadvantages, intended and unintended effects:
I have personally come to appreciate these policies (and their underlying philosophies) as advancing a form of liberty. But I am also critical of the shift away from the recognized practices of democratic control over education, and I m concerned that these policies appear to further stratify the educational experience. Perhaps most troubling or me is the possible abandonment of a key part of the civic mission of schooling, given the likely cycle of our current understandings of citizenship and democracy shaping our educational practices, and those practices then shaping our future understandings of these concepts. Wise policymakers will look down the road, experimenting with promising new approaches but always keeping in mind a long-term vision of American schooling and democracy.
The issue Welner addresses is not hypothetical: as he notes, three states - Arizona, Florida and Pennsylvania - had at the time he wrote well established tuition tax credits laws and three more - Georgia, Iowa, and Rhode Island - hd recently introduced them. In six appendices he offers the text of the laws of five states and of the bill proposing the credits in Georgia, because the law was being adopted as the book went to press.
The book is packed with information. Welner laws it out in six chapters, starting with the Introduction. His subsequent 6 chapters cover a wide range of topics. In a chapter entitled, in quotes, “Something SO Close To Vouchers,” he presents a comprehensive overview of the various attempts at promoting competition with public schools, whether those are formally labeled as vouchers, or placed under a different title such as Florida’s Mackay Opportunity Scholarships. An examination of the research on the various efforts leads him to caution that market-based solutions might not solve “what ails American schooling. The combination of stratification plus few or no achievement or competition benefits leaves little (other than ideological preference) on which to hang one’s policy hat.” (p. 25). Yet he cautions that despite identifiable problems such as stratification and little evidence of achievement benefits, the downsides identified are minimal, thus leaving advocates of such approaches some room within which to maneuver.
To give a complete scope of the material packed into this small book, let me merely list the titles of the remaining 5 chapters:
3 Preferring Preferences: Taxes as Policy Instruments
4 Current Knowledge on the Nature and Effects of Neovoucher Policies
5 Taxing the Establishment Clause: Exploring the Constitutional Issues
6 Policy and Political Implications
7 Future Prospects: Tinkering with Utopia
Because a review of this length does not allow thorough exploration of all the material, the remainder of this revue will concentrate on chapters 5 and 6. I focus on 5 because traditionally one opposition to voucher programs has been the argument that it could represent government money going to religious schools. Yet even before the Supreme Court somewhat eliminated the First Amendment separation issue in Zelman v. Simmons-Harris (2002), the landscape was not as clear as many may have thought. And the current status of jurisprudence is that while Zelman eliminated the obstacle of the First Amendment as a federal matter, it did not address any limitations within State constitutions, especially those with so-called Blaine amendments originally offered as anti-catholic measures in the somewhat more distant past. One might argue that should these state constitutional amendments be litigated before the Supreme Court, that it might a variety of methods choose to invalidate such provisions, for example on an equal protection basis. Welner thoroughly explores aspects of the various issues that come into play. Here his legal background is of particular value in enabling him to clarify the landscape. He thoroughly explores the evolution of the Court’s reasoning in developing tests and standards, exploring for example how the 3-part test established in Lemon v. Kurtzman (1971) has been modified over time in subsequent cases to matters of endorsement, coercion and a rubric of neutrality. Against this he lays out the landscape of 36 states (and Puerto Rico) having Blaine provisions in their constitution, while 29 (including 18 with Blaine language) have a second provision that prohibits taxpayers from having to support any ministry. “Only Michigan’s state constitution includes language that directly and specifically vouchers and tax benefits (p. 67).
I have taken the time to demonstrate how thorough Welner is because the opposition to vouchers, and likely to neovouchers as well, has often been fought precisely on the grounds of a violation of separation of church and state, and it is important as the phenomenon continues, as seem likely, given the expansion of the use of tax credits from 3 to 6 states in recent years, to be sure those involved in such policy matters fully understand the nature of all issues that will come into play.
Let me note as an aside that one can read this chapter by itself as a thorough introduction to Supreme Court jurisprudence on the interplay of government and religion, especially as it plays out in schools. This is an issue that I have studied extensively, and about which I instruct my Advanced Placement students. The chapter is of value just for that.
Welner is also able to bring into play implications of other decision of the Supreme Court. For example, he notes the decision in Romer v Evans (1996) that invalidated a Colorado Constitutional amendment that sought to prevent jurisdictions “from instituting civil rights measures against sexual orientation discrimination. . . The Court analyzed the law as specifically targeting one group for lesser legal protection and therefore as in violation of the equal protection clause (pp. 73-74). Thus would could readily see how the Court MIGHT rule a Blaine provision as similarly violative of the 14th Amendment equal protection provisions. Welner demonstrates his thoroughness by offering a counterbalancing caution:
Ironically, school choice itself could be challenged with a similar argument - that the policies were initiated because of a desire to harm a politically unpopular group. Choice became a prominent policy in the wake of Brown v. Board of Education. Instead of mandating that black and white students attend separate schools, boards adopted so-called freedom of choice policies purportedly allowing all students the option of enrolling in whichever school they wished. p. 74
Of course, any Black student who attempted to enroll where s/he was not wanted would face implicit, and not particularly subtle, threats to discourage such action.
Let me briefly examine the chapter on policy and political implications. First, Welner provides a very complex formula, which I will neither reproduce nor attempt to explain, on page 85, which is supposed to demonstrate how neovoucher policies save public funds. He then examines the reality behind the calculations. He notes that in Arizona, the pro-voucher Goldwater Institute calculated that the state suffered a net loss of #13-18 million in one school year, and that only about 12% of the neovouchers had gone to transferring students. This highlights one problem common in voucher proposals that is still part of many neovoucher approaches: the problems of ensuring that the funds go only to those transferring from supposedly inferior public schools to nonpublic schools. Attempts to control the problems are not always successful. For example, some states prohibit a family from gaining a tax credit contributing to a “scholarship” (or equivalent) for their own children, but that ban is easily circumvented by families pairing up to contribute on behalf of each other’s offspring. That is not to say that such policy issues cannot be addressed, but in the relatively new world of neovouchers they have not as yet been completely addressed.
Similar, Welner notes the requirement in some states that private funds going to neovouchers partially help fund public schools, perhaps requiring 1/3 of funds contributed by a corporation be retained for funding programs within the public system. He also notes that some policy makers prefer neovouchers over more traditional vouchers for a variety of reasons. First, neovouchers do not represent a direct expenditure of government funds, which gets around the Blaine restrictions. Second, by giving a tax credit neovouchers CAN save states money not expended on behalf of the students no longer in the public school, although as already noted of the neovoucher goes to a student who was already in a nonpublic setting, the money saving function is reversed because of the decline in revenue received by the government. And simply put, “tax credits may simply look better than spending increases . . . many taxpayers perceive a tax credit as a tax cut, even though the practical budgetary effect is the same as a direct expenditure” (p. 91) which makes neovouchers easier to “sell” as policy.
By now you should have a sense of the richness of this slender volume. While I am primarily a public school teacher, I have a strong interest in educational policy matters, such that I was pursuing a doctorate in the subject until I found that I could have an impact writing online and lobbying without the magic three letters after my name. I have reviewed books and and served as a peer reviewer for journal articles for a number of years. I have to say I do not believe I have encountered a book on educational policy that provided so much useful material, and in a non-polemic fashion. Welner discusses so much, including thing like how the issue is framed a la George Lakoff. He connect the use of neovouchers with the supply side approach of many of a conservative political persuasion. He provides copious documentation of the material he discusses, which enables the motivated reader to pursue any and all lines of inquiry further.
I intend to recommend this book to several Members of the House Committee on Education and Labor and their education staffers, because it covers the issues so thoroughly. I strongly encourage people wanting to be able to discuss important issues of educational policy to read this book at their earliest convenience.
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December 31, 1969
Have people seen this youtube video? Not to be missed.
December 31, 1969
New paper by David Berliner. Nicely done summary of the effects of non-school issues on school performance.
December 31, 1969
Of course I must get this book.
Tales for Little Rebels is the first anthology of radical children’s literature published in the United States. . . . .
Tales for Little Rebels . . . explores the inherently political nature of kid lit through an expansive collection of examples.
In his foreword, folklorist and scholar Jack Zipes claims that the late arrival of such a book is no accident. . . . “We tend to repress the crucial issues that children need to know to adjust to a rapidly changing world. We tend to repress what is at the heart of the conflicts that determine our lives. We have tried to ‘nourish’ children by feeding them literature that we think is appropriate for them. Or, put another way, we have manipulated them through oral forms of communication and prescriptions in print to think or not to think about the world around them.”
Does anyone out there know of a good ideological analysis of children’s literature and/or television? I’m interested in the overall messages given to kids by these key avenues of socialization. Dora the Explorer anyone?
My 2 year old actually walked over to me this morning and started singing me the opening bars of the All Things Considered theme tune. Da da da da da da dat da.
December 31, 1969
If it continues (and it likely will), the continuing geographical shift of concentrated poverty from the central city to the suburbs will deeply affect visions of “urban education.” Our current model is based on the idea that concentrated poverty around cities is focused in central city areas.
What happens when concentrated poverty shifts to the suburbs?
While there will surely be urban concentrated poverty for a long time, there is evidence that poor people of color are shifting out of central city areas and attempting to “escape” to the suburbs.
Of course the problem, well known by housing scholars, is that it doesn’t take that many poor people of color to “tip” a neighborhood into white/middle-class flight.
When poverty is located in a city, there are at least some established sets of services, smaller distances to travel, and a tax base that consists of more than housing. What happens when a small suburb that depends on housing for tax revenues becomes poor and its housing values plummet (yes, I know, we are already finding out–but right now this isn’t necessarily a shift towards concentrated poverty). Who is going to pay for schools, sewer, etc.?
From a recent article in Miller-McCune:
The displaced poor find value in the aging, outer-ring tract-home developments that once promised easy living far from the city’s hustle and bustle. And housing officials, resolved to breaking up pockets of concentrated poverty (where at least 40 percent of the families are living below the poverty line), are thrilled. The federal Section 8 housing program, which allows recipients to negotiate government-subsidized rentals anywhere, is grounded in the belief that a safe, stable neighborhood can help unbuckle the straps of poverty.
But the positive benefits of moving to a neighborhood of less poverty diminish as the number of poor relocating there increases, new research suggests. In other words, families are far less likely to pull themselves out of poverty when their exposure to other poor families reaches a kind of tipping point. George C. Galster, a professor of urban affairs at Wayne State University, has quantified this poverty threshold as roughly 15 to 20 percent of a neighborhood. If the poverty rate exceeds that, Galster said, “All hell breaks loose” in the form of crime, drop-out rates, teen pregnancies, drug use and, in turn, declining property values.
Galster’s working paper for the National Poverty Center, Consequences from the Redistribution of Urban Poverty During the 1990s: A Cautionary Tale, warns that polices to break up concentrated poverty may be backfiring. While the number of Americans living in the poorest neighborhoods has notably declined since 1990, by about 25 percent, poverty elsewhere has inched up. Galster worries that the rush to relocate the urban poor, through Section 8 and other poverty redistribution programs, has pushed many less-desirable suburban neighborhoods to this tipping point.
The article is focused on “keep the poor people out” kinds of solutions, instead of on wider questions about poverty. Although, if you are poor and live in a neighborhood that might tip, do you really want more poor people to move in? (Hello, institutional racism.)
Also see work by Myron Orfield, including this decade-old piece (PDF) predicting just what we are seeing and also actually discussing some solutions (he was a state legislator before he became a professor). (He’s the brother of another Orfield you might have heard of.)
December 31, 1969
The House of Representatives last week passed the GIVE Act, which would, among other things, provide up to $6 billion in federal funds to increase AmeriCorps, expand volunteers to 250,000 (up from 75,000 currently), increase education funding, expand service-learning for K-12 education and colleges and universities, and expand service options for seniors and veterans. This bill is analogous to one currently in the Senate, the Serve America Act, which will most likely replace the House version. The Senate version was endorsed by both Obama and McCain back during the campaign on 9/11 in NYC. The likely money is that it will pass later this week.
I want to focus on one small aspect of this bill, what has been termed “Campuses of Service” in the bill. The short story is that each state will submit the names of three institutions (one 4-year public, one 4-year private, and one 2-year institution). The Corporation for National and Community Service then chooses 25 “Campuses of Service” out of all of these submissions. There are six criteria for judging the submissions; I want to focus on the first three (the fourth has to do with work study, and numbers five and six focus on graduates going into public service employment and careers):
- the number of service-learning courses offered
- the number and percentage of students who were enrolled in the service-learning courses
- the percentage of students on the campus engaging in activities providing community services, the quality of such activities, and the average amount of time spent, per student, engaged in such activities
What becomes immediately clear is that such criteria are neatly aligned to the Carnegie Foundation’s voluntary “community engagement” classification. This is the diffusion model of institutionalizing service-learning across higher education, most clearly seen in a highly popular rubric developed by Andy Furco. I have in my previous work contrasted this incrementalist vision with a transformational vision.
There is nothing wrong with either institutionalization model or the entire “Campuses of Service” premise if one believes that we in higher education actually know what we mean by “service” and “service-learning”; i.e., if in fact we actually know how to do it, how to teach it, and how to assess it. If, moreover, we know how to actually do the “4 Rs”: reflection, reciprocity, respect, and relevance.
The conventional wisdom is that we do. According to the most recent HERI survey, faculty have overwhelming become attuned to community engagement, with 88 percent believing that colleges should be actively involved with local community issues and the majority finding it “very important” or “essential” to “instill in students a commitment to community service.” Campus Compact is thriving, and President Obama’s consistent calls for a culture of service makes the bandwagon pretty darn big.
Yet I am not so sure. For if one begins to dig down into the details, it becomes pretty muddy pretty fast. The “campuses of service” and Carnegie classification models are deeply and distinctly campus-centric. As Amy Driscoll, the point person for this initiative at Carnegie, acknowledges, community involvement and impact are the least amenable to institutions’ documented success. Or as Randy Stoeker, a key scholar in the community-based research movement, ruefully notes in a wonderful forthcoming book with Elizabeth Tryon, Unheard Voices, “By not knowing what service learning does to the communities it purports to serve, we risk creating unintended side effects that exacerbate, rather than alleviate, the problems those communities suffer from…We may be setting into motion dialectical processes that ultimately undermine the entire effort of service learning.”
The federal model is an attempt to develop a useful proxy variable for service through sheer force of numbers. The more courses, the more students, the more hours, then, seemingly, the better the service. But this is silly and dangerous. It promotes quantity over quality, through-put of students rather than sustained impact, and sky-high numbers rather than on-the-ground changes. Stoeker and Tryon’s work, for example, found that the short-term nature of service-learning was one of the major problems faced by community partners. This needs to be acknowledged.
Even the service-learning field itself is worried. A “democratic engagement white paper” getting lots of recent attention is a summary of a 2008 conference at the Kettering Foundation of the major players in the community engagement movement. The conference’s central guiding question was: “Why has the civic engagement movement in higher education stalled and what are the strategies needed to further advance institutional transformation aimed at generating democratic, community-based knowledge and action?” The conference attendees provided numerous responses (such as the lack of clear definitions and high fragmentation) before propounding a new model of “democratic engagement” rather than simply “civic engagement.” While laudatory, the binary nature of its vision and guiding assumptions of the academy and the community suggests, at least to me, that it will not have much traction for truly changing actual practices and policies in higher education. (I am writing more on this white paper for another time.)
So what’s my point? My point is that while the key players in the service-learning movement worry that their deeper vision of transforming higher education has not come to fruition, the movement they have launched is only further gaining steam. As I wrote a couple years back, my sense is that the service-learning movement is about to get swamped by the very institution it attempted to storm. This is of course not a one-way street. Higher education has of course embraced important aspects of community engagement. But look again at that HERI survey: Two-thirds of the faculty surveyed felt that community service should be considered when admitting applicants. Um. That’s really nice. But some states require every single high school student to perform community service in order to graduate. Maryland has been doing this since 1997. So does every Maryland applicant now have an advantage in the college admittance race?
More likely, what is being expressed by faculty is an idealistic and idealized sentiment of “service.” It is a sentiment that sounds great in rhetoric but has highly deleterious consequences in practice. It privileges a whole host of already hierarchical relationships about who serves whom, to what end, and for whose benefit. In the end, it all too often becomes all about the faculty teaching, the privileged college students volunteering, and the colleges which get the attention from all this activity. Not because anyone is doing anything “wrong,” per se. It’s just that the system as set up highlights and rewards exactly the wrong criteria for determining quality and impact.
Which takes me back, finally, to these “campuses of service.” What we are basically seeing is the institutionalization of service-learning exactly in the wrong way as envisioned by the founders of the movement. This is goal displacement, from attempting to make a difference to attempting to count the numbers. It is the end product of the quantification of the field. It is a mistake. All that is counted are students, courses, and hours. There is no community. There is no impact. What is left unquestioned, and thus unanswered are just the basic questions: ”Service-learning for whom?” and “Service-learning for what?”
December 31, 1969
I was not a supporter of the selection of Arne Duncan as Secretary of Education, but I was willing to withhold judgment, to see where he would attempt to take the nation in education policy. I thought perhaps policy might be made in the White House, with him serving as the public face. I was wrong. Duncan is attempting to drive education in ways that will destructive. Many of the policies he is pushing demonstrate his fundamental lack of understanding.
Today I will briefly explore the issue of mayoral control of big city school systems. Remember, such is Duncan’s experience in years in Chicago. He started as an assistant to Paul Vallas in a system controlled directly by Mayor Richie Daley, succeeding him in that position for a number of years before being tapped by his basketball buddy, the new President, to head our national educational efforts.
In this exploration I am going to rely on an op ed in yesterdays New York Times entitled Mayor Bloomberg’s Crib Sheet, by Diane Ravitch.
Diane Ravitch is currently a research professor of education at New York University. One of her books is The Great School Wars: New York City, 1805-1973. Trained as an educational historian, she served as Assistant Secretary of Education and Counselor to Secretary of Education Lamar Alexander from 1991 to 1993, where she was responsible for the Office of Educational Research and Improvement in the U.S. Department of Education. As Assistant Secretary, she led the federal effort to promote the creation of state and national academic standards. She holds positions as a senior researcher simultaneously at Hoover and at Brookings. She has become an outspoken critic of No Child Left Behind. While I do not always agree with her, I consider her a friend. And before we start with her op ed, I have to put you on notice: she is NOT a fan of Duncan, having recently described him as “Margaret Spellings in drag.”
Ravitch begins by noting Duncan’s call for mayors to take control of the nation’s school and of his pointing at New York City as an example. She then writes
Actually, the record on mayoral control of schools is unimpressive. Eleven big-city school districts take part in the federal test called the National Assessment of Educational Progress. Two of the lowest-performing cities — Chicago and Cleveland — have mayoral control. The two highest-performing cities — Austin, Tex., and Charlotte, N.C. — do not.
Stop for a moment, remember that Chicago has had mayoral control of its schools since Paul Vallas was put in place by Daley in 1995, with Duncan succeeding him in 2001. The National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) is considered the best single, independent measure of school performance we have. Let me quote from the linked Wikipedia article to provide a bit of context:
NAEP conducts assessments periodically in mathematics, reading, writing, science, and other areas.[1] New assessments in world history and in foreign language are anticipated in 2012.[2]
NAEP is administered by the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES), a division of the US Department of Education.
Since NAEP assessments are administered uniformly to all participating students using the same test booklets and identical procedures across the nation, NAEP results serve as a common metric for all states and selected urban districts that take the assessment. The assessment stays essentially the same from year to year, with only carefully documented changes. NAEP reports all results at the national level and provides state results for some assessments. On a trial basis, NAEP is releasing the results for a number of large urban districts.
NAEP results are based on representative samples of students at grades 4, 8, and 12 for the main assessments, or samples of students at ages 9, 13, or 17 years for the long-term trend assessments. These grades and ages were chosen because they represent critical junctures in academic achievement. NAEP provides data on subject-matter achievement, instructional experiences, and school environment for populations of students (e.g., all fourth-graders) and groups within those populations (e.g., female students, Hispanic students). NAEP does not provide scores for individual students or schools, although state NAEP can report results for selected large urban districts.
Educational researchers consider the main NAEP the best single indicator of educational performance over time. There is somewhat less confidence in the accuracy of what is known as state NAEP, especially since participation became mandatory in 2001 with the passage of No Child Left Behind. State NAEP scores provide a check on claims by states for improvement on their own state assessments, those state assessments being used to determine Adequate Yearly Progress under NCLB.
Two quick comments about what NAEP has shown before we return to Ravitch. First, an examination of NAEP scores completely destroys the idea of any Texas miracle in education during the 6 years G. W. Bush was governor - and remember, it was that Texas miracle that was used to sell the nation on NCLB. The Nation’s Report Card, as NAEP is sometimes described, showed no improvement for Texas in the 1990s, and has shown little improvement in the 6+ years since NCLB went into effect. Second, Duncan spent 7 years in charge of Chicago schools in a system of mayoral control that predated him by another 6 years. Vallas was cited by Clinton for raising test scores, but (a) the scores that were raised were a selective set of Illinois tests, not consistent across all of the state tests, and the city showed little progress on NAEP. As we return of Ravitch remember her point - that of the 11 urban districts participating in NAEP for separate scoring, the two lowest scoring were under mayoral control while the two highest were not. And Chicago, after 13+ years of mayoral control, including more than 7 under Duncan, was at the bottom.
I cited the one book by Ravitch because writing it provided her with probably more knowledge about the history of schools in New York City than anyone else in the country. Diane was trained as an educational historian, and IIRC, her dissertation was supervised by perhaps the greatest historian of education we have had, Lawrence Cremins. While I will sometimes disagree with the conclusions she draws, she is a solid researcher on educational history. When evidence proves her previous ideas to be inaccurate, she will acknowledge and correct them, as she is doing in the book on which she is currently working.
Duncan recently came to New York to urge renewal of the state statute, passed in 2002, that gives the mayor control of the schools in New York City. That law expires at the end of this school year. Ravitch points out two key things to know about NYC schools
1. Mayoral control is nothing new: “From 1873 to 1969, the mayor appointed every single member of the Board of Education. The era of decentralization from 1969 to 2002 was an aberration, because the mayor had only two appointees on a seven-member board.”
2. The control over schools Bloomberg currently has is unrivaled in the city’s history, with previous mayors respecting the independence of school board members they appointed. By contrast, “The present version of the board, the Panel on Education Policy, serves at the pleasure of the mayor and rubber-stamps the policies and spending practices of the Department of Education, which is run by Mayor Bloomberg and Schools Chancellor Joel Klein.”
Let me deviate from Ravitch a bit. One of the ironies of mayoral control has been the pattern of appointing people to run schools who really lack the background as professional educators one might expect. I teach in Maryland. A superintendent must meet certain qualifications in order to head one of our 24 school divisions (23 counties and the City of Baltimore). One of those requirements is a doctorate in education, although that State Superintendent can waive some of the requirements (and Superintendent Nancy Grasmick, who herself started as a teacher, has done so). Ever since Seattle experienced some success with hiring a non-educator to run their schools, mayors and governors have somehow thought such an approach was the solution to the seemingly intractable problems of urban education. But retired Maj. Gen. John Stanford was sui generis, and the success he had in Seattle has not been duplicated by similar appointments, whether of Generals (Julius Becton in DC), former Governors (Roy Romer in Los Angeles), financial managers (Paul Vallas in Chicago, Philadelphia and New Orleans), or lawyers (Duncan in Chicago and Joel Klein in New York). [Michelle Rhee in DC did spend several years in a classroom with Teach for America, during which time by her own admission she was a lousy teacher until near the end of her second year. Her subsequent experience was running The New Teacher Project, a non-profit that was one of many spinoffs from the TFA family. Her highest degree is a Masters in Public Policy]
Ravitch - and remember her background and her responsibilities in the US Dept of Education - examines the claims of supporter of the Bloomberg-Klein regime of spectacular improvements. They argue for approval without change of the current law. She quotes Sec. Duncan
I’m looking at the data here in front of me,” he said while in New York. “Graduation rates are up. Test scores are up … By every measure, that’s real progress.”
Except that claim is unsupported by independent measures:
On the federal National Assessment of Educational Progress — widely acknowledged as the gold standard of the testing industry — New York City showed almost no academic improvement between 2003, when the mayor’s reforms were introduced, and 2007. There were no significant gains for New York City’s students — black, Hispanic, white, Asian or lower-income — in fourth-grade reading, eighth-grade reading or eighth-grade mathematics. In fourth-grade math, pupils showed significant gains (although the validity of this is suspect because an unusually large proportion — 25 percent — of students were given extra time and help). The federal test reported no narrowing of the achievement gap between white students and minority students.
When supporters of the Klein regime try to point to scores on state tests, which have improved, Ravitch responds:
indeed, the state scores have soared in recent years, not only in the city but also across New York state However, the statewide scores on the N.A.E.P. are as flat as New York City’s. Our state tests are, unfortunately, exemplars of grade inflation.
She also points out how other measures, such as graduation rates reported by the city schools, do not indicate improvement:
The city says the rate climbed to 62 percent from 53 percent between 2003 and 2007; the state’s Department of Education, which uses a different formula, says the city’s rose to 52 percent, from 44 percent. Either way, the city’s graduation rate is no better than that of Mississippi, which spends about a third of what New York City spends per pupil.
Moreover, the city’s graduation rates have been pumped up with a variety of dubious means, like “credit recovery,” in which students who fail a course can get full credit if they agree to take a three-day makeup program or turn in an independent project. In addition, the city counts as graduates the students who dropped out and obtained a graduate-equivalency degree.
Let me step back for a moment. First, remember the requirement of NCLB to participate in NAEP. This was required precisely to serve as a check on state’s manipulating their own tests to “show improvement.” One can establish a first year cut score (the raw score which represents passing) to show a low pass rate, then lower the cut score to show” “improvement” even if the raw scores have not changed. I experienced that in the one year I taught middle school in Virginia. The year before I arrived our school had a 58% pass rate on middle school American History. The year I was there, with the other two teachers being first year teachers and me being new to the curriculum, our pass rate was 81%, which seems to be a spectacular improvement. Except that the cut scores were changed to have a more acceptable passing rate - if we had restated the previous year’s scores according to the new pass rate, it would have been about 71-72% - we improved, but not that much. And of course, we were comparing two different cohorts of students.
The manipulation of graduation rates is a well-known phenomenon. We saw it in Texas during the tenure of Gov. Bush, especially in Houston under Rod Paige. Students would be held back, sometimes more than once, in th grade (because the Texas tests were in 10th grade), until they dropped out, then they would not be listed as a drop out if you could get them to say they might go eventually for a GED, instead being listed as transferring to an alternative educational program. All this was in this professional literature in work by Walt Haney BEFORE NCLB was passed into law near the beginning of Bush’s first term.
Let’s return to Ravitch. She notes that the NY figures do not include as dropouts those listed as discharged during their hs years:
Some discharges are legitimate, like students who moved to another school district. But many others are so-called push-outs, students who were ejected from school even though they had a legal right to be there, often because their grades and test scores were bringing down their schools’ averages. The Department of Education refuses to disclose how many students are in each of these categories. We do know, however, that more than one-fifth of the members of the class of 2007, or 18,524 students, were discharged and not counted as dropouts.
One point to bear in mind is that Ravitch is not totally opposed to some level of mayoral involvement in the governance of schools. She is opposed to the model one sees in NYC, in which there is no oversight of the actions taken by the mayor and his designee, and hence no public participation in s school governance. She is willing to have the mayor appoint the members of the Board of Education for fixed terms,
Candidates for the board should be evaluated by a blue-ribbon panel so that no mayor can stack it with friends. That board should appoint the chancellor, and his or her first responsibility must be to the children and their schools, not to the mayor.
What a remarkable idea - the head of the school system has as first responsibility the children. If one returns to the history of Paul Vallas, for example, one finds him finishing second in 2001 (to Blagojevich and ahead of Burris) for the Democratic nominee for Governor of Illinois, has since considered running again in 2010 and has announced that he plans to run this year for the Cook County Board as a Republican. Reasonable people might well question his dedication to the children that should have been his primary responsibility.
Ravitch believes that school boards need to make their decision in public, subject to public scrutiny. She further advocates for some level of parental control, writing
Local school boards composed of parent leaders should oversee the schools in their districts, although they should not have any financial authority.
She wants independent auditing to evaluate claims of improvements in test scores and graduation rates. The current New York law has none of these features. Instead all power resides within the hands of a chancellor / ceo, Joel Klein, who is answerable only to the mayor. So far that model has not proven successful, and yet that is what Duncan wants to propagate across the nation, perhaps because that is his own personal experience, an experience which has not shown positive results.
If our schools are truly public schools, they should be answerable to the public. Their governance should be democratic. The model of mayoral control, especially as implemented in New York City, meets neither of these criteria. By itself that should be sufficient reason to reject that model of governance. The model is further undercut by the lack of success that can be demonstrated by independent evaluation, not only in New York, but also in Chicago under the leadership of Duncan and of his predecessor.
Let me offer the final paragraph penned by Ravitch in this piece:
Not every school problem can be solved by changes in governance. But to establish accountability, transparency and the legitimacy that comes with public participation, the Legislature should act promptly to restore public oversight of public education. As we all learned in civics class, checks and balances are vital to democracy.
checks and balances are vital to democracy - we have just escaped from an 8 year administration that did not believe it should be subject to checks and balances, and we came close to destroying our economy and our international standing as a result of actions taken without such checks and balances. If nothing else, we should have learned that no public function can be trusted to people who are not subject to checks and balances. Our public schools should be preparing our children not only to be employed, but to be participating citizens in a representative liberal democracy. The model of governance advocated by Duncan is opposed to that. By itself that should be sufficient reason to reject it. And it does not work, as both his experience in Chicago and the tenure of Joel Klein in New York demonstrate.
Peace.
