A Weekly Bulletin of News and
Analysis from the Thomas B. Fordham Institute
April 4, 2002, Volume 2, Number 14
Contents
From
Checker's Desk
The Preschool Establishment Strikes Back
Americans tend to feel warm, proud,
and a mite smug when they hear the phrase "Head Start." Aside from
Social Security, it's the most beloved of all federal domestic programs. But no
complacency is warranted. Head Start is one of those swell ideas from the
1960's that urgently needs reforming for the 21st
Century. One study after another has shown that it's good at hugging little
children, keeping them safe, giving them healthy snacks, even getting them to
the dentist, but does nothing of lasting value to prepare them to read, write
and do arithmetic.
Earlier this week, President Bush
proposed a Head Start makeover. He wants it to incorporate a true preschool
curriculum, centering on the skills a child needs when entering kindergarten so
as to have the best chance of learning there, especially learning to read
there. These skills include knowing sounds, shapes, words and colors, even
letters and numbers. He would retrain Head Start staff members-many of whom
never completed college-so that they would be better able to impart such skills
to their 900,000 young charges. And (following the mandate of a 1999 law
supported by Bill Clinton) he would evaluate the nation's thousands of Head
Start centers to see how well they're fulfilling this mission.
It's a timely and needed rethinking
of a familiar and popular program, meant to get more educational bang from the
$6.5 billion already being spent on it-some $7000 per young participant, equal
to what's spent on schooling their older siblings.
But the preschool establishment
wants no part of this reform. Head Start has been around for nearly four
decades-it began as part of LBJ's "War on Poverty"-and over the years
it has become stubbornly set in its ways and acquired its own army of adult
interest groups that resist change.
At the head of this army is the
National Head Start Association, which swiftly attacked the Bush reform plan.
It makes "little sense," intoned Association president
Sarah Greene. It "subjects our youngest children to standardized
testing" and "wastes a great deal of money."
No "standardized testing"
is involved in Mr. Bush's plan and the "wasted" money would be spent
on staff training and program evaluations. But Ms. Greene and her associates
don't want those things. Like many in the early childhood field, they view Head
Start's mission as fostering "child development" or, worse, providing
day-care, not running true preschools. They're content with hugs, snowsuits,
blocks, swings, gerbils, carrot sticks, and dentist visits. They shun
responsibility for advancing a child's cognitive development.
Yet that's precisely what Mr. Bush
wants them to do. And what they ought to do. He accurately notes that tens of
thousands of young Americans enter kindergarten each year without having
developed the skills they need to succeed there. Many of the least-prepared
children are poor and minority. If, as the President says, "reading is the
new civil right," it's imperative to get disadvantaged youngsters ready
for it.
When Bill Bennett, John Cribb, and I wrote The Educated Child a couple of
years back, we decided to list essential "kindergarten readiness"
skills. To our surprise, it filled four pages. Some items are things that Head
Start programs have long done. But most have serious cognitive components, such
as "knows what an alphabet letter is," "places a short series of
events in correct order," "recognizes common sounds,"
"counts aloud to ten" and "recalls basic facts about
stories." Expertly parented children get most of these at home. But
disadvantaged girls and boys usually need other adults to help them learn such
things. That's the proper mandate of Head Start and other preschool programs.
The National Head Start Association
is not the only naysayer. Its views of childhood are shared by many other
groups that partake in what E. D. Hirsch terms the "naturalistic fallacy
of developmentalism": the view that children
ought not have their minds stretched by systematic
adult efforts to fill them with skills and knowledge. This remains the dominant
philosophy of early childhood educators in America. But it's contradicted by
research, common sense, and the experience of other countries. It's also one of
the biggest reasons that too many of our children enter school unprepared to
learn and exit without having learned nearly enough. As the clamor mounts to
create "universal" preschool opportunities, George W. Bush is right
to insist that we stop wasting those we already have, especially those designed
for the neediest children in our midst.
For more guidance on the issue of
early childhood education, see pages 79-91 of The Schools We Need and Why We
Don't Have Them, by E.D. Hirsch, Doubleday, 1996. (Available through major book retailers.)
See also pages 37-40 of The
Educated Child: A Parent's Guide from Preschool
through Eighth Grade, by William J. Bennett, Chester E. Finn, Jr., and John
T. E. Cribb, Jr., The Free Press, 1999. (Available through major book retailers.)
Two education experts squared off on
the issue of early childhood education in the summer 2001 edition of Education
Next. See "Do
Preschoolers Need Academic Content?" by Grover Whitehurst (now
assistant secretary of education for research and improvement) and "Early
Childhood Education: Developmental or Academic" by Tufts University
professor David Elkind.
"Bush Offers Plan
to Improve Head Start's Teacher Training," by David E. Sanger, The New York Times, April 3, 2002
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Chicago union to offer graduate degree
In Chicago, the teachers' union is
creating a graduate program in teacher leadership aimed at making teachers
"agents of change." Teachers who earn the two-year degree will be
eligible for a $6,000 pay hike. For more see "Teachers union
launches unique graduate school," by Rosalind Rossi, Chicago
Sun-Times, March 29, 2002.
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Maryland teachers' union grabbing power to negotiate
curriculum
The California Teachers' Union is
receiving a lot of press lately-most of it bad-for its forceful effort to
expand the scope of collective bargaining in the state to include matters of
curriculum and instruction. There is much pushback, including hostile editorials
in every major newspaper in the state. A continent away, however, the Maryland
legislature is quietly poised to hand over many of the same powers to the
Maryland State Teachers Association. A bill passed last week by the state
Senate would add curriculum selection, classroom assignments, teacher
evaluations, and other topics to the list of issues that teachers' unions can
bargain. The legislation, which is being pushed by Governor Parris Glendening (and termed by some his parting gift to the
teachers' union) is expected to pass the House of
Delegates easily. (That chamber overwhelmingly supported an even broader
version of the legislation last year. It was the Senate that resisted then.)
Local school boards and superintendents have ardently lobbied against the
measure, arguing that education decisions should not be decided at the
bargaining table. For details see "Senate passes bill to
expand teacher bargaining power," by Howard Libit,
Baltimore Sun, March 26, 2002
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Taking charter school accountability seriously
For charter schools in Chicago,
accountability is simple: you don't perform, you don't survive. Last week, the
city's charter czar shut down Nuestra America Charter
School, where test scores had plummeted, as had attendance. But an editorial in
The Chicago Tribune argues that the school's involuntary closure
demonstrates how well the charter model works. As the editorial notes, regular
public schools that fail ask for more time to get their acts together. They
also seek more money-and they usually get both. Charter schools are far more
accountable. While Nuestra America failed, all but
two of the city's charter schools are surpassing their neighborhood public
schools, several of them by large margins, according to a study released by the
Chicago Public Schools. "Charters are moving beyond experiments," the
editorial concludes. "Now it's time for neighborhood schools to explore
why 12 of Chicago's 14 charters are outperforming them." "When
failure means success," editorial, The Chicago Tribune, April
1, 2002.
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Are Increasing Test Scores in Texas Really a Myth, or is
Haney's Myth a Myth?
Laurence A. Toenjes
and A. Gary Dworkin, Education Policy Analysis
Archives
March 21, 2002
In August 2000, Boston College ed school professor Walter Haney
sought to dispel what he called "The Myth of the Texas Miracle in
Education" in a paper for the Education Policy Analysis Archives (EPAA).
Indeed, he said that the tremendous improvement by Texas sophomores on the
state's spring exit test was a sham. According to Haney-who has served as an
expert witness in a lawsuit claiming that Texas testing program is unfair and
discriminates against minority students- the rise in pass rates on the 10th
grade Texas Assessment of Academic Skills (TAAS) from 52 percent to 72 percent
between 1994 and 1998 was the result not of higher standards and stronger
achievement but of special ed exemptions and weak
students dropping out prior to taking the test. Those assertions made a bit of
a stir, considering that the 2000 election was then just a couple of months
away and candidate George W. Bush was making much of his state's education
track record. In this new paper, the University of
Houston's Laurence Toenjes and Gary Dworkin say that Haney got it all wrong. Delving into the
details of his data and methodology, they show that none of the score
improvements can be attributed to dropouts or testing exemptions. Rather, they
show, via close examination of "progression ratios" (calculations of
Grade 11 enrollment divided by Grade 6 enrollment) that enrollments-including
those of minorities-actually rose during the years in question, thereby
disproving Haney's assertion that TAAS drives struggling and/or minority
students to quit school altogether. Though the analysis is a bit complicated,
this debunking of Haney's anti-testing tract is worth a read at http://epaa.asu.edu/epaa/v10n17/.
Haney's paper can be found at http://epaa.asu.edu/epaa/v8n41/.
by Kelly
Scott
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High-Stakes Testing, Uncertainty, and Student Learning
Audrey Amrein
and David Berliner, Education Policy Analysis Archives
March 28, 2002
Audrey Amrein
and David Berliner of Arizona State University are the authors of this 70-page
cyber-article that seeks to determine whether high-stakes testing has actually
boosted student achievement in eighteen states that, say the authors, have
attached "severe consequences" to their testing programs. They don't
seek evidence from the states' own tests but, rather, from other national data
sources. They conclude that high-stakes testing doesn't boost student
achievement, that gains shown on state tests are the result of various manipulations
(e.g. curricular narrowing, excluding students), and that undesirable
consequences are rampant. The essay also serves as another opportunity for
Berliner to restate his familiar view that the nation is not and never was
"at risk." The piece, overall, is more hatchet job than careful
social science. The information they use about many of the eighteen states in
their sample is not entirely accurate. For example, they ascribe to a number of
states "consequences" that haven't yet taken effect or have affected
only a tiny number of students or schools. Their principal sources of external
data are college-admissions tests (SAT, ACT, AP) that are not taken by all
students and that are less apt to be affected by state-level accountability
policies aimed at low-performing students and schools (those being students
less apt to even apply to college); and NAEP results, which are not even
available at the state level in 12th grade. What sort of social scientist would
use NAEP 4th and 8th grade scores to (in the authors' words) "test the
effects on learning from using high-stakes tests in states that have
implemented high-stakes high school graduation exams"? In sum, I see no
basis for accepting the authors' starting premise that "the ACT, SAT, NAEP
and AP tests are reasonable measures of the domains that a state's high-stakes
testing program is intended to affect." To my eye, they fail to make their
case. If, nonetheless, you'd like to see for yourself, surf to http://epaa.asu.edu/epaa/v10n18/.
If you'd like to see more systematic rebuttals of the claim that tests don't
boost student achievement, by Cornell's John Bishop and colleagues, you can
find two of them (in PDF format) at http://www.ilr.cornell.edu/depts/cahrs/PDFs/WorkingPapers/WP00-09.pdf
and http://www.ilr.cornell.edu/depts/cahrs/PDFs/WorkingPapers/WP98-27.pdf.
You may also want to check out the 2001 edition of Brookings Papers on
Education Policy, edited by Diane Ravitch, about
which you can learn more at http://www.brookings.edu/dybdocroot/press/books/bpep2001.htm.
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Revolution at the Margins: The Impact of Competition on
Urban School Systems
Frederick M. Hess
2002
Brookings has just published this
important book by Frederick M. Hess, a young but insightful political scientist
at the University of Virginia. Based on case studies of Cleveland, Milwaukee
and Edgewood, Texas (the San Antonio district with the most ambitious
privately-funded voucher program), this volume tries, in the author's words, to
provide "a more nuanced consideration of the way education competition
works in practice," to "shed light on the ways in which urban system
structure and practice hamper efforts to improve urban schooling," and to
advance understanding of "the promise that market-driven reform holds for
the provision of public services." He concludes that competition is a
useful but limited strategy for the reform of urban education, in itself not
powerful enough to transform dysfunctional school systems. He outlines a number
of other strategies for change. It's a perceptive book, though I'm ultimately unpersuaded by his explanation of why a "hybrid"
combining market forces with top-down, results-based accountability won't work
better than either strategy taken alone. Serious followers of contemporary
education policy debates will want their own copies. The ISBN is 0815702094.
You can learn more at http://www.brookings.edu/savingsforthepoor/revolution%5Fmargins.htm.
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San Diego's Big Boom: District Bureaucracy Supports Culture
of Learning
Amy M. Hightower, Center for the
Study of Teaching and Policy
January 2002
This report describes the efforts of
the nation's eighth largest school district to use the coercive power of
bureaucracy to create an education system grounded in effective principles of
teaching and learning. The author, Stanford's Amy Hightower, notes up front
that she is trying to meld two characterizations-districts as bureaucratic and
districts as learning-centric-that have traditionally been seen as polar
opposites. For the better part of two decades the bureaucracies of large, urban
school districts have been vilified by education reformers as
"dysfunctional dinosaurs," "intransigent," and "beyond
reform." Hightower claims that a small set of divergent examples now
challenges the image of school districts as irrelevant, hopelessly disjointed,
and bureaucratically hamstrung. One such example is San Diego. In March 1998,
Alan D. Bersin, a former U.S. Attorney, was named as
the city's new superintendent and charged with pulling the school system out of
its "organizational rut." One of Bersin's
first acts was to recruit educator Anthony Alvarado to serve as his Chancellor
of Instruction and co-leader of reform. This dynamic duo declared that the
"status quo was no longer acceptable." They made clear that they
would use their bureaucratic power to refocus the system on instructional
issues. They set about to "jolt the system." They opposed those who
advocated incremental reforms and used every available mechanism of coercion to
transform a system entrenched in standard operating procedures to one where
administrators, principals, and teachers worked together to improve instruction
across the city. Bersin's chief of staff succinctly
expressed the bottom line: "There are two types of people in this
[district] community. There are the teachers and those who support
teaching....And if you can't fit into one of those two categories, if you can't
accept your role in one of those two categories, then you need to leave."
Their strategy has its critics. A top-ranking administrator argued (upon
exiting the system) that an "era of intimidation" had begun. Teacher
unionists asserted that reforms were being forced on them. Despite the dissent,
Hightower writes, the San Diego City Schools show how a district can employ
bureaucratic methods to destroy a dysfunctional culture and create something
grounded in effective learning and teaching. But, she adds, despite initial
success-SAT-9 scores increased three years in a row-it is too early to know
whether these changes will prove durable. This report is available at http://www.ctpweb.org.
by Terry
Ryan
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The U.S. Department of Education
seeks proposal readers for its Teaching American History Grant Program. Readers
will have a chance to influence how $100,000,000 of federal grant money-aimed
at improving K-12 history teaching-is distributed. For more information, surf
to http://www.ed.gov/offices/OESE/TAH/tahfaq.html
or e-mail Steve Balch at [email protected]
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