A Come-Back for Common Sense?

When she was Assistant Secretary of Education from 2001 to 2003, Susan Neuman helped implement No Child Left Behind, which embodies the belief that well-run schools can wipe out the problems caused by poverty.

Now a professor at the University of Michigan School of Education, she's endorsed a very different approach to shrinking achievement gaps. Neuman was the most surprising signer of a statement from 63 education leaders affirming that no, schools can't work miracles.

"There is no evidence that school improvement strategies by themselves can close [achievement] gaps in a substantial, consistent, and sustainable manner," the statement says.

Or, as Neuman put it more succinctly in an interview yesterday, "A school can not trump poverty."

But the point of the new statement is not just to say what can't be done. It's to propose a different angle of attack.

"There is solid evidence that policies aimed directly at education-related social and economic disadvantages can improve... student achievement," the statement affirms.

It sets out four "pillars" for a "Broader, Bolder Approach to Education." The first is to keep working to make schools better through research-proven strategies like smaller classes for disadvantaged students.

The other three pillars all involve efforts outside k-12 education:

• Invest in high-quality pre-school.
• Invest in healthcare for kids.
• Pay attention to the time students spend out of school.

"By and large, low-income students learn as rapidly as more-privileged peers during the hours spent in school," says the group, citing an amazing research finding which is almost universally ignored.

Helen Ladd, one of three co-chairs of the group, told Education Week, “Our notion is that schools can’t do it alone... That has been missed in the education debate.”

The original signers come from all over the political spectrum. Neuman is not the only former Bush Administration leader in the group.

Neuman says that even when she was at the Department of Education, her speeches focused on poverty and bringing community resources to bear on reducing its effects.

"There's been a failure of us as a society to recognize how important the effects of poverty on a child are," she said. "This is something that stays with a child every moment. We need a national conversation on how to create a 360-degree surround for these children."

Does the broad support for this statement signal a return to common sense? The bloggers are buzzing. Here's one example. Here's another. (I picked two that I agree with. Google "Broader, bolder" to find more.)

In the spirit of the Web, Neuman and her co-signers are inviting other people to join them in signing the statement.

You'll be in good company!

--Alain Jehlen

She Said, She Said

It's been largely absent from every public debate in the 2008 presidential primary, much to the chagrin of educators, parents, and advocates, but last week education got front-page treatment by the presumptive presidential nominees. Not the candidates themselves exactly. Rather, the senior education advisers for Sen. John McCain and Sen. Barack Obama focused on the issue to the Association of Educational Publishers' Great American Education Forum in Washington, D.C.

Under questioning from a panel of journalists, policy wonks, and advocates (including NEA's own Joel Packer) the McCain camp's Lisa Graham Keegan and Obama proxy Jeanne Century outlined their candidates' positions on everything from No Child Left Behind to merit pay.

And what of NCLB? Keegan, the former Arizona Superintendent of Public Instruction, said it is "immoral" if teachers are waiting for the threat of sanctions to compel them to focus on reading and math. She added that teachers should be worried about teaching a rich curriculum, not worrying about teaching to the test. "Let's not talk about No Child Left Behind," Keegan told the audience. "Let's talk about our work. Take it off the table." Century, director of the University of Chicago's Center for Elementary Mathematics and Science Education, countered that she doesn't "know any teacher who teaches reading and math because they'll be penalized. They teach reading and math because it's part of their full rich curriculum."

Here's what else they said:

* In response to Packer's lightning-round question about whether their candidates support or oppose federal vouchers for private schools, Keegan said McCain is "supportive of choice at the state level." Century replied simply, "opposed."

* Asked about merit pay, Century said Obama is "against traditional merit pay that ties individual teacher pay to student outcome." He wants to collaborate with teacher organizations and school districts to come up with alternatives, such as paying teachers for being leaders or mentors, or attaining additional education that displays deeper knowledge of their subject area. Keegan said that McCain favors an "innovative compensation system" that rewards teachers "for classroom excellence." But she would not specify if that meant student test scores. Stakeholders would have to define what classroom excellence meant, she said.

Asked to give a final soundbite about their candidates, Keegan and Century offered starkly different blurbs. Said Keegan of McCain: "He does not care if you don't agree with him," pointing to McCain's stance on immigration reform, which brought considerable criticism from those in his own party. Century focused on Obama's desire to "absolutely confront the barriers in education."

To read more for yourself about Obama and McCain's education policies and voting records, head to Education Votes.

Reading Last?

Students enrolled in Reading First, a key component of President Bush’s so-called No Child Left Behind law, read no better than students who aren’t in the program, according to a new Department of Education study.

“There was no statistically significant impact on reading comprehension scores in grades one, two, or three,” Grover J. Russ Whitehurst, director of the Institute of Education Sciences at the Depart of Education, said in a press briefing.

This comes as no surprise to educators:

“As an experienced teacher of third grade, I am deeply saddened by the Reading First Program. I have been teaching for more than 25 years and I have never seen so many students hurt by something that is supposed to be helpful,” writes one educator. “Many of our best teachers are seeking employment in non-Reading First Schools. The reason …is that the focus is on fluency and not comprehension. As a result, we have students who quickly read a passage, but cannot comprehend a word that they have read. I have [also] seen language skills, math, science, social studies, and all other aspects of education neglected because of the pressure of Reading First.”

Others are frustrated by the constantly changing curriculum procedures, and mountains of documentation requirements:

“I am a veteran teacher and this is my first year in a Reading First school....The workload is outrageous! I never seem to be caught up because we make changes constantly. Everyone is on pins and needles waiting for a state visit. There is no room for flexibility. I plan to leave at the end of the school year,” says one frustrated educator.

President Bush and Education Secretary Spellings have lauded Reading First as an effective program rooted in science and research, but controversy surrounded it from the start. Federal investigators found that some overseeing the $6 billion program had financial ties to the publishers of Reading First materials.

“The Bush Administration has put cronyism first and the reading skills of our children last and this report shows the disturbing consequences,” said Sen. Edward Kennedy, chairman of the Senate education committee. “Instead of awarding scarce education dollars to reading programs that make a difference for our children, the Administration chose to reward its friends instead.”

Are you in a Reading First school? Share your experiences on our discussion board.

Why Our Nation Is "At Risk"

A quarter of a century ago this month, America was informed that our economy was "at risk" because of "a rising tide of mediocrity" in our schools.

"If an unfriendly foreign power had attempted to impose on America the mediocre performance that exists today, we might well have considered it an act of war," said the famous report, commissioned by the Reagan administration.

At the time, the United States was much less exam-oriented than other countries. We had state tests, but they didn't dominate the school experience. An excellent education, we knew, can't be reduced to a standardized test score.

And we proved it. Since the report, those supposedly "mediocre" American students have led the creative burst of innovation that gave us the computer revolution and continues to transform the world.

Our kids do have the right stuff.

But somehow, America's educators get no credit, at least not at home. Instead of building on our strengths to solve our problems, we've adopted the foreign focus on tests, amplified it, and made it our own.

Is that going to cost us our edge? Will the next fantastic technical upheaval erupt from somewhere else?

You know, if an unfriendly foreign power had attempted to impose on America the stifling test-score obsession that exists today, we might well have considered it an act of war.

--Alain Jehlen

Soviet-Style Education

The latest on No Child Left Behind:
Yesterday's Education Daily says some Senate education staffers have put together a proposal to replace the current NCLB accountability system with a Yearly Growth Index calculated as follows:

"States' indices would base AYP on a combination of student results on standardized reading and math tests, additional content-area tests, performance- based tests, and 'additional indicators' that are not test based. States could assign different weights to the components in the index, subject to certain caps. Reading and math test results would each make up no less than 35 percent of the index weight in grades 3-8 and 25 percent of the index in high school, for instance. States could give additional credit to students who move from the 'below basic' to the 'basic' proficiency level on these tests. To calculate AYP, states would set a total proficiency objective and calculate a separate baseline index score for each school and each subgroup within the school."

Got that?

Good, 'cause there's more:

"Each year, a school would make AYP if the schoolwide index score and each subgroup's index score met or exceeded the state proficiency objective.

"Schools and subgroups whose index score fell below the state proficiency objective would still make AYP if both the schoolwide index score and each subgroup's index score increased at least 5 percent of the difference between their respective baseline scores and the state proficiency objective."

(Sigh.)

Yes, NCLB flunks some great schools and passes some that are not so great. But that doesn't mean we need even more complex rules, which won't work, either. It means rigid central planning for complicated enterprises is the wrong way to go.

The Soviet Union failed, remember?

News Flash!

Spelling Discovers 1

The Secretary of Education has decided that a school that keeps missing one No Child Left Behind targets doesn't have to be treated as if it missed, say, 37 targets.

At least, not if that school is in one of 10 states participating in a pilot program Secretary Margaret Spellings announced recently. Other states must shut down or drastically change schools that persistently miss even one target, but the lucky 10 will not.

It's called "differentiated accountability."

"This is something good, something we’ve been advocating," commented NEA President Reg Weaver. But much more needs to be done, he added.

Spellings' new policy leaves intact the law's rigid reliance on test scores to measure school quality. And some observers point out that it treats urban schools with many minority and low-income children much more harshly than schools that are richer and whiter. In the Alice-in-Wonderland world of NCLB, schools that are wealthy and mostly White can pass with the same scores that would flunk an urban school.

That's because, if there are only a few English language learners, they don't have to meet the school-wide test score goal, but if there are a lot of ELLs, they do. And the same for other subgroups.

The idea of making schools accountable for the achievement of a subgroup only if the group has a certain minimum size was justified on the grounds that a small number of students might not be statistically representative, so the school shouldn't be responsible, but the achievement of a large group is more likely to represent school quality. If that were the real reason, though, the minimum group size would be the same across the country and it would be determined by a statistical test. Instead, every state was allowed to pick a different number -- clearly a political decision.

Urban schools generally have more members of many subgroups, so they have a higher hurdle to jump to reach the all-important "adequate yearly progress.

Here are some comments on the new program from NEA and from the Columbus Education Association.

--Alain Jehlen