Packer & Puriefoy, Part One

With a new President to be elected this year, it's time to look at a new federal agenda for education. In the latest podcast, I interview Wendy Puriefoy about a new report from the Forum on Education and Democracy that sets out a Marshall Plan for education -- including more investment in teachers and research, and a greater emphasis on engaging parents and educating communities.

Listen to the podcast, and send your questions to Joel@nea.org.

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The transcript follows:

Hi, I’m Joel Packer and welcome to the podcast. And today’s podcast is going to be a little bit different as opposed to just hearing me talk, we have today a distinguished guest with us, and we’re going to have in some future podcasts some additional guests. So today we have with us Wendy Puriefoy, who is president of the Public Education Network and also a convener of the Forum on Education and Democracy.

For those who don’t know PEN, the Public Education Network, is the country’s largest network of community-based school reform organizations. Ms. Puriefoy has been deeply involved in school reform since the 1970’s when she served as a special monitor of the court-ordered desegregation plan for Boston’s public schools. Prior to starting in her role as President of PEN, Wendy was Executive Vice President and Chief Operating Officer of the Boston Foundation in Boston, Massachusetts.

She also serves on numerous boards of national organizations including the Children’s Defense Fund. So, Wendy, welcome and thanks for joining us today.

Wendy Puriefoy: Thank you for having me.

Joel Packer: Good, so Wendy, start off a little bit about the report from the Forum on Education and Democracy. Actually, first just tell us a little bit about what the Forum on Education and Democracy is and what your role with it is as a convener.

Wendy Puriefoy: The Forum includes a group of both researchers and people who run organizations who decided to come together to really look at the ways in which we could talk explicitly about the connection between education and democracy. So often the conversations we have about improving public schools are able specific individual strategies. And in this new report we actually recommend a number of specific strategies.

But the Forum always keeps in mind what is the state of our democracy in relationship to the quality of public education. So that’s one of the purposes. The other was to, is to really be able to take a fresh look at the issues that each of us are grappling with within our institutions and organizations or as professors. In the case of Linda Darling-Hammond and Gloria Latson-Billings and Pedro Negara, and to really be able to sort of freshly come to material and really say, what do we think about this.

Joel Packer: Great. And so the Forum just recently released a report called Democracy at Risk. So what does the report mainly focus on and what does it say about the No Child Left Behind Act?

Wendy Puriefoy: Well, there’s a set of things. The first is, we decided as a group that it would be important, given the upcoming election and the election of the new President that will take place in November of this year, that it was now time to really put together a federal agenda, a new federal agenda for public education. So if, in the report there are really three sort of major sections of the report. One part of the report has to do with the deep investment that we need to make in teachers.

And we talk about that as the Marshall Plan. Another part of the report really has a great deal to do with the ways in which we can engage communities, which is the part of the plan that I in particular am very interested in. And the, probably one of the most important parts of the report is a way in which the report helps people to see that because education is so critical for obvious things, productivity and employment and the positioning of the nation, obviously important to us individually.

It therefore becomes a significant investment that the nation should be making. And so part of the report begins with really looking at this concept we call the educational debt.

Joel Packer: Okay. And so does the report talk at all about the current federal role through No Child Behind and some of the issues with that, or problems that that’s causing?

Wendy Puriefoy: I think the way in which the report explicitly talks about NCLB is by making a set of recommendations about sets of things that need to be done in terms of the investment in teachers, the investment in research. So it calls for different types of investments than what presently exist in NCLB.

Joel Packer: So let’s talk a little bit more about the report’s recommendation that’s called Engage Parents and Educate Local Communities. So how can the federal government really do that, or help do that, and why is doing that, why is parent involvement and community involvement an important part of improving education?

Wendy Puriefoy: Well, you know, one of the, to talk about NCLB for just a minute, one of the hallmarks of No Child Left Behind is, in fact, it talks about the role that parents play in the quality of education that their children receive. And the need for parents to be engaged, not only in their homes, but at the school level, and to help engage others. Because actually, parents only make up 30 percent of the population, and so we need the other 70 percent.

So in the NCLB legislation, it really calls for the creation of parent councils and it calls for information to be gotten out to parents. And so what this report does is really continue to focus on that engagement of parents to ensure that the people who are closest to the issues of what’s going on in school, are the people who can be used not only to help improve schools, but to also lever engagement or leverage engagement with others.

Because for the most part, if the general public doesn’t see parents engaged, they can't make the connections to why they should get engaged. So it talks about, in terms of the report, it talks about family engagement in schools, it looks at the ways in which community agencies can become involved. And it reminds people that schools are really centers of community. So there’s a tendency for us to, at least now, to look at schools as completely separate from community. And we forget that there was a time when communities were literally built around schools.

Joel Packer: Right.

Wendy Puriefoy: And today, despite our not talking about it explicitly, you and I go and buy a house in a neighborhood, and the first thing the real estate developer will tell us is, your investment is really great here because this community’s got great schools.

Joel Packer: And so what should the federal government specifically do?

Wendy Puriefoy: Well, the federal government has, at least under NCLB and in this proposal, is that one, parents and teachers and schools don’t often interact well. So there needs to be really, real training to help schools and principals know how to engage with parents as a group, specific parents in terms of language difficulties; or to be very aware of the fact that parents, some parents, particularly parents of poor and disadvantaged children, don’t engage with the schools because they’ve had bad experiences.

Practically a number of people don’t engage with schools because they’re working at the hours that schools typically do their engagement. So the report really asks us to take a look at who the parents are, how to engage with them, train teacher and school personnel about engaging with parents more effectively, and also to look at different ways in which parents can be engaged. Not just to look at say a single pipeline of 20 years ago where mothers stayed at home and you could come to a PTA meeting at 3 o’clock in the afternoon.

So that’s one part of it. So that’s one part of it. The other is that it’s really using, the report talks about having community and family member, families invited to learn about what the next new thing is that’s going on in school. And that those kinds of meetings are held at a time when information can be gotten out. We can use technology to get some of that information out.

Also to work with employers to help employers be able to see that it’s an investment in their employee if they’re a parent to enable that parent to have time off from work to be able to participate in their school, their children’s school’s activities because it’s going to pay off long term.

Joel Packer: Well, Wendy, President Bush and Secretary Spellings often highlight that No Child Behind empowers parents. My view is when they talk about that, they’re really meaning school choice, private school vouchers, after school tutoring, those kinds of things. So how is what the Forum proposes for parent-community involvement different than that?

Wendy Puriefoy: Well what the Forum is proposing may be a deeper, better extension of what NCLB is talking about in terms of parent involvement. Good news about NCLB is that it talks about parent involvement over 300 times, I think, in the legislation. So it’s clear to anybody who’s reading it that parents are an important constituency in terms of increasing student achievement and setting goals for children about how important it is to be educated.

What the Forum’s report is talking about in terms of parent involvement is really, I would say in two ways. One, we recognize that parents have to be able to engage with their children’s school. There are various reasons why they don’t. Some that have to do with, psychologically school was a bad experience for many poor and parents who were poor and disadvantaged. For some, the traditional involvement strategy falls outside of a time when they can be involved because they’re at work, either during the day or at night.

And the report also recognizes that parents are the key link to engaging the rest of the community. So in the report what we talk about is the importance of having schools prepared to deal with parents. In other words, making sure that school personnel receive the kind of training that parents are not an add-on, but they’re a central part of educating. To help people who work in schools to figure out how to talk to parents, how to elicit feedback from parents, how to use various means to engage parents besides coming to the school.

Technology is clearly an option for some parents. The other part of it really has to do with how we help parents understand what their children are learning, why they’re learning it, and what role the parent can play in helping to stress the importance of a particular lesson, or what’s going on in school, or the importance of school to the child. Increasingly making that child more and more comfortable about being in school, and at the same time setting standards.

One of the things that you'll see in this report is the extent to which we talk about the multiple approaches to parent engagement. We encourage in this report, for example, employers to recognize that an investment in the parents in their company will pay long term benefits. Not just for the child, but will pay long term benefits for the company in terms of its stature in the community, the satisfaction of an employee, and a sense that education is as important to people who are not parents as it is to people who are parents.

Joel Packer: Okay, well great. Well thanks Wendy for being with us today. We’re actually going to have Wendy back in Part 2 of this podcast where she’s going to talk about, and we'll ask her some questions about, PEN’s own work and a report they issued last year about No Child Behind. So once again, I’m Joel Packer, thanks for listening.

Schools Carry That Weight of Bush Magical Mystery Tour

In less than a year, the Bush administration’s Magical Mystery Tour approach to education will come to an end. The belief that schools magically improve without resources or funding or relationships with educators, administrators or school districts – all that will fade like a flashback. The mystery of how this Administration believed it could sell a policy that says fewer resources plus reduced time to teach plus more testing equaled greater student achievement will never be solved.

Listen to the podcast, and send your questions to Joel@nea.org.

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The transcript follows:

Hi. This is Joel. Welcome to the podcast.

If President Bush and Education Secretary Spellings had to use a song to describe their funding policy for No Child Left Behind they might have picked the Beatles’ “Can’t Buy Me Love”. You know “'cause I don't care too much for money, money can't buy me love.”

But most educators and state and local officials would instead pick another Beatles’ song, “Money” and think of these words as music to their ears:

“Money don't get everything it's true.
What it don't get I can't use.
So gimme money that's what I want.”

It’s true. Money “don’t get everything” needed to help close achievement gaps, improve student achievement for all students, or ensure all students have great public schools, but without the resources and investments needed so educators can get the job done, we won’t reach the goals.

Yes, it takes money to pay for smaller class sizes, expanded professional development for teachers, after-school programs, quality PreK, new textbooks, technology, and modern schools.

Yet in each of the past three school years, an average of 63 percent of school districts have received LESS Title I money than they got the previous year.

Title I provides federal money for extra reading and math help for educationally disadvantaged students in schools where low-income students are concentrated.

These cutbacks should not be a surprise because since the enactment of NCLB in 2002, funding for Title I is more than $54 BILLION below what was proposed in NCLB. And sadly, President Bush’s budget for next year would further shortchange children and public schools under Title I by another $10.7 billion; more than 4 million low-income children will NOT receive the full range of services and programs they need and deserve.

That’s not even the worst of it. When you compare the overall mandates of the law to the overall money committed, by the end of the Bush years the funding short fall will be more than $85 billion.

In a report last year, the Center on Education Policy found that in recent years approximately 80% of districts have assumed costs to carry out NCLB for which they are not being reimbursed by the federal government.

NEA and eight school districts have filed a lawsuit challenging the right of the federal government to force states and school districts to spend their own funds to meet the NCLB mandates. The suit is still pending in the U.S. Court of Appeals with several states now supporting our effort.

The funding squeeze becomes worse each year as the federal mandates become more stringent. Annual standardized testing of students in reading and math originally was only required for three grades -- once in elementary, once in middle school, and once in high school. Starting in the 2005-06 school year, every state had to test every student annually in reading and math in seven grades - each of grades 3-8 and once in high school. Starting in the 2007-08 school year, each state had to annually test students in at least three grades in science. All teachers of core academic subjects had to be highly qualified by the end of the 2006-07 school tear. And of course, by the 2013-14 school year, 100% of all students must be proficient in reading and math.

Mandates piling up, dollars draining away. It may be the worst thing the Bush Administration has done to public education. And what has the President proposed in his budget for next year?. How about over $1 billion for two new private school voucher programs. How about eliminating funds for arts education and parent information centers? How about cutting state grants for safe and drug-free schools by 66%?

In less than a year, the Bush Administration’s Magical Mystery Tour approach to education will come to an end. The belief that schools magically improve without resources or funding or relationships with educators, administrators or school districts – all that will fade like a flashback. The mystery of how this administration believed it could sell a policy that says fewer resources plus reduced time to teach plus more testing equaled greater student achievement will never be solved.

The Bush education policy tour isn’t over, but it has more than lost its way, now it’s just plain lost.

Education Smackdown -- No Child Left BeHype vs. No Child Left BeReal

It’s time for Congress to reject the hype and outright falsehoods too often marking the final months of Bush policy.

Listen to the podcast, and send your questions to Joel@nea.org.

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The transcript follows:

Joel Packer Has All the Answers Podcast -- May 13, 2008

Hi. I’m Joel Packer. Welcome to the podcast.

Get ready for some numbers. I promise you’ll be smarter in just a few minutes with our famous Joel Packer Has All the Answers individualized instruction. And there will be no test needed to move on to the next podcast.

What’s the main objective of No Child Left Behind? Increasing student test scores. Sure, the law is more than 1,000 pages long and contains some 50 programs, most of them unfunded mandates by the way. But the major “bright line” to quote Education Secretary Margaret Spellings, is that by the year 2014, every single student – 100 percent - will be proficient on statewide reading and math tests.

Every year from the start of the law in the 2002-03 school year through the year when all children will be above average and living in Lake Wobegon, increasing percentages of students must score proficient or higher on these two tests.

So, has it worked? Are the children now all above average, just as in Garrison Keillor’s fantasy world?

Secretary Spellings says everything is fine. She says scores on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) have increased, so she says NCLB is “like Ivory soap: It’s 99.9 percent pure…there’s not much needed in the way of change.” Even President Bush said, “These scores confirm that No Child Left Behind is working.”

But is it?

The percentage of fourth graders who scored at the proficient or higher level on NAEP only increased by 2% between 1998 and 2002 (pre-NCLB). Yet from 2002 to 2007 - after NCLB began - the increase in the percent proficient was also just 2%. Based on 4th grade math scores, the percent proficient rose by 9% from 2000 to 2003 but only 8 points from 2003 to 2007.

For 8th graders in reading, the percent proficient improved by only 1% between 1998 and 2002 but actually went down by 2 points between 2002 and 2007. The only area where performance was better post-NCLB than before was in 8th grade math, where the percent proficient went up just two points between 2000 and 2003, but rose 4 points between 2003 and 2007.

FairTest co-Executive Director Monty Neill criticized the Administration for its claims saying, “NAEP shows educational improvement across the nation slowed significantly since NCLB went into effect…despite the fact that curriculum narrowed in many schools to little more than test preparation in reading and math.”

The NY Times in a September 2007 article said, “…gains in reading achievement have been marginal, with performance declining among eighth graders… The results also showed that the nation had made only incremental progress in narrowing historic gaps in achievement between white and minority students, a fundamental goal of the federal law.”

The Civil Rights project at UCLA (formerly at Harvard) in a 2006 study, Tracking Achievement Gaps and Assessing the Impact of NCLB on the Gaps, reached the following conclusions:

• NCLB did not have a significant impact on improving reading and math achievement across the nation and states.
• NCLB has not helped the nation and states significantly narrow the achievement gap.
  The Bush administration’s hard spin on its failed education policy doesn’t straighten out away from NCLB issues either. Spellings recently said about the Reading First program, “If ever there was a program that was rooted in research and science and fact, this is it,” she said. “This is [like] the cure for cancer.” Two months later her own Department’s research arm issued a report saying the Reading First program had no real effect on reading comprehension in Grades 1-3.

It’s time for Congress to reject the hype and outright falsehoods too often marking the final months of Bush policy.

It’s time to fundamentally overhaul NCLB and shift its focus from testing, labeling, and punishing. It’s time to support states and districts to build capacity, use comprehensive meaningful measures of student learning and school quality, and provide resources for proven programs like smaller class size.

And finally, it’s especially time to stop pretending when it comes to closing the achievement gaps – to allow school systems flexibility to put in place appropriate interventions targeted to the underlying problems in struggling schools – instead of failed one-size-fits-all mandates.

Thanks very much. I’m Joel Packer.

Welcome to Joel Packer Has All the Answers

In the inaugural podcast, Joel explains why he's here, why he's focusing on the No Child Left Behind law, and how the law became so toxic. But he needs your questions -- so ask Joel@nea.org!

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The transcript follows:

Joel Packer Has All the Answers Podcast - May 1, 2008

Welcome to the podcast. I’m Joel Packer, Director of Education Policy and Practice at the National Education Association.

For more than 20 years I’ve been at NEA helping to represent the views of educators to the Congress and four different presidential administrations. Our goal over the next several months is to keep you informed and updated on the No Child Left Behind Act and to give you a sense of what we can do together to make a difference in education policy.

Let me start by saying I don’t have all the answers, but I do know why they picked this name.We are determined to be interactive. There’s a national dialogue about this law and that dialogue is going to be reflected here. Having answers means I’ll be getting questions - and you better believe, with a title like that, if I don’t HAVE the answers, I’ll get them. But the title also means I’ll be asking some questions and sharing YOUR answers. We may even have a guest from time to time. There’s an email address on the website nea.org and at the end of this podcast where you can ask me specific questions, suggest topics and share stories and tips and your experience under this law.

So why focus on No Child Left Behind?First of all, since the original Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965, nothing has had a more sweeping effect than NCLB. From testing to funding to the curriculum and more, NCLB reaches out and touches some aspects of almost every school.

NCLB passed Congress with overwhelmingly bipartisan support in 2001, but controversy and confusion over the law among educators and the general public grows every year. And support has rapidly eroded. Even the House of Representatives Education and Labor Committee Chairman George Miller, one of the original four authors of the law, recently said that NCLB “has become the most negative brand in America.”

While the law officially expires September 30, it is virtually certain that due to divisions between Congress and the President, divisions in Congress between Democrats and Republicans, as well as divisions within each party, that the law will not be renewed this year. The reality however is that the law doesn’t really expire or go away. As long as Congress continues to fund the many NCLB programs including Title I, Teacher Quality grants, and after school, the law’s requirements and mandates stay in effect.

What this means for all of us is a chance to influence the way the law is rewritten in the coming months into next year. Yes, 2008 is an election year and elections can make a difference in shaping policy. But this podcast won’t be about politics or elections. We’ll be talking about how the law has affected your schools and students and communities and how we can create federal policies that help rather than hurt.

Why has NCLB become so toxic? We’ll explore the reasons in depth in upcoming episodes, but here’s a brief list:

• NCLB has failed in its own fundamental purpose – to raise student test scores and close achievement gaps.NCLB is narrowing the curriculum.
• NCLB is too focused on standardized tests.
• NCLB is a severely underfunded mandate that is shortchanging our students and public schools.
• NCLB will eventually result in almost all schools failing.

In case you can’t tell, the National Education Association opposes the law and is leading the way to a fundamental overhaul. We were the first national organization to propose substantive changes and helped organize a coalition of 144 groups calling for changes. We initiated a lawsuit challenging the unfunded mandate provisions of the law and have worked with members of Congress from both parties to draft bills to change the law. There are actually 134 bills on NCLB pending in Congress that we support

…So there’s our first podcast. Stay tuned to nea.org and please, if you have a question you’d like addressed on future podcasts, a comment, or an idea or experience to share with our vast national audience – Hi Mom! – send an email to joel@nea.org. That’s joel j-o-e-l @nea.org.

Thanks.