School Choice in Compton

If there is anyplace in California that needs more competition and choice, Compton is the place. The Los Angeles Times reports on a pretty much doomed bill to give kids in Compton a way out.

The Compton experiment would be modeled after the highly popular Cal Grant program for college students, which provides the financially neediest students with grants of as much as $9,708 a year to pay tuition and student fees.

Haynes refused to detail his strategy for getting the bill approved in a Legislature dominated by Democrats who oppose vouchers. But he indicated that packaging the subsidies as scholarships similar to Cal Grant subsidies would make the bill more attractive to Democrats.

The plan would get a five-year test run, starting Jan. 1. The results would be evaluated and decisions made on whether to expand it elsewhere.

As a potential model for the rest of the state, Haynes said, Compton "was a good place to start.... What we need in Compton is a revolution." . . .

Haynes identified the sponsors of his bill as about 50 Compton parents and a nonprofit organization known as the Coalition on Urban Renewal and Education, a conservative, religion-based think tank with an office in Los Angeles. It was founded by commentator Star Parker, a one-time Los Angeles welfare mother who wrote the book "Pimps, Whores and Welfare Brats."

"We wanted to submit a bill that had to be taken seriously. We did not want a bill that would be thrown out because it was not constitutionally acceptable or credible," said Timothy McGhee, the organization's director of community affairs.

But Haynes said it will be very difficult to push the bill through the Legislature and get it signed by Gov. Gray Davis, who opposes vouchers. Haynes said he told the Compton parents that it would take lots of work and expansion of their group of 50 parents to "something more like 10,000" for the bill to succeed.

If a scholarship/voucher program passes in Washington DC, then these other urban public-school sinkholes will have more of a fighting chance.

Just Teaching

I am on the fence about the value of standardized testing to improve education--believing that choice and competition are much more efficient mechanisms to enforce quality. However, if tax money is involved then there must be standardized tests to assess value for cost.

I am always skeptical about claims of “teaching to the test” and how that erodes the quality of a child's education. First off, I question what was going on in the classroom before the standardized test. What were the children doing in the classroom for 6-7 hours that would preclude scoring well on basic reading and math exams?

Homeschoolers are taught using very flexible curriculums yet often score high on most standardized tests—because reading and math skills are obviously part of any good curriculum. My children go to private school and have not yet participated in California’s standardized tests. However, I would expect that my son would score well in reading and math based on the private school curriculum—even though he has not explicitly been “taught to the test.”

Ed Hirsch is right—there is just a certain amount of “core” reading and math skills that one would expect any adequate curriculum to cover. Whether it’s a Montessori method or the popular “Abeka” Christian curriculum, one would expect that any second grader could read certain passages at grade/age level or complete certain math items on a test. So what is it that public school students are doing all day that is flexible yet yields low scores on standardized tests? (Whether every student can reach a certain baseline on any standardized test is a different debate and people who promote standardized testing often seem to have missed basic tenets from their college-level statistic course.)

Kim Swygert has an excellent anecdote from a Korean student taking the writing portion of the SAT II that illustrates how studying material for a valid test enriches general learning. Kim notes “Brian feels the writing test helped his real-world writing skills, which is the added benefit of any good test, and is the reason that "teaching to the test" is indistinguishable from teaching when the test is valid.”

Tax Credit Gold Rush

I Love this. Tax credits are my preference when it comes to school choice. Today's Orlando Sentinel reports on the demand for tax credit scholarships in Florida:

More than 15,000 children receiving the scholarships already have exhausted the $50 million that lawmakers allowed for the program last year.

Thousands of students are sitting on waiting lists, with little chance of participating this fall unless other children drop out or lawmakers expand the program.

Although voucher advocates expected that parents would jump at a chance to send their kids to private schools, they were surprised by the frenzy of interest, especially because there was little advertising.

About 55,000 people applied for the scholarships, which are available to children who qualify for free or reduced-price lunches in public schools, according to the Florida Department of Education.

One argument that is always made against vouchers and tax credits is that every private school will raise their tuition to the minimum amount of the voucher or scholarship. In Milwaukee and Florida, the evil private schools, who are only concerned with making profits on the backs of children, but do not charge the full scholarship amount, have returned the money to the state to allow additional children to participate. In Florida, many private schools charged less than $3,500 per child. Leftover money allowed about 600 more kids to participate, according to the state.

New Charter Bills

The San Francisco Chronicle reports on two new charter school bills. One bill would give Mayors, Universities, and nonprofits a chance to authorize and supervise charter schools. States with the most robust charter school competition allow multiple charter school authorizers. In other words, these states do not require that a charter school's direct competition (the school district) be the only permissible authorizer.

The second bill would require charters to prove they are doing a better job than other similar schools -- or be shut down. This would include any charter that did not rank at least a 4 against schools with similar demographics on the Academic Performance Index, a state measure of performance in which 10 is best. I think we should level the playing field and shut down all public schools that do not rank at least a 4 against similar schools.

Paid Vacation

The Education Gadfly reports this New York Post story on New York City teacher sabbaticals.

The cash-stressed New York City school system is spending about $70 million this year on paid sabbaticals for 1000 veteran teachers, the New
York Post reported last week. The teachers are on six- and twelve-month leaves of absences, taking college courses part-time. Their union contract allows teachers to take a full-year sabbatical at 70 percent pay after fourteen years of service and a six-month sabbatical at 60 percent pay after 7 years. The Post notes that some of the courses are of a recreational nature, such as Beginning Tennis.

Such a deal. I need someone to pay for my sabbatical!

Special -Education Vouchers

The Cato Institute has a new policy brief on Florida's McKay Scholarship program.

Here are some interesting highlights:

· The program includes 8,000 of the state's 350,000 special-ed students receiving an average of $6,808 to take to the private school of their parent's choice.

· 89 percent of the McKay students reenrolled in their scholarship schools.

· Once a child takes a scholarship, the family opts out of the burdensome IEP special education paperwork.

· School capacity grew under the program from a few schools in 2000 to 547 eligible schools.

· 50 percent of the students qualify for the free lunch program but close to 75 percent of the student's families chose to pay additional tuition above the McKay scholarship amount.

High Priority Doublespeak

What a euphemism in California government. Nah…

Via Pacific Research Institute, Capital Ideas

AB 96, the first piece of legislation ever advanced by Rudy Bermudez, a
freshman Democrat from Norwalk, changes the designation "low-performing
schools" to "high-priority schools." Mr. Bermudez said that the state
should not employ terms that "disable children." Supporters of his idea,
which passed the Assembly 51-22, say that "low performing" is demeaning and
that the new label will boost self-esteem and inspire performance.

Sylvan throws in the towel on K12

Sylvan Learning Systems, well known for their strip-mall tutoring centers and public education contracts, is divesting the company of tutoring and other K12 ventures such as their virtual charter schools. Sylvan CEO Doug Becker was one of Reason's first Making School's Work speakers focusing on privatizing reading and math instruction in public schools. Looks like even the potential millions from the NCLB act couldn't keep Becker and crew from moving on to focus exclusively on the more profitable postsecondary market.

Playing with the Big Kids

Since I was on a blogging panel at Reason Weekend with Virginia Postrel, Glenn Reynolds, Nick Gillespie and Eugene Volokh (I represented the token niche blogger), I guess I will pretend like I'm a real blogger and blog.

Money Can't Buy Love or Test Scores

The New York Daily News reports that New York's most successful schools spend less.

Money can't buy success - especially when it comes to the city's best public schools.Of the 209 top-performing schools exempted from Chancellor Joel Klein's mandatory curriculum, 71% spend less per pupil than the city average, a Daily News analysis shows.

In New York, following the national norm, money follows failure.

"We paradoxically lavish more resources on schools the worse they do based on the premise that the additional money will help turn them around," said Jay Greene, an education researcher with the Manhattan Institute.

Dropout Retention Program

Via the Sacramento Bee.

California has had a Dropout Prevention program for the better part of two decades, but you wouldn't know it by the numbers. In 1985, the Legislature created this categorical program amid public alarm about all the teenagers failing to earn diplomas. At the time, the state's graduation rate stood at a grim 69 percent, meaning nearly a third of ninth-graders failed to graduate with their classes four years later. Eighteen years and $242 million in taxpayer dollars later, that rate hasn't budged. In the state's most recent accounting of high school graduates, it was 68.9 percent.

Grade Inflation

Mark also has an excellent essay on what high school grade inflation means in college.

A record low of 34.9% of college freshmen report having spent more than six hours per week on homework during their senior year in high school. This is down from the high of 47.0% reported when the question was first asked in 1987. During that same period of time the number of students reporting that they spent less than one hour per week on homework during their senior year in high school rose from 8.5% to 15.9%.

While the amount of time high school seniors spend "hitting the books" has dropped to a new low, their high school grade point averages continue to inflate. As the chart below (from the report) shows, almost 70% of freshmen at private universities now receive A averages in high school, and more than half of the freshmen at public universities receive A averages as well. . .

Those of us who teach at the university level are left to cope with the effects of this system of illusory accomplishment. The majority of our incoming freshmen are ill prepared to cope with the intellectual demands of college courses -- not because they lack intelligence, but because they have not developed the study and time management skills that are needed to succeed in an environment where most learning takes place outside the classroom.

I remember this well--many of my public speaking students had difficulty selecting a topic for themselves--when the assignment meant that the students could select any informative topic that was significant to them. They always wanted me to tell them what to say.

College Pork

I hadn’t checked in with Mark Shapiro, The Irascible Professor, for a while… I missed his December 29 column on pork-barreling in higher education. I loved the piece because it intersects my life in many ways. First, as an alumni of “Krispy-Kreme University” both as a student and a debate coach and because my husband and Royce were roommates many, many years ago when Royce wore a trench coat, and because Fullerton is my hometown—I am always interested in the goings on at Cal. State Fullerton. Plus, I am always amazed at vast sums of federal dollars that are given freely unattached to competition or performance.

According to a September 27, 2002 article in The Chronicle of Higher Education by Jeffrey Brainard, the level of pork-barrel spending on academic projects reached $1.837 billion in the 2002-2003 federal budget. This represents a 9.2% increase over the previous fiscal year, and a 500% increase since 1989. The $1.837 billion figure refers to Congressional "earmarks", or direct grants of federal funds to academic institutions across the country, as opposed to federal funds for research and educational projects that are granted through the normal, competitive process of peer-review.. .

Here at Krispy Kreme U. our administration has been attempting to obtain a Congressional earmark to aid our Institute of Gerontology for the past few years. No doubt, our Institute of Gerontology does worthwhile work; however, the IP has heard of no good reason (other than need) for the Institute to be seeking funds outside the normal peer-review channels. Indeed, this may be an uphill battle in any case, because Krispy Kreme U. has the misfortune (or fortune depending on your point-of-view) of being located in the district of Congressman Ed Royce, who fancies himself a "pork buster". Congressman Royce has sponsored or co-sponsored legislation to abolish the Department of Commerce and the Department of Energy, as well as to abolish the Advanced Technology Program. This hardly sounds like the kind of guy whose going to spend a lot of effort to direct a million or so of taxpayer dollars to the Institute of Gerontology at Cal State Fullerton, even though he's an alumnus of the institution.
But that may be neither here nor there.

The IP's principal objection to the use of federal earmarks for funding projects in academia is that most of the projects either are of little or no national interest, or should have been proposed through the normal peer-review process. Some examples from right here in California include: a $2,000,000 grant from the Department of Transportation to Cal Poly Pomona to rebuild campus roads to accommodate buses, which were in jeopardy of being rerouted off campus; an $800,000 grant from the Department of Education to support distance education projects at Los Angeles Harbor Community College; a $200,000 grant to Cal State Monterey Bay to support student services; a $12.8 million grant to Cal State San Bernardino from the Department of Defense to create a distance-learning center that can provide education and training in disciplines of interest to the department; grants of $7.7 million, $9.0 million and $8.5 million to Loma Linda University from the Department of Defense for various aspects of medical research.

All of this reminds me of a multi-million dollar grant that the communication department of Cal. State Fullerton received back in my day, to study the best way to stop immigrants from being run over at immigration checkpoints on California’s I-5 interstate. The department printed extensive surveys (asking graduate students among others) what to do about the problem. The end results were the large signs that show pictures of a immigrant family running with children, which are posted before and after the immigration check points. I’m not sure if this was a pork barrel grant or a competitive grant—but those signs cost millions.

The Language Police

The March 2003 (not available on-line yet) Atlantic Monthly excerpts a list of banned words and stereotypes compiled by Diane Ravitch from bias guidelines issued by major educational publishers and state agencies.

Some samples:

Adam and Eve (replace with “Eve and Adam,” to demonstrate that males do not take priority over females)

Bookworm (banned as offensive; replace with “intellectual”)

Craftmanship (banned as sexist)

Fairy (Banned because it suggests homosexuality; replace with “elf”)

Founding Fathers, the (banned as sexist; replace with “the Founders” or “the Framers”)

Huts (banned as ethnocentric; replace with “small houses”)

Junk bonds (banned as elitist)

Old (banned as an adjective that implies helplessness, dependency, or other negative qualities)

Polo (banned as elitist)

Straw man (banned as sexist; replace with “unreal issue” or “misrepresentation”)

Yacht (banned as elitist)

The article goes on to describe stereotypes and images to avoid in text. Some more samples:

African Americans who are baggage handlers.

Men playing sports or working with tools.

Women as passengers on a sailboat or sipping hot chocolate in a ski lodge.

Native Americans living in rural settings on reservations.

Asian-Americans having strong family ties.

Hispanics in urban settings.

Older people who are fishing, baking, knitting, whittling, reminiscing, rocking in chairs, or watching television.

The Language Police will be published in April by Knopf.

On a vaguely related note, one of my constant pet peeves is how my private school lamely tries to copy zero-tolerance policies of the public school. My child was not allowed to take off a sweatshirt during January’s 80-degree weather because she was wearing a t-shirt from a Route 66 car show—sponsored by Stater Brothers--with one car in the graphics that had a flame painted on the side. I guess the theory was that a picture of a hot rod would turn the four-year olds into baby boomers who refurbish old cars. Or maybe the flame represented gang symbolism or could be viewed as a weapon?

School Choice Budget Crumbs

An Education Department spokesman said yesterday that the fiscal 2004 budget proposal contains an estimated $756 million in school choice programs, with a small portion to be used for a pilot voucher plan in the District and several other cities.

Why I like Jeb

Via Education Intelligence Agency

Be Careful What You Wish For.

Florida voters set themselves up for a mess when they approved a constitutional amendment to reduce class sizes in the state's public schools, but returned to office the man who campaigned strenuously against the measure: Gov. Jeb Bush. Faced with implementing an initiative he opposes, Gov. Bush squared the circle by floating his own method to cut class sizes… offer vouchers to students in overcrowded classrooms. "It's a cost-effective way of dealing with this issue," said the governor.

As you might imagine, supporters of the amendment are apoplectic. "It's totally inappropriate to empty classrooms by sending kids to private schools," state Sen. Debbie Wasserman told the Miami Herald. "That's not what the voters voted for."

Third World Choice

By this weekend, I should be out from under a couple of big projects that have me literaly tied to my computer. But in the meantime, please enjoy this fabulous article from the Institute for Economic Affairs, James Tooley, on private education in India and Africa. It has great stories.

$5 Mil and Counting

I guess DC union thieves figured if they were going to steal, they might as well go all out.

An audit released last night alleges that more than $5 million was looted from the Washington Teachers' Union over the last seven years by union officials and others, an amount far greater than previous estimates of improper spending.

The audit, prepared by a private firm at the request of the union's parent, the American Federation of Teachers, said three former union officers -- president Barbara A. Bullock, her assistant Gwendolyn M. Hemphill and treasurer James O. Baxter II -- diverted the money to themselves, their relatives and others for personal benefit.

The report said that because many records are still missing, the total amount of money found to have been misappropriated is likely to grow "and this increase could be substantial.. ."

Among the improper expenditures were political contributions, according to the audit. In 2000, Bullock contributed $9,000 to the Democratic National Committee and $2,000 to Hillary Rodham Clinton's U.S. Senate campaign and charged the payments to the union's American Express account, the audit said, adding that those funds have since been returned to the AFT.

I really shouldn't be shocked.

Edison Scores Up?

From Edison's press release:

Edison Schools (Nasdaq: EDSN), the nation's largest private manager of public schools, announced today that achievement gains at its schools far exceed, by ratios as high as 5 to 1 and by an overall average of more than double, those gains at similar schools in the locales where Edison is working.

Edison compared each one of its schools to every other "similar" public school within the same district. Similar schools were defined as those serving students with similar levels of economic disadvantage (as determined by free- or reduced-price lunch eligibility) and a similar demographic population (Edison's overall national demographic includes 88 percent minority enrollment) within plus or minus 10 percentage points of the Edison school. For example, if 73 percent of students in an Edison school were eligible for free- or reduced-price lunches (Edison's national average eligibility level), then that Edison school was compared with those schools with free- or reduced-price lunch percentages ranging from 63 percent to 83 percent (and serving the same tested grade levels).

Edison's comparably superior performance is true not only for gains made during the last academic year, but also for cumulative gains made since Edison began its management. For the 2001-2002 academic year, Edison schools with comparison schools available gained an average of 4.4 percentage points on criterion referenced tests and 4.3 percentiles on norm referenced tests; the gains at more than 1,000 comparable schools were 0.7 percentage points and -0.4 percentiles, respectively. Essentially, the comparable schools made no academic gains last year, while the Edison schools gained solidly. Viewed over the period of time since Edison began management at each school, the results are similar. Edison schools with comparison schools available have improved by an average of 3.6 percentage points every year on criterion
referenced tests and 5.5 percentiles on norm referenced tests. Comparable schools have gained only 1.4 percentage points and 2.7 percentiles, respectively-approximately one half of Edison's improvement rate.

I'm sure the negative analysis for why Edison has not really raised test scores will begin soon.

Funding Drives Children's Drug Use

In a new Lexington Institute brief, Robert Holland and Don Soifer point out that:

In a study released this week examining data for almost 900,000 youths who were enrolled in several states’ HMO or Medicaid programs, Dr. Julie Magno Zito and her associates at the University of Maryland found a 200 percent to 300 percent increase in use of behavior-altering drugs between 1987 and 1996. By far the largest increases occurred after 1991 -- and therein may lie a valuable lesson for policymakers who are concerned about the widespread drugging of American kids.

It was in 1991 that federal funds first were made available to treat what is called attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). Before a child gets the psychiatric drug, he gets a label -- often a preliminary one of learning disabled from school authorities, and then ADHD or simply ADD from a physician. The prescription commonly given is Ritalin, a powerful stimulant that is supposed to help its users focus their mental energies.

Anti-privatization Law Cripples California Schools

My latest Reason Foundation commentary on how California's new privatization law handicaps school administrators during this severe financial debacle is here.

Computers Down

Reason's Hit and Run has the unsurprising story that computers in the classroom do not raise student achievement. Just proves that when it comes to raising achievement content matters most.

A three-year study by the British Educational Communications and Technology Agency found "no consistent relationship between computer use and pupil achievement in any subject at any age." In fact, some of the greatest educational gains were made by students who used PCs the least.

Yet, in the US the e-rate and other dubious government technology programs continue to enrich contractors and school officials--even if children rarely use the technology effectively.

D.C. Vouchers

Deroy Murdock helps turn on the pressure for school vouchers in the nation's capital.

On the 2000 National Assessment of Educational Progress, for example, 6 percent of DCPS' eighth graders performed math at grade level, versus a U.S. average of 31 percent. On the 1998 NAEP writing test, 11 percent of DCPS' eighth graders were proficient or advanced, compared to 25 percent nationally. On that year's NAEP, only 10 percent of DCPS' fourth graders read at grade level, versus 35 percent nationally.

While 31 percent of U.S. students currently fail to finish high school, 42 percent of DCPS pupils drop out. Among DCPS graduates who reach the University of the District of Columbia , 85 percent need remedial education.

Meanwhile, the Washington Post reported in 1997 that DCPS officials illegally kept two sets of books and “reprogrammed” money to pay unauthorized staffers. That year, $1.6 million mandated for needy students somehow became employees' salaries.

According to a December 18 FBI affidavit, labor bosses in the Washington Teacher's Union waltzed off with some $2 million in members' dues. As WTU honchos reportedly let rent and utilities bills pile up, they allegedly purchased a $6,800 crystal ice bucket, $17,000 in furs, a $57,000, 288-piece Tiffany sterling silver service set, and more.

DCPS itself is virtually gold-plated. It spent $10,477 on each of its 67,500 pupils in 2000-2001, versus a national average of $7,483 as the National Education Association estimates. Ahead of the 50 states, the NEA ranked DCPS as America 's number-one school system...in public funding. Taxpayers finance 10,967 DCPS employees; only 4,719 of them teach.

D.C. kids need something besides money that ends up paying for school officials vacations, clothes, and dining. Let the public schools compete for the kids.

No Surprise Here

The $2.25 billion E-Rate program has helped connect thousands of schools and libraries to the Internet, but it may also be enriching unscrupulous contractors, according to a report released yesterday.

The program is ‘‘honeycombed with fraud and financial shenanigans,’’ said the report from the Center for Public Integrity in Washington.

What a federal education program riddled with fraud? Get out.

Hard to Imagine

My children are 4 and six and a half and I can't imagine leaving them alone for twenty days. What's more, the mother told the four year old and seven year old to stay inside and they did. My children probably would have alerted the neighborhood--and we live in a remote area not an apartment. Terribly amazing.

Spielberg Effect

Jay Mathews has a very good column on people who succeed despite being rejected from their first-choice colleges.

One of the teachers he had asked to write recommendations told Siegman he had decided, on his own, that no matter how much the teenager believed in his dreams, the teacher thought they were out of whack. The teacher had told the colleges that Siegman was a nice enough young man and worked very hard for his grades, but he did not have the intellectual capacity to flourish at such schools. He was not Ivy League material.

There are many Greg Forbes Siegmans. America is a country built on supersized ambition. The 120-pound water boy thinks he can be quarterback. The book store clerk dreams of writing the great American novel. The high school dropout is certain he will win a Grammy and live in Bel Air. The college admissions process is designed to bring all those hopes in line with reality. Siegman's teacher probably thought he was doing Siegman a favor. If he went to Harvard, the teacher figured, he would only be disappointed and struggle against his limits without any hope of reward.. .

When Siegman was twenty-four, working as a part-time restaurant doorman and just starting as a substitute teacher in one of the poorest neighborhoods in Chicago, he decided to start a mentoring program called brunchbunch.com. He invited people of different backgrounds to weekly meals designed to break down stereotypes and other psychological and social barriers.

After 70 weeks of successful brunches, in which young professionals forged deep relationships with young people needing mentors, Siegman set up a foundation. It supervises the brunchbunch.com program and raises money so young people can get the opportunity he was denied to attend their first-choice colleges.

He called it the 11-10-02 Foundation, celebrating the day that he would turn 30 and his belief that people under 30 were as capable as anyone to do anything. By that date he was resolved to have made a difference in the world, no matter what his high school teacher had thought, no matter how unrealistic his dreams still seemed to many of the people he met.

Naturally, long before the deadline, his optimism and energy had exactly the desired effect. Not only did the weekly brunches change many lives, but the foundation raised more than $250,000 to further the cause. His ShakingUpChicago.com Scholarship Program gave out tens of thousands of dollars in college grants. In 1999, Siegman was honored by Hasbro as a real-life American hero. In 2000, he became the youngest adult in the country to be honored at the National Jefferson Awards for Public Service. He was named a Man of Distinction by Zeta Beta Tau in 2001. In 2002, he was honored as one of America's Points of Light.

There is now a term for this phenomenon, invented by Stacy Berg Dale of Mathematica Policy Research and Alan Krueger of Princeton University, who have been working with data on the effects of selective college enrollment on lives.

While looking at their numbers, Dale and Krueger noticed something odd. In many cases, they found that applicants who were rejected by brand-name schools did as well in later life as those who were accepted. The researchers began to wonder whether students' sense of themselves made admissions committees' opinions less important. Under this theory, if you applied to Columbia, Wellesley, and Swarthmore, then you were by definition Columbia, Wellesley, and Swarthmore material, even if those schools spurned you and you had to make do with Cleveland State.

The notion deserved further study, they decided. In the meantime, they gave it a label. It seemed fitting to use the name of a scrawny, bespectacled senior at Saratoga High School near San Jose, Calif., who applied to the famous film school at UCLA but was rejected. He went to Long Beach State (later to become California State University-Long Beach) instead, still thinking about a way to create the career he had in mind. He later tried to transfer from Long Beach State to another famous film school, the University of Southern California, but again he was rejected.

He made five films at Long Beach State, crashed some of the student film screenings at USC, and pushed the studio executives so hard that eventually he got a chance to show what he could do when allowed to make a real feature film.

His name was Steven Spielberg. Dale and Krueger dubbed the phenomenon of rejected college applicants succeeding in spite of their disappointment the "Spielberg effect."

Sanitizing Text Again

New York state education officials are still rewriting literature according to today's New York Times.

In new guidelines, the state promised complete paragraphs with no deletions, but an excerpt from Kafka (on the importance of literature) changes his words and removes the middle of a paragraph without using ellipses, in the process deleting mentions of God and suicide.

The new state guidelines promised not to sanitize, but a passage on people's conception of time from Aldous Huxley (a product of England's colonial era) deletes the paragraphs on how unpunctual "the Oriental" is.

But the saddest example of how standardized testing is lowering academic standards (as a recent national study by Arizona State University reports) can be seen in the way New York officials butchered an excerpt from a PBS documentary on the influenza epidemic of 1918.

Like any good historical work, the documentary on this epidemic, which killed half a million Americans, included numerous interviews with historians, novelists, medical experts and survivors, and quoted primary sources of the era. But the three-page passage read out loud to students on the state exam is edited to make it appear that there is only one speaker.

Though the new guidelines promised to identify the authors of any excerpts, the state does not identify the documentary's author, Ken Chowder. It does identify the narrator, although — oops! — incorrectly: the narrator was Linda Hunt, not David McCullough. As Ms. Heifetz says, any student who melded the words of a dozen people into one and then misidentified the narrator would surely be flunked.

The state version cuts out the passages with the most harrowing and moving accounts of the epidemic, as when children played on piles of coffins stacked outside an undertaker's home. It removes virtually all references to government officials' mishandling the epidemic. It deletes the references to religious leaders like Billy Sunday, who promised that God would protect the virtuous, even as worshipers dropped dead at his services.

Of course this trend is what is wrong with most public school curriculum: by cleansing information to make it politically acceptable, literature and history become just boring.

Top Ten

I liked the number one pick for education quote of the year from the Education Intelligence Agency top ten:

1) “If you’re looking at test scores on standardized tests, the higher the test score, the worse the teaching because it means that they have narrowed their focus.” -- Janice Auld, president of the North Sacramento Education Association, in the June 13 issue of the Sacramento News & Review.

The list also includes a special Wayne Johnson Wing in honor of the many choice quotes from CTA's president.

Benchmarks Don't Lie

I share this story because it marks such a rare occurrence: A positive news story in a Philadelphia newspaper about Edison Schools. More importantly, this story demonstrates how quickly the education establishment will respond to any competition and change instructional practices to meet the competition.

The article describes Edison's benchmark testing program, which has an instant feedback loop so that teachers immediately know their students' academic weaknesses and can tailor their lesson plans to meet student needs.

The Benchmarks lab is where second through eighth graders come each month to answer reading, math and language arts questions geared to the Pennsylvania System of School Assessment (PSSA), the state's achievement test.

Used correctly, Vasconez said, the Benchmarks tests can change how schools operate. They allow teachers to get instant feedback on what students are learning and what they are missing. The teachers, in turn, can tailor their lessons to the weak spots of an individual far sooner than they typically can now.

However, the most telling part of the article is how quickly district schools are adopting Edison's testing practices.

The Philadelphia School District seems to agree that programs such as Benchmarks can affect teaching results. It has contracted with Princeton Review and Schoolnet to install a system similar to Benchmarks in its 21 "restructured" schools, which received extra resources to compete with the privately managed ones.

Competition matters. When students have any alternative to the traditional public schools, public schools change their practices to retain students.

It is worth reading just to understand the serious obstacles Edison continues to face in implementing their best education practices. They persevere to the benefit of many disadvantaged children.

While only Edison can be held accountable for its rough ride, Edison's slogan rings true: "Benchmarks don't lie." Too bad so many public schools don't have any.

Where's the money, Part II

Via Mackinac's Michigan Education Report:

DETROIT, Mich. - LaVonne Sheffield, Detroit Public Schools' chief academic officer, repaid the school district $5,861 in the past three weeks for personal expenditures and purchases without receipts that she billed to the district.

The reimbursements included $1,200 to the Detroit Institute of Arts Founders Society, $846 for a Skymall catalog purchase, $278 to Mario's Restaurant, and $344.60 for flowers she bought for staff.

Sheffield also paid back money for University of Michigan and Wayne State University alumni dues, and $118 for a room at the Luxor hotel in Las Vegas that she canceled to move to a different casino hotel for a district-approved conference. While at that May conference, Sheffield got married to Detroit police Inspector William Hudson.

Sheffield was among top-level administrators who repaid the district after the media requested debit card bills and receipts last month. Those receipts show some of the same misspending and lax bookkeeping for which principals and school bookkeepers were disciplined over the past two years.

District policy prohibits use of school money for "purchases of personal items that benefit school or district staff and their family members."

This happens in school districts across America and provides a clue as to why teachers do not have money for pencils or tissues.

School Choice Saves Schools Money

Brandon Dutcher makes a compelling case for why school choice could help ease the education budget crunch in Oklahoma. His arguments really apply nationwide, as most education budgets are in similar fiscal crisis.

Thanks to the government spending spree of the 1990s, Oklahoma is now experiencing its own fiscal unpleasantness. But consider how much worse the state’s budget crunch would be if private school parents and homeschoolers weren’t saving taxpayers a small fortune. According to the U.S. Department of Education’s 1999-2000 private school survey, 31,276 students attend private elementary and secondary schools in Oklahoma. Informed estimates place the number of Oklahoma homeschoolers at 14,000 to 25,000.

So let’s say there are 50,000 Oklahoma schoolchildren whose parents are paying for their education. What would happen if these 50,000 kids showed up at their local public school tomorrow morning? (“I’m here for my free education, please.”) In order to maintain the current per pupil expenditure of $6,284 (of which 58 percent is state money, 32 percent local and county, and 10 percent federal), politicians would have to come up with a few hundred million more dollars every year. And that’s not counting construction costs. I’ve seen estimates of $15,000 to $35,000 per seat for a child in public school.

Just because the state provides for education doesn’t mean it has to produce all of it. Policy-makers should be glad so many parents are choosing to educate kids on their own nickel. Indeed, they should encourage this behavior by passing a modest tax credit, which would give parents more choices, reduce school overcrowding, and help ease the state budget crunch.

For example, let’s say a child is trapped in a school where she’s not learning to read or do math. There are several philanthropies – K-12 scholarship funds which help kids pay tuition at private and religious schools – which would love to help her, but they can only help a limited number of children. The demand for scholarships far exceeds supply.

Oklahoma policy-makers should allow a tax credit for individuals or businesses who donate money to these scholarship funds. Not only would this allow the philanthropies to rescue more kids, it also would help ease the state’s fiscal woes. An OCPA study released earlier this year (“The Oklahoma Scholarship Tax Credit: Giving Parents Choices, Saving Taxpayers Money”) pointed out that “when tuition scholarships enable students to transfer out of public schools into private ones, the state and local authorities have fewer pupils to educate and can therefore reduce expenditures accordingly. According to conservative projections, this tax credit could be saving Oklahoma taxpayers more than $138 million annually by 2012.”

Unfortunately, educrats always see the glass as half empty and see kids who choose alternatives as lost revenue. Kids who do not choose public schools are never saving the state money but instead costing them tax dollars.

Why Work Harder?

This little vignette from the Education Intelligence Agency makes it clear why teachers have no incentive to perform better.

Unions Win Battles Against Individual Pay Hikes. Back on June 11, 2001, EIA first told the tale of Matthew Hintz, an industrial arts technology teacher hired by the Crete school district in Nebraska for $2,350 more than the district's usual starting salary. Hintz was the only qualified applicant, and that's how much he wanted. The district placed him at step one on the salary schedule, and added a $2,350 "bonus" to cover the difference between base salary and what he had been promised.

The Crete Education Association filed a complaint with the state Commission of Industrial Relations, claiming this arrangement was a "deviation" that violated the collective bargaining agreement. The commission agreed. The district took the case to court and the Nebraska Supreme Court decided 7-0 last week that districts cannot bypass the union to pay teachers more. According to the Omaha World-Herald, the union's attorney "hailed the ruling as a victory for collective bargaining."

Meanwhile, in Arizona, the Scottsdale Education Association filed a grievance against the district for its plan to spend as much as $500,000 on teachers who serve on committees or as club advisers. The union wants the money divided among all the district's teachers.

The truth hurts

Reason's Hit & Run discovers another argument for school choice: teachers who tell kindergartners that Santa isn't real and that the presents come from your Mom and Dad.

Affirmative Action Linking?

Homeschooling blogger Isabel Lyman describes an apparent new trend by edu-bloggers:

Name Game. Dr. Daryl Cobranchi, who runs the "other" homeschooling blog, has a new, politically-correct last name. Here's his explanation: "The Confidence Man on Saturday blogged a story out of the Sunday NYT on the controversy surrounding Rice University's new affirmative action, er, admissions policy. The school is not permitted to base admissions on ethnic or racial background but it somehow manages to do so anyway. Hmm - my mother's maiden name is Suarez. Think I'll start hyphenating my last name; I wonder if Instapundit has an affirmative action linking policy. Daryl Suarez-Cobranchi." Amigo, thanks to you, I am seriously thinking of using my mom's maiden name. How does Isabel Azuola-Lyman sound? Maybe I will get featured in the NYT with that moniker.

Unfortunately, my maiden name is Byrne and my mother's maiden name is Ward. Oh well, I guess I have to rely on gender.

More Special-Ed Hell

Special education teacher Margaret Ann Davis used a small paintbrush to apply Tabasco sauce diluted with water on the hands of an 11-year-old deaf and mute student who constantly sucked her hands. The Tabasco sauce was washed off after about five minutes.

The report said a teacher's aide reported the incident the next morning to the principal, who called police. Casper told police she had informed the student's mother of the incident, and that the mother had asked for assurance that it would not happen again.

Kim at Number 2 Pencil and others have linked to this piece by a special education teacher who describes the blackhole of special education.

One of the most shocking aspects of special education is that school officials continue to pressure parents into signing their kids over to the special education system. After my December Reason special education feature, I had several parents and special education teachers write about their experiences with aggressive special education "recruiters."

When we moved to Palo Alto, my oldest attended 5th grade at Briones [Elementary School]. The very nice teacher wanted to get him extra help. I was at first for it, thinking he would get tutored. But she wanted him in the special ed program! That didn't make any sense to me because he never had a problem at Faria [Elementary School] in Cupertino (the top elementary school in CA!) and tested always at the top. So I started looking into books on gifted children and told the Briones teacher I thought the problem was he was bored! She agreed and let it go. Later, I learned this same experience happened to a friend of mine -- her son transferred into 4th grade and Briones also tried to get him into special ed. She even went through the evaluation process and decided it didn't apply to her son. He is now a sophomore at Stanford! This is education gone amok.

I am a speech pathologist who worked for 25 years in public schools here in west central Florida. It is just as you describe it. I left special ed in disgust over the lunacy of it all. We had to pack the kids in to generate funds for our salary. It was an unwritten law we all followed.

The growth of special education is despicable, especially in light of what happens to many kids once they get labeled.

Abuse of Power

Former Superintendent Delaine Eastin, most-recently known for accusing California homeschoolers of truancy and breaking the law, seems to have broken a few laws herself while in charge of the state's education dollars.

The state Department of Education and outgoing Superintendent Delaine Eastin were slapped Wednesday with a $4.5 million judgment in a whistle-blower case in Sacramento Superior Court.

In an unusual verdict -- holding a high-ranking official personally liable -- the jury found Eastin "acted with malice" and that she should pay punitive damages, which could be millions of dollars more. . . .

Lindberg said he and others were forced to quit or were fired after they discovered the misappropriation of federal funds doled out by the department between 1995 and 2000 to community-based organizations that ran adult-education English and citizenship classes.

Investigations later found cases of embezzlement. Education Department officials were unable to account for $11 million in taxpayer funds.

Lindberg, who worked for the department for more than 20 years, said that after he brought his findings of wrongdoing to Eastin and other department officials, they attempted to "sweep them under the carpet." They demoted him to keep him from telling others, he said.

For a full account of how the California Board of Education and Delaine Eastin have wasted billions in education dollars see this new study by the Pacific Research Institute education team. Their findings are shocking!

Paid Informants

School district administrators in New Jersey will pay parents to turn in out-of district students.

These days, a truant officer's job goes beyond keeping kids in school. Some spend more time keeping out-of-towners out, sometimes by spotting bogus leases or trailing students home.

A few school districts are even going a step further, offering members of the public bounties of $100 or more for information on students who sneak across district lines.

Parents falsify proof-of-residence documents to get their kids into schools for their academic reputations, extracurricular activities or proximity to after-school care. Each illegal student costs a district thousands of dollars.

"I can understand why people might want to do it," said Piscataway, New Jersey, truant officer David Ford, whose district offers a $300 reward. "But it's not right."

It's not right. Children should have free exit and entry rights to schools rather than having to resort to desperate measures to get a higher quality education.

The Price of Financial Aid

Via Reason's Brickbats:

Students Unknowingly Trade Privacy for Aid (12/3)

Students applying for federal aid are revealing their life to the world. Congressional investigators found the Department of Education is sharing applicants' information with the Pentagon, the Selective Service System, the Justice Department, other federal and state agencies, and private companies such as debt collectors.

Hard Times in Riverside County

Here's my new Reason Public Policy Institute commentary on the Indio Charter School's battle with the County of Riverside.

By any reasonable judgment, the Indio Charter School would be considered a success. The school, in the desert of Riverside County, California, offers a four-day week for 300 mostly-Hispanic students in grades K-12. Children attend school from 8 a.m. until 4 p.m. Indio charter school students attend class for 1910 minutes a week versus 1800 minutes in other California public schools. Of the 9 public elementary and 4 public middle schools in the city of Indio, Indio Charter School had the highest average score on California's Academic Performance Index (API). In fact, the school was 20 points ahead of the second-place school. Indio Charter School also had the highest average reading scores in all grades, except 7th, where it was second.

Despite the Indio charter's academic performance, the county of Riverside continues to penalize the school for offering a nontraditional school schedule. A ruling by the Riverside County Superior Court, upheld the state's right to withhold nearly $ 240,000 from the Indio Charter School. The state penalized the school, saying it failed to follow state attendance laws requiring students to attend classes for at least 175 days a year. Indio Charter School officials contend that their four-day week contains more than the required minutes of instruction and that California law allows charter schools more flexibility in their schedules.

Value-Added

Value-added is more than just a trendy phrase. Jonathan Crane from the Progressive Policy Institute, has a very-readable 7-page report on the promise of value-added testing for public schools. The most impressive part of his report is the discussion of teacher quality and value-added testing.

In a study of second to fifth grade students in Tennessee between 1991 and 1995, William L. Sanders found, with all other things being equal, the top one-fifth of teachers raised their students' achievement test scores 39 percentile points more than teachers of the bottom one-fifth. . . . A 39 percentile difference is enormous. It implies that a child who winds up in the bottom one-third of the distribution (say in the 30th percentile) after a year with a poor teacher, might have wound up in the top one-third (the 69th percentile) if they had been lucky enough to get an excellent teacher that year. What's more, these large effects were found in all kinds of classrooms with all kinds of students. . . . They helped struggling students as well as those who were excelling.

Concentrated Competition

Economic research by Caroline Hoxby (among others) has found that in order for charter schools and other systems of public-school competition to have an effect on public schools, the competition must be significant and actually impact specific public schools. This point seems obvious, but most school-choice experiments, including most charter schools, do not have a significant impact on the specific public schools they are competing with. In other words, until public schools feel a loss of students from their competition, there is no incentive to change ineffective school policies. In fact, I would argue that the right of students to exit the public schools (in a feasible manner), is the only reform strategy that will actually lead to real changes in public education.

So, I like the idea of Los Angeles school leaders and philanthropists coming together to create a “shadow” Los Angeles Unified School District through a charter-school network. Education Week reports that:

The Los Angeles Alliance for Student Achievement, the successor organization to two groups that mounted major education reform efforts in the 1990s, is hoping to open about 100 charter schools serving some 50,000 students over the next five years, alliance leaders say.

Plans are for the 2-year-old nonprofit alliance to apply for charters, hire principals, and then run "families" of elementary, middle, and high schools that together would strive to foster college-going cultures in disadvantaged communities. While details of the plan are still being worked out, its ultimate goal will be to leverage higher student achievement in the broader public system, chiefly in the 737,000-student Los Angeles Unified School District.

While this will be difficult to pull off, even with the Los Angeles education elite supporting it, a 100 charter schools in Los Angeles in five years would provide real competition to perhaps the biggest education BLOB of all, LAUSD. And as I have argued elsewhere, even with the Supreme Court decision in favor of vouchers, charter schools are a reform strategy that more closely reflects the tradition of "local" education policy in the United States. With a charter school, the reformers have a much smaller political set of stakeholders to contend with. Not to say that it is easy to convince stakeholders that a single charter school is a good idea, but much easier than convincing say the entire state of California that school vouchers are a good idea. And I truly believe that the way to widespread school choice is to let as many public school alternatives as possible be allowed to prove their viability.

Education Research Enlightenment

E.D. Hirsch Jr. has one of the best articles I have ever read on education research in Policy Review. I can't do it justice so you will just have to read the whole thing.

Special Education's Shame

The October issue of Governing magazine has a feature on "Special Eduction's Dark Secret." Like my December 2002 Reason article, Governing's John Buntin argues that "The number of children with learning disabilities is surging. Some say the real problem is schools' failure to teach students how to read." He writes:

According to Gloeckler, New York's experiences with extending accountability to students with disabilities has been both encouraging and sobering. The good news has been that students with disabilities seem to respond well to higher expectations. "What we found was, once everyone understands that kids need to be included and that access to general curriculum is absolutely essential, we're finding that kids are doing better than people thought they would," says Gloeckler.

But New York's data on the performance of students with disabilities have also highlighted the educational chasm that divides the wealthiest 15 percent of the state's school districts from the state's four largest urban school districts. "We found in the 4th grade particularly, but also in the 8th grade, the special-education students in wealthy districts are outperforming general-education students in the cities," says Gloeckler. In short, by Westchester County standards, almost all inner-city students are learning disabled.

Parental Judgment

The Goldwater Institute has a fascinating piece by former UCLA Dean of Education Lewis Solmon. He found that when Arizona parents graded their charter schools, the grades closely matched state grades for the same charter schools.

Critics of school choice have long questioned the ability of parents to choose the best schools for their children. Critics fear that parents do not have the time, qualifications, or information to make informed decisions about the quality of their children’s schools. New evidence tells us it’s time to put this fear to rest.

Gathering data for the fourth annual Arizona Charter School Parental Satisfaction Survey, I surveyed parents of children attending 239 charter schools in Arizona, and asked them to grade their schools on 21 characteristics. At the same time, the Arizona Department of Education was preparing profiles of 163 charter schools, ranking them as excelling, improving, maintaining, or under performing. The department ranked elementary schools based on Stanford 9 and AIMS scores, and high schools based on AIMS scores and graduation and drop out rates. 112 of the charter schools ranked by the state were included in my parent survey.

Comparing the two report cards helps us answer the all-important question: Are parents good judges of school performance? The data suggest they are.

Across the board, state officials and parents gave nearly identical grades to the charter schools in question. On 16 of the 21 characteristics on which parents graded their charter schools, the highest grades went to Tempe Prep Academy, the one charter school rated “excellent” by education officials.

Moving down the line, the pattern of parallel ratings continues. The lowest-graded schools by parents were the schools most likely rated “under performing” by the state.

Retest

The LA Daily News reports on how California's high school exit exam is working out:

So far, the California high school exit exam seems to be a measurement not of students' learning but the educational bureaucracy's competence.

And the bureaucracy is flunking.

In the Los Angeles Unified School District and elsewhere, due to the year-round academic calendar and other factors, the exam must be administered every eight weeks. The only problem is, it takes 10 weeks to score the results.

Consequently, students who have already passed the test and thus shouldn't have to take it again are left taking it again. Schools then have to find the space to administer the test to students who ought to be studying new material, and finding personnel to monitor the testing sites.

Bathroom Man

Yet another reason for homeschooling, school choice, or perhaps privatizing janitorial services with performance-based contracts that specify outcomes like clean bathrooms.

With upwards of 900,000 public school lavatories in the United States (Keating estimates that as many as forty percent are "horrific"), it's a monumental, never-ending battle. "Everybody knows the problems. What people don't spend time on is suggestions or solutions," says Keating, 61, a self-employed educator based in the suburbs of Atlanta, Georgia. For Bathroom Man the problem goes beyond empty soap dispensers, cracked mirrors and overflowing toilets—it's a fight against the forces of apathy. "Some school superintendents will say, 'This is a problem that has been around forever and everybody has this problem,'" reports Keating.

Instead of giving in to this failure mentality, Keating started Project CLEAN (Citizens, Learners and Educators Against Neglect) in 1996. He got the idea from his son and daughter, who, along with a lot of other kids, avoided the restrooms at school at all costs. "I would be mowing the lawn and our next door neighbor, Ty, would race into his house to go to the bathroom because he held it in all day," remembers Keating.

In fact, it was the neighborhood kids' unending horror stories that led him to investigate the issues. "I got permission—which took a little doing—to go to a high school in Dekalb County [Georgia] and cleaned toilets for six hours one day," he recalls. "I went back the next day and they were just as bad as they were [before I cleaned them]."

Today, Keating doesn't need to don rubber gloves to be effective. "My job is as a coordinator, facilitator and cheerleader," he says. "I'm trying to get school districts and kids to do what they ought to do."

Life Makes a U-Turn

Robert Holland from the Lexington Institute has a nice synthesis of of all the 2002 happenings favoring school choice beginning with the November 5 elections.

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Jeb Bush's landslide re-election as governor of Florida secures what has become School Choice Central in the never-ending experiment that is American federalism. Arizona is the only other state that comes close to matching Florida in the array of public/private education choices offered families.

In addition, the shift of power in the Senate means Sen. Judd Gregg, New Hampshire Republican, a leading advocate of portability (public money following a child to a school of choice), is likely to take over as chairman of the Senate Education Committee.

Together, Mr. Gregg and House Education Committee Chairman John Boehner, Ohio Republican, could argue effectively that federally aided programs such as the mammoth Individuals With Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) — currently up for reauthorization — should allow for increased consumer choice as an alternative to mindless bureaucracy.

On the House side, two significant reinforcements for the cause of choice at the level of national policy are Reps.-Elect Trent Franks, who played a key role as a state legislator in passage of Arizona's pioneering scholarship tax credit, and Tom Feeney, who as speaker of Florida's House filed the state's first full-fledged voucher bill in 1990.

Bond Boondoggles

My op-ed on school bonds and public-private partnerships ran in the LA Daily News today. I write about some of the history of school construction waste in California and go on to describe how private builders can build schools more quickly for less money than their public school counterparts. Here's a sample:

The poster child of school-construction nightmares is the Belmont Learning Center, just west of downtown.

The LAUSD poured more than $150 million into the school and then ceased construction -- with it halfway done -- because of environmental concerns. If the school is ever finished, the price tab will exceed $250 million, and it will go down as the costliest school in state history.

Los Angeles isn't the only city that has trouble keeping tabs on its cash.

Records show San Francisco Unified School District used as much as $100 million of bond and tax money to support a sprawling bureaucracy and to finance ill-conceived construction projects that ran far over budget. Most of that money -- as much as $68 million -- was spent on salaries for nonteaching employees, including several officials who are now the focus of corruption investigations, including one who stole more than $850,000 from the district.

And recently the state was forced to appoint a financial expert to monitor the Oakland school district after accounting discrepancies revealed the district was missing millions.

The sheer dollar volume of the new bonds makes the potential for future fraud and waste enormous.

The LAUSD will receive nearly a quarter of the new bond money -- more than $3 billion dollars (in addition to the $3.35 billion approved by local voters with Measure K). Given the district's sad history when it comes to construction, LAUSD officials should focus their attention on educating our children and allow companies actually in the construction business to handle the new school construction projects.

Another State's Standards Bites the Dust?

According to Michigan's Mackinac Center for Public Policy, state school officials are considering lowering state education standards in response to the federal "No Child left Behind Act."

State Board of Education members are debating whether or not to lower Michigan's education standards, in order to keep Michigan schools off federal "failing schools" lists.

New federal regulations, part of President Bush's No Child Left Behind Act, require states to set improvement standards for schools and sanctions for underperforming schools. The program developed by Michigan will affect how the state uses federal funds for education.

The State Board is torn between wanting to maintain existing standards and not wanting the sanctions generated by schools listed as "failing." Under current standards Michigan has the most "failing" schools in the nation: 1,513.

"By lowering standards, we increase the flow of federal money into Michigan and protect a significant number of schools," David Plank, a Michigan State University professor who studies K-12 issues told the Lansing State Journal. "On the negative side, we want our kids to achieve higher levels. To scale that back in exchange for money is not a legitimate bargain."

Perverse incentives work. A law where the consequences mean that Arkansas has zero failing schools and Michigan has 1,500 is bound to have unintended consequences--every state strives to be Arkansas.

School Buildings, Taxes, and Proposition 47

Keeping it all in the family, my husband, Michael Snell, takes on the bad math of propositon 47, California's largest ($13 billion) bond initiative at Reason online.

California spends, on average, about half of the entire state budget for education. It spent $53.7 billion on K-12 (not counting college and university expenditures) during the fiscal year ending June 30, 2002, according to the state's Department of Finance.

Polls indicate 57% of California's population finds Proposition 47 attractive. It has received a vast amount of positive press and is supported by all the usual suspects, from the state PTA to the League of Women Voters (ironically charged by the state with presenting non-partisan analysis of ballot measures). . . .

What is most bothersome is that Prop. 47 supporters are, to be charitable, disingenuous, and to be uncharitable, lying, when they make the claim that Prop. 47 will not increase taxes. This gross misstatement, bandied about in print, radio, and TV ads splashed across the Golden State, has garnered much of the support that exists for the proposition. It would seem that everybody wants something for nothing and we are quite willing to believe it can be had for that price.

The harsh certainty is this: The bonds must be repaid, together with interest, and the funds to repay the debt can only come from tax dollars. Taxes will increase or other government expenditures will be cut so as to service the debt on these bonds. That is a fact just as absolute as the fact that a leap from a tall building will splatter you on the sidewalk like a ripe watermelon.

Blog vacation

I'm taking the week off from blogging to ensure that I finish my last child-welfare study on children’s advocacy centers for Reason Public Policy Institute. After this study I will be concentrating on education rather than education AND child-welfare issues like foster care. My study looks at public-private partnerships that increase child safety while respecting due process for parents. The only bureaucracies worse for children than the education establishment is the police state that is child protection in our nation--this agency manages to let real child abuse slip through the cracks while unnecessarily interfering with hundreds of families.

Blogchildren

Proud to be one of Joanne Jacobs' blogchildren.

I'll Be Back

Gearing up for his bid for Governor no doubt. . .

Action star Arnold Schwarzenegger is swapping on-screen combat for a real-life political fight in California as he pushes a ballot measure to dedicate state money to after-school programs.

Too bad many after-school programs can not fill available seats and have a difficult time attracting the population of kids between 12 and 16. This initiative moves what had been a private segment of the education industry into another tax-supported public school service at the cost of at least $85 million for the first year increasing to $550 million annually if state revenues grow.

One for the Good Guys

School violence studies have shown that random searches with metal detectors do not work anyway.

A jury has awarded $425,000 to a Los Angeles school teacher, who claimed she was not rehired because she refused to allow students to be searched for weapons.

Ami Motevalli, 32, an art teacher with a one-year contract at Locke High School in South Central Los Angeles, charged the Los Angeles Unified School District with violating her First Amendment rights.

She said was not rehired because she spoke out against random searches of students using hand-held metal detectors.

Charter School for Cops' Kids

Another example of a workplace charter school. I have written several studies of charter schools centered around the workplace.

It's something that apparently has never been done before: a charter school for children of police officers, one that could meet the needs of parents with erratic schedules and students with special fears.

Developing such a school is one way New Orleans could improve its police department's morale, recruitment and retention rate, according to a blue-ribbon committee studying the problems. Now supporters of the idea say it's time to move forward with it.

More Appalling Special Education Policy

And we wonder why special education students are not making progress. . .

Stories of special-education children repeatedly handcuffed in front of classmates, sent to "time-out rooms" for long periods and disciplined in other ways for misbehavior have prompted a state review of "behavioral interventions."

Special education advocates say schools misuse time-out rooms and school police officers to deal with unruly students.

The stories of abuse are shocking:

His 16-year-old son, Joey, has an IQ of 49 and suffers from the effects of Fetal Alcohol Syndrome. Because of his outbursts, he was placed in Dakota Ridge School, a small school in Apple Valley run by the Rosemount-Apple Valley-Eagan school district for students with emotional or behavior disorders.

In the four months before removing Joey from the school in January, Callaway said his son was restrained 13 times, placed in a seclusion room 14 times, and was handcuffed by a sheriff's deputy six times.

Attorney Amy Goetz said her clients include an 8-year-old taken out of class three times by a police officer and an 11-year-old student with autism who spent 28 hours out of a 30-hour school week in an isolation room.

She worries that schools are criminalizing behavior that is a direct result of a child's disability. When protections afforded students under special-education laws become too burdensome for educators, too often schools call in police officers to deal with a situation, she said.

The story does not mention that this is one inevitable consequence of one-size-fits-all solutions like full-inclusion for special education students.

KIPP Charter Model Shows Impressive Test Scores

Jay Mathews reports that the KIPP Academy charter schools are making consistent academic progress:

The study says the KIPP DC/KEY Academy, which opened a year ago with 80 fifth-graders in a Southeast Washington church basement, posted unusually large increases on the Stanford 9 achievement test.

The students took the exam in fall 2001 and again in spring 2002. On a 99-point scale, they improved their average reading score from about 34 to 46 and their average math score from about 41 to 65. The results are similar to percentile scores, and the average score for the nation is about 50.

The fall-to-spring gains at the KIPP DC/KEY Academy were more than twice the increases that students typically achieve from one spring to the next on the exam, the study says. About 80 percent of the school's students qualify for federally subsidized lunches.

KIPP uses a funding model that combines the charter school per-pupil funding with outside philanthropic funding.

All of KIPP's 15 schools are public, using tax dollars alloted to charter and independent schools, although 18 percent of their money comes from outside sources, including the Walton Family Foundation and the Challenge Foundation. Outside funding drops to 12 percent in established grade 5-8 schools, KIPP officials say. Given the extra money and longer schools days, some educators wonder whether many other schools can follow KIPP's example.

School Voucher Growth

Milwaukee

The number of students in Milwaukee's controversial voucher program reached 11,750 this year, continuing a trend of slow but steady growth. The program grew by 868 students over last school year.

Six private schools joined the program this year and six schools left, keeping the total number constant at 103.

Florida

Via Children First America

Choice as a Florida School District.

Florida is among the leading states in promoting school choice, with A+ Scholarships for children in failing schools, McKay Scholarships for children with disabilities, and with tax credit scholarships for low-income children. Choice opponents often claim that choice programs represent some sort of plot to help pay the costs for wealthy and/or easy-to-educate children to attend private schools.

In Florida, the number of students taking advantage of vouchers to escape failing schools jumped more than twelve-fold from last year. Also, an estimated 9,000 special education students - twice last year's total - have enrolled in school using McKay Scholarships. Perhaps most impressively, about 20,000 students have applied for scholarships provided through Florida's new corporate tax credit program.

If you combine these three programs however, you find that at least 42.5% of choice children have disabilities compared to a statewide average of 14.9%, and a minimum of 55% of the 23,500 choice kids are eligible for the federal free/reduced lunch program, compared to a statewide average of 36%. (The actual free/reduced lunch figure is higher than 55%, but income statistics are not readily available for McKay or A+ Scholarship beneficiaries).

Considered in whole, school choice kids are already a larger group than 45 of Florida's 67 school districts. Including the over 50,000 children attending the 232 Florida charter schools, the "school choice district" is the larger than all but five of Florida's government school districts, and growing fast. In a state that faces overcrowding problems in government schools and where it costs $30,000 per seat in construction costs for new schools -- choice works for parents, students and taxpayers.

Some Florida candidates have threatened to abolish Florida choice programs, but one cannot help but wonder where the state will find well over two billion dollars it will take to build spaces for these children in the public school system (which they would prefer not to attend).

Cleveland

And in Cleveland, applications for state-financed vouchers increased by 29 percent - from 2,100 last year to 2,700 this year. The month of July showed a particularly sharp increase - from 163 in 2001 to 648 this year

No Federal Investigation

The U.S. Department of Education says that no federal funds were involved and that it is outside its jurisdiction to investigate how Edison won contracts to run Philadelphia schools.

School Choice Legal Strategy

Education Week's Mark Walsh covers the second phase of the Institute for Justice's legal strategy to defeat state constitutional provisions that block school vouchers from being by students to attend religious schools.

"The rule of law we are seeking to establish in these cases is that a state cannot discriminate against religious school options," said Clint Bolick, a vice president of the institute who was the architect of a decade-long legal strategy that led to the high court's ruling upholding vouchers under the U.S. Constitution. In its June decision in Zelman v. Simmons-Harris, the justices held that the inclusion of religious schools in the Cleveland voucher program was not an unconstitutional establishment of religion under the First Amendment.

Now the focus has shifted to the states, where new choice programs that would include religious schools potentially face state constitutional barriers. The institute says 37 states have so-called Blaine amendments in their state constitutions. These are provisions, named for 19th- century U.S. Rep. James G. Blaine of Maine, that prohibit government funds from going to religious sects or institutions. Most of these provisions were added after the failure by Congress to adopt such an amendment to the federal Constitution in the 1870s, a measure pushed by Rep. Blaine.

Richard D. Komer, a senior lawyer with the institute, said 29 states have so- called "compelled support" provisions in their constitutions, which tend to predate the Blaine era and provide that no one be compelled to attend or support a church without consent.

In the institute's view, these state barriers should not prevent the inclusion of religious schools in any choice program. It argues that parents have several grounds under the U.S. Constitution for seeking to open choice programs to religious schools. These include the First Amendment's guarantees of free speech and free exercise of religion and the 14th Amendment right to equal protection under the law. . . .

The institute plans to file lawsuits challenging Blaine amendments and compelled-support provisions around the country. It will pick its battles carefully, the lawyers said, because it doesn't have the resources to sue in every state, but it wants to litigate in enough places to create a conflict among the federal circuit courts. That would eventually lead back to the Supreme Court.

Where's the money part deux

A just-released NEA teacher survey performed in June 2002 of 1,000 teachers nationwide claims that:

One out of six elementary and secondary school teachers who use textbooks in their classes say they do not have enough books for every child in their class, and nearly one in three teachers report they do not have enough textbooks so that all students can take a textbook home.

I'll say it again. The average class yields around $200,000 a year in per-pupil income. Yet, there is no money for books. What are they spending the money on?

Where everyone knows your name

One of the things I have against the public schools is the institutional indifference. This Education Week story about a teacher's experience with accidentally calling a boy by the wrong name gets close to my sense of how public schools operate.

Miguel's paperwork arrived about three weeks after he had moved away. I was going through the folder, updating it for his next teacher, when I noticed something that made me catch my breath. His name wasn't Michael. It wasn't Miguel. His name was David.

I wondered how it was that this child could have been part of my classroom for more than a month, and in that entire time he never had enough personal power to tell me that his name was David. What was it about me, about the other children, about the school that made David feel he had to give up his name? No child should have to forfeit his identity to walk through our classroom doors. No child. Ever. It is much too high a price to pay.

Kids give up more than their names in public classrooms.

And we want to give them more money...

Keep this in mind when you are thinking about voting yes on the largest California school bond in history.

So Typical . . .

Via Education Intelligence Agency

Defense Department Schools Study Wastes Money to Save Money. EIA is devoted to the principle of limited government, especially the federal government. EIA rarely finds itself in agreement with NEA affiliates, especially when the issue concerns reducing the role of the federal government. Nevertheless, EIA finds itself aligned on just such an issue with the Federal Education Association, the NEA affiliate that represents education employees of the Department of Defense (DoD) schools.

For those unfamiliar with the system, the Department of Defense runs schools overseas for the dependents of U.S. military personnel and civilian DoD employees. The department also runs some 58 schools for 32,000 students of military parents in the United States. Congress has mandated a DoD study to determine the fiscal benefits of closing the stateside schools and sending the students to local public schools.

The $1.15 million research contract was awarded to the Donahue Institute, associated with the University of Massachusetts. A second study, at a cost of $450,000, will determine how much it will cost to bring the DoD school facilities into compliance with federal, state and local building regulations for use as public schools by the local district.

As a general rule, the feds should not perform a task better suited to state and local governments. In some Southern states, there might even be a cost benefit to letting local school districts handle the job. What's missing from a such an analysis, however, is the fact that students in DoD schools, especially poor and minority students, significantly outperform their peers. Shouldn't results count for something?

The Federal Education Association and the National Military Family Association are already asking researchers to include measures of quality in their analysis. EIA believes the $1.6 million would be better spent replicating the DoD school environment in the local public schools, instead of the other way around.

Anti-Testing

While were on the subject of school drug policies Daryl Cobranchi covers a Boston Globe story on drug testing. He notes how drug-testing policies began with a narrow group of student athletes and have grown to potentially include every high school student.

So, to catch the 1.76% of student-athletes who were smoking and the 0.29% who were using illegal drugs, the school district subjected the other 97.9% to an invasive, embarassing, useless test. This testing craze started out with the "drug problem" among student-athletes. Then we started sliding downhill to testing students participating in competitive inter-scholastic events (like "choir"). This morphed into testing students who needed to drive to school. And now the slope carries us down to testing nearly everybody for pretty much any damn thing the schools decide to test for. Your tax dollars at work (and another good reason to HS).

Zero Judgement

Via reason Brickbats

Zero Tolerance, Zero Sense (10/8)

Joshua Erdkamp has been suspended for five days for not turning in a classmate's drugs quickly enough. When a classmate handed the eighth-grader some pot to pass to another student during class, he got up from his desk and threw the drugs away. After class, he told a trusted school counselor what had happened. His actions didn't satisfy the principal, who says Erdkamp should have told his teacher immediately. Since he didn't, he's being punished by the Nebraska school. That'll teach him to keep his mouth shut next time.

Similarly, Our Horrible Children has the latest on the suspended sophmore honor student who found a baggie of over-the-counter and prescription pills and didn't turn them into teachers because she was afraid they'd claim the drugs were hers.

The Florida high school student that was recommended for expulsion for "drug possession", after she found a baggie of pills outside the school, has been reinstated back into school by a hearing officer. John Allbritton, a local attorney who served as the hearing officer, said Teresa cannot be guilty of possession of an illicit substance if she didn't know what the pills were. "The argument of the superintendent that the fact that (the) student concealed the baggie and passed it onto her friend is evidence that she knew of the presence and illicit nature of the pill is without merit," he wrote in his order. "It is simply evidence of a frightened 15-year-old child who did not use good judgment and who probably would have done the same things, even if all of the pills had proven to be legal."

The Coed Question

In an engaging New York Times magazine piece Margaret Talbot questions the new-found support for single-sex education. She notes that the evidence that boys and girls learn better when they are apart is slim and argues for the positive benefits of learning in a coed environment.

What is troubling about this breezy new enthusiasm for segregation is not that it may lead to new single-sex schools, some of which will be good schools whatever their gender makeup. What is troubling is the tenor of the arguments. There is no solid body of evidence showing that single-sex education is better for girls or boys. A handful of public schools, including the six-year-old Young Women's Leadership School of East Harlem, have shown impressive results. But whether this is because these schools also tend to have small classes and the kind of committed teachers and parents eager to devote themselves to an educational experiment is not clear.

As for research showing that boys and girls (or men and women) use their brains in vastly different ways, it comes in two forms: the soft and speculative social psychology of books like ''Women's Ways of Knowing'' and brand-new, small-scale brain-imaging studies. Brain imaging may yield all sorts of durable insights into gender differences, but it certainly has not yet. The recent and much-bruited study that showed that women are ''hard wired'' to recall emotions better than men involved a grand total of 12 men and 12 women.

But perhaps the most insidious aspect of the latest advocacy is the idea that boys inevitably bring out the worst in girls, or hopelessly intimidate them. For while single-sex education is sometimes presented as a boon for boys, especially in the inner city, it is usually portrayed as a way of rescuing and protecting girls.

Talbot notes that there is nothing wrong with parents paying for private single-sex schools. I would go farther and argue that school choice would make this whole debate go away.

Monitoring Matters

In order for any kind of school privatization or contracting to work better than the government provider, the contracts must be monitored and measured. Oversight is always key. This story about private special education contracts in DC demonstrates what happens with poor oversight.

The District public school system paid $67 million over a 28-month period to private special education providers without reviewing their bills for accuracy, including $1.2 million in payments for students who may not have been eligible for the services they received, according to a city audit.

The D.C. auditor blamed poor oversight by the school system and its financial office, which is run by the city's chief financial officer. The audit also cited flaws in a payment system for private services that was set up as part of an ongoing class action lawsuit against the schools.

Private providers face the same incentives as public institutions when tax money is involved--especially when it is unclear who the customer is.

These overpayments appear to be the result of an earlier school management deficiency.

The audit examined payments under a special system established to pay many private schools and other providers. Under the plan, devised in the 1990s at a time when vendors were not getting paid on time, the providers send the school system estimates of their costs per child and are paid based on those estimates. The school system is later supposed to reconcile any differences between the estimates and the final costs.

A federal judge, the school system and the plaintiffs in the class action lawsuit signed off on the plan. A new plan, in which payments would be made based on actual bills, has been negotiated and awaits the judge's approval.

Weak Blogging

I'm going to get back on track for more frequent education updates. Between Reason work demands, the implementation of our K12 home charter school program, a case of strep throat for Katie 4, and a toothache for Jacob 6--meaning multiple doctor and dentist visits and more all-nighters with miserable crying children than I care to count--blogging has been very slow.

I think our family might be starting to adjust to our multiple commitments (either that or we are just delusional). We like watching the children learn and having them with us all the time, but it is slow going!