Natalie's Corner Archive
Natalie and Gerald Sirkin write about education and other topics of interest to NABR supporters in "Natalie's Corner", a column published in New Fairfield's Citizen News. With their kind permission, we present selected columns here, with the more recent at the top:January 3, 2008 SCHOOL CHOICE, ESSENTIAL TO SUCCESS
March 14, 2003 E.D. HIRSCH, JR., A MAN TO EDUCATE EDUCATORS (CN 3-14-07)
October 26, 2005 THE FIFTY-YEAR BATTLE FOR SCHOOL CHOICE
June 22, 2005 EDUCATORS FIND A CASH MACHINE
March 16, 2005 NO CHILD LEFT BEHIND OR ADVANCED
March 3 2004 SCHOOL COMPETITION AND HOW TO GET IT
May 28, 2003 TEACHER UNIONS, ANOTHER SCHOOL POTHOLE
February 2003 A SOLDIER IN THE EDUCATION WARS
October 2002 THE SICKNESS OF ACADEMIA
October 2002 THE TESTING WAR
May 2002 THE MATH WARS AND HOW
THEY GREW
January 9, 2001 WHOLE-SCHOOL REFORM: BIG PLANS, BIG
FLOP
October 31, 2001 THE CULTURAL DRAG ON LEARNING
April 4, 2001 HOW WHOLE LANGUAGE SURVIVES
January 24, 2001 THE SPENDING-LEARNING DISCONNECT by Gerald and Natalie Sirkin
October 26, 2000 A SAD STORY OF SCHOOLS AND SCORES
September 27, 2000 THE DOWNHILL HISTORY OF AMERICAN EDUCATION
July 5, 2000 UNDERSTANDING READING FAILURE (CN 7-5-00) by Natalie and Gerald Sirkin
June
14, 2000 MULTICULTURAL
READING SACRIFICES THE CHILDREN by
Natalie and Gerald Sirkin
May
10, 2000 PARENTS' GUIDE TO EDUCATION
REPAIRS by Natalie and Gerald
Sirkin
April
10, 2000 REGIONALIZING
SCHOOLS, NON-SOLUTION by Natalie
and Gerald Sirkin
March 15 2000 MERIT
PAY FOR TEACHERS AND HOW TO DO IT by
Natalie and Gerald Sirkin
March 1 2000
MATH
WARS, WHEN
NOBODY CAME by
Natalie and Gerald Sirkin*
February 2 2000 MATH FAD--FAILED REVOLUTION by Natalie and Gerald Sirkin
January
5, 2000 THE
WAR AGAINST WESTERN CIVILIZATION (CN
1-5-00)
August 25 1999 WHO WILL REFORM THE SCHOOL REFORMERS by Natalie and Gerald Sirkin
January 3, 2008 SCHOOL CHOICE, ESSENTIAL TO SUCCESS
Q. What’s the best strategy for closing the gap [between black and white students] and what in your view are the prospects for success?
A. Abigail Thernstrom: If I had my druthers, I would turn every urban school into a charter school and with the bucks stopping on the principal’s desk.
A. Stephen Thernstrom: I wouldn’t want to restrict the choice made available to students to charter schools. I see no reason why we cannot make it through some kind of voucher plan.
Sam Diego Union-Tribune, November 13, 2007
Vouchers, besides charter schools and private schools, are covered in Herbert J. Walberg’s new book, SCHOOL CHOICE, THE FINDINGS. It contains solid empirical evidence on all including private schools, secular and parochial. Walberg, an expert on effective educational practices and research methods, has fitted the findings into a tiny paperback which will fit into a pocket or pocketbook. The findings are from all the valid empirical studies. CATO published this jewel in 2007, but without an index or footnotes which are in the big edition and are available from CATO.
Only six public high schools were on the list of 39 high school alma maters of students who are in the eight foremost colleges in 2007 (Wall Street Journal, November 30, page W6).
Public schools
Traditional public schools perform less effectively and efficiently than either charter or private schools. U.S. students are among the poorest performers and at the highest per-pupil cost of students of 39 countries. Productivity (achievement per dollar spent) over the 30-year period 1970 to 2000 declined to 73 percent from 55 percent.
Charter schools
The largest study of charter schools, which included nearly every charter school in the country together with its nearest traditional-school neighbor, showed charter schools outperforming comparison schools. Poor and Hispanic students achieve well. Outcomes improve as charter schools are given more autonomy, funding, and time to work out their opening operating problems. Charter schools have a beneficial effect on their own students and students in nearby traditional schools. Overregulated and underfunded, they spend a fifth less than traditional schools.
Vouchers
Eleven studies found positive effects on academic achievement of those attending voucher schools but sometimes showed little effect on white students. Studies of voucher programs in Washington, D.C., Cleveland, and Milwaukee show reduced social tension compared to traditional schools. Research indicates that voucher programs yield results at least as good as those of traditional public schools, and particularly good for black students. Vouchers benefit both private and public schools. The first federal voucher program signed by President Bush in 2004 gives 1900 low-income students choice of private schools.
Voucher programs in the U.S. are too small to provide evidence that supporters believe exists, but evidence is available from Sweden since 1993, the Netherlands since 1917, Chile since 1982, the Czech Republic since the fall of Communism, and Colombia since 1991. Improvements are seen in student achievement, parent satisfaction, and increased numbers of independent schools.
On the effects of private schools, Walberg reviews the findings with respect to academic achievement, efficiency, racial integration, parental satisfaction, and civic engagement by students. Private schools achieve better than public and at lower cost. The findings show they are more likely than public schools to foster cross-racial friendships, social integration, civil participation, and tolerance.
The larger the state share of school costs, the smaller the accomplishment. Unfortunately, states have been providing an increasingly larger share. Where states provide only a small fraction of the funding, accomplishments are greater, perhaps because each school has to compete with other schools. This was the result of Harvard economist Caroline Hoxby’s study of New Hampshire, where the state pays only seven percent of K-12 costs, and six other states including Connecticut. Smaller districts show higher achievement than larger districts. Walberg finds that citizens in smaller districts involve themselves more in school affairs than in larger.
Customer satisfaction—parents, children, the public—matters. High level of parental discontent has helped put over one million students into home-schooling.
Dissatisfaction with public schools suggests basic differences of the public and professors at schools of education. A 1997 Public Agenda survey of education professors’ views showed that only a fifth agreed with the public that students should write correct grammar, spelling, and punctuation.
The schools of education set the views in the public schools. Abigail Thernstrom told the San Diego editors, “And I will never forget the day that I walked into my daughter’s fifth grade and said, ‘Where is she?’ And I was told ‘Oh, we’re doing math. She doesn’t like math. She doesn’t do math. She’s in the library reading.’”
The prospect for success lies in advancing school choice, as Milton Friedman knew decades ago. In education as in the economy, competition produces winners. School choice is the key to competition in academic achievement. Walberg summarizes:
Two literature reviews of some 140 studies showed that most studies show positive effects of increases in school choice opportunities on overall student achievement. The most rigorous 50-state study found strong positive effects. The largest international study of school choice effects . . . also showed strong positive effects on overall academic achievement
E.D. HIRSCH, JR., A MAN TO EDUCATE EDUCATORS (CN 3-14-07)
The mediocrity of American education becomes more worrisome as international economic competition intensifies. The United States has been wrestling for years with the task of raising the level of learning and catching up with other countries. Reforms, experiments, and a lot of spending have produced no improvement. Education-performance remains mediocre.
What has been missing is someone who understands the root cause of the failure. We have such a one. He has been writing about it for twenty years. His books have been widely read. Yet he has had minimal effect on the education establishment.
He is E .D. Hirsch, Jr., professor emeritus at the University of Virginia, author of Cultural Literacy, What Every American Needs To Know (1987), The Schools We Need and Why We Don’t Have Them (1994), What Every Child Needs To Know (separate volumes for each grade), and The Knowledge Deficit (2006).
Professor Hirsch’s college teaching had two specialties, the history of ideas and the theory of reading, a combination that prepared him for insight into American elementary education. The ideas that misled American education and impeded the learning of reading go back at least a century but became dominant in education more recently.
Those ideas are known in the history of ideas as Romanticism, which means faith in nature. Follow what is natural and you can’t go wrong. Children will learn to read naturally the way they learn to talk, says romantic theory. They will learn to recognize words, with the help of pictures. Once they can read, they will pick up knowledge about history, literature, science, and the rest. Till then, content, facts, are not important, only development of skills, according to the romantics, Dewey and Rousseau.
From the romantic theory came the reading method called “Whole Word,” later “Whole Language,” which treats our language as if it were Chinese symbols that must be memorized.
Unfortunately, as Hirsch points out, there is nothing natural about reading. Some, like the American Indians, had no written language and never learned to read. Writing is a code. To read, people have to be taught to decode by phonemic awareness and phonics, which is learning the sound of letters and blending of letter-sounds into words.
School systems have been making progress in discarding Whole Language and introducing phonics, but improvement in reading ability is still far less than we need. A large proportion of children tests no higher than “proficient,” which means barely literate.
Something is missing in reading instruction. Phonics and decoding skill are not enough. Professor Hirsch has put his finger on the missing component and emphasized it in his books, but it has not caught on. What has been missing is the factual or cultural knowledge which writers assume. Without that knowledge, readers may be able to decode the words but not generally comprehend them.
Hirsch gives an example from a business letter by his father that includes the words, “There is a tide.” When that letter was written many years ago, most business executives would have recognized the quotation from Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, “There is a tide in the affairs of man which taken at the flood. . . .” The words mean “Act now.” Not many today would understand it. Teachers colleges and schools began disparaging facts or cultural knowledge as “dull” some years ago. That is when reading comprehension began to decline.
Professor Hirsch began his campaign to overcome cultural illiteracy by publishing what he called his Core-Knowledge sequence curriculum, in a series of volumes for each grade. Over 800 schools have adopted the Core Knowledge program (three in Connecticut) with substantial improvement in reading over other schools. However, much of the education administration continues to reject facts as dull.
One of the ideas from the romantic theory of education that is retarding learning is the “developmentally appropriate” concept. Educators “delay teaching the mechanics of reading until a child reaches a state that is deemed to be a developmental stage of ‘reading readiness.’ Before that time, children are not to be interfered with by premature and artificial teaching of letter-sound correspondences, because these are ‘developmentally inappropriate’,” Professor Hirsch wrote in The Knowledge Deficit.
But reading is not a natural development like walking and talking. It must be taught, and the sooner the teaching begins, the better. “Those [children] who start at age three do better in later reading than those who start at age four, and starting school at age four is better than starting at age five,” says Hirsch in “ Adequacy Beyond Dollars: The Productive Use of School Time.” That generalization is based on many studies utilizing data from over a hundred years of French pre-school experience. The idea of developmentally appropriate, for skills that do not develop unless they are taught, is nonsense.
American schools, says Professor Hirsch, spend so much time on the mechanics of reading that they neglect history, literature, science, and other fields of knowledge. Children do not ordinarily acquire in school the factual knowledge---the cultural literacy---which is necessary for reading comprehension. Children in upper socioeconomic families pick up cultural knowledge and vocabulary at home, but in lower level families, children are deprived of that opportunity, hence the education lag of minority children.
Hirsch concludes, “Cultural literacy constitutes the only sure avenue of opportunity for disadvantaged children, the only reliable way of combating the social determinism that now condemns them to remain in the same social and educational condition as their parents.” There is hope for American education if schools will become Core Knowledge schools and educators will learn from E.D. Hirsch, Jr.
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THE FIFTY-YEAR BATTLE FOR SCHOOL CHOICE
Fifty years ago, noted economist Milton Friedman published an article with a brilliant insight: “The Role of Government in Education” (1955) pointed out that two functions, the financing of education and its administration are separate and separable.
There is good reason for public financing of education. Education, in the sense of general education for citizenship, is in the public interest because, as Friedman wrote, “A stable and democratic society is impossible without widespread acceptance of some common set of values and without a minimum degree of literacy and knowledge on the part of most citizens.”
On the other hand, there is no good reason for government administration of education. We have in fact good reasons to not have government administering education, the same reasons why we prefer private over government production of most other goods.
Friedman’s idea seems obvious, as do many good ideas after someone has thought of them, but they elude us till someone lays them out.
From the basic idea of separating school administration from financing, Friedman arrived directly at his solution, the voucher system. Parents would be given a voucher for a specific amount of money, which they could spend for their children’s educaton at a school of their choosing. Were we starting from scratch, Friedman suggested, the schools would probably be private; but since we already have government schools, the vouchers could be spent at either private or government schools.
Friedman’s analysis and voucher proposal were exceptionally well timed. Just a few years after his 1955 article, it became clear that American education was going down hill. Test scores were falling. Illiteracy was rising. Ignorance of math, science, history, was deepening. Schools were becoming encrusted with bureaucratic regulations. The growth of teacher unions beginning in the 1960s added another layer of regulations. Education professionals took control while the influence of parents faded.
All plans for reform, of which we have had many, have failed to make much improvement. Reforms will continue to fail as long as the same bureaucratic conditions and motivations prevail in the education establishment. The voucher system would break schools out of their stifling bureaucratic bonds by introducing competition. If parents could choose schools and schools had to compete for students, they would have to satisfy their customers, as do all businesses that are not handed a guaranteed market.
Naturally, the school bureaucracies and teacher unions have fought vouchers with all their considerable financial resources and political power. Friedman answered with fifty years of articles explaining vouchers and eventually establishing the Friedman Foundation, devoted exclusively to promoting parental choice.
The Foundation has published the Friedman articles in a book, Liberty and Education: The Collected Works on the Voucher Idea, 1955-2005. Particularly helpful is a section on the most frequent objections to vouchers:
- Vouchers used in parochial schools would be unconstitutional. But it is doubtful that the Supreme Court would rule against them. The vouchers would not be given to religious institutions but to parents who can spend them where they choose, just as they can give their social security benefits to a church. No one ever questioned the schools that veterans attended with their funds from the G.I. bill.
- Vouchers will raise the cost of schooling because children now attending private schools will receive government funds. The answer is that the amount of the vouchers can be set so that the total cost does not rise. Private schools are generally so much more efficient and less costly, that vouchers can pay less than the per-pupil cost of government schools.
- There is a possibility of fraud by parents, it is said. However, vouchers are paid directly to the schools and not to individuals.
- Private schools would tend toward racial segregation. The opposite has been true. Private schools have generally led the way toward integration.
- New private schools will not be sufficient to handle the demand. There is no reason for this concern. Create a market for schools and entrepreneurs will enter just as in any other market.
- Vouchers will destroy public schools which have done so much for our democracy. Friedman replies, if government schools are doing such a splendid job, why should they fear competition? And if they can’t do well enough to compete, why should we regret their destruction?
An episode in the battle for school choice tells us what to expect. In the 1960s when schools in New York City were at their worst, groups of parents using private funds opened schools in storefronts. A successful example was Harlem Prep. The facilities were poor, but the results were phenomenal. Drop-out rates fell, students behaved. Many students went on to college. But with money running out, Harlem Prep gave in to the New York City Board of Education and agreed to conform to government school regulations in exchange for financial aid. Harlem Prep rapidly declined into mediocrity.
The forces of bureaucratic self-interest are powerful. Nevertheless, school choice has made some progress. In a free society, it is hard to kill a good idea that is desperately needed, like vouchers for school choice.
EDUCATORS FIND A CASH MACHINE
On June 1, an organization that calls itself "Connecticut Coalition for Justice in Education Funding" presented a report to the State Board of Education that signals the opening of a well-organized drive by the education establishment to extort more money from Connecticut taxpayers.
The Connecticut Coalition for Justice in Education Funding (ccjef.org) hired a consulting firm, Augenblick, Palaich and Associates based in Denver, Colorado, "to determine the cost of education-adequacy in Connecticut public schools."
"Education-adequacy" is defined as meeting the State standard under the No Child Left Behind Act. How does the consultant arrive at a figure for the cost of achieving adequacy? One method is the Successful-School-District (SSD) approach. The consultant examines the spending of schools that are meeting the standards and, by a mathematical formula, estimates the amount each school should spend per-pupil to be
successful.
A second method is the Professional Judgment (PJ) approach. You assemble a panel of teachers, principals, superintendents, business managers, and others from the education establishment. You ask them how much money they think they need. This approach has wide application to questions of spending. How much should you spend for an automobile? Just ask the salesman. How much should you donate to your university? Just ask the university. It may not be smart, but it is simple and fast.
According to the SSD calculation, Connecticut schools are now underfunded by $481 million. An anomaly of the calculation is that 13 of the 35 schools listed as "successful" turn out to be underfunded when the formula is applied to them.
"I conceptually don't understand how a successful school district can possibly be (so far) below your adequacy figure," said State Board of Education President Allan Taylor. "If they're already doing it, isn't the answer that they already have what it takes?" reported the Waterbury Republican-American on June 2.
The PJ approach concludes that Connecticut public schools will be underfunded by $2 billion in 2014, when every public school student must, by No Child Left Behind, be proficient in math and reading (except that PJ calls for the funds in 2011). Somehow, we are not surprised that the education professionals have a generous estimate of how much more money should be handed to them.
Underlying the Coalition's report is the staggering assumption that outcomes depend on the amount spent on inputs, and that more spending will improve outcomes. The report does not mention or question the assumption, but merely takes it as self-evident. Yet research rejects the simplistic connection.
Well-known economist and statistician Eric A. Hanushek of the Hoover Institution has surveyed studies of the relation between spending and learning in "The Failure of Input-Based Schooling Policies," in the Economic Journal, February, 2003. From 1960 to 2000, real spending-per-student more than tripled. The average pupil-teacher ratio fell from 25.8 to 16. What did we get in learning from the three-fold spending increase? Almost nothing. For example, scores of 17-year-olds on the National Assessment of Educational Progress reading and mathematics tests fell and then recovered, ending only slightly higher. Science scores ended significantly lower.
Attempts to explain these results by changes in families cannot explain the discrepancy. Similarly, the rise in the cost of special education cannot because special ed costs are too small a proportion of total costs.
International comparisons confirm these findings. A correlation study of spending and test scores on TIMSS (Third International Mathematics and Science Study) of secondary schools in 23 developed countries shows a nearly zero correlation (0.06).
We can see what lies ahead for Connecticut by looking at developments in New York, described in an article by Dr. Hanushek for a forthcoming issue of Education Next. A legal advocacy group, Campaign for Fiscal Equity (CFE), filed suit claiming New York State was not sending New York City enough funds for "a sound basic education." CFE commissioned a pair of consulting firms to calculate the cost of a sound basic education.
The consultants used the same methods as the consultants in Connecticut, SSD and PJ. What do you know—-the New York City schools are underfunded! Their report went to a judge of the New York Supreme Court. He gave the report to a panel of three Referees (two retired judges and a retired law school dean). The Referees, accepting the figures derived from PJ, decided that the schools need an additional $5.6 billion. Moreover, they recommended that new studies be done every four years to find out how much more money the New York City schools need.
From the experience of schools that educate successfully in the U.S. and abroad, we know what changes will improve learning. Simple changes requiring no additional spending will raise test scores: homework, higher standards, order in the classrooms, focus on basics and an end to freaky progressive teaching methods like Whole-Language reading and new-New Math, which predominate in the public schools.
Dr. Hanushek notes that consultants' reports using SSD and PJ calculations are being compiled all over the country: "By spring 2005 major studies of educational costs similar to those that supported the stunning New York judgment have been initiated under the prodding of teacher unions, school districts, and other interested parties in more than two-thirds of the states."
We don't yet know what stunning judgment a Connecticut court may hand down, but clearly the educators have found a device that seems to work, and the big education cash rip-off is well under way.
NO CHILD LEFT BEHIND OR ADVANCED
Put simply, NCLB assumes that the entities that long permitted these
schools to fail to educate millions of children will now display the fortitude,
ingenuity, and capacity to turn them around.
Finn and Hess
The latest major effort to produce an education that educates is No Child Left
Behind (NCLB), signed into law three years ago.
NCLB is a compromise of the ideas of the Bush Administration and Senator Edward
Kennedy, to whom the President gave a large role in order to get the bill
passed. The outcome is a "bipartisan consensus" of 1100 pages, a Rube
Goldberg contraption, say Chester E. Finn, Jr., and Frederick M. Hess in their
essay, "On Leaving No Child Behind," in The Public Interest, Fall, 2004.
Kennedy-education resembles Hillary-care, a massive body of regulations rigidly
controlling every aspect of the program. Public-school students in Grades 3
through 8 are to be tested annually in reading and math. Each school must
measure whether it is making "adequate yearly progress" (AYP) toward
"proficiency." Proficiency means barely literate. Two categories are above it:
meeting goals, and advanced.
AYP is required of all students in every grade and in subgroups by gender, by
race, disability, English-language status, "and so on."
A school that fails to achieve AYP in any such subgroup in any year is judged to
be in need of improvement and is subject to sanctions and interventions, which
get tougher with each successive year of failure. A school that fails for two
consecutive years must offer its students a choice of alternative public schools
including charter schools.
After a third year of failure, the school district is to provide students with
supplemental services like tutoring. After a fourth year of failure, the school
is to draw up a school improvement plan. After the fifth year of failure, the
school is to be "reconstituted," which may mean a new administration.
NCLB is a 12-year schedule for boosting student achievement in math and
reading. But NCLB has gaps. Districts with failing schools are not likely to
have successful public schools. Why order failing schools to offer good
alternative schools if there aren't any?
NCLB has worse problems. Each state sets its own standards and tests, which are
supposed to be "challenging." Some states, Connecticut among them, have asked
for waivers of the testing and other requirements. They have been refused.
What the state education authorities including Connecticut have done is to
reduce failures by lowering their standards. An analysis of NCLB in the
Hoover Institution's quarterly, Education Next, Spring, 2005 (www.educationnext.org),
compares each state's proficiency standards for 4th and 8th grade reading and
math with the fairly rigorous standards of the National Assessment of
Educational Progress (NAEP) in 2003.
By Connecticut's standard, 77 percent of the 8th grade were at or above
proficient in reading, but only 37 percent were proficient by NAEP's standard.
Likewise, in 8th grade math and 4th grade math and reading, there is a huge
difference of around 40 between Connecticut's and NAEP's standards in percent
of the grade at or above proficient.
Only four states have standards close to NAEP's. By law, states are required
to reach 100 percent proficient by the year 2014.
Commentators on NCLB looking for something positive to say have suggested that
the testing will shine a light on failing schools. Say Finn and Hess,
hopefully:
NCLB's testing mandate is already yielding a wealth of valuable
achievement data that deepens popular awareness and parental
understanding of school effectiveness, fosters prudent choices among
schools, equips principals and superintendents to manage their schools
better, and arms elected officials to do informed battle with the
traditionally secretive public-education establishment.
But NCLB will shine little light on schools if their performance is hidden
behind very low standards. The "traditionally secretive public-education
establishment" is not likely to surrender so easily.
The politics of public education has left its mark on NCLB in its preoccupation
with egalitarian goals. It seems more concerned that every student and student
subgroup shall make equal progress than it is with the amount of progress. NCLB
might well have been titled "No Child Advances Much." It pays little attention
to higher-potential students and the country's need for a corps of well trained
scientists, technicians, engineers, and managers to move forward and meet
foreign competition.
The states, criticized for not cooperating to make NCLB work, complain that the
federal government has not provided the funds to pay for NCLB, which, they
protest, is an unfunded mandate. But the complaint has no substance. The only
new cost in NCLB is the cost of additional testing. The other costs-the costs
of improving the schools-are costs for which state and local governments have
always been responsible. The cost of testing is a minor item, more than covered
by the increased federal funds.
NCLB may end up as a disappointment to those who expected an education program
worthy of a world leader. This vast bundle of regulations is to be implemented
by state authorities who don't like it and don't want it. It ignores the one
reform that we believe would help, competition through school choice financed by
vouchers.
SCHOOL COMPETITION AND HOW TO
GET IT
by Natalie and Gerald Sirkin
A fact of political life today is that if you favor meaningful
educational reform, you can automatically count yourself a political enemy of
two groups: the teachers unions that prefer the status quo and too many
politicians who depend on them for financial support.
Wall Street Journal editorial, February 25, 2004
A century and a half ago, when education was delivered by private schools,
illiteracy among schoolchildren was close to zero. Today, more than 25 percent
of high school students are illiterate or barely literate. International tests
show that our students are far behind many other countries' in reading,
mathematics, and science.
The mediocrity of American education has been recognized and worried about for
several decades. Today, the worrying has intensified as we see skilled jobs
going abroad and the productive advantage that permits relatively high incomes,
shrinking.
We know what has to be done to raise the level of learning: eliminate fads
like whole language reading and new new-math, higher standards enforced,
homework, order and discipline in the classroom, reform of the schools of
education to teach more subject matter and less pedagogy, more school time on
academic learning, less social engineering. The hitch is that we cannot get the
schools to do these things.
The latest federal government attempt to push the schools forward, the No Child
Left Behind Act, illustrates the difficulty. A number of states are balking at
setting the standards required. The law provides no way of assuring that the
standards will be high enough or that penalties for failing to meet the
standards will actually be imposed.
The public school system is in the hands of people whose chief concern is not
the quality of education but higher incomes, easier work, and avoidance of
trouble. School administrators generally show little interest in improving
learning. Boards of education do not exercise oversight on learning. Most
powerful have been the teachers unions since the 1970s when they gained
bargaining rights. With such people in control, how do we improve the schools?
Among the efforts pointing the way is a unique study. Education and
Capitalism, How Overcoming Our Fear of Markets and Economics Can Improve
America's Schools, by Herbert J. Walberg and Joseph L. Bast (Stanford,
California: Hoover Institution Press, Stanford University, 2003, pp. 362,
softcover, $15), applies economic analysis to the problem.
The private economy drives producers to improve their product by competition
and consumer choice. Government schools are sheltered from competition. They
derive their income not by satisfying customers, but from taxes. Their income
does not depend on good performance, as in the private sector. On the contrary,
it has generally been the case that the poorer the school performance, the more
money they get, based on the delusion that more money will buy better education.
The solution to school mediocrity is competition and consumer choice. Charter
schools, publicly supported but free from bureaucratic and union rules that
smother ordinary government schools, provide some competition. The charter
school movement, however, is small, with fewer than 600,000 students. The
movement is likely to remain small because the unions with their political power
fight charter schools fiercely.
Home-schooling provides an excellent education for an estimated one million
children, but it is not the answer to a defective school system. Not many
families have the time, resources, and ability to undertake it.
The significant road to competition is through vouchers that go to parents to
permit them a choice of schools in the marketplace. The school voucher is a
reform which "has the capacity all by itself to bring about the kind of
transformation that, for years, reformers have been seeking to engineer in
myriad other ways," the authors note.
Voucher programs on a small scale have been in operation for over a century in
Vermont and Maine with academic success but nationally are just beginning. In
Milwaukee, Cleveland, and Florida, they have improved learning. Research cited
by Walberg and Bast shows that increased competition improves the learning not
only of the students able to attend private schools but also of the students in
the public schools that face the stronger competition.
Public opinion polls show that vouchers are very popular. The authors and other
voucher-advocates easily refute the objections to vouchers. The
constitutionality of vouchers is regularly questioned, but Supreme Court
decisions have upheld all of them. The claim that there will not be enough
private schools is disproved by the experience of the Netherlands and Sweden
where after the introduction of vouchers the supply of private schools expanded
to meet the demand.
Will vouchers be expensive and raise taxes? On the contrary. They will
probably lower costs and taxes. On average, private schools spend half as much
as government schools.
Nevertheless, voucher programs are lagging far behind their public popularity.
Legislation for school vouchers is usually defeated. The authors' explanation
is that it "is the public fear and misunderstanding of capitalism." Hence half
of their book is devoted to explaining how a private-enterprise market system
works and why it is superior to the management of government schools and other
government enterprises.
Are fear and misunderstanding of private enterprise the problem? The failure of
socialism and the success of free-enterprise economies have long been obvious.
While a study of the chapters on capitalism will be beneficial, it may not aid
the cause of school vouchers. Only an unrelenting effort to overcome the mighty
political power of teachers unions and school officials will enable vouchers and
school choice to progress.
TEACHER UNIONS, ANOTHER SCHOOL POTHOLE
By Gerald and Natalie Sirkin*
We all have our favorite explanation--or perhaps several favorites--for poor
public-school education. All the explanations have some validity except the
most popular one, that we aren't throwing enough money at it.
There is a neglected explanation, and Peter Brimelow calls attention to it in
his book, The Worm in the Apple, How the Teacher Unions Are Destroying
American Education (New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 2003, pp. 296,
$24.95). Brimelow has written several books including a best seller on
immigration and many articles in Forbes and other financial publications.
We had forgotten or never knew that the National Education Association, founded
in 1857, and the smaller American Federation of Teachers (1916) did not start
functioning as labor unions till the 1960s. Before then, the NEA was a
professional association concerned with improving standards, ethics, and
teaching methods. The AFT was nothing much. Neither engaged in collective
bargaining, which was prohibited by law for government employees.
That changed when President John F. Kennedy issued an Executive Order allowing
collective bargaining for federal employees, and state governments followed his
example. Quickly the unions' purpose shifted from the prospering of education
to the prospering of teachers. Perhaps it is not just a coincidence that the
sharp, long-term decline in SAT test scores began very soon after, in 1965.
The large union membership (2.6 million in NEA, 1 million in AFT) and their
wealth (NEA revenues from dues, $1.25 billion per year) give them immense
political clout. Over one-third of NEA revenue is spent for political purposes,
and teacher political-action committees add more. Almost all these
contributions are to the Democratic Party.
The NEA also derives substantial income from affiliation with insurance
companies that sell insurance to members. The Michigan insurance sold by the
union agency costs $1,000 more than the state health plan (and is paid by the
taxpayers).
Control of insurance is also a disciplinary tool. Teachers who don't join the
union can be denied access to the union's liability-insurance programs, though
they pay the premiums in their compulsory "agency fees"--the equivalent of union
dues.
In education there are two kinds of news, bad and worse. The bad news is that
collective bargaining and political pressures for teachers' benefits have made
schools extremely expensive. The worse news is that the unions have diminished
what we get for all that money. They impede learning. Most people are aware of
the high cost of education but are generally unaware of the effects of unions on
the quality of schooling.
The teacher unions' greatest power, writes Terry Moe in A Primer on America's
Schools, is to block what they don't want, to stifle reforms they don't
like. They will of course support a change like ever-smaller class size, which
creates teacher jobs, school construction, and higher costs, yet does nothing to
increase learning. But they will not hear of a relaxation of restrictive rules
that hamper school operation.
Union rules cover hiring and firing. In most states trying to remove a teacher
who ought to be removed is so costly and time-consuming that schools seldom try.
In New York City with 72,000 teachers, for example, the Board of Education
tried over two years to dismiss only three for incompetence.
The unions' most damaging effect on education is by opposing competition among
schools. Some competition can be provided by charter schools, which are
relatively free of the paralyzing rules and regulations imposed on ordinary
public schools by unions and governments.
The teacher unions fought against state laws permitting charter schools. In
spite of their power, the unions have lost, and charter schools have been
established in nearly every state.
The NEA tactic was then to propose establishing its own charter schools, which
has not been a success. Local teacher unions have strongly opposed it, even
though the same union rules would apply as in ordinary schools. From union
locals have come comments like "charter schools are often the playground for
malcontents" (California), "counterproductive distractions" (Maine), "not just
eroding support for public schools, they are destroying them" (Massachusetts).
In the few union charter schools that have opened, enrollments have lagged.
Apparently many parents see no advantage in schools that will be hamstrung by
the same rules that bind existing schools.
The greatest hope for improvement in schools lies in a voucher system for school
choice, which will enable parents to choose a private school when they are
dissatisfied with the government school.
The teacher unions are fighting vouchers with every weapon they can put their
hands on. They challenge vouchers in court, tie them up with regulations, paint
them in blackest colors, predict the direst consequences. In a school-board
election, the Milwaukee Teachers Association spent lavishly to defeat
pro-voucher candidates, though Milwaukee eventually got a voucher program.
Costly campaigns defeated voucher initiatives in 2000 by unions in California
and Michigan.
Still, on occasion the unions have been beaten, and vouchers in the near future
may be another such occasion. Pressure for vouchers is building up.
Home-schooling is rapidly increasing. All other public-school reforms have
failed or are failing in the absence of competition to force change. Parents
concerned about their children's future are growing impatient. Vouchers are
inevitable, and inevitable things usually happen.
* Gerald and Natalie Sirkin are residents of Sherman.
A SOLDIER IN THE EDUCATION WARS
By Gerald and Natalie Sirkin*
We have been so busy turning our schools into social science laboratories,
social work agencies, churches, psychiatry wards, wellness clinics, parenting
surrogates, and daycare centers that we have completely lost sight of what is
uniquely their mission-giving students a solid foundation of knowledge and
understanding, a love of learning, and the tools for pursuing that learning.
* * * * * * *
* * *
Virtually all of the latest fashions in K-12 education that I have
surveyed-multiple intelligences, whole language, fuzzy math, self-esteem
building, multiage classrooms, block-scheduling, etc.-are rooted not in concern
for the highest achieving student, or even the average student, but the most
educationally disadvantaged student.
` J. Martin Rochester
Most people know less about what is happening in public education than they know
about sports or show business. To those who care, the discovery of what is
happening in education comes as a shock.
The story of one shocked discoverer is captivatingly told in Class Warfare:
Besieged Schools, Bewildered Parents, Betrayed Kids and the Attack on
Excellence, by J. Martin Rochester (San Francisco: Encounter Books, 2002, pp.
316, $26.95). Rochester, parent of two sons in the schools, is professor of
political science at the University of Missouri--St. Louis.
The Rochesters settled in a St. Louis suburb, known as an excellent school
district. In a few years, he discovered that the schools were going rapidly
downhill. Most disturbing was that the schools were moving toward a one-track
system that mixed high and low achievers, even in the Gifted and Talented
Program. The best were held down to the level of the mediocre.
The family moved to another district with reputedly good schools, but in a short
time that district began the same downward slide. Professor Rochester--as he
writes--became a soldier in the Great American Education War.
He spoke to the superintendent, to the principal of his sons' schools, to the
board of education. He published articles, founded an organization of parents
which gave an annual Goofy Award for the most bizarre idea or practice. The
education war went on for years, and the parents lost. The Goofy practices
multiplied, and the pupils' learning declined.
The ideas taking over the schools, known as "progressive," have long infected
the margins of education, but in the 1960s they became an epidemic. The list is
long and, to a normal mind, staggering.
Whole language replaced phonics for teaching reading. It is based on the theory
that since good readers can recognize words at a glance, children should learn
to read by recognizing words rather than decoding letters. New New-Math doesn't
teach children basic math skills. They just need to know concepts and use
calculators.
Other ubiquitous fads include classes that mix students of different ages;
"cooperative learning" (a group of students works on an assignment usually done
by the ablest student); self-esteem building (though research shows the amount
of learning inversely related to the amount of self-esteem).
Progressive education disfavors homework chiefly because it widens the gap
between high- and low-achieving students. Also, as all students do not have
suitable conditions at home for studying, progressives make the doublespeak
recommendation that homework be done in school--adding nothing to learning time.
Learning by doing "projects" is in vogue. Unfortunately, outside of the arts
and mechanical subjects, it is hard to find projects that teach much.
Rochester's son's 8th grade English class was assigned the project of
expressing, in any medium, their feelings about prejudice. Students painting,
cutting-and-pasting, or playing with Play-Doh, were not learning grammar and
literature.
Going out of vogue is standardized testing because it permits comparisons among
schools and pupils. It detects failing schools. It is a tool of
accountability.
Testing may damage self-esteem, declares the psychotherapy wing of the
schooletariat. It exposes the gap between high and low achievers when the goal
is to hide it. Preferred, are subjective methods like portfolios and projects,
with no standards and scores at the option of the scorers. With the word-skill
of a snake-oil salesman, such assessments are called "authentic assessments."
Much of the progressive experimentation on children grows out of
"constructivist theory," the idea that learners construct their own knowledge.
Teachers are not to teach but be facilitators. Students do not need a
foundation of factual information and basic skills. They are to go directly to
critical thinking, inventing their own spelling, expressing their feelings,
figuring out for themselves mathematics, history, and the world.
Rochester's criticisms met a stone wall. Throughout the country, such critics
have had the same experience. It is useless to talk to school personnel, says
Rochester. They have been thoroughly indoctrinated with progressivism in the
schools of education. They have been taught that their job is to close the gap;
and since they can't raise the bottom much if at all, they must lower the
learning of the top. (This is Outcomes-Based Education.)
Rochester found it useless to talk to boards of education. They do not feel
qualified or inclined to deal with academic issues. They limit themselves to
managing budgets and the mechanical details of the schools.
The only force that can break through the entrenched power of the school
establishment is competition. One kind of competition, charter schools,
has poor prospects. Being public schools, they are subject to all the
roadblocks of the school bureaucracy, as in the case of the proposed
back-to-basics Thomas Jefferson Charter School in a Chicago suburb, where the
school district "declared war" on it with lawsuits and scary communications to
the parents. Commented the Chicago Tribune, "You'd think this was the
Saddam Hussein Charter School."
A voucher system offers a true hope for competition. Desperation and disgust at
the miserable state of public education may yet overcome the fierce opposition
to vouchers by teachers, unions, school boards, and the rest of the
schooletariat.
* Gerald and Natalie Sirkin are residents of Sherman.
THE SICKNESS OF ACADEMIA*
by Natalie & Gerald Sirkin
For nearly 40 years, American universities have been out of step with American
thinking and with America's idea of a university.
United States is a country of diverse ideas but tending toward a moderate
centrist position. That centrist position-to judge from elections, surveys, and
polls-is based on individual rights, a preference for limited government, and a
free-market economy. Free and open debating of diverse ideas would lead to the
widest conclusion, the country has predominantly believed.
The idea of a university has been that it would prepare its students to conduct
the free and open debate.
Since the 1960s, with only a few exceptions the universities' faculties and
administrations have become so unbalanced that the diversity of ideas has
disappeared and, consequently, so has the preparation for the debate of ideas.
A recent survey of Ivy League college professors by pollster Frank Luntz found
that just six percent consider themselves conservative or somewhat conservative.
In a Gallup poll, 67% of the population favored a substantial tax cut, while
80% of Ivy League professors opposed a tax cut. Only 13% of Ivy League
professors believed taxes should be cut when the Federal budget has a surplus.
In a Gallup poll on whether the government should spend money to build a defense
against nuclear missiles, the country said it should by 70 %. Only 14% of Ivy
League professors agreed.
In a comparison of the liberal editorial pages of The New York Times and
the conservative editorial pages of The Wall Street Journal, 72% of
professors said they agreed more with the Times, and five percent said they
agreed more with the Journal.
Who has been the best president in the past 40 years, in the opinion of Ivy
League professors? At the top of the list was Clinton (26%) followed by John F.
Kennedy, Linden Johnson, and Jimmy Carter. At the bottom were the five
Republicans led by Reagan (4%).
Lacking a survey of other universities, one can use party-affiliation as a rough
approximation of political philosophy. Democrat and Republican are not
synonymous with left-liberal and conservative, but they indicate left and right
leanings. The party imbalance in universities is staggering. At the Unviersity
of Colorado, professors who are Democrats constitute 94%, Republicans 4%;
University of Mexixo, Democrats 89%, Republican 7%. University of North
Carolina, Democrats 91%, Republicans 9%; University of California at Los
Angeles, Democrats 93%, Repuhblicans 6.5%.
How did universities get so lopsided? In the cultural revolution of the 1960s, a
new breed of faculty grew sufficiently numerous to control the hiring "The
transformation that followed was succinctly described by the distinguished
intellectual historian, John P. Diggins, at an Annual Meeting of the American
Studies Association a decade ago. Diggins told the assembled academics,
When my generation of liberals was in control of university faculties in
the
Sixties, we opened the door to the hiring of radicals in the name of
diversity.
We thought you would do the same. But you didn't. You closed the doors
behind you.
Universities that present one kind of thought and systematically exclude
opposing kinds of thought, are not educating. They are indoctrinating.
"The power base of the left in America is in the universities," says Richard
Rorty, a well- known moderately left professor of philosophy at Stanford
University. From that power base the indoctrination spreads to the schools
where it is implanted in young absorptive minds. As for Professor Roray, "That
such a figure should celebrate the conversion of academic institutions into
political "power bases," speaks volumes about the tragedy that has befallen the
university," comments David Horowitz in Political Bias in American
Universities. From that power base the indoctrination spreads to the
schools where it is implanted in young absorptive minds.
The university thought-police control more than the classrooms. They have the
power to ensure that competing ideas do not reach students outside the
classrooms.
For example, university funds for invited speakers are disbursed by student
committees which typically allocate the funds only to left-wing speakers. At
the University of Wisconsin in 2001, radical activities received $1 million, a
conservative group $500. At Duke, $100,000 went to left-wing groups, $500 to
the Duke Conservative Union. When conservative groups raise money for a
speaker, they find the money in other ways.
NYU canceled a talk by Horowitz on the grounds that the room was needed for
another purpose. The University of Oregon canceled his appearance on the day he
arrived because the room had been given to another event. Vanderbilt University
and James Madison University used the same device to silence Horowitz.
At Columbia University in 1998, a mob of 250 students threatened to disrupt a
conservative conference. The President, George Rupp, didn't use his security
system to maintain order. He simply canceled the conference.
At Dartmouth, Brown, the University of California at Berkeley, and other
universities, whole issues of conservative student newspapers have been stolen
or destroyed by radical student gangs. No university administration has
punished the criminals.
The American Council of Trustees and Alumni is an organization devoted to
studying and publicizing the bias and suppression of free inquiry in American
universities. Its latest publication, Defending Civilization, notes "the
climate of intimidation" on campuses. "Students have reported more and more
that they are intimidated by professors and fellow students if they question
'politically correct' ideas or fail to conform to a particular ideology."
The universities' response to the September 11 terrorist attacks reflects the
sickness of academia. "Ironically, instead of ensuring that students understand
the unique contribution of America and Western Civilization--the Civilization
under attack--universities are rushing to add courses on Islamic and Asian
culture." The intent and the effect have been to reinforce "the mindset that
it was America-and America's failure to understand Islam-that were to blame."
An institution that can so effectively undermine a great civilization's will to
survive demands our attention.
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previous page
THE TESTING WAR (CN
10-30-02)
Here comes another education war. We have the reading
war and the math war. Now we have the testing war.
The tussle over testing has been precipitated by the No-Child-Left-Behind Act
signed into law by President Bush last January. A key provision requires the
states annually to test reading and math (and, in a few years, science) in
grades three through eight.
The purpose of the testing is to hold schools accountable for meeting their
standards and to identify schools that are failing. The Goals 2000 law in the
Clinton Administration had pushed states to set their standards. The standards
were set, some high, some mediocre, some low, and some, like the history
standards, deplorable. But for the most part, that was as far as it went.
Schools do not hold students to the standards. Those students who do not
attain competency have been passed along to the next grade and eventually to
the hopeless task of remediation in college.
The No-Child-Left-Behind Act is supposed to drive states to drive schools to
reach the states' standards. Schools must make progress toward the goal of
bringing every student up to proficiency. The goal must be reached in 12 years.
Otherwise, various penalties will be imposed.
The gains from testing are not hard to understand. Tests identify schools that
are failing to teach. They identify students who are failing to learn. They
identify particular respects in which learning is failing. They motivate
educators to teach, students to learn, and parents to supervise.
Tests can expose educational foolishness of which we have much. In California,
the 1998 initiative that scrapped bilingual education and ordered children to be
taught in English was recently upheld by the U.S. Ninth Circuit Court of
Appeals. In the year after the initiative was passed, test scores rose
significantly in schools that adopted English-only instruction compared to those
that got waivers to retain bilingual instruction.
Nevertheless, the opposition to testing is formidable. Advocates of the Whole
Language method of reading-instruction have long denounced testing, which
exposes their failures. Many school officials don't like the accountability and
discipline imposed by testing. For all those reasons, teachers' unions oppose
testing. Students don't like testing. Parents frequently protest testing,
particularly if the risk is high that their children will fail.
A major complaint about testing is that it leads schools to "teach to the test,"
meaning that schools will emphasize subjects that are expected to be covered in
the tests to the neglect of other subjects.
But schools presumably have specific standards for what they are to teach.
Tests should be based on the standards, and teaching to the test will mean
conforming to the standards. In the worst schools, it will mean at least
teaching something.
When schools complain that teaching to the test will cut out art, music, and
psycho-social correctness because there is not enough time for all, they are
confessing they are wasting time. A well-run school has time to teach both the
fundamentals of a good education and the cultural trimmings.
An article by Harvard professor of education Richard Elmore, "Testing Trap,"
argues that testing won't improve bad schools: The administrators and teachers
in failing schools are incompetent to run schools properly and teach
effectively. "Low-performing schools aren't coherent enough to respond to
external demands for accountability. . . . Low-performing schools, and the
people who work in them, don't know what to do [all italics Elmore's].
If they did, they would be doing it already."
It is not at all clear that people who do a poor job are incapable of doing
better. Running disciplined and demanding schools and classrooms is harder and
less pleasant than inflating grades, passing under-educated pupils on to the
next grade, and mollifying angry parents. Testing is the way to force such
schools to improve.
Speaking for opponents of testing, Dr. Elmore proposes to supplement
it---he says---with "portfolios and formal exhibitions," projects, and
teachers' grades. Portfolios are collections of students' better productions.
Grades can be and generally are inflated to whatever is necessary to move
students on to graduation. Evaluating portfolios is as reliable and objective
as reading tea leaves.
We can foresee the course of the testing war from the reaction to the testing
requirements introduced by many states in the 1990s. In Wisconsin, the
legislature under pressure from parents refused to fund the exit examination.
In Massachusetts, after a high proportion of students failed the Comprehensive
Assessment Test, the state board of education lowered the passing score. In
other states, students boycotted tests, education authorities lowered standards,
parents hounded legislators, and legislators went to work on bills to gut
testing-requirements.
Testing is the objective way to measure student and school performance, but the
opponents of objectivity are strong and growing stronger. The U.S. Department
of Education has just sent a warning to the country's school commissioners not
to try to evade No-Child-Left-Behind. Unless some way is found to prevent
evasions, the U.S. will lose the testing war, allowing public education to
worsen.
THE MATH WARS AND
HOW THEY GREW
By Natalie and Gerald Sirkin
The First American Math War ended in the 1970s. We are now in Math War II. A
conference at Harvard University in 1999 examined the reason for the math
wars--and the Reading War discussed in our previous column--and why the
education wars are not resolved.
The papers presented at the conference have been published in The Great
Curriculum Debate, How Should We Teach Reading and Math? edited by Tom Loveless
of the Brookings Institution (Brookings Institution Press, Washington, D.C.,
2001, pp. 360, hardback $44.95, softback $18.95). Papers by Gail Burrill,
recent President of the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics, and Michael
Battista, are sympathetic to the latest math reform. Critical of it are papers
by Richard Askey, Roger Shouse, and Adam Gamoran. Unclassifiable is Daniel
Geary's. Loveless's is neutral.
Loveless traces the Math Wars from the now-almost-forgotten debacle of New Math,
which emerged in late l950s and exited in early 1970s. New Math concentrated on
understanding math concepts (set theory, non-ten-based number systems,
commutative properties) and denigrated pencil-and-paper drills and memorizing
math facts like the multiplication table.
Symbolic of the giddiness of the New Math reform was the boost it got from the
Soviet Union's surprise-winning of the race to put a space satellite in orbit,
according to Loveless. The cry went up that American education especially in
math was at fault.
Math had nothing to do with it. Americans didn't see the value of a crash
program to put up a satellite. The Soviet Government didn't care whether their
people saw its value. They launched a satellite crash program and we launched
New Math. Ours crashed.
By the early 1960s, parents were complaining that their children could not do
simple calculations. Teachers, too, were critical. By the early 1970s, math
scores in the SATs were falling. California and New York reported declining
math scores. New Math had passed its peak.
In 1989, the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics (NCTM) published K-12
standards and guidelines for another new math reform resembling New Math.
Professional mathematicians played no role in this development. Eager to do
something about poor math performance, and spurred on by NCTM's public
relations counsel and the National Science Foundation, the country embraced NCTM
math without field trials to see how it worked.
NCTM math, like New Math, denounced memorization of math facts and drills in
calculations. Calculators could do the calculating. Students should work at
"problem-solving," by which they would learn math concepts and (some said) be
motivated to pick up the math facts on their own.
NCTM math has a strong flavor of "discovery learning," a favorite theory of
progressive educators that holds that students only learn what they discover for
themselves. It sounds great till you consider how little knowledge education
would cover if students had to discover all that they need to know. How many
physicists would we have if students had to discover the principles of physics?
In the years since NCTM math took over math classes and textbooks, math-learning
has not improved. American 13-year-olds ranked 19th out of 21 countries in
TIMSS, the Third International Math and Science Study. The proportion of
college freshmen needing remedial math has increased.
The chief observable result of NCTM math has been the decline in simple
arithmetic skills. High school graduates without a calculator are baffled if
they have to multiply 6 x 7.
The paper by Adam Gamoran comments on the NCTM approach, which shuns the
teaching of math skills and knowledge ("rigorous content") in favor of teaching
math concepts ("in-depth understanding") as if the two approaches conflict. "In
fact, precisely the opposite is true: content and understanding are mutually
interdependent," he writes.
A report on a statistical study of methods of teaching math in a paper by Roger
Shouse finds that progressive education devices do not improve math
achievement. Some, like frequent use of computers and student discussion, have
small negative effects.
Protests from parents who find that their children are not learning math, and
sharp criticisms from professional mathematicians, indicate that NCTM math may
soon be on its way out. The California State Board of Education in 1998, after
conscientious study, threw out its NCTM math and returned to traditional math.
What then is the answer to American math failure? Gamoran, examining Japanese
math education, suggests what needs to be done. First, math teachers in Japan
(and generally in Asia) are much better educated in math than American teachers.
Too many American math teachers have not been trained in math.
Secondly, Japanese schools follow a rigorous math curriculum, assign more
homework, and require hard work. They expect students to learn the material
when it is taught and spend little time on review. American schools follow a
"spiral curriculum," making limited forward progress as each grade tends to take
up, again, a subject partially covered in the previous grade. Classrooms in
Japan are not disrupted by loud-speaker announcements, as they are in America.
The Great American Debate points to one conclusion about math. Our math
education does not need progressive gadgetry. It needs traditional math taught
well.
WHOLE-SCHOOL REFORM: BIG PLANS,
BIG FLOP
By Gerald and Natalie Sirkin
Much has been written lately about school-wide programs, those efforts that
promise to improve student learning by changing the entire school. Most of
the prose describing these efforts remains uncomfortably silent about their
effectiveness. American
Institutes of Research
A failed experiment, say scientists, is not a failure. It tells us what
doesn't work, which is valuable information if we pay attention to it. A case
in point is the New American Schools experiment.
In 1991, the CEOs of 15 major corporations established New American Schools
Development Corporation to promote a "no-nonsense business-savvy" revolution
in American education. (By mid-'97, the name NASDC was shortened to NAS for
New American Schools.)
The NAS designs, now ten years old, is old enough to be assessed. The Fordham
Foundation asked education historian Jeffrey Mirel of the University of
Michigan to make the assessment. His report, "The Evolution of the New
American Schools: From Revolution to Mainstream," describes its history and
is based on published studies and articles.
The NASDC approach was to develop model "break-the-mold" schools, schools
discarding the old ideas about schooling and adopting comprehensive systematic
change to embody bold and creative ideas. The successful new schools would
serve as models for all American schools.
NASDC disseminated a Request For Proposal for "whole-school" designs. "Assume
that the schools we have inherited did not exist," instructed the RFP, which
also promised funding. It received 686 proposals. From these, it selected
11. Mirel's examination of the 11 shows that this expedition into new savvy
ideas went off the road at the very start.
The proposals all contained variations of old progressive reforms: multi-age
classes, integrated interdisciplinary curricula, project learning, real-life
tasks, child-directed learning with teachers as facilitators. There was
nothing new about the reforms. They derived from the progressive era of
1895-1920.
When the time came to implement the reforms, they ran into obstacles.
Teachers' unions and many teachers didn't welcome a drastic overhaul of their
schools. Even stronger objections came from parents. Parents didn't like the
progressive gadgetry, declaring it was not delivering good basic education and
was not preparing their children for college.
Two participating systems in Bensenville, Illinois, and Gaston County, North
Carolina, dropped out or were dropped at an early stage. By 1995, two more
were dropped.
Memphis offered an example of what NAS-promoted reforms could accomplish.
The city enthusiastically embraced whole-school redesign and introduced it
quickly into nearly half the schools. Memphis pupils were 80 percent African
American and 60 percent low income.
The first study of the Memphis results showed significant gains in learning.
However, a second study a year later showed the gains to be small and not
significant. In June, 2001, after six years, Memphis abandoned NAS. State
test scores in math, reading, and English had showed virtually no gain in some
schools and actual decline in others.
Elsewhere, NAS schools showed similar results. The reforms did not produce
gains. That outcome should have been expected from proposals that merely
repeated old progressive ideas. Jeffrey Mirel cites noted authority Jeanne
Chall: "After surveying a host of research studies, Chall found that, on
average, schools guided by progressive ideas have been less successful in
raising academic achievements, especially among children from disadvantaged
backgrounds, than more traditional schools."
NAS failed to establish a method for evaluating the academic achievement of
the reforms. Indeed, it appears that the NAS leadership did not attach much
importance to academic achievement. NAS president John L. Anderson instead
emphasized achievements in "implementation, communication, and data
collection." Anderson's position resembled the book reviewer who is less
interested in the contents of the book than how it was marketed.
Summarizing, Mirel concludes that "despite millions of dollars and enormous
effort, over the course of a decade," some NAS schools made only small gains
and the rest made no gains or retrogressed.
Nevertheless, these are reforms that have spread to 3,500 schools. Mirel
declares them "a fixture of the U.S. education landscape." As Robert Holland
characterized another education reform, they are "loony notions that sweep the
nation."
Clearly, the business executives who created NASDC/NAS didn't know much about
education. School reform faces a huge obstacle. Those who want change, like
business executives, governors, and other politicians, don't know what needs
to be done. The school establishment, which knows something about education,
doesn't have the will to undertake reforms that work. And those who both
understand the reforms that are needed and want to undertake them, lack
influence.
THE CULTURAL DRAG ON LEARNING
By Natalie and Gerald Sirkin*
American students have long been showing little improvement despite years of
research and reform. This trend was not broken by the Brown Center on Education
Policy's report entitled "How Well Are American Students Learning." The report,
written by Tom Loveless, Director of the Brown Center, covers one year. It is
published by The Brookings Institution.
Since 1990, Federal and state tests show no gain in reading scores. Math scores
increased substantially on one type of the National Assessment of Educational
Progress test, called "the main" test, which emphasizes the fashionable area of
problem-solving, statistics, and geometry. Only a small gain appears in the
other NAEP math test, the "trend" test, which tests the traditional basic
arithmetic skills. The traditional basic skills are the foundation for advanced
mathematics, in the opinion of nearly all professional mathematicians.
For two decades prior to 1990, reading and math "trend" basic skills showed
little or no improvement. Reading scores have been flat since 1971 in the three
grades tested, 4th, 8th, and 12th. Since 1973, math skills (the "trend" series)
showed only a very slow rise. These are NAEP data, reported in the Brown
Center's first report.
International comparisons from the 1999 repetition of the Third International
Mathematics and Science Study (TIMMS-R), given only to the 8th grade, show the
United States in the middle, well below Singapore, Korea, Taiwan, Japan, and
Belgium (Flemish), Netherlands, and Hungary. These 1999 results are similar to
the 1995 TIMMS scores for 8th grade, but the 12th grade showed the U.S. at the
bottom of the 21 countries taking that test.
Among the findings in the Brown report is that a math gimmick on which American
educators put their hopes does not improve math learning: the use of
"practical" problems from everyday life. Students usually taught with "items
from everyday life" score lower than students who are rarely or never taught
that way. The high-achieving foreign countries rarely teach that way.
Why the failure to recover from the deterioration in U.S. education? Why the
enormous gap between the U.S. and high-achieving less wealthy countries? The
report investigates a neglected answer, the culture of U.S. high schools.
Studies of teenagers track a decline of dedication to learning. In the 1890s,
fewer than ten percent of high-school age youngsters attended school. Their
high-school yearbooks covered only the academic life of the school. By the
1920s, athletics was as important as academics in the yearbooks.
In the 1950s, sociologist James S. Coleman studied high school students and
found that admiration for academic accomplishment begins disappearing as soon as
youngsters enter high school. In the typical high school, social status is
earned for athletics, not academics. The value system of the typical high
school--Coleman wrote in The Adolescent Society--dictates that the "boy who goes
all-out scholastically is scorned and rebuked for working too hard; the athlete
who fails to go all out is scorned and rebuked for not giving it his all."
Where does the high school culture come from? From adults, answered Coleman.
Today's observations confirm Coleman. We hear from parents mostly that they
want their teen-agers to be happy, well rounded, successful socially and also
athletically if possible. Parents show much interest in music and art lessons,
which in a society with high regard for learning would be after-school
activities.
To sharpen the picture of American high-school culture, Loveless conducted a
survey of foreign exchange students in the U.S. A random sample of 500 answered
questions contrasting the schools they attended at home and in the U.S. These
were foreign students who attended above-average U.S. schools and took the
toughest courses. They did not experience the worst.
They found U.S. classes not very rigorous. Over half, 56 percent, found U.S.
classes much easier, and 29 percent found them a little easier. Over half said
American students spend less time on school work than students in their home
countries; only one-quarter said they spend more time on school work.
Do American students value success in mathematics? The foreign students thought
only 14 percent do, compared, for example, to 51 percent in Sweden, 63 percent
in Russia, and 69 percent in Japan.
Do they value success in sports? Sixty-seven percent answered that success in
sports is much more important among American students than among students in
their own countries.
The starkest contrast is in part-time jobs. Most American students hold
part-time jobs, particularly in their senior year. Among foreign students, 73
percent reported that in their home countries, they took no jobs. Only nine
percent spent more than five hours a week at jobs.
These answers supplement what we know from the Brown Center report and other
sources. A study of 20,000 American high school students by Laurence Steinberg
in Beyond the Classroom (1993) found that their culture directs their time and
attention primarily to sports, hanging out with friends, and part-time jobs.
Why? Because, as Steinberg says, the non-intellectual culture is the culture
of their parents and other adults around them.
We can improve learning a great deal through school reforms: phonics instead of
a "balance" of phonics and whole language, traditional math instead of the
new-New Math of the National Council of Teachers of Math, better qualified and
better trained teachers, school-choice. But unless we change the culture, we
cannot expect sufficient improvement in high-school learning.
* Gerald and Natalie Sirkin are residents of Sherman and have a regular column
in the Citizen News of New Fairfield.
HOW WHOLE LANGUAGE SURVIVES
By Gerald and Natalie Sirkin
Published in Citizen News, April 4, 2001
In all the talk in Washington about improving our schools, we see few signs that they know how to do it. They adopt the admirable principle, “Leave no child behind.” They advocate more of the remedies we have been trying for years without success, like standards, early intervention, performance-assessment. Above all, they recommend more money.
We hear little about changing the ways schools actually teach. A litmus test of whether the latest effort to improve education will be more of the same or something new, is reading instruction.
Schools that turn out a large proportion of students who can’t read or read badly should outrage the nation. American schools appear to have lost the ability to teach reading, and the breakdown has still not been repaired after many years of failure.
The indisputable conclusion of research is that the way to teach reading is to begin with phonemic awareness. Children need to hear the smallest spoken units of a word. (“Check” has three phonemes; “stop” has four.) Children learn that sounds are associated with letters, which blend into syllables, which combine to make words. They learn rules and ultimately are able to decode about 85 percent of the words in the English language. This method is phonics.
For decades, educationists have been wedded to another method of teaching reading. This method expects children to memorize the configuration of the whole word as if it were an ideograph in the Chinese language. This method is Whole Language (WL).
Compared to decoding words, memorizing the configuration of a large number of words is difficult.
WL instructs students, when faced with an unfamiliar word, to guess at it from the picture or the context or ask somebody or substitute a likely word or skip it.
A reasonable person not in education might well be puzzled that phonics has been replaced by WL and that WL has survived the barrage of criticism directed at it since it was identified as the cause of inability of children to read.
Answers to these puzzles are offered by Louisa Cook Moats in Whole Language Lives On: The Illusion of “Balanced” Reading Instruction (Washington, D.C., Thomas B. Fordham Foundation, October, 2000, pp. 21. A free copy is available from the Foundation at 1-888-TBF-7474.)
WL flourished as theorists decided that children should not be bored taking words apart to sound them out and blending the sounds into words. (Memorizing the configuration of words is not boring?) Such drills take the fun out of reading and discourage it. Children should see and understand the whole word as good readers appear to do.
Unfortunately, the theory is unsound. Children cannot behave like good readers before they become good readers. First, they must learn to decode words.
Other bases for WL, advanced by theorists without empirical support, include the assertion that reading is a natural function, which children can pick up without instruction, just as they pick up speaking.
That assertion is transparently incorrect. Reading is not a natural function. Many societies including American Indians and most Africans never developed a written language. Over 20 million Americans can speak but cannot read.
Based on obviously fallacious principles, with a record of dismal results, WL should long ago have disappeared. Yet it lives on. Schools of education are strongly attached to such theories. Teachers have not been trained in phonemic awareness and in explicit, systematic, intensive phonics.
How have the educationists managed to keep WL as the predominant method of reading, not only in the U.S., but in all English-speaking countries?
They have adopted a strategic pseudo-retreat. They no longer claim that WL is the way to teach reading. They take refuge in a balanced approach. They say they teach a balance of the “best” of WL and the best of phonics. A befuddled public is seemingly satisfied that you can’t go wrong with balance.
The trouble with balance is that WL has no best parts, just as sewage that pollutes water has no best parts no matter how balanced. Louisa Cook Moats does not mention the finding of expert remedial-reading teachers that WL not only fails to teach the essential skills of reading but inculcates bad habits which impede reading. In WL, children are not oriented to read from left to right and from top to bottom; their eyes skip about the words on the page. WL also promotes imprecision by encouraging children to guess at unfamiliar words.
Dr. Moats concludes with eight recommendations for purging WL from the schools, but they call upon, to change their ways, the same people and institutions that are enthusiasts for WL.
As this column concluded five years ago in “On Reading Failure Through Whole Language,”
The arrogant coterie of closed minds that controls reading-instruction will never reform itself. One way or another, by private schools, charter schools, school vouchers, or home schooling, our unfortunate children will have to be taken out of their control.
THE SPENDING-LEARNING DISCONNECT
by Gerald and Natalie Sirkin
The incoming Bush Administration has been heralding its theme, better education. The subject is not new. The past several administrations talked much about the failing public schools and passed many laws intended to improve them.
What is new is that President George W. Bush, unlike his predecessors, has been giving clear signs he understands what must be done. The clearest sign is his choice for Secretary of Education: Rod Paige, Superintendent of Schools in Houston, who has a solid record of raising academic achievement.
Dr. Paige’s policies are plain and practical—things that work. In his confirmation hearing, he twice used the word “phonics” as the key to teaching reading.
The hearing indicated that the senators still know little about the education problem. While they sensed and appreciated the nominee’s soundness, they asked little that brought out how he differs from typical superintendents.
Several questions showed concern that he favors giving parents some choice of schools. Senator Frist spoke for more research in education, apparently unaware that we have years and years of research that identifies teaching methods that work and don’t work. Educators either don’t know about the research or ignore it.
The senators’ idea for improving education was more money—more money for construction, for technology, for smaller classes, for Head Start and other programs. In short, nothing much has changed among the politicians as among the educators and the public: More money is the cure-all.
According to a page-one January 4 Wall Street Journal column, taxpayers are increasingly “willing to dig deeper into their pockets” to increase school spending, thanks to the surge of affluence in the past few years.
Thus Colorado, one of the states that had adopted strict limits on government spending, in November amended its state constitution, requiring the state to increase spending on public schools by at least one percentage point above inflation in each of the next ten years: a robotic approach which replaces thinking.
State courts have long been making their contribution to misunderstanding by ordering the equalization of school spending among school districts, generally on the theory that educational opportunity depends wholly on per-pupil spending. The classic case is the Kansas City magnet schools. Under court order, a billion additional dollars were spent but failed to reverse the white flight or improve pupil-learning. That disaster, however, has had no discernible effect on other courts intent on redistributing education funds.
Hundreds of research studies have examined the relation between per-pupil spending and academic achievement. Economist Eric Hanushek reports on more than 400 studies that have searched for a link between spending and achievement He writes:
In general, these studies have been unable to detect any consistent, positive relationship between increased resources and student learning.*
Once we understand why public education has deteriorated and what has to be done to rehabilitate it, we can see why spending above a moderate threshold does not improve learning.
Spending is disconnected from learning because most additional spending is not for the purpose of improving learning, and the changes that would improve learning add little if anything to spending.
Bigger and fancier buildings, expanded sports programs, drugs and health and sex education, conflict resolution programs, and other peripheral activities may have their merits but do not contribute to the learning we are worried about: reading, writing, math, and science. The major increases in school spending have been for teachers’ pay and more administrators. Whatever the arguments for adding to that spending, one argument the record does not sustain is that they improve learning.
We know from years of research what would help learning and what we are doing that hinders learning. The methods that would help, don’t cost any more than the hindering methods we are using:
The Whole Language method of teaching reading is the roadblock to learning to read (and the gateway to special education). Systematic, intensive phonics, preceded by phoneme awareness, is the proven method of teaching reading. Phonics doesn’t cost more than Whole Language.
Whole Math, the method of the National Council of Teachers of Math, doesn’t teach children the basics of arithmetic and leaves them ill equipped for algebra. A proper grounding in arithmetic doesn’t cost more than Whole Math.
Reform of the schools of education, so that new teachers are educated in