NRC Report on Teacher Ed Finally Appears

Back in 2004, Congress commissioned the National Research Council to do a study of teacher preparation. Given the impact of the NRC report on the teaching of reading, that seemed like an important (possibly even alarming) development. As the months and years went by, I would occasionally visit the NRC website to see if they were making any progress. Once in a while the minutes of a meeting would be posted but eventually it looked as though the project had disappeared into the bureaucratic ether. I thought perhaps it had lost its funding. (I realize that admitting I was following this so closely shows what a nerd I am.) But today the study finally appeared. You can read about it in Education Week or buy a copy here. Now, in 2010, it doesn't seem quite so important, but I'm not sure why.

More on Florida

From the Associated Press, via Education Week:

Conservatives Hail Fla. Teacher Bill as Model

Hailed as a national model by conservative academics and politicians, legislation that would make it easier to fire Florida teachers and link their pay to student test scores went to Gov. Charlie Crist in the wee hours of Friday morning after a marathon House debate that began Thursday night.

Business interests as well as most Republicans backed the bill that was opposed by teachers and their unions, local school officials and Democrats.

Read the rest here.

I'd be interested in hearing any thoughts from Florida CEE members about this.

New Study on Public Schools, Private Schools

There's a new public schools vs. private schools study out today from the Center on Education Policy.

Public High School Students Do As Well As Private School
Students, Report Finds

No Difference Found Between the Academic Performance or
College-Going Rates of Public and Private School Students

WASHINGTON—October 10, 2007—Contradicting decades of research, a new report finds that, once family background characteristics are taken into account, low-income students attending public urban high schools generally performed as well academically as students attending private high schools. The report, issued by the Washington, D.C.-based Center on Education Policy (CEP), also found that the students at public high schools are as likely to attend college as those attending private high schools.

According to the report, students attending independent private high schools, most
types of parochial high schools, and public high schools of choice performed no better
on achievement tests in math, reading, science, and history than students attending
traditional public high schools. In addition, students attending any type of private high school were no more likely to attend college than those attending traditional public high schools.

The report also finds that young adults who had attended any type of private high
school were no more likely to enjoy job satisfaction or to be engaged in civic activities at age 26 than those who had attended traditional public high schoo

The More Things Change

According to an Orlando Sentinel special report on Florida's merit pay system, "teachers at predominantly white and affluent schools were twice as likely to get a bonus as teachers from schools that are predominantly black and poor." Read the rest here.

Random Access

This is from an article at Education Week about the perils of doing randomized experiments in educational settings:

Study of Federal Upward Bound Program at Risk

By Debra Viadero

Congress is weighing plans to scuttle a $5 million evaluation of the national Upward Bound program for low-income high school students because the federal study calls for randomly assigning students to either the program or a control group.

_____________________________

“You can’t tell a kid, ‘You’re going to be in this life-changing program,’ and then say, ‘No you’re only going to be in the control group,’ ” said Susan Trebach, a spokeswoman for the Council for Educational Opportunity, a Washington-based group that represents administrators of Upward Bound and other federal college-access programs. “We already have some people telling us the kids they deal with are devastated.”

Reading First Budget Cut

From Education Week:

House Panel Votes to Slash 'Reading First' Aid

By David J. Hoff
Washington

House Democrats want to put their own stamp on federal education spending by increasing Title I and other programs they favor and slashing Reading First and other priorities set by President Bush.

In the $56 billion fiscal 2008 spending bill for the Department of Education unveiled by the Democrats, No Child Left Behind Act programs would receive a $2 billion increase, with the Title I program for disadvantaged students receiving $1.5 billion of that.

But the $1.03 billion Reading First program—which the Bush administration points to as one of its biggest accomplishments under the NCLB law—would take a cut of $630 million, or 61 percent. What’s more, the administration’s latest proposals for private school vouchers and new mathematics programs would not be funded at all.

Read the rest here (registration required).

In Washington

The House Subcommittee on Higher Education, Lifelong Learning and Competitiveness met yesterday to discuss teacher preparation. Washington seems to be fairly interested in this issue, but it's hard to tell where the interest will lead. As usual, the focus seems to be on using federal dollars to lever change. For me, the big question is how any federal moves will interact with the state licensing apparatus and with NCATE. Here's the whole story at Inside Higher Ed.

It Just Keeps Coming

More on Reading First from the Boston Herald/Associated Press:

More conflicts disclosed in Reading First program
By Associated Press
Wednesday, May 9, 2007 - Updated: 04:04 PM EST

WASHINGTON - Officials who gave states advice on which teaching materials to buy under a federal reading program had deep financial ties to publishers, according to a congressional report Wednesday.

The report, compiled by Senate Education Committee Chairman Edward Kennedy, D-Mass., details how officials contracted by the government to help run the program were at the same time drawing pay from publishers that benefited from the reading initiative.

Kennedy’s report added new detail to a conflict-of-interest investigation by the Education Department’s inspector general, which earlier had found that the Reading First Program favored some reading programs over others and that federal officials and contractors didn’t guard against conflicts.

The new report focused on four contractors who headed centers that guided states in choosing reading programs aimed at kindergartners through third graders.

It found the contractors "had substantial financial ties to publishing companies while simultaneously being responsible for providing technical assistance to states and school districts." That damaged the integrity of the program and illustrates the need for Congress to act to head off future conflicts, the report concluded.

More here.

On Standards, Cut Scores, and Expectations

Here's a piece from The St. Petersburg Times about tenth-grade reading tests in Florida. It does a pretty good job of trying to untangle some of the complexities of testing. (Who would have imagined we'd reach a point where this is considered of interest to the general public?)

Suddenly, 10th-graders are FCAT flops
A moving bar makes failures of students who tested well once and still outrank U.S. peers.

By LETITIA STEIN and THOMAS C. TOBIN
Published April 15, 2007

Florida's 10th-graders look like terrible readers. Their FCAT scores are the worst in the state.

Yet those same students are among the best readers on a test that compares Florida students with their peers across the United States. They also score well on the FCAT math test.

Why the confusing results?

Blame an FCAT system that holds students in different grades to very different standards.

Nowhere is that more apparent than in high school, where the bar is highest. Only one-third of Florida's 10th-graders met FCAT reading standards last year. By contrast, nearly two-thirds of seventh-graders passed.

The disparities have consequences:

More than half of Florida's elementary schools earned A's last year, compared with fewer than 20 percent of high schools. Elementaries received $81-million in FCAT reward money. That compares with $23-million for high schools.

"We do not make kids dumber when they come to high school," said Jeff Boldt, the principal of Chamberlain High School in Tampa, which has earned straight C's since school grades debuted.

State officials acknowledge the standards are far more rigorous for high school students, but say they need to be to prepare them for college and work.

But some testing experts say large inconsistencies between grades and subjects can undermine confidence in the system.

Kristen Jackson, an 11th-grader at Tampa's Alonso High, has narrowly failed the FCAT graduation requirement in reading twice. But by another reading test, she can read as well or better than 96 percent of her peers nationally.

"I was actually crying when I failed," said Kristen, who earns A's and B's. "It tortured me. It was a horrific experience."

More here.

Burdensome and Demoralizing

AFT president Edward McElroy was one of those who testified at the senate hearings on NCLB held Tuesday. AFT has been rather supportive of NCLB, so some of the language in his testimony surprised me:

It’s demoralizing for students, parents, teachers and communities when they know that their schools are making solid academic progress, yet still see them listed in the local paper as “not making the grade.”

At one recent town hall meeting on NCLB convened by the AFT, the comments of a fourth-grade teacher from Boston reflected this demoralization: “The entire reputation of our school hangs on one test,” she said. “It’s not about balanced curriculum, enrichment or learning anymore. It’s all about avoiding that ‘failing school’ label.”

And

Educators also tell us they are required to administer test upon test upon test, including school, district and state tests. This layering of tests leads to an excessive amount of what should be instructional time being diverted instead to testing and drill-and-kill preparation, which results in a narrowing of the curriculum to only those subjects being tested. Students should have science, social studies, the arts, history—and recess.

And

Let me be clear: NCLB in its current form is burdensome and demoralizing to teachers, and yet they continue to teach and continue to adhere to requirements that allow them to teach because they have chosen the teaching of children as a career. But it is unacceptable to ask them to meet yet another unproven federal requirement.

Teachers want to be effective. And schools must be places where teachers feel they can be effective. We ask too many teachers to teach and students to learn in conditions that frankly are shameful—in dilapidated school buildings, without the basic materials they need, and in unsafe conditions that are hardly conducive to teaching and learning.

You can read the entire statement here (pdf).

NCLB Hearing

The Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions held a hearing on NCLB reauthorization yesterday. The focus was "Strategies for Attracting, Supporting, and Retaining High Quality Educators." Some semi-interesting testimony(if you like that sort of thing). Click here to read it or watch it.

In the News

Three items this morning for your consideration:

Diane Ravitch and Deborah Meier have started a joint blog on the Education Week site. It will be interesting to see them debate their differences. So far they've been agreeing more than disagreeing, but I expect that will change over time. The blog is called Bridging Differences, and unlike much content on the Ed Week site, you can read it without registering.

At Inside Higher Ed, there's a piece about the National Education Association's new plan to deal with the growth of adjunct faculty positions. The article provides an overview of the whole adjunct issue, including the positions held by AAUP and the AFT. (I'd be interested in hearing your comments about the role of adjuncts in teacher education programs.)

Finally, if you were fortunate enough to attend the CEE luncheon in Nashville, you'll want to know that Sherman Alexie's new novel is out. It's called Flight: A Novel and apparently deals with a time-traveling teenager name "Zits." You can read the publisher's information about it here.

National Teacher Ed Standards?

From Education Week:

National Standards Urged for Math, Science Teachers
By Sean Cavanagh

A federal commission has issued draft recommendations calling for the creation of national licensing standards for teachers in mathematics and science, in what would mark a clear shift away from a system controlled by individual states and universities.

Either the federal government or a national policy organization would establish guidelines for certification and teacher training, under the proposal. States and school districts could be given federal financial incentives to follow those standards, according to the report’s recommendations.

Read the rest here (requires registration).

I think it's unlikely this idea will become law, but if it does, it's hard imagine it won't happen to English as well.

The "Reading First" Story Continues

This is from ABC News:

Study: Bias by the Billions in Flawed Ed Program

February 23, 2007 11:16 AM

Justin Rood Reports:

Top Education Department officials, including former Secretary Rod Paige, allowed specialists to improperly encourage state and local officials to spend billions of dollars in federal grant money with a small group of companies, government investigators have concluded.

In educating state and local officials about the department's Reading First grant program, officials loaded expert panels with speakers who overwhelmingly preferred products from a handful of educational companies, according to a report released yesterday by the Education Department's inspector general.

"It sounded like a sales job," one attendee complained in comments to the department which were reviewed by IG officials. "Why are certain approaches disregarded[?]" asked another. "We did not get the whole picture," wrote a third.

"Arrogant! You must think us stupid and uncaring," wrote another. "What else would explain how you talk down to us, preach to us, treat us like morons. I don't experience this level of a 'sell' job when I buy a car." The sessions, known as "the [Education] Secretary's Readership Language Academies," were largely controlled by senior Education Department officials, the investigators found.

The department is barred from interfering with curriculum decisions by state and local education officials.

What's more, the department appointed certain advisors to help state and local officials make spending decisions with their grant money, despite the fact that they had financial ties to the companies whose products were under consideration by those officials, the report found.

Read the rest here, and a different account from Education Week (via Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington) here.

Framed and Excluded

Les Burns critiques the role NCTE and CEE have played in recent policy debates in the new English Education ("On Being Unreasonable: NCTE, CEE, and Political Action"). While his analysis is nuanced and evenhanded, his overall conclusion is that the actions taken by NCTE and CEE in response to accountability mandates and other policy reforms have been "modest" at best. He also points out that when policy-makers have excluded NCTE from key conversations about English language arts issues, the organization hasn't necessarily served as an effective platform for protest:

The fact that non-professionals have successfully framed literacy policy discourse to exclude professionals from participating in their own governance seems like it should be considered the primary concern of an organization like NCTE. Does it make sense for the organization to publish journal articles and offer conference sessions based on the perceived and reported interests of various constituents when our field is being reframed without professional input and leadership?

My own view is that CEE and NCTE are considerably more politically engaged than they/we were five years ago but also that the influence of politics and governmental policy on our work may be growing even faster than our engagement. I'd be interested to hear from others on this.

Are National Standards on the Way?

Lynn Olson writes about the move toward national standards in Education Week. It may not be too soon to start thinking about the involvement of professional organizations like NCTE/CEE in the process. The first time around (when NCTM created their standards and other subject matter organizations received grants to follow suit) there was a certain amount of political maneuvering, but that was nothing compared to what we're likely to see this time. We should also start considering what impact national subject matter standards would have on teacher education.

Standards Get Boost on the Hill
Bills before Congress aim to raise the bar in states.
By Lynn Olson

The politically sensitive idea of increasing the rigor of state standards and tests by linking them to standards set at the national level is getting a push from prominent lawmakers as Congress moves to reauthorize the No Child Left Behind Act as early as this year.

Sen. Christopher J. Dodd of Connecticut, the second-ranking Democrat on the Senate education committee and a newly announced candidate for president, introduced a bill with Rep. Vernon J. Ehlers, R-Mich., last week that would provide incentives for states to adopt voluntary “American education content standards” in mathematics and science, to be developed by the governing board for the National Assessment of Educational Progress.

Sen. Edward M. Kennedy, D-Mass., the new chairman of the committee, introduced a bill Jan. 4 that would encourage states to benchmark their own standards and tests to NAEP, but would stop short of calling for the development of national standards.

Read the rest here.

The Year in Education

USA Today reviews the year's top education stories in today's issue. They include the Spellings commission report on higher education, the SAT test scoring errors, and the ongoing debates about the effectiveness of NCLB. Nothing surprising, but it's interesting to see what the mainstream media views as important stories. Also in the papers today (in this case the Washington Post) is a column by Jay Mathews which is largely dismissive of the "Tough Choices or Tough Times" report (see below).

Rediscovering the Liberal Arts

Chester Finn’s conservative Fordham Institute recently held a conference focusing on the importance of a liberal arts education. It’s strange and interesting to see those who have been such strident supporters of basic skills curricula and test-driven accountability suddenly decide that curriculum narrowing is a real problem and that there might be some drawbacks to “schooling conceived primarily as a service commodity whose priority is to serve the economic interests of students and those they’ll one day work for.” (Although they haven’t changed their spots entirely– “adding subjects to the test docket” is advocated as a key way to make sure the liberal arts get taught.) You can read the papers from the conference or watch a webcast here.

Report Suggests Scrapping Current Approach to Teacher Ed

On the policy front, the National Center on Education and the Economy has just released a report from their New Commission on the Skills of the American Workforce. Titled “Tough Choices or Tough Times,” the report recommends (among other things) that current policies regarding teacher education “be scrapped” and replaced by state agencies that can contract with any group(s) they wish to provide teacher education. Also recommended are grade ten tests that would channel students into particular educational or vocational paths and shifting the “ownership” of schools from local school boards to independent contractors. Given the NCEE’s influence in the past, this may be a report worth looking at. (Note that only the executive summary is available on the web.) And after you’ve read the summary, you might also want to read Jerry Bracey’s critique.