Educational Policy, Ethics, & Leadership

George Will on No Child Left Behind

George Will's column in today's Washington Post (syndicated nationally) discusses the No Child Left Behind Act and the fuzzy math that can accompany funding.  LINK

Common sense and conservatism, which are usually similar, said that the No Child Left Behind law, which vastly expanded the federal government's supervision of education from kindergarten through 12th grade, was problematic for two reasons: A few of the 50 state governors are apt to be wise innovators, so let policymaking remain at state and local levels. And when Washington makes a mistake, as it has been known to do, it is a continental mistake.

The federal government has recently made one that subverts a promising development in education at the state level. That development is the 65 percent requirement: 65 percent of every school district's education operational budget should be spent on classroom instruction.

Nationally, 61.3 percent is so spent. The 3.7 percentage point difference amounts to nearly $15 billion, which could pay for 370,000 teachers at $40,000 apiece, or a computer for every K-12 student in the country. Only three states today hit the 65 percent target. Seventeen states and the District of Columbia spend less than 60 percent.

And:

But in July the National Center for Education Statistics, part of the U.S. Education Department, undermined this national effort. A report on expenditures for public elementary and secondary education for the 2003-04 school year contained this finding: "The percentage of current expenditures spent on instruction and instruction-related activities was 66.1 percent in 2003-04 for the nation as a whole" (emphasis added). Seasoned students of government verbiage noted the suspiciously vague phrase "instruction-related activities."

Opacity is a sign of insincerity: Government language becomes opaque as the government's conscience becomes uneasy. When no Iraqi weapons of mass destruction were found, the U.S. government began speaking foggily of finding "weapons of mass destruction-related program activities."

Now that Americans' concern is shifting from how much money is spent on education to how much education the money is buying, government has blurred the measurement in a way that says 66.1 percent of education dollars already reach the classroom. If the "instruction-related" criterion is not added, the percentage of dollars devoted to instruction has declined for five consecutive years, to 61.3.

And:

Warren Buffett has written that "yardsticks seldom are discarded while yielding favorable readings," but when readings are unfavorable, "a more flexible measurement system often suggests itself: Just shoot the arrow of business performance into a blank canvas and then carefully draw the bull's-eye around the implanted arrow."

No Child Left Behind supposedly promotes education accountability by mandating reliable data to measure progress. But Washington looks like an untrustworthy manipulator of data when it uses the phrase "instruction-related activity" to draw a bull's-eye around the status quo.

A Chapter on Hubris

That's the title of an editorial in the Fort Worth Star-Telegram discussing a report by the U.S. Department of Education's Inspector General on the Reading First program.  LINK

Where's the accountability?

It seems that the U.S. Department of Education was so intent on improving youngsters' reading skills that some officials manipulated federal grants, ignored parts of the No Child Left Behind law and generally set a bad example of behavior by public servants.

That's a fair reading of a new report from the Education Department's own inspector general about a program called Reading First.

The program, which started in 2002, provides more than $1 billion annually to help children develop reading skills in the early grades. States are to spend the money on programs that incorporate "scientifically based reading research," or SBRR.

The law specifies that the department use expert panels to review states' grant applications and not endorse any particular curriculum. Evidence shows that at least two officials, the program director and an assistant education secretary, did not understand their assignment -- or simply ignored it.

The effectiveness of Reading First in helping children wasn't at issue. But the inspector general found ample grounds for marking down officials' oversight of taxpayers' dollars and trust during 2002 and 2003.

Program officials "failed to maintain a control environment that exemplifies management integrity and accountability," one section of the report concluded. Among the failings: Review panels were stacked with members who supported Reading First Director Chris Doherty's favored approach to teaching reading. Also, some panel members had connections to particular programs that could be considered conflicts of interest.

Officials purposely obscured what the law required from applicants and "otherwise took actions that seemed to disregard Congress' direction and intent," the report said.

Officials also tried to steer states toward preferred programs and tried to get them to drop disfavored ones after grants had been approved.

In an e-mail that leaves little to conjecture, Doherty wrote to a staffer: "Beat the [expletive deleted] out of them in a way that will stand up to any level of legal and [whole language] apologist scrutiny. Hit them over and over with definitive evidence that they are not SBRR , never have been and never will be. They are trying to crash our party and we need to beat the [expletive deleted] out of them in front of all the other would-be party crashers who are standing on the front lawn waiting to see how we welcome these dirtbags."

In a different e-mail, he wrote, "I think this program-bashing is best done off or under the major radar screens."

The assistant secretary who was cited in the report left the agency in 2003; Doherty resigned Friday, the day the report was released, several news accounts said.

Education Secretary Margaret Spellings, who has headed the department since 2005, agreed with the report's recommended changes and told the inspector general in a Sept. 19 letter that she's going even further to improve the management of Reading First.

Neither taxpayers nor this country's schoolchildren can afford the kind of bureaucratic arrogance that the inspector general uncovered.

1 in 12 Texas Schools Fall Short of Federal Standards

That's the headline in an article for the Friday Dallas Morning News.  LINK

One in 12 Texas schools failed to achieve minimum federal standards this year, and nearly half of those – 291 campuses – have multi-year failures that will tag them for sanctions ranging from staff replacements to optional transfers for students.

    

State Education Commissioner Shirley Neeley on Thursday announced new federal ratings for Texas schools under the No Child Left Behind Act, touting the increased number of campuses that made the grade this year. About 81 percent met or exceeded the so-called “Adequate Yearly Progress” targets specified in the federal law.

    

A year ago, 78 percent of schools met the AYP targets. The percentage of school districts meeting AYP this year was virtually unchanged from a year ago.

It Takes More Than Schools to Close Achievement Gap

That's the title of this week's On Education column in the New York Times. 

WHEN the federal Education Department recently reported that children in private schools generally did no better than comparable students at public schools on national tests of math and reading, the findings were embraced by teachers’ unions and liberals, and dismissed by supporters of school voucher programs.

   

But for many educators and policy makers, the findings raised a haunting question: What if the impediments to learning run so deep that they cannot be addressed by any particular kind of school or any set of in-school reforms? What if schools are not the answer?

The question has come up before. In 1966, Prof. James S. Coleman published a Congressionally mandated study on why schoolchildren in minority neighborhoods performed at far lower levels than children in white areas.

To the surprise of many, his landmark study concluded that although the quality of schools in minority neighborhoods mattered, the main cause of the achievement gap was in the backgrounds and resources of families.