Sherman Dorn

Give children the vote?

While I'm doing some journal editing tasks and catching up on more than 100 e-mails that have lain unattended in the last mumbledy days, I'll offer you the following provocative proposal: Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry recommends that we Give Kids the Vote! (Hat tip).

Before you answer, I should warn you: I have adolescents at home, they want to vote, and they are shrewder and have sharper tongues than I do.

Reading First analysis, the Boring Version

I've got to stop being even slightly witty, or I'll continue to be quoted slightly out of context, but in this case, it's entirely my fault for being all "meta" on Mike Petrilli's defense of the Fordham Foundation's defense of Reading First.

So let me try to address the substantive policy issues. No Child Left Behind created a large program (Reading First) to give money to states that promised to adopt early-reading programs with significant research support. This came on the heels of a National Reading Panel report that emphasized the importance of phonemic awareness and phonics instruction to early reading, among the focused questions it addressed.

For now, let me skip the question of the NRP report, since I'm not a reading research specialist (see completely ambiguous disclosure at the end of this entry). Instead of looking at the reading research base, I'm going to make the point that at least the implementation was bollixed up. The Department of Education's appointees to various pieces tied to Reading First were often tied to people at or from one institution (the University of Oregon), and the Inspector General's report was concerned about both conflicts of interest and also the way that many states felt pressured to adopt a specific curriculum/reading program.

I don't have much experience reading program audit reports, but from the few I have, there's an understated quality to most of the language, and it's not clear from the outside whether the muted tones necessarily mean, "Well, someone complained, and there are minor problems," or whether they mean, "I'm going to be very polite, but at least one person screwed up massively, and the only reason why no one's being prosecuted here is because there's no covering statute or the threshold for conviction is pretty high--but since I'm an auditor and not a prosecutor, I'm staying well out of that territory." I'm on the outside, so I have no clue which is which with the Reading First report, though I looks like it shaded into at least minimal corruption.

So it's possible that the Congressional bristling at appropriating funds for Reading First may reflect some informal briefings about the extent of problems. But it's not that simple, either, since Reading First appropriations may also be the way that Congressional Democrats can exercise limited authority over the Bush administration scandals: it may be possible that since Democrats can't punish the DoD or key administration figures over Halliburton the way they'd like, they're going to Make Damn Sure that other shenanigans are shut down (or programs they perceive to be shenanigans). Whether that shades into partisan battles probably depends on your partisan leanings.

... or it may be the standard legislative Scandal Fatigue: "We're not sure exactly what the problem is, but something's wrong, the program evaluation doesn't appear to look good, and maybe just wiping the slate clean is best."

... and wiping the slate clean may be best, both for state officials who want funding for reading programs and also for children. There will probably be a new reading program, with several new statutory requirements to prevent a repeat of what the IG found (or what Congressional leaders think the IG found or are concerned about because of the report or what their staffers think is a good idea in response to the audit report or...).

Whatever federal program comes out of the ashes of Reading First may be as closely related to phonemic awareness and phonics as Reading First, but it may not. The evaluation cracks open the debate over teaching reading that the NRP never really closed. I'm not sure it's that controversial that fluency is important but not sufficient to guarantee comprehension. But Big Bucks are involved, so everything gets magnified. The corruption in Reading First hasn't helped that, either.

(And now the disclosure: My experiences are firmly on the side of phonemic awareness's importance: I was a postdoc with a fellow postdoc who was a firm advocate of Direct Instruction (with capital letters), and I've seen similar stuff work with struggling young readers. And one of my children clearly learned to read relying first on phonics and classic blending instruction (together with individualized picture mnemonics to learn the ball-and-stem letters' sounds). But my DI friend's roommate was a comprehension researcher who teased her friend, "So after your kids learn to sound out words fluently, they need to come to me to learn what the stuff means!" The struggling readers I mentioned earlier also had the benefit of engaging text. And my other child clearly was a print-convention person whose learning of reading didn't appear to need phonics instruction, as far as I can recall. Go figure, but if you can find an ax I'm grinding here, you're pretty creative.)

Agreements with Fordham

Lest readers assume I disagree with Mike Petrilli and Fordham colleagues on everything, let me give them full credit for standing on the right side of science education in Florida, where they were ahead of the curve several years ago in criticizing the state Department of Education's cowardice on science standards, supported the new standards, and criticized Florida Senator Ronda Storms's efforts to couch religious and political intrusions into science education under the misleading term of academic freedom. I'm a supporter of academic freedom, but Fordham and I agree that many Florida legislators need a bit more education on the concept and on what science is.

Extra credit assignment for grad students

2 extra points, a gold star, and a free hall pass to beginning scholars who can spot the flaws in Mike Petrilli's defense of Reading First. It's clear that the Reading First program administration was corrupted, and reading Petrilli's blog entry looks like it's really a knee-jerk defense of Fordham's previous defense of Reading First and about as credible as Hillary Clinton's defense of her 2002 vote to authorize the Iraq war.

Desegregation history

Eduwonkette made me wince a few weeks ago with her entry, Did School Integration Really Do Much Good? She quoted a relatively new economic study using Louisiana, but there's a fairly sizable literature on this already, including classic works by Roz Mickelson and Jennifer Hochschild, among many many others. Yes, there is evidence of cognitive (achievement) effects of desegregation that are not attributable to better funding. Not everyone agrees with those evidentiary claims, but one of the consequences of NCLB on research is that accountability has sucked the air out of all sorts of questions, including the consequences of ending effective desegregation in dozens of our large metropolitan areas.

Sins die

Sine die* is one of the few Latin expressions known or used in the Florida statehouse, and it marks the end of a session (technically adjourning indefinitely). 6pm EDT was the scheduled close, and when the traditional handkerchief dropped a few minutes afterwards, the legislature had wreaked havoc on the state budget, blown apart the merit-evaluation process for $85 million in start-up funds for large research centers, ... but failed to act on two foolish educational ideas, one the misnamed "academic freedom" bill that would undercut the science standards and the other a constitutional proposal that would strip the state's Board of Governors of all authority to manage the state's universities except what the legislature deigned to give it.

In both cases, there was a broad array of opponents, though the bill to undermine science standards was far closer to passage. In the case of university governance, the state's university faculty were joined by the editorial boards of major daily newspapers, the state's Chamber of Commerce, a business development group called the Council of 100, and a former private-university president who is now a state-house representative. Everyone who opposed the proposal deserves credit for killing it.

* The pronunciation is commonly "sigh-nee die," though purists would probably prefer "sin-ay dee-ay." I still like "sins die," but maybe that's because I'm now completing my 12th year in Florida.

The rest of the story on the excessed teacher controversy

I had been wondering what else was going on with the controversy over the excessed teacher pool in New York City. The politics here just seemed as if something was missing. Leo Casey calls it a naked political power play and lays out UFT's perspective, along with a trail of specifics. The core of the allegation is that

... when UFT President Randi Weingarten blew the whistle on the DoE's wasting of taxpayer funds at City Council hearings, the DoE retaliated by publishing the New Teacher Report it had been holding for this moment...

So part of this is the question of substantive policy, but another piece is the allegation that the NY DoE was being manipulative, essentially making policy by press strategy.

Incidentally, we'll now be able to judge the UFT's details by the city Department of Education's response. Here, remember the adage about what lawyers do: If you have the facts, pound the facts. If you have the law, pound the law. If you have neither the facts nor the law, pound the table.

Reading the literature fairly?

In his blog entry today, Jay Greene announces a Manhattan Institute study he and Marcus Winters wrote on special education vouchers and Florida. Since I'm running between meetings today, I haven't read it and won't comment on the substance, but there's an odd bit at the end of Greene's entry:

Like the bulk of previous research, including Belfield and Levin [and several other studies], ... the new study finds that student achievement in public schools improves as vouchers expand the set of private options.

Greene is referring to a 2002 review by Belfield and Levin in Review of Educational Research. I remembered it differently and went to the source, where the abstract says the majority of studies show positive effects. So far, so accurate. But here's the next sentence:

The positive gains from competition are modest in scope with respect to realistic changes in levels of competition. The review also notes several methodological challenges and recommends caution in reasoning from point estimates to public policy.

Was Greene's link appropriate in that context? I give leeway on blogs, but Belfield and Levin is far more cautious about voucher programs than Greene is, or rather Belfield and Levin's article has far more cautious conclusions than Greene implies.

Kudos to Corey; tomatoes for NY Times reporter

Corey Bower gets this week's award for careful reading with his blog entry, Limitations of Research and the Headlines that Ignore Them. He went beyond the New York Times article on a recent study and read the article. Something that reporter Kenneth Chang downplayed is the setting: college students.

Our findings suggest that giving college students multiple concrete examples may not be the most efficient means of promoting transfer of knowledge. [emphasis added]

Chang was lazy in one other way: he accepted at face value (or misinterpreted) the researchers' claims that there is no solid research on manipulatives for K-12 students: "Dr. Kaminski said even the effectiveness of using blocks and other 'manipulatives,' which have become more pervasive in preschool and kindergarten, remained untested." But there is a 1989 Evelyn Sowell meta-analysis on manipulatives in math in K-12 (JSTOR $). Also see a more recent meta-analysis by Evelyn Koresbergen, Mathematics Interventions for Children with Special Educational Needs ($).

Graduation rate regs

I will need to read the proposed regulatory changes in NCLB more carefully when I have the chance, but it looks like there are several good things and a few odd things in the uniform definition of a graduation rate:

• Good: The proposed regs propose a longitudinal graduation rate as the long term, preferred measure of graduation.
  
• Bad: The proposed regs allow the "averaged freshman graduation rate" as a transitional measure until 2012. AFGR has little empirical basis for its estimate of the ninth-grade cohort size.
  
• Good: The proposed regs eliminate several loopholes I've seen states use to inflate graduation rates, including shifting a student's cohort when the student is retained in grade, removing the student from any cohort if they drop out to enroll in GED programs, and so forth.
  
• Odd: the only graduation measure proposed is a four-year cohort rate. While I disagree with Leo Casey's claim that the cure is worse than the disease, the four-year-only rate fails to acknowledge or credit schools for promoting graduation on any schedule other than a strict four-year schedule. It makes much better sense to report a four-year rate, a five-year rate, and an any-time rate.

And anything more will have to wait until I'm back home, have caught up with other things, and have had a chance to think about this some more.

Delaware symposium

I've had a wonderful time in the past two and a half days in Newark, Delaware, as a presenter at a University of Delaware symposium on the past, present, and future of special education. I had the chance to catch up with several friends I hadn't seen in a few years, make some new friends, meet a whole bunch of people, and talk about special education. I was a postdoctoral researcher in the department of special education at Peabody College of Vanderbilt in the mid-1990s, my wife is a special education teacher in the Hillsborough County schools here in Tampa, and my family has had plenty of friends with and without disabilities over the years. So I'm aware that I'm invested in this. (Even if you don't have the professional connections with special education, you almost certainly have parallel personal connections, at the least, and we are all temporarily able-bodied at best.)

In addition to the perennial issues with special education, there was somewhat more focus on two topics: the Responsiveness to Intervention (RTI) policy initiative and concerns several presenters had about personnel preparation. There was an interesting range of views on RTI, with some disagreement about where special education fits on the levels/tiers and what proportion of students would be in the chronic non-responder category. Mary Brownell effectively made the point that no matter what teacher education and personnel preparation models you want to use, there are uncomfortable dilemmas. There was plenty of other discussion, and there will be follow-up to turn the papers into something more.

And I received some nice comments on the style of my slides as well as the substance. When I get home (I'm working in the grad-student office at the U. Delaware school of education), I'll upload a few of them.

College graduation

The new Ed Sector report by Kevin Carey, Graduation Rate Watch, summarizes some of the material available from the IPEDS 6-year graduation measures for four-year colleges and universities. The main point is that there are vast differences within different higher-ed sectors not only in 6-year graduation stats but also Black-White differences in graduation. He correctly points out that some institutions such as Florida State have programs that appear at first glance to provide substantial support to first-generation college students, support that increases the likelihood of graduating.

Kudos: the interesting slice of IPEDS rates, with the appropriate hedges/caveats; the nod to Vincent Tinto's work; the acknowledgment of Cliff Adelman's suggestion for improving the IPEDS measures; the observation that U.S. News & World Report rankings largely diss graduation rates as ways to distinguish institutions; the recommendation that financial aid be shifted away from its merit-based emphasis today and back towards means-testing; the observation that funding enrollment does not provide a strong incentive for retention programs.

Kumquats: the continued push for a national unit records database. I think that's the only DOA suggestion in a compact, complex report. I may disagree with some other ideas, but the report on the whole is thoughtful and presents issues in a clear way. I might want a bit more use of the current college-retention literature, but I can't point to specifics because that's outside my area of expertise.

Some broader issues that complicate efforts to increase undergraduate graduation:

• A large proportion of college students are in community colleges, and programs that focus on first-time-in-college students at universities are great... and limited to that sector of higher education.
  
• Part-time students are a serious puzzle in terms of retention and even measurement. In many states, part-time students have a much harder time getting aid (in part because they are often older, and in part because of minimal-credit requirements). They also have competing obligations, are on campus less frequently, etc. I love older students in my classes for very selfish reasons (they are more mature, they help teach their classmates simply by being there and talking about their lives), but I'm not sure who has cracked the practical challenges that part-time students present for themselves and for their colleges.
  
• Health crises can turn a student with marginal success into a student who has dropped out, and young adults are among the least likely Americans to have adequate health insurance.
• Institutional pecking orders are hard to pinpoint, and they can shift rapidly: witness Florida, where reduced funding is pushing most of the state's public universities into being far more selective. My guess is that graduation rates will rise in 4-5 years, but while some institutions (including mine) are figuring out how some concrete steps to increase student success, some part of that will be a selection effect. So making comparisons with "peer institutions" may be a difficult enterprise.
  
• Measures focused on undergraduates make it somewhat more difficult for graduate-focused institutions in any incentive system. States need to be flexible and negotiate the systems with institutions, or they are likely to provide odd advantages to some institutions over others, advantages that will only be discovered after the fact.

And those are the issues that are apparent to me without knowing the higher-ed attrition/retention/graduation literature. There is one faculty colleague at USF who focuses on higher-ed attrition, and there are IR gurus for whom this is an occupational focus, so I do have local resources... now I really need that Time-Turner. But for now, it's 11:30 pm, and I still need to provide feedback on a student thesis...

The Indiana Jones response to philosophy-of-research blogging

Kevin Carey has his say on a preponderance-of-evidence standard on policy propositions (in response to an Eduwonkette discussion of growth measures). Skoolboy responds. I wouldn't go all ad-lib-for-convenience on you all if it weren't 11:20 at night, but I'm tired, and since this is a meta-discussion about judging teachers based on test scores, I'll just say this: It already happens (firing educators based on test scores), it's called reconstitution, and the evidence of its success is mediocre at best. We don't need to go all meta- when there's experience at hand... or specific proposals such as New York City's (which Skoolboy points out fails the sniff test of basic algebra).

If anyone were tempted to go meta-, I'd point out that there is no such thing as a monolithic social scientist's frame for policy. Then again, I'm not only an alleged social scientist, I'm a card-carrying member of the Social Science History Association and have a degree in one of those odd number-crunching realms (demography).

Head-scratching time on another "teacher sex scandal" news story

I know that newspapers sometimes dig for stories, but the story today in the St. Pete Times, Does the rise in alternatively trained teachers spell trouble?, is just bewildering. The reporter is asking if the fact that two of the six came through alternative-certification programs is an indication that alternative certification programs are magnets for pedophiles, miscreants, felons, and those who still listen to ABBA. There's a pretty substantial gap in logic there. The questions about the quality of alternative certification is about the value of skills imparted in different programs, not the character of the people who go through the programs. Yes, being in a bricks-and-mortar program for several semesters gives faculty a chance to spot people who should not be in classrooms (and we do spot some of them), but school-district employees go through background checks and ethics-training seminars no matter where they were educated and in what major. You can't draw any conclusions from six wayward teachers other than that they deserved to be fired and arrested.

Silence on AT&T Aspire an "Ed in '08" parallel?

Is it my imagination, or has there been a deafening silence in both news outlets and the blogosphere after the AT&T Foundation's announcement Wednesday of a $100 Million Dropout Prevention Program? I wrote about the initiative Thursday, but given the lead-in publicity (the America's Promise report with Ed Week about low graduation rates?), I expected more commentary than just my note about the history of outcries about and responses to dropping out.

I know that $100 million is a drop in the bucket compared to public-school spending, but it's a big splash in philanthropy and usually gets more attention than the Ed Week article (linked above) or the Chronicle of Philanthropy note on the announcement.

Think, then blog

I'm occasionally embarrassed when a typo appears in a blog entry, and I'm frequently learning from comments here, but I'm surprised at Mike Petrilli's simplistic argument that "bad ideas flow from academia into our K-12 system ... (... moral relativism, the decline of the core curriulum, dubious pedagogical approaches)" and that "one of public education's worst features" is "its hyper-unionized workforce." I'm not sure when I've seen Petrilli this shrill.

Taking the claims one by one...

• The arguments about moral relativism and the decline of civilization appeared ... let's see: "Times are bad. Children no longer obey their parents, and everyone is writing a book." That's Cicero. Today, everyone's writing blogs (PDF), including Petrilli. In any case, I don't think Cicero could blame either TV or higher education.
  
• If one wants to blame higher ed for the decline of the core curriculum, when should we pinpoint it? Harvard with its elective system in the late 19th century, or when institutions stopped requiring Latin and Greek for Ph.D.'s? Si tacuisses, philosophus mansisses.
• To claim that higher education is at fault for standard pedagogy, one would have to accumulate evidence that it was substantially better at some point. And that evidence is...?
• Public education's worst features... unionization? So Mississippi and Alabama schools are perfect, because they don't provide collective bargaining rights for public employees?
  

Incidentally, is there any evidence that graduate-student unions are horrors visited upon public universities that have them?

$100 million... how will it be used?

Looking at today's New York Times story on AT&T Aspire, the $100 million effort to reduce dropping out. In reality, $100 million is a visible splash and not chump change, but it's a small amount compared to all the money spent on high schools every year. That effort to get a visible splash to serve as a lever is common with educational philanthropy these days. After all, Bill and Melinda Gates's entire fortune is only a few billion dollars more than what California taxpayers spend every year on education.

There's very little information about this on the AT&T Foundation website, other than working with Colin and Alma Powell's organization America's Promise to create local partnerships through "dropout summits." At that level, it looks remarkably like the early 1960s efforts I chronicled in Creating the Dropout. It doesn't have to be as ineffective as those efforts, and I hope this time around, it works out better.

Fordham v. Fordham

Congrats to Fordham for writing more entries in the first day of its new blog Flypaper than I've written in about 7 years... On the other hand, it looks like the blog that the Fordham Fellows started last year has been taken over by others, especially when an entry is named Argan Oil, a Nutritional Novelty.

Funding in higher ed

Kevin Carey's column on unequal funding of higher education makes the obvious but important point that states' public higher education systems are often skewed in favor of spending more in institutions with better-prepared students. Carey uses per-student (FTE) instructional expenses calculated using the Governmental Accounting Standards Board numbers (i.e., numbers that institutions reported using GASB definitions), and because I don't know the details on the relevant definitions, I can't comment on the methods in terms of his back-of-the-spreadsheet estimates that California institutions spend more than $10K per student when students' entering SAT scores are higher. I suspect somewhat different measures would come up with different numbers.

But the larger point is still true: community colleges spend less on instruction per student, in large part because they receive less per FTE than universities and because their tuition is lower. In turn, they pay full-time faculty less than in universities, and they rely far more on contingent faculty. At the same time, community college students are far more likely to be told to take developmental (remedial) courses.

The historian in me wants to know how this inequality in spending (however calculated) has changed over the past three decades, as states have disinvested in higher education. And also what the relationship is between general higher-ed revenue structures in a state and the inequality within the state. The easiest way to equalize spending in higher ed is to cut revenues back for every public institution, and that inevitably reduces the range in instructional spending. We're trying that here in Florida, but I don't think anyone is going to like the outcome.

(A note to Carey and to the editors of Inside Higher Ed: the word is methods, not methodology. Methodology is the study of methods. A little later: That word probably caught my eye because I'm in the midst of journal-editing stuff today, and I regularly have to change "methodology" to "methods" in that role.)

Legislative rolling and the New York budget language on tenure

One more thought on the New York state budget's language placing a moratorium on using test scores to deny teachers tenure: I'm wondering how much of the ire directed at the legislature and the calumny aimed at NYSUT (the state teachers union affiliate) is about the process of how this happened—i.e., without the "right" people in control or at the table.

I suspect the substance of the language is all about the waiting game going on with the end of Michael Bloomberg second term as New York mayor. The use of value-added measures as the sole or a primary tenure criterion is now blocked until after Bloomberg is out of office (and after Joel Klein is also likely to be gone as schools chancellor). Whatever decisions are taken after the moratorium ends will be taken by other people, in other political circumstances.

And it's that fact that makes me wonder about the undiscussed process issue. For the last seven and a half years, plenty of players were ignored in education policymaking. That's why the legislature approved mayoral control: to remove large bunches of stakeholders from the decision-making, in hopes that putting power in the hands of one person (Mayor Bloomberg) would aid significant reform. The political regime that followed that decision is something I'll leave to others to describe (and I suspect it would make a great dissertation for someone in the New York area), but the whole point of mayoral control was to remove people from the policymaking process.

So what happened in Albany? According to the critics of the decision who blamed NYSUT, the teachers union used every lobbying trick at their disposal to hide this provision in the budget while it was being drafted/finalized, while others (Bloomberg and allies) were left out of the process. The tone used by DFER head Joe Williams is one of anger and surprise, a "we was robbed" attitude. One informal term for being robbed and beaten up in the process is "being rolled," and that's much the impression I get from the critics of the language, especially the New York Daily News's referring to Albany as in the midst of a "legislative crime wave." No one likes to be rolled politically, but the irony here is that many of those who disapprove of being rolled in Albany haven't said boo about others' being rolled in NYC.

Organizational psychosis?

Yesterday's New York Times article on 'credit recovery' puts the Bloomberg-Klein years in New York in perspective, as one Manhattan principal explains:

I think that credit recovery and the related topic independent study is in lots of ways the dirty little secret of high schools. There's very little oversight and there are very few standards.

The NYC Department of Education said one decent thing in its defense (that the plural of anecdotes is not data), but it would be relatively easy to look at the students who earn credit through credit-recovery and look at other data about their achievement... that is, if the Department of Education will release information about it.

I see the same thing in Florida to a lesser degree, in Florida's calculation of graduation in a way that calls it a success when a student drops out of school and immediately enrolls in a GED program. That's why I am not celebrating Margaret Spellings's announcement that regulations to define graduation rates are in the works: the devil's in the details.

Even more broadly, there's something fundamentally at odds with reality to create a system that keeps ratcheting up pressure on both students and educators and then addresses one of the resulting problems in a facile way. When individuals experience a substantial gap between their experiences and reality, we term that experience psychosis (which I know is a broad range, and plenty of people have psychotic experiences such as hallucinations without being mentally ill).

There is no organizational term to capture a gap between what we would consider reality and institutionally recognized reality, but maybe there should be something akin to organizational psychosis. And at least according to the Times article, the credit recovery system is one likely candidate for that category.

There it ain't -- a rap on The Quick and the Ed's knuckles

In The Quick and the Ed today, Kevin Carey boldly overclaims:

The Times is reporting that, at the behest of the teachers unions, last-minute language was snuck into the New York State budget providing that "teacher[s] shall not be granted or denied tenure based on student performance data." There's really not much one can add to that; it's hard to imagine a more unambiguous declaration of the union's total disregard for student learning when its members' jobs are at stake.

I suppose there really isn't much to add except that the Times article clearly states that the provision in question is not a ban but a two-year moratorium. It's hard to imagine a more unambiguous declaration of the union's caution about buying into rash schemes, and it puzzles me why Carey would make such an obvious omission in a way that undercuts his argument. See Eduwonkette for more links.

Should schools borrow the best or the worst from business?

Today, Florida TaxWatch issued a set of recommendations for cost cutting in education (hat tip), and one quotation put in a separate box stood out for me, from Florida TaxWatch's Center for Educational Performance chair David Mann:

Education should borrow from business practices:...

As Good to Great author Jim Collins might ask, that's all fine and dandy, but do you want schools to borrow from good business practices or bad business practices? It strikes me that we're in a recession because of a bunch of pretty lousy business practices. Should schools follow down that path?

In particular, the report focused on the proportion of school spending that goes towards food, transportation, air conditioning, and other expenses, noting that in Florida, 19.7% of funding is reported for these categories, in contrast to 17.8% for the U.S. as a whole. Maybe we're higher than average on those categories because a higher proportion of children in Florida are poor, plus we have county-wide school districts and choice programs that involve busing, plus we have higher air conditioning costs because we're in Florida. For goodness' sake, it's well known in the state that our governor has a fan with him at all spots because he doesn't want to be shown sweating. (I don't want to know what temperature his offices are kept at. Wait a minute: I'd love to know, but maybe his office wouldn't want us to know. Any reporters out there, my guess is that thermostat settings are public records...)

Then there are recommendations that make little sense, such as one to maximize economies of scale. Florida has county school systems, a centralized system of data warehousing, etc. I view that recommendation as hand-waving. Or the proposal to outsource more; haven't we had enough scandals with Florida's privatization in the past decade?

The third grading turning point and other myths

A few weeks ago, Sara Mead wrote about Combatting The Third Grade Slump in the Early Ed Watch blog, and she repeated a phrase that always bewilders me a bit:

We know that third grade is a major transition point in children's education. It's when they make the switch from learning to read, to reading to learn. [emphasis added]

Mead's link is to an article for teachers coauthored by Jeanne Chall, which reiterates the common adage. While there is a nugget of truth in it (if you can read complex text fluently, you're more likely to understand or at least wade through poorly-written textbooks), there's a developmental reasoning there which surprises and disappoints me. It surprises me because Chall is definitely not a developmentalist in the classic sense, and it disappoints me because it implies some significant divide between early childhood education and the "real" curriculum.

Wrong isn't quite the word for it. Maybe distracted is the better word. Or maybe my ear is too sensitive to cute phrasing and pat edubabble formulae. Is there any evidence that the curriculum suddenly changes in third grade? Or that there are accelerated demands on reading in the best reading materials that one could choose? if there is a "third grade slump," it's that third grade is where many struggling readers are identified with learning disabilities. I haven't checked the stats recently, but my guess is that you could infer that from the grade distribution of students receiving special education services.

So is third grade where the curriculum changes or where school systems finally intervene with children?

When your definition of rigor depends on the market

The news in this morning's Washington Post that the College Board is cutting several AP programs should make educators think at least a second time before tying their curriculum to an outside entity's financial fortunes. While it is non-profit, the College Board made decisions to cut French and Latin literature, Italian, and one of the computer science AP exams based on demand. Essentially, if the number of schools and students don't reach a certain threshold (enough to pay for exam development and whatever overhead the College Board calculates on that), the College Board has to subsidize the low-demand exams with high-demand exams. I am sure that the College Board will say that the finances do not absolutely determine whether they continue to offer courses, but it plays a role: who can credibly say that we should discourage students from learning French and Latin literature?

According to the Post's article, the three foreign-language courses have demand concentrated in the DC area. It'll be interesting to see if the schools involved create a consortium to continue the exams. And it'll be even more interesting to see how colleges and the public respond. AP and IB programs have instant credential value because of institutional longevity. But does rigor count if it's the same curriculum but without that credential?

A dozen questions for an official graduation rate

When the OMB clears the draft regs on counting dropouts, we can expect another wave of stories on graduation rates and what they all mean. Sharp reporters and other observers will ask the following questions of the draft regs:

1. Does the definition of graduation include or exclude non-standard completion categories such as GEDs and "certificates of completion"?
2. How does the definition of graduation handle students with disabilities with a modified curriculum (that is, with an emphasis on functional rather than academic goals)?
3. Is the mandatory measure a longitudinal statistic such as the NGA compact or a synthetic measure such as Chris Swanson's Cumulative Proportion Index? (I will assume until proven wrong that it is a longitudinal measure.)
   
4. Regardless of the measure proposed, how many states have data systems that can produce the statistics required?
5. How does the measure address transfers, homeschooling, migration, and mortality?
   
6. For the adjustments proposed for transfers, homeschooling, migration, and mortality, are there any requirements that states audit the corresponding codes in their data systems?
7. How does the proposed measure handle grade retention (e.g., multiple years in ninth grade)?
8. Does the proposed measure forbid a state from using the Florida tactic of calling a dropout a transfer if the dropout immediately enrolled in a GED program?
9. How does the proposed measure handle students who graduate in five years?
   
10. Do the proposed regs require that school districts and schools must meet benchmarks in graduation in the same way that they must meet benchmarks with % 'proficient'?
11. If there are such required benchmarks, is there any supporting research to suggest that the status or improvement benchmarks are realistic?
12. In crafting the draft regs, did the Department of Education consult with more than two of the researchers recognized to have published in the relevant area, such as Chris Swanson, Rob Warren, Melissa Roderick, Russell Rumberger, Bob Hauser, Michelle Fine, or Gary Orfield? I'm an historian, and we're generally trotted out as mantel decorations for such affairs, if at all, but there are plenty of solid researchers in the area who could be consulted. And if you're a reporter, you need to line up a few of those folks to be ready to respond to draft regs.
    

I'm exhausted from a third straight fragmented day, looking forward to a fourth one... but I suspect the above set of questions covers much of the ground on the anticipated raft regs defining an official graduation rate.

An NEA member at the head of AFT?

In all the discussion about Randi Weingarten's imminent rise to the AFT presidency is one small detail that hasn't yet been discussed: UFT's state affiliate NYSUT is now merged and affiliated with both NEA and AFT. Which makes Weingarten an NEA member.

I have no clue whether Weingarten is a delegate to the NEA convention this summer, but that would be interesting.

Gradu[r]ated

So U.S. Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings Announces Department Will Move to a Uniform Graduation Rate, Require Disaggregation of Data (the true title of the press release today announcing imminent-but-not-published draft regs defining a graduation rate and only a few words away from the type of book title that would cure almost any insomnia). And George Miller huffs some that it wasn't bipartisan (hat tip to David Hoff on the Miller statement). So what's the buzz about?

1. Spellings is channeling Adlai Stevenson's approach to governance and proudly announcing bold action on issues that are almost consensual and would happen without her intervention.
2. Especially for this particular issue, the devil is in the details. Florida has a longitudinal graduation measure, but that doesn't mean it's accurate. If the regulatory language released in draft form would allow Florida to keep doing what it's doing officially, you won't see much in the form of transparency (and at least with two issues, you may see things get worse).
3. Spellings is hoping the gravitas and charm of Colin Powell rubs off. Admittedly, Powell hasn't (yet) been on NPR's Wait, wait, ...

Maybe this is more evidence that Spellings will run for elected office in Texas and claim that she created growth measures, differentiated consequences, and airtight graduation rates. At least she's not claiming to have invented the Internet...

Biology is constructed, but there's only one version of history

Today the Florida Senate PreK-12 committee approved Ronda Storms's bill (SB 2692) that would undercut the new state science standards that include evolution as the basic model of biology. It's called the "Academic Freedom Act," but it only applies to biology teachers who want to teach Intelligent Design (or the Flying Spaghetti Monster theory of creation). If you're a history teacher, you're on your own with a set of rigid legal prescriptions that tell you what history is:

American history shall be viewed as factual, not as constructed, shall be viewed as knowable, teachable, and testable, and shall be defined as the creation of a new nation based largely on the universal principles stated in the Declaration of Independence.

So someone who thinks that the Declaration of Independence was undercut by a more conservative Constitution is forbidden from teaching that. Since history is factual, you can't debate arguments about whether the founders were more influenced by their views of Enlightenment debates in Europe, Renaissance political theories, or classical history. And you definitely can't read David W. Noble's Historians against History (1965), which critiques precisely this claim that the history of the U.S. represents an entirely fresh start, a dramatic break from the past.

To mash up W.C. Fields and Elbert Hubbard, biology is a rich stew of diverse views, but history is one damned fact after another.

Turnitin.com, students' intellectual property, and fair use

Eric Goldman has the latest news and commentary on the high school students' lawsuit (and the suit's dismissal) against having to submit papers to Turnitin.com (hat tip). It's a fascinating and complicated issue, and Goldman's discussion explains at least some of the tangles involved (though I wouldn't be surprised if there were more).

AERA brief note

I'm in the Delta terminal of JFK, waiting to go home to Tampa. Presented. Listened. Laughed. Bought things in both the AERA exhibit hall and also the Juliiard School bookstore (which was having a 30%-off sale on a bunch of CDs). I will be blogging later this week on a NYC nutty policy and on the 20th retrospective session on Jim Anderson's 1988 book, The Education of Blacks in the South, 1865-1935.

"Differentiated accountability"

Alexander Russo links to news coverage of the Margaret Spellings announcement yesterday that maybe not all AYP failures are the same. Here's some blog coverage:

• Ed Week reporter David Hoff notes the irony that Spellings made the announcement in a state that was ineligible for the pilot.
• St Pete Times reporter Ron Matus anticipates that Florida politicians will say "we did it first!"
• Jim Horn quotes the FairTest reaction that it's rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic.
• Eduwonk Andy Rotherham says it's a good policy move, but the administration's political context for the announcement ain't pretty.
• NSBA's BoardBuzz calls it "probably a day late and a dollar short."
• Eduflack wonders why Spellings is allergic to the word "flexibility."

Spellings went to growth pilots, waivers (or turning the other cheek) to allow tutoring before choice, and now differing judgments on failure to meet AYP after others talked about the ideas for years. I think Spellings is just channeling Adlai Stevenson, who once quipped that leadership is seeing where the crowd is heading and getting in front of it.

(Does anyone know the exact wording or source for that?)

Florida ed policy and politics

The legislative session is in full swing (or a more colorful noun), and a bunch of things are in the air either in Tallahassee or elsewhere:

1. Both houses of the state legislature are considering bills to change the role of state testing (FCAT), either by adding other information to the labeling of high schools (the senate's approach) or by a compromise bill that discourages test-prep and sets more specific grade-level standards (the proposal in the house).

2. The ACLU sues Palm Beach County for its low high school graduation. Superintendent Art Johnson suggests it's the state's fault for not providing enough money (scroll down for "But the superintendent..."). (Disclosure: A 2006 paper of mine is mentioned in both stories.)

3. Something that wasn't covered in my local papers in January: Holmes County administrators have banned students from displaying anything related to gay pride. The