Home Front

Dave McCarthy, our favorite Marine Colonel, sent this picture to complement his “Baghdad Update” (4/29/07). With Dave are his wonderful wife Carrie and the “loveable monkeys” Connor and Trevor.

Several readers have asked for Dave’s contact information. Here is his email david.mccarthy@iraq.centcom.mil

and here is his snail mail address

MCCARTHY, DM

MNC-I C-3 AT/FP

APO AE 09342

Dave asked me to please let people know that he can't always reply in a timely manner. He loves cookies and prayers: “As for cookies or anything else, we are always VERY appreciative of anything and everything that people want to send, and everyone here always shares everything, which is good because some guys never get mail. Please let people know that I - we – truly appreciate the prayers; I personally am a very big believer in the power of prayer. Just be sure and pray not that I'll come home safe or even that I'll come home at all, just that God's Will be done.”

The Post Office provides boxes (roughly 12x14x3.5 inches) that they will mail to our troops for $8.10 no matter the weight. They arrive in about two weeks.

As a follow-up to yesterdays post (“Sensible Education Reform”), I have a suggestion for Recommendation 1: Reduce the barriers to entry into teaching for those without traditional teacher certification. Hire former soldiers.

The Troops to Teachers program is a source of quality teachers for America's schools. John Gantz, Department of Defense, Defense Activity for Non-Traditional Education Support (DANTES) asks:

“Can a tough crusty old no-nonsense Marine Corps Sergeant Major be an effective teacher in our public schools? How about a retired infantry Army Lieutenant Colonel, or an Air Force Special Operations Senior Master Sergeant, or a former Navy submarine commander? Some within the public education community raised concerns about the suitability of career military personnel as teachers. These military veterans, the critics said, would be too rigid, too demanding, inflexible, harsh, and their approach to teaching would be totally incompatible with the needs of today’s students.”

But there are almost 9,000 military veterans who have successfully made the transition from uniform to the classroom and proven the critics wrong. A recent study titled “Profile of Troops to Teachers” conducted by Emily Feistritzer, President of the National Center for Education Information, concludes that Troops to Teachers brings to public education “exactly what the nation has identified it needs”:

• More men

• More minorities

• Teachers in high demand areas – inner cities

• Teachers in high demand subject areas – special education, math, science

• Well educated teachers

• Competent teachers

• Teachers who believe all children can learn

• Teachers who value high standards for themselves as well as for students

• Committed teachers

• Teachers who plan to stay a while

Another study conducted by William Owings of Old Dominion University sought to determine the effectiveness of Troops to Teachers. Among the findings:

• Principals overwhelmingly (over 90%) reported that “Troops” teachers are more effective in classroom instruction and classroom management/student discipline than are traditionally prepared teachers with similar years of teaching experience.
• Principals stated (89.5%) that “Troops” teachers have a positive impact on student achievement to a greater degree than do traditionally prepared teachers with similar years of teaching experience.
• “Troops” teachers teach in high poverty schools, teach high-demand subjects (special education, math, and science), plan to remain in teaching as a career, and increase the teaching pool’s diversity.

John Gantz concludes: The success of the program is due solely to the fact that “Troops” teachers are highly effective in the classroom. Through Troops to Teachers, military personnel are able to continue their service to the Nation on the front lines in public school classrooms throughout America.

The Los Angeles Unified School District is looking for retiring or separating members of the Armed Forces, Coast Guard, Reserves, and National Guard to teach Math, Science, English or Special Education. Officers and enlisted troops holding a bachelors degree with expertise in these subject areas may qualify for the Troops for Teachers program. Servicemembers and veterans who are interested in learning more about opportunities with LAUSD should

click here to fill out an application.

The Department of Defense provides a $5K stipend to qualified participants to help pay for teacher certification programs (a waste). An additional $5K is available as an incentive to attract more individuals to schools serving a high percentage of disadvantaged students.

Schools should be eager to access this supply of men (Over 80% of “Troops” are men), minorities (40%), teachers of critical need subjects of math, science or special education (50%) and teachers willing to accept positions in schools serving disadvantaged students (67% of the “Troops.”)

Tell your School Boards about this great program.

Sensible Education Reform

It is a pleasant surprise whenever I find a liberal public institution making a sensible policy proposal. Thus the report of the Hamilton Project, associated with the liberal Brookings Institution, caught my eye. (It was even written up today by Nicolas Kristof in the New York Times -- another surprise.)

“Identifying Effective Teachers Using Performance on the Job,” written by Robert Gordon, Thomas J. Kane and Douglas O. Staiger, makes several specific recommendations for K-12 education reform:

Recommendation 1: Reduce the barriers to entry into teaching for those without traditional teacher certification. There is no reason to limit initial entrance into teaching to those who have completed traditional certification programs or who must take such courses in their first years on the job (like my friend Bob G.).

Recommendation 2: Make it harder to promote the least effective teachers to tenured positions. School districts have very good information about a teacher’s effectiveness after two or three years on the job and should base retention decisions on that trial period.

Recommendation 3: Provide bonuses to highly effective teachers willing to teach in schools with a high proportion of low income students. Today, the lowest achieving teachers are clustered in the poorest schools where students are most in need of effective teaching.

While there is a severe shortage of science and math teachers, the potential supply of technical workers (engineers, lab technicians, etc) who might enter teaching is thwarted by the credentialing requirements. Recent evidence demonstrates that teacher certification is a poor predictor of teacher effectiveness. Data from 150,000 students in 9,400 classrooms in the Los Angeles Unified School District (yearly from 2000 through 2003) show that there is no statistical difference in achievement for students assigned to certified and uncertified teachers.

If one examines the course curriculum of teacher’s colleges, this result is not surprising. Heather MacDonald in The Burden of Bad Ideas explains why Johnny’s teacher can’t teach. It’s because Teacher Ed schools worry more about stamping out racism in aspiring teachers than about test results. In fact they worry about “Anything But Knowledge”: self-actualization, social adjustment, following one’s joy, multicultural sensitivity,… “ABK” was born in the anti-intellectual fervor following WWI when progressive educators such as John Dewey decided that schools needed to prepare students for life by providing life knowledge as opposed to traditional knowledge.

They decided that kids needed to learn “critical thinking skills” rather than spelling, the multiplication tables or any facts at all. When teachers dismiss actual knowledge, you have to replace it with something, and the Ed schools favored “constructed knowledge.” I have mine, you have yours, Johnny has his, and it’s all just fine.

They promoted “child-centered schools” where the kid became the decision maker relegating the teacher to the role of advisor (a much easier gig). Teachers were taught disdain for report cards and objective tests in favor of “meta-cognitive thinking.” At all costs teachers must avoid “teaching to the test.” It sounds like discredited folderol, but professors of education, “like aging vestal virgins, still guard the progressive flame.”

Returning to the Hamilton Project report, effectiveness varies substantially among certified teachers and also among uncertified teachers. And those large differences are evident even after adjusting for the obvious socioeconomic and educational factors such as baseline test performance, race/ ethnicity, family income, gender and so on.

While certification status was not helpful in predicting teacher impacts on student performance, teacher ranking during their first two years of teaching does provide a lot of information about their likely impact during their third year and beyond. The average student assigned to a teacher who was in the bottom quartile during his or her first two years lost on average 5 percentile points relative to students with similar baseline scores and demographics. In contrast, the average student assigned to a top-quartile teacher gained 5 percentile points relative to students with similar baseline scores and demographics. Therefore, the average difference between being assigned a top-quartile or a bottom-quartile teacher is 10 percentile points. Furthermore this 10 point delta is cumulative growing to 20 points in two years, etc.

Many measures might be used to assess teacher performance including principal evaluations, parent evaluations, classroom observations, and the number of times a teacher is absent. However, measures of outputs and performance rather than credentials would need to be used.

We hear a lot about the critical need to reduce class sizes. An experiment in Tennessee of classroom size reduction found that schools could improve achievement by half as much—5 percentile points—by shrinking class size in early grades. But class size reduction of the magnitude considered in that experiment is expensive: shrinking average class size from twenty-two to sixteen students per class would require a 38 percent increase in the number of teachers and the amount of classroom space in those early grades.

Progressive doctrine has severely damaged our educational system. It is time to bring teaching into the twenty-first century where competition drives improvement and over-regulation is the enemy of progress.

Heroes versus Stooges

Every once in a while the Los Angeles Times prints something intelligent and I feel compelled to offer a nod of appreciation. Yesterday the lead editorial headline was “Small classes aren't a cure-all.” In the seventh paragraph the stark truth emerged: “There is still no evidence that the multibillion-dollar investment in small primary classes has made more than an incremental difference in achievement.”

The State has been investing $1.7 Billion yearly in class size reduction and it has had, maybe, an incremental (read miniscule) effect on student performance. Meanwhile this “well-intentioned” expenditure of our money swelled the ranks of the teaching profession and has led to fraud at some school districts. In one case, the Santa Ana district fudged the books to make it look as though there were no more than 20 students per teacher in the primary grades so the schools could receive $16 Million from the state for reducing class size. The Times recommends a “public spanking” for the Santa Ana school board and superintendent. How about some jail time?

I have two friends who retired from engineering and went into teaching hoping to make a difference. Roger went to a high school in a tough LA neighborhood. He lasted four years and finally gave it up, quite discouraged. Bob is sticking it out in a school near Watts, but it’s tough. The quality of teachers at their schools was not the problem. The size of their classes was not the problem. The composition of their classes was. If classes could be restricted to those kids who wanted to be there, who did not want to cause trouble, who could spend their time thinking about biology rather than their babies, class size would not be an issue. One partial solution to this problem is school choice.

Friday the Times printed a column about the Los Angeles Unified School District’s decisions on two charter school issues. In the first, the LAUSD board rejected the application by Green Dot Public Schools to build eight new charters in a Watts neighborhood, one of the city's worst. The board members who voted against the charters are allies of the teacher’s union. Despite the promising results Green Dot has produced at its other charters, they remain skeptical of the group's reform model, whatever that is.

In denying the charters the LAUSD board violated state law.

My friend and school board member Mike Lansing, who represents Watts, accused his colleagues of bending to the wishes of the influential United Teachers Los Angeles, which opposes the charter movement, and which donated over $1 Million dollars to the election campaigns of their three board stooges. “It's really disappointing that we keep talking about wanting to do what's best for children first, when without a doubt that vote was about a teacher’s union and three board members not having the backbone to stand up and do the right thing for kids over their ties to the union,” Lansing said after the vote.

For those of you who don’t know Mike, he is the full time director of the Boys and Girls Clubs of Los Angeles Harbor. Like Roger and Bob, Mike is a hero.

In the other LAUSD board decision, it voted to renew the charter of Academia Semillas del Pueblo despite the fact that the unconventional school has had terrible test results for five years. The school’s absurd multilingual curriculum includes Spanish, English, Mandarin and Nahuatl-Mexicano. But the board bowed to pressure from political stooges Richard Alatorre and Jackie Goldberg and Spanish groups to keep it open, the kids be damned. Until the unions lose their hold on politicians and school board members, the kids have little to no chance.

Banish the Bling

“A culture of failure taints black America” wrote Juan Williams of National Public Radio. (Washington Post, 8/21/06) Williams noted there is a “sinister obstacle facing African American young people today: a culture steeped in bitterness and nihilism, a culture that is a virtual blueprint for failure.”

In response to my post “Parsing the Achievement Gap” (3/23/07) blogging buddy Mahndisa commented about the “mass popularization of NEGATIVE rap and NEGATIVE rock and roll, plebian, gut bucket, baby mamma having, concubining, drug selling and doing foolishness that is glorified, rather than condemned as in previous generations.”

Mahndisa is a black educator who fights against the culture of failure every day. She concludes: “I am sick and tired of seeing people who choose a life of ignorance because they are trying to be black.”

Williams talks of generational poverty caused by the fact that nearly 70% of black children (and 50% of Hispanic children) are born to single women today. “Their search for identity and a sense of direction is undermined by the twisted popular culture that focuses on the “bling-bling” of fast money associated with rap artists, drug dealers and the idea that women are at their best when flaunting their sexuality and having babies.”

Bob Herbert in the New York Times (“The Danger Zone”) talks about the extreme joblessness of young black men — “joblessness that is coursing through communities and being passed from one generation to another, like a deadly virus” — that is a direct consequence of dropping out of school. For high school dropouts, the jobless rate is 29% for whites, 19% for Hispanics and 67% for black men.

Herbert’s solution is “Education, Education, Education.” For black males, employment rates rise from 33% among high school dropouts to 57% among high school graduates to 86% among four-year college graduates (just 2% below the white rate).

Herbert believes that not working “breeds all manner of antisocial behavior, including violent crime” and that there are so few black marriages because “there are so many black men who are financially incapable of supporting a family.” This is disturbing. Here is an educated, black columnist for the New York Times who thinks that lack of a job causes crime. It is, again, a question of cause and effect, chicken and egg.

Kay Hymowitz (“Marriage and Caste,” City Journal) notes that America’s chief source of inequality is the Marriage Gap. As of 1960, the percentage of high school dropout women who were single mothers barely hit 1%. That all changed in the decades following the 1960s when women with lower educational levels “decided that marriage and children were two entirely unconnected life experiences.” Such behavior is irrational as marriage improves the economic situation of low-income women, even if their husbands are only deliverymen or janitors.

Barry, another friend and blog reader, has pegged the root cause of the increasing illegitimacy among poor people. The Great Society welfare programs made it economically advantageous to be a poor mother with out-of-wedlock children and no job. It allowed males to skip out of all family obligations. Now we have a third generation on the way whose culture is tied to a welfare state mentality and the accompanying victimization complex of their hypocritical leaders.

Jesse the Jackson wrote today that young African-American boys are in crisis… but “we can't simply load the blame on the schools.” Is this a new JJ? But then he reverted to huckster form. In the crucial early years, “they are shackled…. with no systematic program to ensure prenatal care, health care, day care, parental education.” JJ’s solution is mo gub’ment to take care of the kids while the moms … do what the moms do.

“We've got too many babies raising babies,” said Jackson, “who don't have the resources or the knowledge of how to take care of their children.” Right on!

Mahndisa punctuated the issue: “All of my Black ancestors would roll over in their graves if they knew folk were acting like this!”

The bloody crime is that the poor in America were better off fifty years ago because they had better values that included being married to your children’s mother and supporting your family, no matter what it took.

Parsing the Achievement Gap

My initial reaction to the California education report (Getting Down to Facts?, 3/18/07) was decidedly negative. The newspaper accounts emphasized the CA education performance (dismal) and the projected financial needs (astounding). Like the other scribes, I was dismayed. Over the last few days I took the opportunity to look more closely at the massive 1700 page report and now I’m really depressed.

The summary lays out the dismal statistics. The 2005 National Assessment of Education Progress ranked California 44th in eighth grade math, 48th in reading and 50th in science (ahead of only Mississippi) in comparison to the 49 other states and the District of Columbia. Some suggest that California’s position simply reflects the large minority populations in the state. However in math scores, for example, California ranked only 36th for both white students and for children of college graduates relative to their peers in other states. We are proud of the fact that Palos Verdes high school students rank in the top 3% in CA, but how well do they perform relative to districts with comparable demographics in New York or Wisconsin?

Some “Getting Down to Facts” conclusions: Solely directing more money into the current system will not dramatically improve student achievement. Simply introducing more new categorical programs will not produce the desired achievement gains. Our system is not making the most efficient use of its current resources. State policies do not let administrators make the best use of the pool of potential teachers nor adequately support current teachers. And something must be done about the excessive difficulty in dismissing weak teachers.

It takes 1700 pages to explain these obvious issues while making not one concrete proposal to fix the broken system. That will take another year and another million bucks. I have a suggestion: Just fix it! The teacher issues tread on the third rail of union contracts, but all it takes is political will, starting with the Gov and the legislature, to make the needed changes.

And make those changes before spending another extra dollar (or billion dollars) on the system. The relationship between spending and performance is so unclear that the various studies projected costs ranging from a few extra billion dollars to over a trillion dollars. For example, take a district that is spending $8000 per student and has an API of 750. Using the cost function estimates, a fifty-point increase in API (to 800) would require an increase of only $181 per pupil. Using the production function estimates, the same fifty-point increase in API would require an increase of $11,600 per pupil, that is, 64 times as much. And “total estimated costs from the California production function are $1.5 trillion.” Such disparate estimates resemble those coming from the global warming computer.

As a great counter-example, consider the liberal Kansas City judge who ordered that the failing local school district be given whatever amount of money was necessary to succeed. The spending per student skyrocketed to the neighborhood of $40,000. Everything was first class. The result: Grades dropped even lower and the drop-out rate increased.

The most discouraging thing is the realization that five years after “No Child Left Behind,” the major CA accomplishment is the establishment of world class standards and a system of assessment and accountability for schools and students. The problems that existed in 2000 have barely budged.

Parsing the Achievement Gap by Paul Barton synthesizes a large body of research that identifies those factors associated with educational attainment. The picture is daunting because it is clear that educational achievement is associated with home, school, and societal factors, almost all having their roots in socioeconomic forces affecting the country.

Parsing lists 14 correlates of elementary and secondary school achievement, six related to schools and eight related to families.

School correlates are (1) rigor of the curriculum, (2) teacher preparation, (3) teacher experience and attendance, (4) class size, (5) technology-assisted instruction and (6) school safety.

Family correlates are (7) weight at birth, (8) exposure to environmental hazards such as lead, (9) hunger and nutrition, (10) reading to young children, (11) the amount of TV watching, (12) parent availability, (13) student mobility (how frequently children change schools) and (14) parent participation.

Data show that whites (62% of the student population) take 66% of the AP classes while blacks (17%) take 4% of the AP courses. The percent of 8th grade math teachers lacking certification is 13% in non-poor schools but 22% in poor schools. The percent of teachers with class sizes above 24 kids is 22% in low-minority schools but 31% in high-minority schools. Low minority classrooms come 94% equipped with computers compared to 77% of high minority classrooms. The percent of students reporting gangs in school is 16% in predominantly white schools but 29% in black schools.

The teacher issues can be easily solved by assignment and extra pay. Only the unions stand in the way. The AP courses and gangs in schools are related to families.

The percent of babies born with low weights is white 7%, black 13% and Hispanic 7%. Lead poisoning is more likely in black homes (22% contain lead based paint) compared to white homes (6%). Only 2% of white children are regularly hungry compared to 7% of black children. The percent of third grade children who have already switched schools 3 times is 13% among whites but 27% among blacks. Over 75% of white children live with two parents compared to 38% of black children. The percent of children who are read to daily is 64% of white kids compared to 48% of black kids. On the other hand 42% of black kids watch 6 or more hours of TV daily compared to 13% of white kids.

The school system is nearly helpless in addressing these family issues. And these are the issues that drive achievement far more that the school issues. The family issues can only be solved by changing black and poor culture and that has to be done by those communities themselves. We definitely need more Bill Cosby’s.

Getting Down to Facts

Well, we can all rest a lot easier. The root cause of the gross failure of the California education system has been discerned, and the solution is at hand.

A year ago Governor Arnold S. appointed a blue-ribbon commission to take a comprehensive look at the education system. Democrats and Republicans alike say a wholesale transformation of the public schools is essential. “Our system is broken, and only major fundamental change can fix it,” said Chairman Ted Mitchell of the Gov's education committee.

The commission’s findings are being offered as a blueprint for fixing CA schools. In 1700 pages of light reading, "Getting Down to Facts" has all the answers, boiled down to the 3-Rs for education: revenue and revenue and mo revenue.

Just to get an idea of the financial ballpark, let’s look at the baseline. Today CA spends $43 Billion on K-12 education or $11,600 per year on each of its 3.7 million students. Yet California’s education problems are massive, with students ranking 48th out of 50 states in both reading and math.

Something must be done! Drum roll please: According to the report, $1.5 Trillion more each year will be needed to make all California students academically proficient. That’s $1.5 Trillion or $1,500 Billion for all you kids who flunked 5th grade math. That tidy sum works out to a bit over $400,000 per pupil per year. Thus education funding would increase from 50% of the state budget to 95%, each and every year.

Perhaps that figure is a bit inflated says report co-author Jennifer Imazeki, an assistant professor of economics at San Diego State. Her calculation was not a serious proposal for funding but rather an exercise to demonstrate how broken things are. “The relationship between money and performance is weak and noisy in California” she said. I’ll bet she is right!

After the laughter died down, economist Jon Sonstelie of the Public Policy Institute of California reported on a different approach. He interviewed 567 teachers, principals and superintendents and put them in charge of a hypothetical school budget that was, hypothetically, 50 percent higher than in real life. Without raising salaries, interviewees had to decide how to spend the extra loot so as to best maximize achievement. They lowered class size, added administrators, hired a lot more support staff and increased collaboration among teachers. All nice to-do’s.

Sonstelie’s conclusion: School spending would have to grow by $17 Billion for even half of the schools to hover in the 800-point range of the Academic Performance Index, the CA goal. The new spending would be just $16,200 per pupil per year, a bargain compared to $400 grand.

But notice how this result was obtained. Sonstelie conducted interviews, asking school officials how they would spend more money, and to guess how much of an effect it would have. Spend 40% more money to improve 50% of the test scores, based on gut feel, with data pulled out of you know where.

Such studies should be interpreted as political documents not as scientific studies, according to Stanford University’s Eric Hanushek. “The important question for assessing costing out studies is whether they can describe policies and resources that will reliably lead to the new, higher achievement levels. None can.”

Hanushek, who is a “Getting Down to Facts” contributor, examined every scientific study available on the effects of spending and educational outcomes, 163 in all, and found that “dramatic increases in resources have not led to improvement in performance of our students.” One wonders why he was not banished from the commission.

Fortunately there were a few good ideas in the report. More than anything else — even increased funds or more teachers — principals said they needed greater power to fire ineffective teachers. With typical insight, the head of the California Teachers Assn. criticized the focus on ineffective teachers. “Frankly, firing one or two teachers isn't what this is about,” said Barbara Kerr. “It's about big-picture reform. I'm sure if you ask teachers what they want, they would say to get rid of bad administrators. Let's get over this part.”

Hey, here’s an idea: How about if we fire all the bad ones, and ruthlessly reduce bureaucracy (“RRB”) everywhere.

But as with all discussions of education reform in California, the liberals always have the last word. “We already know what needs to be done, and now we have the research and data to back it up,” said Soledad Padilla of the grass-roots group California ACORN. We need money, mo money, really humongous money, and you taxpayers had better give it to us.

Meanwhile, more money is already starting to flow to schools in need as a result of the $2.9 Billion settlement between Gov. Arnold and the California Teachers Assn. Although the money belonged equally to all schools, the parties to the lawsuit opted for a plan that targeted one third of the 20 percent of worst performing schools (not the bottom 6.7%, but that’s another story). LA Unified school board member David Tokofsky called the infusion significant: “This is not permanent money, and this is not a very well thought-out program, but it is being driven by all of our feelings that we can wait no longer,” said Tokofsky.

In lower education, feelings trump everything else.

Critiques of the Education Report

Since the release of the report from the New Commission on the Skills of the American Workforce, the response from the Educational Establishment has ranged from measured to hostile. “Tough Choices or Tough Times” was written by a group of distinguished educators including former Secretaries of Education Rod Paige (Bush admin.) and Richard Riley (Clinton admin.); Joel Klein, chancellor of the New York City public schools and Tom Payzant, retired head of the Boston school district; plus prominent political and business leaders.

California Superintendent of Public Instruction Jack O’Connell issued a reasoned response: “The commission makes several provocative and far-reaching recommendations. We must be willing to rethink the way we deliver education services if our state and nation are to survive, let alone thrive, in this rapidly changing, technology-driven world. While change to a system as large and complex as public education is difficult to achieve, flexibility and agility are now imperatives.”

The Arizona State University School of Education issued a thoughtful response: “The report is not recommended reading for bedtime, if you're hoping for a good night's sleep.” Their assessment is fair: “This new report is no jargon-laden bureaucratic screed, but a plainspoken and urgent proposal for a top-to-bottom reworking of the American education system unlike any we've undertaken since the dawn of the Industrial Age. And it is not for the faint of heart.”

Response from the teacher’s unions could be described as tentative at best. NEA President Reg Weaver called “Tough Choices or Tough Times” a “provocative report” adding that “NEA has long championed the concept of high school reform, and we agree that we need to provide students with the tools and resources they will need to succeed in a global society.” Weaver was glad that “fully funding pre-K is among the list of suggestions from the commission.”

However, he cautioned against “drastic changes that could potentially disenfranchise poorer communities and eliminate community voices in the reform conversation.” He disagreed with the Commission’s recommendation to dramatically increase teacher pay while bringing benefits packages into line with the private sector. “Our nation’s teachers deserve to be well compensated now,” said Weaver, “and they deserve the safety and security of retirement plans that will not leave them destitute in their later years.”

It is business as usual for the union chief: Have your cake and eat it too. Weaver concludes: “In the end, we all must get down to the work of reforming our public schools, one step at a time.” And he has the tried-and-true solution: “We know the source of the problem: too few resources, not enough textbooks, outdated technology, and a lack of qualified and certified teachers.” More money is all we need.

A more hostile response comes from Diane Ravitch, an icon in educational circles. In her address to the American Association of Colleges for Teacher Education, Ravitch agreed with the report that “today we really do face a situation that can justly be called a crisis.” Does the crisis consist of the horrific dropout rates among some minorities, the declining test scores and the fact that so many high school grads need remedial help when they enter college? No, not a bit of that, it’s because “Never have I felt more certain that public education itself hangs in the balance.” The continued existence of the public school system is the focus of her crisis.

Ravitch mocks the report’s assertion that (in her words) “our teachers are not coming from the right strata of society.” Thus, paraphrasing the report again, we must “seek to recruit the best and the brightest with salaries ranging from $45,000 and to $110,000.” That actually makes her “blood boil.” Her suggestion: “Set the top salary at the median of the income earned by members of the commission. My guess is that it would be about $300,000.”

Actually, the report recommends that teachers be recruited from the top third of college students, not necessarily from the Ivy Leagues. A starting salary and range in line with engineering grads does not seem out of line. Her argument is rather specious for such an esteemed educator.

Racitch worries about what she calls the “super-high stakes” test at the end of tenth grade recommended by the report. She contends that “this eminent group of leaders feels that we have not done a good enough job of sorting kids into winners and losers and preventing the less prepared from going to good colleges.” Losers? Those who go to trade schools or community colleges she calls losers.

Most of all Ravitch decries the “complete privatization of American public education.” She claims to have “read it. I read it again. Then I read it again. I still could not believe it.” It appears that Ravitch is in need of remedial reading herself. The report reads that the role of school boards would be to approve performance contracts with these managers and monitor their performance. It seems not to have registered with her that the top bosses are the publicly elected school boards. The private firms that run the schools work for the school boards.

Ravitch asks, “What secret do private organizations have that has not been shared with the nation’s educators? What is the logical connection between privatization and quality education?” It appears that she also has not heard about the benefits of competition, the free enterprise system, and the American way.

In a piece called “For Whom the Bell Curves: America's Education Dilemma,” eminent economist Arnold Kling wrote:

“The best sign of a vibrant education sector would be more institutional failure. With sufficient competition and innovation, we would see colleges and universities fold or merge at the same rate as ordinary businesses. We would see schools shut down because parents send their children elsewhere. We would see large layoffs in some school systems, with hiring taking place among successful start-ups.”

Ravitch does not believe in competition: “Public schools are not a private good. They are not like shoes or soap or cars, where we shop around to find the best thing at the lowest price.” She’d shop around for the best lawyer she can get for the lowest price, but teachers, oh no, they are a “public good.”

I believe the report contains many excellent proposals and some that are wrong-headed. (See my post “Tough Choices or Tough Times,” 2/27/07.) However, I saved my most severe criticism for the end. Neither the report, nor any of the critiques that I have seen, mention the single most critical issue.

David Brooks writes in the New York Times (3/1/07): “Family relationships matter more than anything else. Schools filled with students who can’t control their impulses, who can’t focus their attention, will not succeed.”

Being a “NYT conservative,” Brooks believes that government needs to do something about family relationships such as “providing young mothers the sort of cajoling and practical wisdom that in other times would have been delivered by grandmothers and elders.” Here is an argument for another time, but the need is obvious.

Shock and Remonstrance

Forget the Oscars. (They were goring.) The buzz among the lower education crowd is about the nominees for best horror story, documentary category. The first two stories were shocking. Two reports issued last week by the US Department of Education assessed the performance of 12th-grade students and raised sobering questions about two decades of educational reform.

The first report on standardized test results showed that 12th-grade reading scores have been dropping since 1992. On the math test fewer than a quarter of the 12th graders scored proficient.

The percentage of students scoring at the Basic level on the reading test was 73 percent, below the 80 percent in 1992. The percentage of students performing at or above the Proficient reading level decreased from 40 to 35 percent. In math 61 percent of high school seniors performed at or above the Basic level, and 23 percent performed at or above Proficient.

David Driscoll, the Mass. commissioner of education, called the study results “stunning,” adding “I think we're sleeping through a crisis.”

David Gordon, Sacramento County school superintendent, spoke out about the achievement gap between whites and blacks that has barely diminished in the last 15 years. “It's clear to me from these data that for all of our talk of the achievement gap among subgroups of students, a larger problem may be an instructional gap or a rigor gap, which affects not just some but most of our students,” Gordon said.

The second report on the classroom grades of graduating seniors showed that, compared to students in 1990, the 2005 high school graduates had much higher grade point averages. The average GPA rose from 2.68 in 1990 to 2.98 in 2005. Higher grades yet lower standardized test scores. What’s up?

“What we see out of these results is a very disturbing picture of the knowledge and skills of the young people about to go into college and the workforce,” said Daria Hall, of the Education Trust, a nonprofit dedicated to improving education for poor and minority students. Hall said the studies provided clear evidence of grade inflation. “What it suggests is that we are telling students that they're being successful in these courses when, in fact, we're not teaching them any more than they were learning in the past,” she said. “So we are, in effect, lying to these students.”

The third report in the horror trilogy offers the hope, however tenuous, of salvation. “Tough Choices or Tough Times” is a sobering report from the New Commission on the Skills of the American Workforce. “Anyone who hopes to hold a job in the next several decades should read, if not memorize, this extraordinary report” wrote Norman R. Augustine, former CEO of Lockheed Martin Corporation.

This is a significant report containing many revolutionary ideas. William Brock, Secretary of Labor in the Reagan Administration, described the New Commission’s recommendations: “This proposal is radical? Yes. Hard to achieve? Of course. Essential? Absolutely. Our nation's schools are failing to educate our children, and that has to stop, else we condemn our own kids to ever lower incomes. We must act, now!”

The report is so full of tantalizing ideas that it deserves another blog post, tomorrow. Here I’ll only list my reservations, consisting of a number of false premises and dubious conclusions.

The report features a pyramid diagram of the US workforce in ten years time. “Prototypical US Industry” shows the preponderance of US workers (~85%) in 10 years at the top of the pyramid employed in Creative work, if only the policies recommended in the report are adopted. But the premise ignores another “pyramid,” the bell-shaped one peaked at 98, which shows that only a minority is intellectually capable of Creative work. No educational system, even one designed in heaven, is going to change that fact.

Step one of the recommendations rests on the assumption that “we want to send everyone, or almost everyone, to college. Now set up a system to do it.” This viewpoint is consistent with the Prototypical US Industry vision, but is out of touch with reality and with US needs. As Charles Murray noted in his Wall Street Journal articles (Jan. 16-18), there is an “explosive increase in the demand for craftsmen. Finding a good lawyer or physician is easy. Finding a good carpenter, painter, electrician, plumber, mason --- is difficult, and it is a seller's market. Journeymen craftsmen routinely make incomes in the top half of the income distribution while master craftsmen can make six figures. They have work even in a soft economy. Their jobs cannot be outsourced to India.” (See my post “No Child Left behind,” 2/3/07).

Step 2 involves “building a high-quality full-service early childhood education system for every 3- and 4-year-old student in the United States.” The assumption is that children need to be in a formal school setting from age 3 onward. Yet the top achievers in the world from Finland start formal schooling at age 7 when kids are just about mature enough to begin learning in an organized setting. (See “Finland the Model, 2/6/07).

Here in Palos Verdes the cry for reducing kindergarten class size has reached a crescendo. A parent explained why. “Today’s kindergartners are learning how to use calcalulators. They’re not just learning their A-B-Cs and 1-2-3s said Terri Mitani. “How damaging do you think it is to a child’s self-esteem when they feel rushed?” Next year they will want universal pre-school with laptops for the 3-year-olds, better to protect their self-esteem.

Step 3 aims to recruit future teachers from the top third of college students whereas now they largely come from the bottom third. I approve of this goal but reject the underlying assumption. Throughout the report the focus of learning is on the teacher – just give us better teachers and we will conquer the world. Any parent knows that the burden of learning is on the student who needs to work very hard to achieve anything substantial.

The report contains many politically correct assumptions that detract from its seriousness. These objections aside, I do think it has some great ideas about how to really reform the K-12 education system. I’ll take them up tomorrow.

Is “Teaching Profession” an Oxymoron

“At a time when disappointing student performance, stark achievement gaps, and an ever-flattening world call for retooling American schools for the 21st century, the most daunting impediments to doing so are the teacher collective bargaining agreements that regulate virtually all aspects of school district operations.” Thus begins an important new report by Frederick M. Hess of the right-leaning American Enterprise Institute and Martin R. West of the left-leaning The Brookings Institution.

A Better Bargain: Overhauling Teacher Collective Bargaining for the 21st Century lays out one piece of the strategy for fixing our underperforming schools. Living in Palos Verdes, it is tempting to think that the real problems are down the hill in the LAUSD. Up here there is a raging battle over the number of hours kids spend in kindergarten. The present schedule has an overlap of morning and afternoon sessions that allows for significant savings in salaries and classroom space. The Teacher’s Union wants to eliminate the overlap, and the savings, for the sake of the kids. Is it true that kindergarten class size must be reduced or is this yet another case of no-teacher left behind ?

A letter to the editor of the Palos Verdes Peninsula News pleads for the change: “The rigorous, chaotic schedule our kindergartners are subjected to is astounding.” I have to ask, why rigorous? Why chaotic? Kids are subjected to? These are 5 year olds. What are they doing to our kids in kindergarten? It seems that the problems are everywhere.

Apple CEO Steve Jobs lambasted teacher unions last week at an education reform conference. In a discussion of technology in the classroom (what else?), Jobs shocked the audience by saying no amount of technology in the classroom would improve public schools until principals could fire bad teachers.

Jobs compared schools to businesses with principals serving as CEOs.

“What kind of person could you get to run a small business if you told them that when they came in they couldn't get rid of people that they thought weren't any good?” he asked.

“Not really great ones because if you're really smart you go, ‘I can't win.’”

Mr. Jobs elaborated on the source of the problem.

“I believe that what is wrong with our schools in this nation is that they have become unionized in the worst possible way,” Jobs said. “This unionization and lifetime employment of K-12 teachers is off-the-charts crazy.”

Hey, what does Steve Jobs know?

Hess and West note that “teacher collective bargaining agreements are vestiges of the industrial economic model that prevailed in the 1950s, when assembly-line workers and low-level managers were valued less for their knowledge or technical skills than for their longevity.” At a time when effective teachers are demanding to be treated as respected professionals, teacher unions are an anachronism.

Hess and West also spread the blame to the superintendents and school boards who sign off on the union contracts.

A Better Bargain charts a new course, recommending five key changes in collective bargaining agreements:

1. Teacher pay should reflect the scarcity and value of teachers’ skills, the difficulty of their assignments, the extent of their responsibilities, and the caliber of their work. Pay for value.

2. Pension and health benefits should be like the rest of us get (if we're lucky), which will entail shifting to defined-contribution plans better suited to the new economy and a professional workforce.

3. Tenure should be eliminated from K–12 schooling. (See Steve Jobs.)

4. Personnel should be assigned to schools on the basis of educational need rather than seniority.

5. Work rules should be weeded out of contracts, and contracts should explicitly define managerial prerogatives. Principals need to be CEOs.

These necessary changes are only feasible in conjunction with a reform strategy committed to a world-class K-12 education system based on principles of accountability, competition and transparency.

Accountability: Results-based accountability is needed throughout the system, from administrators to teachers. One key step is the construction of reliable statewide databases that track individual students’ academic progress over time so that teacher pay and professional development can be linked to classroom effectiveness.

Choice and Competition: Enhanced school choice and competition are essential to heighten incentives to improve student performance. In particular, state officials should eliminate obstacles to the creation of charter schools that operate free from many statutory and contractual restrictions.

Tough-Minded Governance: District officials must shine light on inefficient contract provisions, push for fundamental changes in contract language, and fully exploit permissive or ambiguous language where it exists. In addition, civic leaders and citizens must support management practices that may create, at least initially, disgruntled unions and increased labor unrest.

Mayor Mike Bloomberg of New York believes “the desire to learn has disappeared down the bottomless well of centralized urban public-school bureaucracies.” Bloomberg proposed greatly increased autonomy for school principals, and he wants teachers to prove they deserve tenure, an idea so obvious that it probably has no chance. The liberal mayor of America’s biggest city is willing to preserve tenure (a bad idea) but has no chance of introducing reasonable accountability.

American K-12 education is a monolithic, over-regulated yet over-protected system with dysfunction in every major subsystem. In my post “NO Child Left Behind” (2/3/07), the capabilities and responsibilities of the students were highlighted. The kids and their parents have primary responsibility for learning, but we spend a substantial portion of our government budgets on teachers who need to hold up their end.

It is about time for the many fine teachers to stand up and demand to be treated like professionals with requisite rewards and accountability. It is past time for the few underperforming teachers to find other employment.

And it is time for the elected school boards and the PTAs to join together and demand accountability, excellence and fiscal responsibility in this most critical profession.

No Child Left Behind

I have many friends who are or were teachers, administrators or school board members and they generally complain about No Child Left Behind. The NCLB Act of 2001 is a federal law that aims to improve the performance of schools by increasing the standards of accountability. Who could argue with the need to increase educational performance in light of the ongoing dismal performance of US students on international tests?

Yet, many educators object to the specific requirements and implementation of the program. NCLB requires States to create an accountability system of assessments, graduation rates, and other indicators. Schools have to make adequate yearly progress by raising the achievement levels of subgroups of students such as African Americans, Latinos, low-income students and special education students to a state-determined level of proficiency.

NCLB requires that by the end of the 2005-2006 school year all teachers will be “highly qualified” as defined in the law. All students must be “proficient” by the end of the 2013-2014 school year.

Schools identified as needing improvement are required to provide students with the opportunity to take advantage of public school choice. Congress has appropriated a substantial increase in Title I funding to enable school districts to implement the parental choice requirements. (from Wikipedia)

I’m still searching for an objectionable provision of the law. But, as always, the devil is in the details.

In a recent series of articles in the Wall Street Journal (Jan. 16, 17, 18, 2007), The Bell Curve author Charles Murray described how “education is becoming the preferred method for diagnosing and attacking a wide range of problems in American life,” with NCLB as a primary mechanism. Murray objects to the dirty little secret that “education's role in causing or solving any problem cannot be evaluated without considering the underlying intellectual ability of the people being educated.” Intelligence is the most significant factor yet the one that nobody mentions.

Murray begins with a truism that is nonetheless commonly denied: “Half of all children are below average, and teachers can do only so much for them.” The first part is a law of nature: Like the distribution of heights, weights, and athletic ability, intelligence is distributed from low to high in a bell-shaped curve with 50% below and 50% above the mean. But unlike heights and weights, there is very little one can do about basic intelligence. As Murray put it, “We do not live in Lake Wobegon.”

Furthermore, academic accomplishment is dependent on intelligence, as well as motivation, and intelligence sets the limits. Murray uses the example of a girl in the 99th percentile of intelligence, corresponding to an IQ of 135, but getting a C in English. She is underachieving, and someone who sets out to raise her performance might be able to get a spectacular result. Many of us have had similar experiences with our kids.

What about the boy sitting behind her getting a D-? His IQ is 90, at the 25th percentile? Better instruction and increased effort are not going to enable the boy to “follow an exposition written beyond a limited level of complexity.” If the course is adequately rigorous and the grading is honest, it may not be possible to give him more than an E for effort.

Of course, we hope the boy becomes functionally literate, as that will have an effect on the jobs he can hold. “But still he will be confined to jobs that require minimal reading skills. He is just not smart enough to do more than that.” Do we help the boy by holding up unrealistic standards? Do we really believe that the great middle class of intelligence, the 50% from 90 to 110 IQ, should take college prep courses and attend traditional colleges?

Murray points out that performance of public schools may well be reflecting the innate ability of the students. For example, in the National Assessment of Educational Progress 2005 tests, 36% of all fourth-graders were below the “basic achievement” score in reading. It sounds like a terrible record. But 36% of fourth-graders also have IQs lower than 95. If the proficient level (“basic achievement”) requires the innate ability of a 96 IQ, the results are not surprising.

So, what does proficiency in NCLB mean, and what does it require? Remarkably, it appears that no one has asked what IQ is necessary to give a child a reasonable chance to meet the NAEP's basic achievement scores?

Why has such an important factor been ignored in policy discussions? High intelligence is a gift, like good looks or athletic ability, and those with high IQ are not superior human beings, just lucky ones. By and large God’s gifts are distributed. Take the short, chubby, older gentleman with a 45 golf handicap: wouldn’t it be nice if he had an IQ slightly above the mean? Be fair. But political correctness and the law have made any discussion of the most important factor in educational achievement all but impossible.

The US Civil Rights Act, as interpreted in the 1971 United States Supreme Court decision Griggs v. Duke Power Co., prevent American employers from using cognitive ability tests as a controlling factor in selecting employees whenever (1) the use of the test would have a disparate impact on hiring by race and (2) where the test is not shown to be directly relevant to the job or class of jobs at issue. Since IQ tests fail the first requirement they are disallowed. Schools have largely adopted the same restriction, except in special cases. And academic rigor, or even classroom discipline, are sometimes rewarded with law suits brought by unhappy parents.

Murray is making the case for a more realistic, more practical approach to education policy. The Bell Curve set out to prove that American society has become increasingly meritocratic, wherein incomes and other positive social outcomes are distributed more and more according to intelligence and less and less according to social status. That is a trend to be applauded.

The Bell Curve evidence came largely from the National Longitudinal Study of Youth, a federal project that tested over 10,000 Americans in 1980, with follow-up interviews regularly thereafter. Each participant completed an intelligence test and was then evaluated for subsequent social outcomes (high-school graduation, success in college, level of income, likelihood of being in jail, likelihood of getting divorced or being on welfare, and so forth). As a rule, a person's intelligence turned out to predict such trends rather well, and when intelligence was statistically controlled, many differences among ethnic groups vanished.

Thus, when considering education policy, whether it be No Child Left Behind, the expansion of colleges or the promotion of charter schools and vocational schools, it would be well to include all pertinent factors, most especially the intellectual capabilities of the customers.

Consider the information in the following table that pertains to education policy and expectations.


Grade .....IQ......% Pop....Pop M.....Ed. Potential........Job Potential
A........ >125........5.........15........Prof. School.......Professions, Science
B........ 110-125....20........60..........College.............Sales, Engineering
C..........90-110.....50.......150........Jr. College...........Clerical, Crafts
D..........75-90......20.......60........High School...........Trades, Service
E.......... <90........5........15.........Vocational.........simple & supervised

The first column is a model grade scale reflecting increasing information processing demands (from E to A) for appropriately rigorous school courses. The student populations expected to possess the requisite levels of ability are in the second and third columns. Thus the middle group of student abilities (90–110 IQ) should be expected to achieve a middle grade of C in legitimate courses aimed at the general population. The top 5% of the population is expected to excel and earn “A” grades while the bottom 5% should not pass such courses. Note that in America there are millions of people in each category. Is it reasonable to expect the bottom 25% of the students to perform adequately in such courses? Is it fair?

The education potential of each group is listed in the fifth column. Generally speaking, an IQ of 110 or more (25% of the population) is needed to be successful in a traditional four year college. This is a threshold, but particular disciplines (eg. engineering and most of the hard natural sciences) require much higher levels of intelligence. Yet more than 40% of all persons in their late teens are trying to go to a four-year college. This is a serious mismatch of expectations and reality, not to mention marketplace demand.

All the above says nothing about the quality of the lives that should be open to everyone across the range of intellectual ability. As Murray points out, there has been “an explosive increase in the demand for craftsmen. Finding a good lawyer or physician is easy. Finding a good carpenter, painter, electrician, plumber, mason --- is difficult, and it is a seller's market. Journeymen craftsmen routinely make incomes in the top half of the income distribution while master craftsmen can make six figures. They have work even in a soft economy. Their jobs cannot be outsourced to India.”

Many agree that the K-12 education system is failing the lower half of the intelligence distribution, preferentially inhabited by low income children and minorities (Blacks, Hispanics and Native Americans). The fallacy was in ever expecting that group of kids to be able to compete or even be comfortable in a traditional college prep school setting. Far better would be to segregate the top 25% of students in classrooms and courses away from the much larger group that do not have the smarts to compete in traditional four year colleges and in high skilled occupations. For their sake, the lower 75% would be better served taking courses suited to their abilities and then moving into career programs at trade schools or community colleges.

Then when the college educated car salesman needs to paint his house, he may be able to find his former classmate who, with a crew of minimum wage workers, charges $10,000 for a weeks work. And next week the painting contractor may visit his salesman friend at the Porsche dealership.

Let us close with Murray by looking at the upper end of the IQ distribution. Do they need any help? I have several friends with kids in high school sporting averages of 4.4 or higher. Since all A’s equates to 4.0, the extra 0.4 comes from getting A’s on advanced placement courses. One friend’s daughter had a full semester of college courses finished before she graduated high school. It sounds good, but what it means is that the courses are too easy for her, even the AP courses.

Bright high school students are not being challenged, and many will find college to be a cold deluge. A recent report by the New Commission on the Skills of the American Workforce recommends creating state board exams that students could pass at age 16 to move either on to community college or to a university-level high school curriculum. The system as constructed is failing the majority of students across the spectrum of intelligence.

If “intellectually gifted” is defined to mean people who can stand out in almost any profession short of theoretical physics, then research about IQ and job performance indicates that an IQ of at least 120 is usually needed. That number demarcates the top 10% of the IQ distribution, or about 15 million people in today's labor force--a lot of people.

People in the top 10% of intelligence produce most of the books we read and the television programs we watch. They invent our new pharmaceuticals, computer chips, software and every other form of advanced technology.

The top 10% of the intelligence distribution has a huge influence on whether our economy is vital, our culture healthy, our institutions secure and our nation safe. “Our future depends crucially on how we educate the next generation of people gifted with unusually high intelligence.”

But we live in an age when it is unfashionable to talk about the special responsibility of being gifted, because to do so acknowledges inequality of ability, which is elitist. Our gifts bring along obligations to be worthy of them and the most important and most difficult to achieve is wisdom. The encouragement of wisdom requires a special kind of education. Most of all it requires recognition of one's own intellectual limits and fallibilities -- in a word, humility. Humility requires that the gifted learn what it feels like to hit an intellectual wall.

The encouragement of wisdom requires mastery of analytical building blocks including the details of grammar and syntax and of logical fallacies. The encouragement of wisdom requires being steeped in the study of ethics, starting with Aristotle and Confucius, and an advanced knowledge of history. It is not enough that gifted children learn to be nice. They must know what it means to be good.

The gifted should be taught to be judgmental since they need to learn how to make accurate judgments. They should not be taught to be equally respectful of Aztecs and Greeks. In short, Murray is calling for a revival of the classical definition of a liberal education, serving its classic purpose: to prepare elites to do their duty. I can think of only a few colleges (Chicago, Hillsdale, Dallas, Liberty, Biola, Thomas Aquinas) that serve such a purpose.

Murray’s goal here was not to complete an argument but to begin a discussion; not to present policy prescriptions, but to plead for greater realism in our outlook on education. In order to make the massive changes that our educational system requires, honest and brave people will need to slay the basilisk and do the right thing.

Please do not think that my emphasis on intelligence and school performance means that I am an apologist for the teaching profession. I believe that the large majority of students underachieve in school and there is plenty of blame to go around. A system based on teacher tenure and lacking pay for performance is seriously flawed. However, the students and their parents must shoulder the major portion of the burden and the blame.

The right to a free education comes with responsibilities: To behave in class, to respect your teacher and classmates, pay attention in class, to do your homework and study. These are listed in order of importance and should be non-negotiable, but in many schools the poor teacher cannot even rely on the first priority. School boards, principals, teachers, mayors, PTAs and parents must stand up and demand discipline even if it means fighting parent-initiated lawsuits, the government and the ACLU.

Finally, the schools need to start again to teach what is important and worry less about student’s self esteem. In 1989 the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics issued a report that influenced a generation of teachers to “let children explore their own solutions to problems, write and draw pictures about math, and use tools like the calculator at the same time they learn algorithms.” Consequently, only 50% of 10th graders pass the math part of state assessment tests and our students get slaughtered in international competitions. Fuzzy math, following the last fad called “new math,” has crippled students by de-emphasizing basic drills and memorization in favor of allowing children to find their own ways to solve problems. A back-to-basics movement in math and reading (phonics) is imperative.