________________________________________  THE VERMONT EDUCATION REPORT January 10, 2005 - Vol. 5, No. 02 ¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯  Covering education news in Vermont and beyond... Informative, provocative, unique... Published by Vermonters for Better Education  VBE is a nonprofit, nonpartisan organization whose mission is to enlist parents and the public at large in achieving quality educational opportunities for all the children of Vermont by monitoring the state of education in Vermont; promoting the value of educational freedoms for all parents; and giving parents the evaluative tools with which to identify excellence. Libby Sternberg, executive director: VTBetterEd@aol.com NEWS & ANALYSIS... THERE'S STILL A PROBLEM? One of the promises of Act 60 was that it would equalize education spending among so-called poor and rich districts. After all, the Act was in response to a court ruling that mandated this leveling of the playing field. So it was a surprise to learn last week that Education Week, the education newspaper of record, has given Vermont an "F" on the "Resources Equity" component of the paper's annual "Quality Counts" report. According to the report, Vermont received the lowest grade among all 50 states because of "wide disparities in per-pupil spending across districts relative to other states."  As has become the norm when the state receives a bad grade on any national report, Vermont's education officials were quick to offer caveats.  William Mathis, superintendent of Rutland Northeast Supervisory Union and a force behind the original lawsuit that led to Act 60, was quoted in a Rutland Herald article saying that Vermont's statewide education property tax is "perfectly equitable."  Vermont Commissioner of Education Richard Cate said in an AP article that "No education funding formula is perfect, but I am confident that ours is one of the most equitable in the country." The report also lists Vermont's latest scores on National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) tests. These show about 35 to 40 percent of Vermont students scoring proficiently on some gateway skill areas such as math. Here, too, Superintendent Mathis has explanations. He believes the state's standards are "incredibly high," according to the Rutland Herald article. "Are we really seeing a cost benefit for the money? In my opinion the answer is yes." For the full Quality Counts Report, go to http://www.edweek.org EDUCATION COMMITTEES SHAPE UP Last week, we speculated that Rep. George Cross (D-Winooski) would become chairman of the House Education Committee and Sen. Jim Condos (D-Chittenden) would retain his chairmanship of Senate Education. Well, 50 percent of our predictions "achieved the standard." That is to say, we were half right. Rep. Cross is head of House Ed, but Sen. Donald E. Collins (D-Franklin) is the new chair of the Senate Education Committee, on which he served during the last session. The other members of Senate Ed are: Sen. William Doyle (R-Washington), vice chairman; Sen. Jim Condos (D-Chittenden), Sen. Robert Starr (D-Essex-Orleans), and Sen. Wendy Wilton (R-Rutland).  It's an interesting group and could bode well for education reform that's not too tied to the education establishment's vision. Sen. Wilton supports school choice (she's a member of the board of Vermonters for Better Education, the publisher of this newsletter), and Sen. Starr has a reputation for being a social conservative. As a member of the House, he co-sponsored social conservative bills on partial birth abortion and parental notification, for example. But he also put his name on the "repeal Act 150" bill. Act 150 is the state's extremely modest public school choice program involving only handfuls of students from public high schools. In the House, the Education Committee is comprised of Rep. Cross as chair, Rep. Kathy LaVoie (R-Swanton), vice chair; Rep. Denise Barnard (D-Richmond); Rep. Gregory Clark (R-Vergennes); Rep. Kevin Endres (R-Milton); Rep. Tim Jerman (D-Essex Junction); Rep. Duncan Kilmartin (R-Newport City); Rep. Judy Livingston (R-Manchester); Rep. Rosemary McLaughlin (D-Royalton); Rep. Anne Mook (D-Bennington); and Rep. Dave Potter (D-Clarendon). The majority of members did not serve on this committee last year.  GOVERNOR'S INAUGURAL ADDRESS: NOT MUCH ON EDUCATION The following excerpt is the only portion of Governor Jim Douglas's inaugural address that touched on education issues: "As the pace of our economy's transition from a largely industrial base to a global information age quickens, we must continue our work to improve our infrastructure and empower Vermonters with the education and skills they need to excel in the next generation of jobs... "We need to remain steadfast in our commitment to improve primary and secondary education, close the performance gaps, and encourage innovative approaches and technologies that improve student achievement. "Participants in today's -- and more importantly, tomorrow's -- economy must have opportunities to continue learning and upgrade their skills. We need to sustain our efforts to make our colleges more affordable by improving our support of higher education. "Everyone, young and old, must have access to the knowledge and skills to participate in the evolving economy. That is why I am proposing that we place an even greater emphasis on skills training so every working Vermonter can compete and succeed in the 21st Century. "Working together, we can educate and inspire a workforce that is second to none, making our working families more secure and our communities more prosperous."  *   *   * ELSEWHERE  FROM...The Fordham Foundation  On the web at... http://www.edexcellence.net 1965 AND 2005 by Chester E. Finn, Jr., president of the Fordham Foundation and a former assistant secretary of education Why it seems like only yesterday. . . . Oops, sorry, this is not to be a sappy reminiscence by an aging fogey. (Well, aging, maybe.) But in greeting 2005, I want to explain some momentous changes these past four decades, for American education and for me. Yes, two milestones were passed in 1965. Lyndon Johnson signed the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ancestor of NCLB)--and I applied to the Harvard MAT program. A senior in college, I was swept up in volunteer social service programs of every sort, roused by the era's angry books about poverty and bad urban schools (Harrington's The Other America, Schrag's Village School Downtown, even Kozol's Death at an Early Age), stimulated by a guest lecture that Pat Moynihan gave in Ed Banfield's course on urban problems, and inspired by LBJ's insistence that the path out of poverty led through education and the suggestion that well-intended government programs such as Title I, Headstart, Upward Bound, Job Corps, Teacher Corps and Community Action were sure ways to place millions of needy families upon that path. So to the distress of my parents I eschewed the family career--a fine Ohio law firm founded by my grandfather--and presented myself to Dean Ted Sizer and the other denizens of Appian Way as a candidate to become a bona fide educator. I was, of course, a card-carrying, line-toeing, mid-'60s liberal. After all, I lived in Cambridge, Mass. We had scarcely dried our tears from Kennedy's assassination and the alternative to LBJ was Goldwater! Who could think that I and others like me, marching in synch with a beneficent federal government, would not clobber ignorance, end poverty, and turn America's inner cities into functioning, empowered, responsible communities? Fast-forward forty years. The country changed. Education changed. The "problem definition" changed. The labels changed. And I changed. What happened? I'll suggest ten partial explanations: Those ambitious programs turned out not to work very well and the problems they were combating proved tougher than we thought. The Head Start gains didn't last. Only a few Upward Bounders made it through college. Title I didn't cause schools to perform better. Some well-meaning policies even made things worse. (This was also true of a host of "social engineering" efforts. Remember compulsory busing?) More than a few other Johnson liberals were, in Irving Kristol's famous phrase, "mugged by reality" and began to second-guess their assumptions about the easy efficacy of public policy. Within education, the '60s "equality" goals were gradually displaced by a different but equally urgent problem: quality. We woke up one day to learn that SAT scores had plummeted. Employers grumped. International comparisons showed the U.S. in a bad way. The "Excellence Commission" warned of a "rising tide of mediocrity." (My earliest contribution to this awakening was a 1981 Life magazine article titled "A Call for Quality Education.") James Coleman's powerful insight gained traction, as more people recognized that the antidote to low achievement wasn't necessarily more spending--at least that there's no sure connection between what goes into a school as resources and what comes out as learning. (I first encountered this paradigm-shifting discovery as a grad student--by then in a doctoral program--when mentor Moynihan joined with Frederick Mosteller to conduct a celebrated Harvard "faculty seminar" devoted to a reanalysis of the Coleman data.) The better I got to know Washington, the more clearly I saw that Uncle Sam is a clumsy, imprecise fellow. At the Education Department, where I worked for several fascinating years in the mid-eighties, it proved hard enough to get checks delivered on time to the correct addresses. How could such an agency transform the practices of thousands of schools and millions of educators? Even the policies of fifty states? The state/local agencies that we trusted to do right by kids revealed themselves as part of the problem. School systems and state education departments were glad to take federal dollars but deeply averse to altering their own behaviors and routines, even when it became obvious that these fostered mediocrity, inequality, and inefficiency The ever-balder self-absorption and power-greed of education's so-called stakeholders meant the producers were better served than the consumers. The teacher unions (whose role and clout ballooned during this period) were the worst offenders, but far from the only ones. "Education establishment" became a term of opprobrium, a source of trouble. The public school monopoly similarly revealed itself to be a wellspring of dysfunction. Its fierce opposition to initiatives like tuition tax credits (on which I worked alongside Senator Moynihan in the late 1970's) unmasked its determination to preserve control at all costs. Never mind that Catholic schools (the main focus of the Packwood-Moynihan bill) did a better job at a lower cost; never mind that many kids wanting to attend them could not afford to without financial help. Never mind that government routinely assisted students enrolled in Notre Dame and Fordham and St. Mary's. "Those kids belong to us" was the monopoly's message, "and so do all the education dollars." Even as Moynihan's ideas rubbed off on me, his party forsook me, moving leftward on myriad issues, foreign and domestic, and handcuffing itself to the unions. Meanwhile, the GOP shared my diagnosis of the problem and some of my ideas about solutions. The education profession forsook me, too, stubbornly pursuing ideas, strategies, and beliefs that simply didn't work. By 1981, Diane Ravitch and I founded the Educational Excellence Network. While many members were Democrats, all were discomfited by the regnant "progressivism" of the ed school thought world (which I came to know up-close while on the Vanderbilt faculty). I got more experience with government and politics--and fell in with the likes of Lamar Alexander and Bill Bennett. This exposed me to the power of the bully pulpit to alter ideas and the value (and scarcity) of astute, idea-driven reformers in high places. It also buttressed my sense of the establishment's hostility to reform and the system's inertia. People started to call me a "conservative," but I saw myself (and still do) as a radical, seeking big changes on behalf of the poor and the powerless--and one day I realized that folks called "liberals" were more interested in maintaining the power structure and pleasing the stakeholders than in meeting the needs of children and boosting the performance of schools. It's been quite a ride--and I see no signs that it's going to get smoother. So put on your seat belts. And Happy New Year.  FROM...The Freedom Foundation  On the web at: http://www.freedomfoundation.us SCHOOL REFORM by David W. Kirkpatrick, senior education fellow Many in the public school establishment, especially the two major teacher unions, repeatedly accuse school choice advocates of "bashing" the public schools. That itself is a form of "bashing" -- a resort to name-calling. No one can seriously claim that good things don't occur in some public schools. A system with more than 14,000 school districts, 90,000 schools, three million teachers plus millions of other staff members and nearly 50 million students is so varied that almost anything you say about schools is true somewhere. It is the defenders of the status quo who fear that if students can choose there will be a flight from the public schools, not realizing that by doing so they are giving the strongest argument to permit all students to exercise school choice. Valid criticism of public schools is based on facts drawn from the government, research studies and surveys. Probably the best known critique is the 1983 federal report, "A Nation at Risk," the federal study by a commission composed of members of the establishment. Comments that the public schools are engulfed by a "rising tide of mediocrity," and that, "if another nation did to us what we are doing to ourselves, we would consider it an act of war," have become part of the education debate. Those are taken directly from the report.  All of the students who were in school in 1983 have long since graduated or dropped out, so we have moved beyond the first generation, and are approaching the end of the second generation, of the products of "reform." What has been gained from the time, money and effort devoted to attempts to improve public education? Consider statements by Congress in the "Goals 2000: Educate America Act," passed in 1994, more than a decade after "A Nation at Risk." There, Congress declared that: "A majority of public schools in the United States are failing to prepare students to achieve the National Education Goals..." P. 91 "The current achievement levels of students in the Untied States are far below those that might indicate competency in challenging subject matter in core content areas." p. 112 "The rate of decline in our urban schools is escalating at a rapid pace. Student performance in most inner city schools grows worse each year. At least half of all students entering ninth grade fail to graduate four years later and many more students from high-poverty backgrounds leave schools with skills that are inadequate for today's workplace." p. 115 Defenders of the status quo need to tell Congress to stop "bashing" the public school system. If the Congressional findings seem too harsh, consider the comment that inner city schools "are absolutely terrible -- they ought to be blown up." Keith Geiger, then-president of the National Education Association. Or, how about this one: "we're going to be digging even deeper, and the teachers are going to be even dumber." The late Albert Shanker, as president of the American Federation of Teachers. Shanker also said that "It is time to admit that public education operates like a planned economy...It more resembles a communist economy than our own market economy." And, like any planned economy, public education, being a top down system, cannot be reformed from within. Which is why it hasn't been reformed. Internal reform hasn't happened, isn't happening, can't happen and won't happen. For more than a century, beginning with a study in Chicago in the 1890s, researchers have found that public schools have never met the needs of most students. In the past 50 years, as noted by Andrew Coulson and numerous others, we have cut the pupil-teacher ratio in half; increased per-pupil spending more than fourfold in constant dollars, and tried innumerable "reforms." To no avail. What is needed is not a modified system but a successful alternative. As someone once pointed out, Edison did not seek to improve the candle; he invented the light bulb; and Henry Ford did not seek to breed a better type of horse; he built automobiles. As Winston Churchill's once said, Americans can always be depended upon to do the right thing - after they have tried everything else. David Kirkpatrick is a Bennington native. A former public school teacher and officer in the Pennsylvania NEA, he now lives in Pennsylvania. *   *   * The VERMONT EDUCATION REPORT is published by Vermonters for Better Education 170 Church Street, Rutland, VT 05701, 802.773.5240 Contact VTBetterEd@aol.com for more information.   Subscribe Here SubscribeRemove

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