________________________________________  THE VERMONT EDUCATION REPORT January 12, 2004 Vol. 4, 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... OPPORTUNITY TO TESTIFY Vermonters for Better Education has learned that the House Education committee might be traveling to Rutland on Tuesday, January 20 to hear from educators and ordinary citizens on the issue of public school choice. If you would like to know more about this opportunity or any other opportunity to testify - particularly if you would like to testify in support of public school choice - please contact VBE at VTBetterEd@aol.com and we will notify you of the details of the meeting!  IMPORTANT LEGISLATIVE INFORMATION Legislative Directory (including info on who your representatives are): http://www.leg.state.vt.us/legdir/legdir2.htm Email addresses for Senators: http://www.leg.state.vt.us/legdir/e-mail2.cfm?Body=S Email addresses for Representatives: http://www.leg.state.vt.us/legdir/e-mail2.cfm?Body=H Schedules for committees: http://www.leg.state.vt.us/schedule/schedule2.cfm Search for a bill by sponsor or keyword: http://www.leg.state.vt.us/database/search/search.cfm Status of a specific bill: http://www.leg.state.vt.us/database/status/status.cfm HOW TO CONTACT LEGISLATORS Legislators are often busy and not available to take calls when they are in the Statehouse. However, constituents may call the Sergeant-at-Arms and leave messages for legislators. The phone numbers are: 1-800-322-5616 or 1-802-828-2228. In addition, many legislators post their home phone numbers in the legislative directory (available on-line at http://www.leg.state.vt.us/legdir/legdir2.htm). Legislators are usually home on the weekends and Mondays. If you have a long message or just want to make sure your message is communicated verbatim to your legislator, you can write a note or letter and fax it to the Statehouse at: 1-802-828-2424. Most, if not all, legislators use email as well. While not all email addresses are posted in the legislative directory, the formula for legislative email addresses is simple: first initial followed by last name@leg.state.vt.us. For example, Senator James Condos, chair of the Senate Education Committee, can be reached at Jcondos@leg.state.vt.us. Many legislators also have personal email addresses. Some of those are listed at the legislative directory site. For example, Sen. Condos can also be reached through his AOL address: JCondos@aol.com. HOUSE EDUCATION COMMITTEE Rep. Howard Crawford (R-Burke)chair: hcrawford@stj.k12.vt.us Rep. George Cross (D-Winooski), vice chair Rep. William Aswad (D-Burlington) Rep. Carolyn Whitney Branagan (R-Georgia): cbranagan@leg.state.vt.us or Dunmore@adelphia.net Rep. Henry Chen (D-Mendon): hchen@leg.state.vt.us Rep. Virginia Duffy (R-Rutland City): vduffy@leg.state.vt.us Rep. Kevin Endres (R-Milton); kendres@leg.state.vt.us or MrMtBus@aol.com Rep. Steve Hingtgen (P-Burlington): shingtgen@leg.state.vt.us Rep. Kathy LaBelle LaVoie (R-Swanton): klavoie@leg.state.vt.us or klavoie@together.net Rep. Rosemary McLaughlin (D-S. Royalton): rmclaughlin@leg.state.vt.us or rozo@valley.net Rep. Ann Seibert (D-Norwich) SENATE EDUCATION COMMITTEE Sen. James Condos (D-Chittenden), chair - jcondos@leg.state.vt.us or jcondos@aol.com Sen. Kevin Mullin (R-Rutland) kjmbjm@aol.com Sen. Hull Maynard (R-Rutland) - hull@sover.net Sen. Don Collins (D-Franklin) - dcollins@leg.state.vt.us Sen. Hinda Miller (D-Chittenden) -- hmiller@leg.state.vt.us or hinda@deforestconcepts.com  TEXT OF GOVERNOR'S STATE OF THE STATE ADDRESS Last week, Governor Jim Douglas delivered his State of the State address. In it, he called for an expansive public school choice program. Below is the excerpt from his speech related to school choice: "For our state to succeed economically and culturally we must rely on the informed wisdom of our people, and we are duty bound to do all we can to help foster that wisdom through our system of public education. "Education is the great equalizer, giving the poor, the disadvantaged, the voiceless and the vulnerable the power to pursue their greatest hopes and aspirations so that no one may deny them their destiny. "Vermonters have demonstrated their devotion to this principle time and time again, seeking to balance funding among school districts, reduce class size and improve teacher pay, hoping to slowly but surely develop a system where all schools are capable of addressing all of our children's individual needs. "Vermont is fortunate to have so many wonderful and dedicated teachers and administrators who share this goal. Because of them our public school system is strong and it is a system of which we should be proud. "Despite all of our efforts, however, true equality of educational opportunity continues to escape too many of our children. It is our responsibility to ensure that these children have options so that not one day of learning is unnecessarily lost because of barriers erected by government. "Today, the children of wealthy Vermonters can escape such barriers by paying tuition to another school of their choice. But for many middle and lower-income residents, tuition payments are not an option. Instead, they are forced to play the hand that is dealt them, and their child's future is on the line. "The time has come to find an alternative that gives every child, regardless of residence or economic background, a truly equal opportunity for a first class public education that meets his or her needs. School choice should not be a privilege reserved only for the wealthy. It should be the right of all Vermonters. "That is why I am proposing a statewide, K-12 public school choice program that affords all Vermont students an opportunity to attend the school of their choice. No longer can we allow the defenders of the status quo to stand in the way of equal access to the best education our public schools have to offer. "As you consider my proposal, you will hear testimony from parents whose children would benefit from choice. Their reasons will be diverse, but each equally important to their child. I urge you to listen to these families and the challenges they confront as they struggle to give their children access to the first-class education they deserve, and then pass a bill to guarantee it."  TWO SCHOOL CHOICE BILLS INTRODUCED; CHARTERS TO BE DISCUSSED IN SENATE On the very day that Governor Jim Douglas presented his State of the State address, a public school choice bill was introduced into the House by House Education Chair Howard Crawford (R-Burke). Crawford's bill, H.511, would allow parents to choose any public school for their child starting in 2007. However, as early as 2005 all high school students would be allowed to choose another public school. Money would follow the child in each case, but the formula for tuition payments allows for a gradual implementation of the bill, thus giving school administrators and board members time to adjust to the new world of school choice. For a look at the bill, go to: http://www.leg.state.vt.us/docs/legdoc.cfm?URL=/docs/2004/bills/intro/H-511.HTM Another school choice bill, H.521, was introduced last week as well. With over two dozen sponsors, this bill would allow for a more expansive form of school choice and would include private schools and well as home study programs. The tuition amounts in this bill range from $500 for home school elementary education services to $5,000 for high school. The bill can be viewed at: http://www.leg.state.vt.us/docs/legdoc.cfm?URL=/docs/2004/bills/intro/H-521.HTM A charter school bill introduced last year, S.53, meanwhile, will be on the Senate Education Committee's agenda this week for discussion. This bill is available at: http://www.leg.state.vt.us/docs/legdoc.cfm?URL=/docs/2004/bills/intro/S-053.HTM  EDUCATION WEEK GIVES VERMONT MIXED GRADES The education journal of record, Education Week, has released its annual "Quality Counts" report and once again Vermont has received mixed grades. They are as follows: Standards and Accountability: C Improving Teacher Quality: C School Climate: B- Resources: Adequacy: A Resources: Equity: C+ The full report is available at: http://www.edweek.org/sreports/qc04/ Vermont's mediocre "School Climate" grade is interesting because the state has such a low teacher/student ratio. The report cites a lack of school choice as the reason for a lack of a higher grade: "Vermont is one of only 10 states, meanwhile, without charter school laws. Participation in the state's interdistrict open-enrollment policy is voluntary for districts. Both those facts limit school choice and depress the state's grade in this section."  VERMONT NOT USING ALL ITS FEDERAL MONEY? According to an article in the December 10 Detroit News, states are sending millions of dollars back to the U.S. Treasury instead of spending them on education. The article used data provided by the Education Department and obtained by The Associated Press. The data showed that states returned $124 million to Washington "that was to have gone toward large education programs such as special education and aid to poor children." A table accompanying the article showed that Vermont's share of unused federal moneys was only $18,258 last year. For the full article, go to: http://www.detnews.com/2004/schools/0401/10/schools-31658.htm  INDEPENDENT CANDIDATE ANNOUNCES SUPPORT FOR FULL SCHOOL CHOICE On December 15, Constitution Day, Hardy Machia of Grand Isle, running as an Independent, announced his candidacy for governor. The top plank of his platform is education freedom, that is, parental choice. While the details of his education policy have not been filled in, it appears that he supports some form of choice, probably along the lines of Schoolchildren First, for all parents and for all schools.  *   *   * WHO COVERS EDUCATION IN VERMONT?  WE DO! Please consider a donation to VBE - not only will it help support the continued circulation of the Vermont Education Report, it will also help us fund a radio campaign to explain the benefits of school choice. We've been receiving contributions steadily, but we could use more! Send your checks to: VBE, 170 Church Street, Rutland, VT 05701. Thanks!  *   *   * ELSEWHERE  A round-up of notable articles from other education publications. FROM THE GADFLY, an e-newsletter of the Fordham Foundation (http://www.edexcellence.net) TO GLIMPSE NCLB'S FUTURE, LOOK TO THE PAST by Michael W. Kirst At the second anniversary of NCLB, it is useful to think about the historical evolution of the law that NCLB is meant to reform--Title I of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965. Media coverage of all the unresolved problems of NCLB's design and implementation may engender a shortsightedness. An historical comparison with ESEA Title I circa 1965 makes me believe that a long-run evolutionary view of NCLB is needed. I was the second program person hired by the U.S. Office of Education Title I Director in 1965. Also, in 1980, Dick Jung and I conducted a 13-year longitudinal evaluation of that program's implementation. (EEPA, Vol. 2, No. 5, 1980) To be sure, NCLB is pupil-outcomes oriented, while Title I focused on inputs, yet the analogy has promise. In 1965-68, there was evidence of several major operational failures in Title I implementation, but these were mostly fixed over time, through several federal legislative reauthorization cycles and with increased enforcement by state and local Title I coordinators. For example, in the early years not enough Title I money was spent by local districts in the most poverty-stricken schools, or on special Title I interventions. Massive sums were diverted to regular programs or wasted on frivolous extras. In Louisiana, Title I funds built segregated high school swimming pools; Whitefish Bay, Wisconsin rented tuxedos for students to attend the senior prom. Several states did not even send Title I federal or state regulations and guidelines to local school districts to utilize. And the program as a whole included too many pupils to mount a serious intervention program at the classroom level. In fact, Jung and I found that it took more than a decade to target funds to disadvantaged pupils and create school site intervention programs that met the legal intent of Title I. We concluded that: 1. Given the wide variety of groups responsible for setting and implementing policies concerning Title I --and the decentralized, politically charged bureaucratic setting in which those policies took shape-- changes to local Title I administrative procedures were incremental, not immediate. 2. Over time, however, these incremental changes eventually yielded significant structural and substantive changes in Title I implementation policies and practices. 3. The direction of these changes over the long haul was toward a more aggressive federal rule-setting, monitoring, and enforcement role in implementing some of the program's crucial categorical requirements, and increased compliance with key provisions in the law. 4. Multiple factors affected the pace and directions of these changes, including: a. a political atmosphere dominated by professional education lobbies shifted to one in which interest groups --including categorical program personnel, beneficiaries of Title I services, and lobby groups championing the recipients' causes-- were more oriented toward compliance with federal mandates; b. the emergence of a vertical network of administrative, evaluative, and teaching specialists with careers that depended upon the program; c. broad-based social movements that reinforced the philosophy behind Title I. The lesson of Title I from the 1960s and 1970s is that we should give NCLB a long time before making final judgments about its effectiveness. Growing pains and problems are to be expected with such an ambitious and complex law, and as we gather feedback from local and state education officials and solid information about its classroom implementation and pupil impact, Congress will likely move to adjust the law. This was the case with Title I, which was passed by the Johnson administration, but in 1969 the Nixon administration vowed to clean up the administrative mess, and did so in a bipartisan effort that included Democratic Senator Walter Mondale. One factor that may complicate the effort to smooth out the bumps of implementing NCLB is the lack of state and local support that gradually helped Title I meet its legislative intent. Title I had parent site councils and a cadre of federal, state, and local administrators on the federal payroll who worked to ensure fidelity to the federal intent. These Title I coordinators were more loyal to the federal law than to local politics. By contrast, a recent national survey published in Education Week (12/19/03) indicates that half of school principals "expressed the view that [NCLB] was either politically motivated or aimed at undermining schools." Many local superintendents feel the same way. Title I never had this kind of grass-roots resistance to its basic provisions, so some new tactics seem warranted for NCLB. Perhaps NCLB needs to create the bottom-up parental constituency that was so effective for Title I. Moreover, Title I implementation was supported by an amalgam of interest groups from the legal, educational, religious, and social sectors. Some of the lobbying, technical assistance, and other advocacy processes by these special-focused pressure groups was underwritten and encouraged by such organizations as the Ford Foundation and the Harvard Center for Law and Education. Will NCLB engender this kind of interest group base outside of Washington D.C.? It is unlikely that traditional professional education interest groups such as National Education Association, American Association of School Administrators, or National School Boards Association will lobby to preserve NCLB or press for its effective implementation. (These groups wanted to turn Title I into a general aid program.) But the hopeful lesson from Title I's past is that, if one takes the long view, NCLB implementation will likely improve. NCLB analysts need to follow the law for at least a decade, and resolve major methodological questions: 1. What NCLB explanatory and dependent factors should be traced across time? How is variation in these variables described? 2. What kinds of evidence should be used? 3. How is such evidence best analyzed? 4. What political and administrative coalitions support and resist the law's basic principles, and how does this change over time? Michael W. Kirst is professor of education at Stanford University. RE-FORMING THE SCHOOLS by David W. Kirkpatrick, Senior Education Fellow U.S. Freedom Foundation http://www.freedomfoundation.us Many in the public school establishment, especially those speaking for the two major teacher unions, repeatedly accuse school choice advocates of "bashing" the public schools. That accusation itself is a form of "bashing" - a resort to name-calling rather than an appeal based on facts. Are we critical of much that occurs in public schools? You bet. And some of us have spent enough time as teachers, and even teacher union leaders and staffers to know whereof we speak. But it is also true that a system with more than 14,000 school districts, 86,000 schools, nearly three million teachers plus millions of other staff members and some 47 million students is so varied that almost anything you say about schools is true somewhere. No one seriously claims that good things don't occur in public schools. In fact, with full school choice most students will choose to remain where they are. It is the defenders of the status quo who fear there will be a flight from the public schools if students can choose, not realizing that by doing so they are giving the strongest argument to permit all students to exercise school choice. Valid criticism is based on facts, facts usually drawn from the government, research studies and surveys, and media reports. 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. Thus, if it is "bashing," blame the feds and their commission of educators. Since 1983, this nation has: - spent trillions of more dollars on the public schools;  - increased per pupil spending by 50 percent or more, measured in constant dollars; and  - tried repeatedly to reform the system. 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. Student performance in many inner city neighborhoods grows worse each year... An educational emergency exists in those urban and rural areas where there are large concentrations of children who live in poverty." p. 115 Defenders of the status quo need to tell Congress to stop "bashing" the public school system. Many observers conclude that the decline has continued, or even escalated; student performance has not improved appreciably and there is growing agreement that an educational emergency exists. If the Congressional findings seem too harsh, consider the comment that inner city schools "are absolutely terrible -- they ought to be blown up." That was said not by a school choice advocate, not even by the government, but by 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." That was said by the late Albert Shanker, as president of the American Federation of Teachers. Neither are advocates of school choice for all students, yet the comment of each exceeds almost anything said or written by the critics dismissed as "bashers." 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 a any planned economy, public education, being a top down system, cannot be reformed from within. Note that well: "cannot be reformed from within." Which is why it hasn't been reformed. Internal reform hasn't happened, isn't happening, and won't happen. Expecting those within the system to do it is, like King Canute, trying to sweep back the sea. 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 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. Once again we seem to be demonstrating the merit in Winston Churchill's comment that Americans can always be depended upon to do the right thing - after they have tried everything else. Editor's Note: David Kirkpatrick is a Bennington native, and a former public school teacher and NEA officer 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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