________________________________________  THE VERMONT EDUCATION REPORT March 21, 2005 - Vol. 5, No. 12 ¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯  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... NEW OFFICERS ON THE SBOE The State Board of Education elected new officers at its March 15 meeting. Taking over the chairmanship from Diane Mueller is Tom James. Vice chairmanship went to Bill Corrow. Both men are appointees of Governor Douglas. SPEAKING OF GOVERNOR'S INFLUENCE ON SBOE The move to dilute the governor's influence on education policy continues in the legislature. Recently we reported that Sen. James Condos (D-Chittenden) introduced S. 133, a bill that would add four legislators to the State Board of Education. At first blush, this bill would seem to add some accountability to the people for education issues. Currently, there is no direct line from taxpayers and parents to those responsible for state education policy. Legislators, because they are elected directly by the people, would seem to provide that accountability. However, governing boards represent a dilution of accountability unless every single member of the board is elected. If only a few are, they only serve to dilute the already-weak accountability in place through the appointment process. In other words, the governor has no direct control over education in Vermont. He only appoints the State Board of Education, but he doesn't get to appoint the commissioner of education, the way he does other agency heads. Therefore, this very important state employee who has control over an aspect of Vermont life that is critical to the state's success is not answerable to a high-profile elected official who himself has to answer to the people at election time. If the people don't like the current commissioner's education policy, they have only one recourse - to present their issues to the State Board of Education which hires the commissioner and thus acts as his boss.  The State Board is now comprised of a majority of Douglas appointees, however, so if their impact on education policy is not to the voters' liking, Douglas can in some SMALL way be held accountable at last for education policy. It's a very weak form of accountability, but it's all Vermont statute currently contains. Allowing another appointing body -- the legislature -- to appoint four legislators to the State Board dilutes that already-weak line of accountability. Even though the legislators themselves are elected, and thus directly accountable to voters, they are not accountable to all voters, only to those in their districts.  Because the legislature is now controlled by the Democrats and the governor is a Republican, it is highly likely that any legislative appointees to the State Board would serve only to throw a monkey wrench into policies the Douglas administration might support through his own State Board appointments. This "monkey wrench" theory is certainly hinted at in the House Education Committee witness list when the bill will be discussed this week. On the schedule is Joel Cook of the Vermont-NEA. Call us crazy, but we doubt very seriously if Cook agrees with the governor or his State Board on many education issues. If the legislature is serious about injecting more accountability into education policy in Vermont, however, we have several suggestions: 1. Allow voters to directly elect ALL State Board of Education members;  2. Allow voters to directly elect the Commissioner of Education; and/or  3. Allow a high-profile elected official - the governor - to directly appoint the Commissioner of Education. Any of those measures represents a good-faith effort to bring accountability to statewide education policy and not just a monkey wrench thrown into the gears.  *   *   * FROM ELSEWHERE... FROM THE MILTON AND ROSE FRIEDMAN FOUNDATION On the web at: http://www.friedmanfoundation.org March 15, 2005 Dear Friend, The last 24 hours have seen positive movement for school choice in Arizona, New Hampshire and Missouri. In Arizona, the Senate, by a vote of 16-12, approved a plan to provide universal school choice. Worth up to $3,500 for students in kindergarten through eighth grade and $4,500 for high school students, the plan would allow the students to start kindergarten or transfer to a private school of their choice. The Arizona Republic reports that the House is likely to pass an identical bill later this week. The bill would then be sent on to Democratic Gov. Janet Napolitano. In New Hampshire a voucher bill sponsored by Sen. Carl Johnson passed through the Senate Education Committee by a vote of 4-2. The bill will provide vouchers to families earning no more than 300% of the Federal free and reduced price lunch program and will be phased in by grade level over seven years. The bill will now go to the entire Senate for a procedural vote to move the bill into the Senate Finance Committee. If the bill passes out of Senate Finance Committee it will then be resent to the entire Senate for an up or down vote. In Missouri, a scholarship tax credit bill passed the House Urban Affairs Committee by a vote of 8-4. Of critical importance to note is the fact that the committee is chaired by democrat Ted Hoskins, St. Louis, who, along with other democrat members of the black caucus on the committee, is strongly in favor of the school choice bill. The bill itself would provide an 85% tax credit for contributions made by businesses and individuals that donate to a Scholarship granting organization. The Scholarship Granting organization would then provide vouchers to families that earn no more than 185 percent of the eligibility level for free and reduced-price lunches (for a family of four it's about $64,515). Most of the scholarship money would go toward tuition at a private school or a better-performing public school, textbooks, transportation costs and supplies. An average scholarship would be $3,800, up to a maximum of $6,500. The bill is now scheduled to go to the Rules Committee and then to a floor vote after the Easter break. Sincerely, Gordon St. Angelo,  President & CEO Milton and Rose D. Friedman Foundation  FROM THE FORDHAM FOUNDATION On the web at: http://www.edexcellence.net LEVINE VERSUS THE ED SCHOOLS Only Nixon, it is said, could go to China, and perhaps only Arthur Levine could go to our schools of education. (The analogy is flawed since Nixon, upon arrival, did not proceed to bash the Chinese government, but you get the point.) This week, Levine, president of Columbia University's Teachers College, released the first report in a planned series on education schools, the fruit of a four-year study that included national surveys of deans and faculty and a host of site visits and syllabus research. This one, called "Educating School Leaders," looks at leadership training programs for principals and superintendents. Future editions will include reports on teacher training and education research. Though the early pages laud (at great length) the wondrous diversity of American ed schools, when he gets down to brass tacks Levine could hardly be more clear--or more damning. Assessed against nine criteria spanning curriculum, faculty, admission standards, and financial resources, the majority of education leadership programs, he says, "range from inadequate to appalling, even at some of the nation's leading universities." Ed school leadership programs fail collectively on every one of Levine's nine criteria. For example: Their curricula are disconnected from the needs of leaders and their schools. Their admission standards are among the lowest in American graduate schools. Their professoriate is ill-equipped to educate school leaders. Their programs pay insufficient attention to clinical education and mentorship by successful practitioners. The degrees they award are inappropriate to the needs of today's schools and school leaders. Their research is detached from practice. And their programs receive insufficient resources. Levine blasts ed schools for engaging in a "race to the bottom" to shovel degrees out the door, the better to satisfy school districts that award raises and bonuses for graduate credit, no matter the quality of the program or its applicability to what a principal or superintendent actually does. Curricula are often disconnected from the actual needs of school leaders, as these schools seek to ape the arts/sciences model of graduate education without resting upon the body of scholarly research and evidence that sustains other graduate programs. In short, they're a mess, with only a few bright spots (Vanderbilt's Peabody and Wisconsin-Madison among them) in their dim universe. Levine's report is a self-conscious attempt to emulate the celebrated 1910 "Flexner Report," funded (like this one) by the Carnegie Corporation. Flexner famously excoriated the quacks, phrenologists, and snake-oil salesmen that populated medical education at the time. (See http://jama.ama-assn.org/cgi/content/full/291/17/2139 for an account.) His report is credited for sparking wide-ranging reforms that made America's physician training programs the most rigorous and respected in the world. Let's hope Levine's project has the same effect on education schools. One important difference, however, is that Flexner named the names of flawed institutions as well as good ones. Levine doubtless wants to be gentlemanly, as well as to retain his invitation to the American Association of Colleges of Teacher Education, but if the nation's ed leadership programs are as awful as he suggests, he ought to identify (and excoriate) specific programs. Yet he plays coy, for example, in describing Eminent University Graduate School of Education, on the palm-tree-lined campus of a newer but prestigious research university, where one administrator admitted that some students have GRE scores "just above what you get for filling out the form" and the dean referred to off-campus satellite facilities as "a festering sore." Well, if Berkeley--there, I've said it--is wasting taxpayer money admitting morons and foisting them off on California school districts as highly trained professionals, then maybe the time has come to be candid about it. This is the central flaw in Levine's otherwise compelling study: circumspection and an occasional unwillingness to go where the evidence leads. He does call for leadership programs to be evaluated rigorously and the weak members of the herd to be culled, a good start. And one of his recommendations--states and districts should stop handing out raises for graduate credits--gets to the heart of the rotten bargain many of these schools have cut: full-tuition-paying students (or increased state subsidies) in exchange for open admission and low standards. But Levine studiously avoids mentioning the possibility of a value-added component to determining raises and bonuses for administrators, and in the end, remains focused on process, not outcomes. He urges that the Ph.D. in education be reserved for future scholars and professors, while the Ed.D. should be eliminated as a monstrous waste of time and energy (and he's certainly right there), while a new M.B.A.-like master's degree should be instituted to impart real-life school administration skills. Not bad. But the new "master's in ed administration" that he proposes begs the question: why not get an M.B.A. in the first place? Why not create "education" tracks within M.B.A. programs, much as happened with M.B.A.'s in "non-profit management" or "health care systems"? Alternatively, let's drop the ed leadership programs altogether and allow states and school districts to seek the skills they need, whether for a principalship or the central office, from whoever possesses them--lawyers or accountants or retired colonels or wherever the needed skills lie. That was the suggestion of the joint Fordham-Broad manifesto, Better Leaders for America's Schools, now almost two years old but highly relevant to this debate. (And which, we're gratified to see, Levine notes and even offers qualified praise.) Let us not be too negative. Arthur Levine has done a tremendous service to the education leadership debate by telling the truth--however qualified, masked, or edited his statements sometimes are. Our schools of education are a disaster. They aren't doing their job. Where we disagree with Dr. Levine is the question of whether they will ever be capable of doing the job that needs doing. Meanwhile, we await with some eagerness his next installment, due this fall. Justin Torres is research director of the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation and a research fellow at the Hoover Institution. "Educating School Leaders," by Arthur Levine, Teachers College, March 2005  http://www.edschools.org/reports_leaders.htm "Study blasts leadership preparation," by Jeff Archer, Education Week, March 16, 2005  http://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2005/03/16/27admin.h24.html "Principals pass, then fail," USA Today, March 14, 2005  http://www.usatoday.com/news/opinion/2005-03-14-principals_x.htm "Study: School leaders poorly educated," by Ben Feller, Associated Press, March 15, 2005  http://wireservice.wired.com/wired/story.asp?section=Breaking&storyId=1004668&tw=wn_wire_story "Principals who can lead," Fort Wayne Journal-Gazette, March 15, 2005  http://www.fortwayne.com/mld/journalgazette/news/editorial/11140402.htm  FROM THE EDUCATION INTELLIGENCE AGENCY On the web at: http://www.eiaonline.com QUOTE OF THE WEEK #1 "I will agree with those who think we underfund education if your goal is to involve the state in an always-expanding role in the life of the child. If that's the case, you will never have enough money because you are asking the state to replace, well, you. The dirty little secret, of course, is that school boards negotiate contracts with teachers for amounts of money they don't have and when it comes time to pay the piper they end up selling this balderdash about how we have cut education spending. No, we haven't. The school boards should negotiate contracts based on the amount of money they know they can afford, not the amount of money they hope they can coerce out of the next legislative session." - St. Paul Pioneer Press columnist Joe Soucheray in the newspaper's March 2 issue.  QUOTE OF THE WEEK #2 "I was a shop steward. I believe in the collective bargaining process. But I don't think collective bargaining ought to be driving what we do in the classroom." - California Senate President Pro Tem Don Perata. (March 15 Sacramento Bee)  *   *   * WHO COVERS EDUCATION IN VERMONT? We do! Consider a gift to Vermonters for Better Education, the publisher of the weekly Vermont Education Report, Vermont's ONLY continual source of education news. Send donations to: VBE, 170 Church Street, Rutland, Vermont 05701. VBE is a nonprofit organization and contributions are tax-deductible.  *   *   * 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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