Proud Foundation

5/31/2006 7:05:14 AM	posted by: Jeffrey D. Proud
Professors Find Preschool Benefits Grossly Exaggerated A Rand Corporation study that claims universal preschool will deliver $2.62 in benefits for every dollar spent by California taxpayers has been thoroughly discredited by two San Jose State University economics professors who show the Rand preschool study "cherry-picked" data, based its claims on "unbelievable assumptions that bias the results," and omitted numerous costs and other factors that significantly lower the alleged benefits of universal preschool. The review of the Rand report, published by the Reason Foundation, uses Rand's own data and methodology and finds that California would actually lose 25 to 30 cents for every dollar spent on universal preschool when just a few of the Rand report's most glaring mistakes are corrected. And the Reason study concludes those losses would be even greater if many of the proposed preschool program's costs, wrongly excluded from Rand's calculations, were included in the analysis.
5/30/2006 8:47:06 AM	posted by: Jeffrey D. Proud
Low-cost education providers see a world of opportunity This is mega-cool. I wish this could happen with our K-12 education too. It could happen if the government got out of the way and let free enterprise do it's magic & let our kids learn at their own rate. Gerald Heeger is a newcomer to Texas, but he isn't afraid to set Texas-size goals. In five years, he wants his company, Whitney International University, to enroll more than half a million students around the world and be on its way to becoming the biggest provider of higher education the Earth has ever seen. "How's that for audacity?" Dr. Heeger said in his downtown Dallas office. "I believe there's a big problem in the world, and big problems need big solutions." The big problem is that billions of people in developing countries can't afford higher education. Whitney plans to offer it on the cheap – at one-quarter the price of competitors – by relying heavily on standardized lessons and the Internet. "We've got to get the cost of a college education under $1,000 a year," said Whitney creator Randy Best. "The whole mission is to reach the bottom of the pyramid." That "bottom of the pyramid" phrase comes up often when Mr. Best talks about Whitney. He said his efforts were inspired in part by reading "The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid: Eradicating Poverty Through Profits." That book, by C.K. Prahalad, argues that by targeting the global poor as a market, corporations can raise living standards – and make money.
5/29/2006 10:38:45 AM	posted by: Jeffrey D. Proud
Entrepreneur pursues dream of educational empire Dallas entrepreneur Randy Best has owned more than 100 companies in his career. Bakeries and defense contractors. Greeting-card makers and health-care companies. Companies that sell telecom equipment and companies that sell cheerleading equipment. But now, at 63, his focus is fully on education. Mr. Best is launching a network of for-profit education companies that he says could revolutionize the way students are taught, both in the U.S. and around the world. "We want to help train the next generation of educators," said Mr. Best, who has raised $50 million for the project, with much more to come. If he is successful, his private companies will move into roles traditionally held by public educators or nonprofit colleges. He wants American high schools to buy his curriculum. He wants them to pay his companies to train their teachers. And he wants to sell college education from Bogotá to Beijing. He says his companies can make the world a better place – and do it at costs low enough to turn a profit, even with bargain-basement tuition. He's gone after some big names. Rod Paige, a former secretary of education, sits on his companies' boards and serves as a senior adviser. Mike Moses, a former Dallas Independent School District superintendent and state education commissioner, is a key executive.
5/28/2006 10:34:55 AM	posted by: Jeffrey D. Proud
NO CHILD LEFT BEHIND LAW WON'T DO MUCH FOR YOUR CHILD Past experience with federal education programs predicts that the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) act will also fail parents whose children are doing poorly in school. The federal government has spent over $120 billion on Title 1 programs for low-income students since 1965. Yet the illiteracy rates for these children today are appalling, and the big achievement gap between low-income children and their peers has not closed. If the U.S. Department of Education wants to give real choice to parents, they should not be tinkering with a failed government-controlled school system that, by its very nature, strangles free choice and competition. If the federal government truly wants to give parents more school choice, they should be working to remove local and state controls over education, not adding to those controls with the No Child Left Behind law and other regulations. That is like trying to cure a person dying of arsenic poisoning by giving him more arsenic. Naturally, government education officials can't understand the fact that government control of education is not the solution, it is the problem. Over the past fifty years, federal, state, and city governments have spent hundreds of millions of dollars trying to "fix" the public schools. They have failed, time and again. For example, in July, 2005, the Congress-mandated National Assessment of Education Progress showed that high-school students' dismal reading skills have not improved since 1999.
5/27/2006 4:23:21 PM	posted by: Jeffrey D. Proud
A Last Goliath: America's Public Education System As society changes, what people want from institutions changes. America's public school system is a case in point. It was created during the Industrial Revolution, which was a period of "big organizations doing big things." As parents left the farm and headed to the factories, children were shuffled into "education factories... organized, quite explicitly, to mimic factories and assembly lines, with students envisioned as products." In the 21st century, the sun is setting on the era of factories and assembly lines, and it makes sense to question the prevailing public education model, too. Just as products across the spectrum are being tailored to people's individual tastes, one-size-fits-all schooling seems antiquated. More and more, parents are seeking out new educational options that appeal to their particular circumstances. Trends are converging that make dramatic reform of the current system more likely. Technology gives people the flexibility to work from home and to find new ways to balance professional and family life. No longer, then, is it a given that schools have to perform the function of daycare for students with working parents. As more parents have the ability to spend more time at home, they can seek new ways for their children to receive instruction outside of traditional brick-and-mortar schools. Virtual schools, online education, and other new technologies could play a big role in the future of American education. But innovative learning tools and delivery mechanisms are just one area where technology is shaping the climate for reform. Today, parents have access to a wealth of information about America's public schools that was completely unavailable just a decade ago. All one has to do is visit the Standard and Poors website www.SchoolMatters.com, which aims to give "policymakers, educators, and parents the tools they need to make better-informed decisions that improve student performance." From test scores to budgets to teacher qualifications, SchoolMatters.com provides extensive information about almost every public school and school district in the country. This website-and others such as GreatSchools.net and RateMyTeacher.com-are giving parents unprecedented access to information about their children's schools.
5/26/2006 8:31:14 AM	posted by: Jeffrey D. Proud
Compulsory Schooling? In any debate, those who set the terms have a definite advantage. So, too, with education. It's almost universal for people, whether the establishment, reformers, or the average citizen, to use the terms "school" or "schooling," and "education" as if they are interchangeable, which they are not.  It's a truism that one can be educated without being schooled, as was Theodore Roosevelt.  Sickly as a child, "Teedie" as he was known to the family, was taught by an aunt, and educated through reading and travel, and didn't attend a formal school until he entered Harvard. One can also be "schooled" without being educated, as is too common. Those in charge of the public schools often complain that they must accept all children, whatever their background and condition. This is often used as an excuse for why many students cannot be taught, but that is a burden that is self-inflicted. Try to open up the system, as in higher education, so students can choose the school and the school can choose the student, and see who objects the most. Accept for the moment that schools are not responsible for some students not being able to learn because of their background. To be consistent the schools should disclaim any credit for students who do learn because of their backgrounds. But, of course, to argue that what students learn is determined by their out of school environment is to say that schools don't make any difference.              All states do have laws requiring a set school year, typically 180 days. But none require that many days of attendance. If they did then students who miss a day would be violating the law. Some urban schools find 25% or more of the student body absent each day, thus missing at least 45 days, or attending 135 days, per year.
5/25/2006 9:19:25 AM	posted by: Jeffrey D. Proud
ADHD drugs take toll on minors Accidental overdoses and side effects from attention-deficit (hyperactivity) disorder drugs send about 3,100 Americans -- 80 percent of them children -- to hospital emergency rooms annually, a federal survey has found. Fourteen percent of patients had side effects including chest pain, high blood pressure and irregular heartbeats -- indicators of potentially serious cardiac problems. An estimated 3.3 million Americans who are 19 or younger and nearly 1.5 million ages 20 and older are taking ADHD medicines, making the incidence of emergency-room visits at less than 1 percent. The mostly male victims range in age from a one-month old infant to an octogenarian. Twenty-five deaths linked to ADHD drugs, 19 involving children, were reported to the FDA from 1999 through 2003. Fifty-four other cases of serious heart problems, including heart attacks and strokes, were also reported. Some of the patients had prior heart problems.
5/24/2006 6:41:32 AM	posted by: Jeffrey D. Proud
Reading not a science for many teachers - National council says colleges often don't focus on the systematic method   Most education schools do a poor job of training aspiring teachers in reading instruction, according to a new study. The National Council on Teacher Quality, which issued the report this week, examined course syllabi and required texts from 72 randomly selected education programs and found only 11 colleges, including Texas A&M University, teaching all elements of the science of reading. The report comes more than five years after the National Reading Council endorsed scientifically based approaches to reading, which federal officials define as grounded in the systematic teaching of phonics and related skills. The decision about how best to teach reading is repeatedly cast as a personal one, to be decided by the aspiring teacher. All methods are presented as being equally valid, and how one teaches reading is merely a decision that works best for the individual teacher. As a result, roughly one-third of public school fourth-graders read below basic levels, according to the report. The bottom line is, there is a lack of rigor in teacher preparatory courses, and we need to do something about it.
5/23/2006 9:10:57 AM	posted by: Jeffrey D. Proud
The cost of education - State must rethink how it funds its schools Michigan has an obvious structural funding problem in our schools, community colleges, universities and local units of government. It is being ignored by politicians in Lansing. Just pouring more money into schools without addressing the fundamental structural problems is the equivalent of Ford, GM and Delphi simply increasing the price of their products without addressing the issues causing their problems. We provide nearly $13 billion annually to educate our 1.7 million kids in grades K-12. Let's clean the slate and approach this challenge as if a new territory has been discovered. Would we create the current system to prepare them to thrive and survive in the 21st-Century global economy? I think not.
5/22/2006 12:36:23 PM	posted by: Jeffrey D. Proud
More Children Left Behind Imagine being the parent of a child enrolled in a school that isn't working. You can't send him to a private school because you can't afford it, nor to another public school because there's no room. Every day he comes home from school depressed and disengaged. You do what you can. You visit with his teachers. You help with his homework. But you aren't a teacher. And his teachers, good people, are too busy to focus on your child. Slowly, he is drifting away. Too many children in this country are failing to get the education they need and deserve. What a tragedy it would be if, years from now, we learned that those responsible for providing that education to our children were the very ones responsible for their not getting it.
5/21/2006 4:42:39 PM	posted by: Jeffrey D. Proud
Universal Preschool Is No Panacea Proposition 82 would provide state funding for all four-year-olds in California to attend preschool. The Golden State already spends more than $3 billion per year to send low-income children to preschool. The new program, scheduled to cost more than $2 billion annually. But the case for universal preschool does not hold up to serious scrutiny. Researchers Darcy Olsen and Lisa Snell surveyed the research on early education polices in a new report for the Reason Foundation titled "Assessing Proposals for Preschool and Kindergarten: Essential Information for Parents, Taxpayers, and Policymakers" (http://www.reason.org/ps344_universalpreschool.pdf). What they found should make universal preschool advocates think twice. "We find strong evidence that widespread adoption of preschool and full-day kindergarten is unlikely to improve student achievement," Olsen and Snell write. "For nearly 50 years, local, state, and federal governments and diverse private sources have spent billions of dollars funding early education programs. Many early interventions have had meaningful short-term effects on grade-level retention and special education placement. However, the effects of early interventions routinely disappear after children leave the programs." Olsen and Snell draw a few important lessons from the research. This first concerns what's called "fade out." While early education programs may benefit some student groups (such as disadvantaged children) in the short run, these benefits disappear over time. For example, a February 2006 study by UC Santa Barbara researchers shows that the moderate gains made by children who attended preschool disappear by third grade. A study conducted by the National Center for Education Statistics comparing the benefits of half-day and full-day kindergarten also found that the benefits faded out by third grade.
5/20/2006 8:30:09 AM	posted by: Jeffrey D. Proud
The Teacher Pay Myth and Other Budget Observations Gov. Mike Easley’s proposed budget for education starts from a number of faulty assumptions. Teacher pay, high school reform, and class-size reductions are among the spending items that grow in his budget plan despite a lack of evidence that they improve education in North Carolina. Here are some of the facts behind the myths and some recommendations about how to use the money better. Teacher Pay Increase Governor’s Proposal: $323 million. If the legislature approves Easley’s 8 percent teacher pay increase, the average adjusted teacher salary would climb to $56,960 – more than $5,000 above the adjusted national average. Funds designated for teacher salary increases should be used to implement a merit pay system that rewards individual teachers for the value they add to their students' academic performance. Expansion of Learn and Earn/Early College Schools State Board of Education Proposal: $7.6 million Governor’s Proposal: $9.8 million. Graduation rates for these schools remain about 18 percent lower than the state average. As a group, Learn and Earn/Early College schools had much lower average end-of-course test scores than state averages, despite maintaining a student-teacher ratio of 13:1. The state should not expand the program until there is empirical evidence that Learn and Earn/Early College schools improve student performance.   Expansion of Low Wealth Supplemental Funding State Board of Education Proposal: $0 - Governor’s Proposal: $41.9 million. There is no evidence that these additional funds are having a measurable effect on student performance. For example, the state’s four-year class size reduction program targeting low-performing and low-income elementary schools, found that smaller class sizes did not improve student achievement. The legislature should approve the governor’s request for funds to commission an independent evaluation of low wealth and disadvantaged student funding.
5/19/2006 10:23:44 AM	posted by: Jeffrey D. Proud
The people never really wanted government run pubic schools. The first general school law, Pennsylvania's Common School Act of 1834, so angered the public that virtually every legislator who voted for it was defeated for reelection. Horace Mann said in 1842 that he opposed compulsory attendance yet in 1852 he helped Massachusetts pass the nation's first such law, the only one before the Civil War.  As in Pennsylvania, there were strong objections.   Barnstable refused to comply with the law until the 1880s when the state militia forced children to attend school.           In 1860 Beverly, Massachusetts citizens voted to abolish their new high school.  In 1872, when a Michigan taxpayer sued to prevent his local district from levying taxes to support high schools, the state's  Supreme Court ruled unanimously against him.           As late as the 1890s a Pennsylvania governor vetoed a compulsory attendance law.  By 1898, only 16 states had compulsory laws, and enforcement was uneven.  Massachusetts continued to lead the way and, by 1906, had the nation's first universal compulsory public school system and the world's longest school year.  By 1918 all 48 states had some form of compulsory attendance law.           In Oregon the voters approved a 1922 initiative mandating that basic education students attend only public schools, which would abolish private schools.  In 1925, a unanimous U.S. Supreme Court ruled that parents had a right to determine how and where their children are educated. The struggle has never ended but, at last, there are signs of change.  Homeschooled students have increased from an estimated 10-15,000 in 1980 to perhaps 1,500,000 or more today.  Charter schools have grown from none in 1991 to 3,500 or more today, enrolling perhaps 1,000,000 students.  Public and private student scholarships are emerging, as has long been true in higher education.           Sadly, the main road to "freedom," has been for students to drop out.  An estimated 30% do not finish regular high school.  That is, 15 million of today's 50 million public school students may not graduate.   Millions more may graduate but with minimal skills.
5/18/2006 8:15:29 AM	posted by: Jeffrey D. Proud
Hot Air: How States Inflate Their Educational Progress Under NCLB Some states claimed that 80 percent to 90 percent of their students were proficient in reading and math, even though external measures such as the federally funded National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) put the number at 30 percent or below. One state alleged that over 95 percent of their students graduated from high school even as independent studies put the figure closer to 65 percent. Another state determined that 99 percent of its school districts were making adequate progress, while others found that 99 percent of their teachers were highly qualified. Forty-four states reported that zero percent of their schools were persistently dangerous. With the approval of the U.S. Department of Education, many states are reporting educational results under NCLB that defy reality and common sense. In so doing, they are undermining the  effectiveness of the law. Principals and teachers in states that establish high standards under NCLB are under intense pressure to improve, while similar educators in states with low standards are told that everything is fine and they're doing a great job. Students in states that set the bar high for school performance have access to free tutoring and public school choice when their schools fall short; students in identical circumstances in other states must do without.  The result is a system of perverse incentives that rewards state education officials who misrepresent reality. Their performance looks better in the eyes of the public and they're able to avoid conflict with organized political interests. By contrast, officials who keep expectations high and report honest data have more hard choices to make and are penalized because their states look worse than others by comparison.
5/17/2006 10:37:02 AM	posted by: Jeffrey D. Proud
A failure of textbooks in our schools. At its core, the economic surge in India and China comes down to brains. The industries driving the region’s challenge to American leadership — communications, information technology, biotech and the like — can’t thrive without a steady supply of highly educated, intellectually flexible workers. This is where the United States is falling behind. “Most U.S. high school students don’t take advanced science; they opt out, with only one-quarter enrolling in physics, one-half in chemistry,” the National Science Foundation found. The National Commission on Mathematics and Science Teaching for the 21st Century concluded that U.S. students were “devastatingly far” from leading the world in science and math. American textbooks are both grotesquely bloated and light as a feather intellectually, flitting briefly over too many topics without examining any of them in detail. Worse, too many of them are pedagogically dishonest, so thoroughly massaged to mollify competing political and identity-group interests as to paint a startlingly misleading picture of America and its history. Textbooks have become so bland and watered-down that they are “a scandal and an outrage,” the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, a nonprofit education think tank in Washington, charged in a scathing report issued a year and a half ago. “They are sanitized to avoid offending anyone who might complain at textbook adoption hearings in big states, they are poorly written, they are burdened with irrelevant and unedifying content, and they reach for the lowest common denominator,” Diane Ravitch, a senior official in the Education Department during the administrations of Presidents George H. W. Bush and Bill Clinton, wrote in the report’s introduction. “As a result of all this, they undermine learning instead of building and encouraging it,” she added.
5/16/2006 9:05:14 AM	posted by: Jeffrey D. Proud
Only about half of the students who enroll in college persist and earn degrees within six years. What affects student retention and attainment and what steps to take to help this for the future. Higher education experts had been working for many years to understand the complex web of interrelated factors that affect student success. And so we identified a few of these leading thinkers on persistence and invested in a handful of their most promising ideas. The hallmark grants have yielded important, if not groundbreaking, information about what does and does not work in the difficult area of student retention in higher education. "The answers" have not yet been found, but these projects were a good bet because they accelerated the pace for testing these promising ideas in an expansive way. These projects also seemed to help solidify the Foundation’s commitment to the "culture of evidence" in which institutions use research to define current realities and then set about to improve those realities and forge a better future.
5/15/2006 10:50:09 AM	posted by: Jeffrey D. Proud
The NAACP's fight against private school vouchers Why would an organization that calls itself the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, whose motto is "Making Democracy Work Since 1909," oppose individual choice and freedom and dedicate itself to promoting public policy that guarantees the perpetuation of black poverty? Here, as elsewhere, NAACP leadership automatically equates big government with black interests. The public school monopoly serves the black community so notoriously poorly that many blacks themselves poll in favor of vouchers. The GAO reported in 2004 that there are almost three million kids nationwide in schools failing by No Child Left Behind criteria. These are disproportionately poor black kids. Half of these kids do not graduate and the ones that do, graduate with eighth grade reading skills. So what's going on here? You would think that NAACP leaders would be rabid in pushing for change and opening new educational opportunities available for black children. Yet, they doggedly defend a proven and hopeless failed status quo. The need for school choice for black kids goes beyond the argument for efficiency and competition. The education problem in the black community is really a social, moral and family problem.
5/14/2006 7:09:26 AM	posted by: Jeffrey D. Proud
The Early Reading and Mathematics Achievement of Children Who Repeated Kindergarten or Who Began School a Year Late The effectiveness of these practices, retention in particular, however, has been called into question (Dennebaum and Kulberg 1994; Kundert, May, and Brent 1995; Reynolds 1992). Some research has shown kindergarten repeaters perform worse in their second year of kindergarten than promoted peers who were recommended for retention in kindergarten (Dennebaum and Kulberg 1994), perform no differently than delayed-entry children later in school (e.g., second and fifth grade) (Kundert, May, and Brent 1995), and perform worse in reading and mathematics in fourth grade (Reynolds 1992). Other researchers suggest retention may have short-term benefits. Children appear to make larger cognitive gains in the year they repeat as compared to their first year through a grade (e.g., first-grade retention as studied by Alexander, Entwisle, and Dauber 1994). Recently, a review of the existing research note the need for future research that considers child and program characteristics when evaluating outcomes of retention and delayed entry practices (Jimerson 2001). These research findings have led many investigators to draw competing and even conflicting conclusions regarding grade retention and delayed entry.
5/13/2006 8:31:39 AM	posted by: Jeffrey D. Proud
WHY PUBLIC SCHOOLS PRESSURE PARENTS TO GIVE THEIR KIDS MIND-ALTERING DRUGS Nothing condemns our public-school system more than the fact that many school authorities across America pressure parents to give mind-altering drugs to millions of normal, innocent children to stop bored kids from fidgeting in their seats or "not paying attention." Too often, school authorities refuse to accept the blame for our public schools' failure to teach our children or hold their interest in class. Public-school teaching is structured in such a way that it inevitably bores millions of normal, active children who are forced to sit in classrooms six to eight hours a day with about twenty other immature children. The teacher has to cover the curriculum, so she is pressured to teach all the kids the same material in the same way. Few teachers have the time or patience to know each child's unique personality, interests, strengths, or weaknesses, or give different instruction to each student. Young children in elementary school have natural high energy, and each child has his or her own unique personality. Most teachers simply don't have the time or patience to teach different material or use different teaching methods with each child. Just being cramped into a classroom with twenty other children and told to learn certain tasks by an adult they may not like, can annoy or frustrate many normal, high-energy, but emotionally immature children with a will of their own. Over-worked teachers are under enormous pressure to maintain discipline in class so they can do their job. If some students are disruptive, don't pay attention, or cause trouble in class, the teacher must do something about these children to keep order. In the old days, teachers could discipline kids by smacking or restraining them. If a teacher tried this today, parents would quickly slap her and the school with a lawsuit, so that kind of discipline is now impossible. Also compulsory-attendance laws and other Federal regulations now make it extremely difficult to expel a violent or disruptive student. So how do school authorities solve this discipline problem? Too often, they pressure parents to give Ritalin (or similar drugs) to "calm" children down or make them "focus" on their work. However, school authorities needed a way to justify "recommending" these mind-altering drugs to parents. They found this "justification" by going along with the psychiatric establishment's claim that millions of bored, high-energy, or "hyperactive" kids sitting in boring public-school classes, have an alleged mental illness called ADHD.
5/12/2006 10:28:36 AM	posted by: Jeffrey D. Proud
Tom Peters Judges Public Schools Arguing that "Children know how to learn. It's in the genes," Peters stressed that "The only thing that screws up learning is the classroom ...Designed perfectly to kill all interest in the subject matter at hand."           Nor is he an admirer of much that passes for "school reform."  In his view, "What the reform movement gives us is more of what we have, regimentation, standardization, and brutalizing boredom in places designed by the devil, called classrooms."
5/11/2006 9:06:11 AM	posted by: Jeffrey D. Proud
The teachers unions are mad at me - by Mr. John Stossel I’m sorry that union teachers are mad at me. But when it comes to the union-dominated monopoly, the facts are inescapable. Many kids are miserable in bad schools. If they are not rich enough to move, or to pay for private school, they are trapped. It doesn’t have to be that way. We know what works: choice. That’s what’s brought Americans better computers, phones, movies, music, supermarkets – most everything we have. Schoolchildren deserve the joyous benefits of market competition, too. Unions say “education of the children is too important to be left to the vagaries of the market.” The opposite is true. Education is too important to be left to the calcified union/government monopoly. • The constant refrain that “public schools need more money” is nonsense. Many countries that spend significantly less on education do better than we do. School spending in America (adjusted for inflation) has more than tripled during the past 30 years, but national test scores are flat. The average per-pupil cost today is an astonishing $10,000 per student – $200,000 per classroom! Think about how many teachers you could hire, and how much better you could do with that amount of money. • Most American parents give their kids’ schools an A or B grade, but that’s only because, without market competition, they don’t know what they might have had. The educators who conduct the international tests say that most of the countries that do best are those that give school managers autonomy, and give parents and students the right to choose their schools. Competition forces private and public schools to improve. • There is little K-12 education competition in America because public schools are a government monopoly. Monopolies rarely innovate, and union-dominated monopolies, burdened with contracts filled with a hundred pages of suffocating rules, are worse. The head of New York City’s schools told me that the union’s rules “reward mediocrity.”
5/10/2006 5:54:02 AM	posted by: Jeffrey D. Proud
SAT scores drop; some see red flag - Is it new test? Fewer repeat test-takers? Some colleges are reporting double-digit drops in the average SAT scores of applicants this year, even as other credentials, such as class rank and college-prep coursework, remained similar to or grew stronger than last year's. Among schools reporting large drops: The nine-campus University of California system, which saw a 15-point drop on average among applicants, Average composite scores for the ACT, a rival college entrance exam, were unchanged from last year. It's not yet clear what the drops mean, but colleges are particularly curious because the scores are almost completely based on the new SAT, introduced last year by the non-profit College Board, which owns the test. “We need to have confidence in the test that we're using,” says Stephen Farmer, director of admissions at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, which saw a 12-point drop.
5/09/2006 9:34:22 AM	posted by: Jeffrey D. Proud
Judge likely to halt California high shool exit exam A group of high school students and their parents sued the California Department of Education in February, seeking a preliminary injunction to halt giving the state exit exam to this year's senior class. It's the first class required to pass the exam to earn a diploma. Judge Freedman said in his tentative ruling that he is likely to issue the injunction, based on the plaintiffs' argument that all California students do not have access to the same quality of education. There is overwhelming evidence that kids who attend schools in large cities are far more likely to be taught by teachers who are not qualified or credentialed The department said last week that about 11  percent of this year's senior class (about 46,000 students) has yet to pass the English and math test, although students have multiple opportunities to take the exam. Department officials noted that in previous years, about 13 percent of seniors failed to graduate for various reasons. The same Alameda County judge is scheduled to hear arguments next week in another lawsuit against the exam. Public Advocates, which won a $1 billion settlement over equal access to education in California schools, claims the department failed to properly investigate alternatives to the exam.
5/08/2006 10:45:49 AM	posted by: Jeffrey D. Proud
A new army in New York fights for more charter schools. In New York, two dozen Assembly Democrats will fight the good fight for education reform this week, pushing their colleagues to authorize dozens more charter schools across the city and the state. For the sake of thousands of children trapped in lousy public schools, we wish them every success. The soldiers in this battle are mostly black or Latino, mostly from New York City, and all represent the inner-city neighborhoods where public education has failed most tragically. Lawmakers such as Vito Lopez of Brooklyn, Michael Benjamin of the Bronx and Sam Hoyt of Buffalo have seen their constituents line up by the thousands to enroll their children in charter schools - and put their names on waiting lists when the coveted seats fill up. They've also seen the test scores proving that charter schools consistently do a better job than traditional public schools in the very same neighborhoods. And now, in the face of opposition by Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver and the teachers union, they're demanding that lots more families receive the same golden opportunity.
5/07/2006 11:02:28 AM	posted by: Jeffrey D. Proud
According to NEA's research and other sources, today's teachers are primarily white, female, married, religious, and on average are 43 years old. More than half hold at least a master's degree.  America's public schoolteachers are the most educated, most experienced ever. They have many years of experience. Nearly half of all public schoolteachers (49%) have been in the classroom 15 years or longer; more than one-third (38%) have 20 or more years of classroom experience. The majority of teachers hold one or more advanced degrees.  More than half (57%) hold at least a master's degree. The percentage of teachers with a master's degree has more than doubled since 1961.  Less than half (43%) of public schoolteachers hold only a bachelor's degree-the smallest percentage in 40 years. Public school teachers are highly skilled in the subjects they teach.  Nine out of 10 teachers (90%) say they spend no time teaching grades or subjects outside their licensed subject area. The number of teachers leaving the profession is increasing. Working conditions and low salaries are by far the primary reasons cited by individuals who do not plan to continue teaching until retirement. Twenty percent of teachers say unsatisfactory working conditions keep them from wanting to stay in the profession.  And 37 percent who do not plan to teach until retirement blame low pay for their decision to quit teaching. The percentages are even greater for minority teachers (50%), for male teachers (43%), and for teachers under 30 (47%).  Nationwide, more than 3.9 million teachers will be needed by 2014 because of teacher attrition, retirement and increased student enrollment. Many new teachers leave after five years. Close to 50 percent of newcomers leave the profession during the first five years of teaching. Teacher shortages create shortages in some subjects more than most. The greatest shortages of teachers are in bilingual and special education, mathematics, science, computer science, English as a second language and foreign languages. The teaching profession also is experiencing a shortage of male teachers. Male teachers are a dwindling breed.  A few good men.  Just 24.9 percent of the nation's 3 million teachers are men. Slow extinction of the male teacher. The percentage of male elementary teachers (9%) and male secondary teachers (35%) has fallen gradually since 1961 and now is at the lowest level in four decades. More money, more male teachers.  States with higher teacher salaries tend to have the most male teachers.  Michigan ranks first in the percentage of male teachers (37%), and ranks in the top five nationally in teacher pay. Mississippi ranks 50th in the percentage of male teachers (18%), and ranks 49th in teacher pay.
5/06/2006 6:37:41 AM	posted by: Jeffrey D. Proud
THE RIGHT TO BEHAVE RUDELY? I recently substituted for two consecutive days for a "lab" (i.e., remedial) high school literature class. I was met with ongoing resistance from half the class relative to the lesson, which was comprised of my reading aloud from a novel (since no one else would volunteer to read and I didn't think I'd be successful 'forcing' students to do it). It took nearly a full hour to read one short chapter, because I had to keep stopping and coaxing students to stop being disruptive. (Disruptions included pacing around the room -- including hovering behind me in my 'blind spot' as I stood at the podium; surfing the Web without permission; listening to headphones, then scowling when I'd ask them to turn the volume down; 'scooting' around the room on a desk chair with wheels; blowing bubbles through a long straw -- toddler-style; eating and sleeping; and holding conversations -- all while I was trying to read.) Note the average age of these kids is 16 and this was NOT a special ed class. Whenever I'd prompt/warn perpetrators to behave, I was met with proclamations about the 'rights' students have vs. the 'rights' I supposedly do not have as a substitute. (Meanwhile, 50% of the class waited patiently for me to finish reading and help them with related comprehension questions.) I angrily read them the riot act, as follows: "You do not have the right to prevent other students from learning! In fact, my understanding is that disrupting the educational process is illegal. Did you know that? Students who actually want to learn do not have to put up with this. You are not hurting me -- you are preventing other students from learning. You do not have the right to do that, etc. etc."
5/05/2006 10:31:55 AM	posted by: Jeffrey D. Proud
TEEN-SCREEN - STEALING OUR CHILDREN'S FUTURE The latest foray into our society is the insidious TeenScreen, a suicide screening program, put forth as a solution to save our younger generation from what psychiatry is promoting as an epidemic of teen suicides. However, TeenScreen lies. There is no epidemic. In actuality, in my state, Florida, there have been a total of 250 child and teen suicides in the last 5 years. That's an average of 50 a year out of millions of young people. Each one is a tragedy but this is hardly an epidemic. What the psychiatric community has also failed to mention was that a majority of those 250 who committed suicide had received psychiatric treatment, with most of them on one or more psychiatric drugs. Some of these drugs carry black warning labels from the FDA stating that they can cause violence and suicide in young people. If psychiatry failed those young people and maybe even contributed to their death, why would we deliver more children into their clutches?
5/04/2006 9:05:09 AM	posted by: Jeffrey D. Proud
In lawsuit, parents say schools ignore their beliefs LEXINGTON -- At the center of a federal lawsuit filed last week by two sets of Lexington parents over the discussion of homosexuality in public elementary schools is the question: Do parents or public schools have the final say in deciding what morals, values, and principles should be taught to children, and at what age should those lessons take place? As in many similar debates before it, the parents -- David and Tonia Parker and Joseph Robert and Robin Wirthlin -- have raised the issue of religious freedom. The Parkers and the Wirthlins are described in the lawsuit as devout Judeo-Christians who believe that homosexuality is immoral behavior that goes against the ''laws of the God of Abraham." They say that teachers and administrators are indoctrinating children to believe that homosexuality is acceptable by exposing children to gay-themed storybooks and other lessons in a compulsory school setting.
5/03/2006 6:23:00 AM	posted by: Jeffrey D. Proud
What Makes a High School Great? "We are changing the goal of high school and what it's possible to achieve there," says Tom Vander Ark, executive director of the Gates Foundation's education initiative, which has spent $1 billion in 1,600 high schools in 40 states plus the District of Columbia over the last six years. For parents and students, these schools mean an often bewildering array of choices -- small schools within larger schools, specialized charter and magnet schools for things ranging from fashion design to computer programming, even public boarding schools for budding physicists or artists. On the plus side, students get more adult attention and are less likely to be lost in the crowd. They can focus on subjects they really care about while still getting a grounding in the basics. But some educators think this boutique approach comes with a cost: the loss of a common experience that brings everyone together under one big roof. Maintaining quality is another major obstacle. "I think we're still flailing around," says James Anderson, a professor of educational-policy studies at the University of Illinois. "A lot of this is more theater than substance." Vander Ark agrees that the new schools need to prove they're providing a markedly better alternative to regular public schools. "We want to make sure people raise the bar," he says. Educators have been demanding reform for decades, and it has often seemed as if ferocious policy debates were the biggest obstacles to improvement. Reformers in the 1980s wanted to make all students college-ready with a rigorous core curriculum. A decade later, school choice and testing were the big buzzwords, with some activists arguing that the entire public-school system should be dismantled. More recently, small schools -- first proposed decades ago -- have gained traction with funding from organizations like the Gates Foundation and the New Schools Venture Fund.
5/02/2006 9:01:10 AM	posted by: Jeffrey D. Proud
Models of middle school success - 2 charters flourish, but city rarely seeks their input Educators came to Baltimore last week from Massachusetts, New York, Washington and Virginia to study the success of the Crossroads School. They talked to pupils who, despite impoverished backgrounds, have published a book, made a model of the solar system and outscored their peers, not only around the city but in some cases statewide as well. Crossroads is one of two charter middle schools in the city receiving national recognition for their work educating vulnerable children at a particularly vulnerable age. The other, KIPP Ujima Village Academy, is part of a network of schools held up by Oprah Winfrey last month as an urban education model the same week she lashed out at the Baltimore school system for its poor track record. Meanwhile, city school system officials are grappling with how to reform their 23 traditional middle schools, all of which are failing. They have said that middle schools nationwide have the same problems, and that few models to emulate exist. But staff at Crossroads and KIPP say the system has generally not turned for guidance to the schools, which are producing high student achievement with the same population as ordinary city schools.
5/01/2006 9:04:39 AM	posted by: Jeffrey D. Proud
Should class size be a top priority?: No...Focusing on sheer numbers won't improve teacher quality Research is clear that good teachers matter more than small classes, and all of these problems are substantial obstacles to attracting and retaining top teachers. To get the most bang for the buck, teacher quality rather than quantity should be New York City's top priority right now. Hiring, placement and retention of teachers also need to change. The New Teacher Project has found that in school districts collective bargaining contracts complicate teacher hiring, placement and retention. And rather than receiving substantial mentoring and support, rookies are largely left to sink or swim on their own.

How Reducing Class Size Fails to Raise Student Achievement

In November [2005], the State Board of Education released the final report of the High Priority Schools Initiative, a four-year, $23 million class-size reduction program targeting low-performing and low-income elementary schools. The report offered no statistical evidence that smaller class sizes raised student achievement. Between the first and final year of the program, fewer schools met their state ABC growth targets and even fewer made Adequate Yearly Progress under the federal No Child Left Behind law. Reduced class sizes failed to significantly increase student performance on state reading assessments. In the future, legislators and policymakers should not fund class-size initiatives because of their expediency or popularity but because they produce measurable gains in student achievement.

Our kids are being betrayed in many ways:

1. Public schools can cripple millions of children's ability to read by using the "whole-language" instruction method (now called "balanced reading instruction" by many public schools).

2. Many public schools spend up to 50 percent of the school day on non-academic subjects that waste children's precious time. The rest of their time is spent on classes such as sex-education, personal safety, consumer affairs, AIDS education, save-the-environment, family life, study halls, multiculturalism, homeroom, electives, counseling, or sports activities.

3. Public schools teach "new" or "fuzzy" math (sometimes called by different names). These instruction methods can cripple children's ability to learn basic arithmetic. Students who fear math are less likely to pursue good careers like computer science and engineering that depend on a love of and competence with math.

4. These schools force children to read dumbed-down textbooks in English, History, and many other subjects. The textbooks are often geared to the slowest learners in the class and water-down the subject matter. Dumbed-down classes based on dumbed-down public-school textbooks therefore waste children's precious time. This is especially true for children who are quick learners, who must endure 12 years of excruciating boredom in public school classes.

5. Public schools force children to study subjects they might hate, can't learn, will never use in their lives, or which bore them. For example, many public schools force students to study a foreign language. Children learn better when they study subjects that interest them.

6. Author John Gatto, in his book "Dumbing Us Down" said that a child eager to learn can learn to read, write, and do basic arithmetic in about 100 hours. Yet our public schools keep children locked up for 12 years, yet can barely teach millions of kids to read.

7. Public schools force parents to pay heavy school taxes for an inferior, often mind-numbing education for their children.

8. Public schools are a government-controlled near-monopoly. Bad schools don't close down because compulsory taxes prop them up. Incompetent or mediocre teachers aren't fired because tenure laws protect them. That's why public schools will never improve and will always waste children's precious time.

9. Many public schools subject children to drugs, bullies, violence, and values many parents disapprove of.

10. Some public schools pressure parents who have bright, normal children to give their kids potentially dangerous mind-altering drugs to make the bored kids "behave" in class. Over four million allegedly "unruly" kids, mostly boys, line up for Ritalin every day in public schools across America . Methylphenidate (sold as Ritalin) and cocaine are both listed in "Schedule II" of the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency's Controlled Substances Act (CSA).

11. Public schools are compulsory. They therefore violate parents' natural and constitutional right to control the education of their children. Public school authorities, whose salaries we pay with our taxes, force parents to hand over their children to government employees called teachers and to schools that give an inferior education.

12. Public schools can destroy children's love of learning and self-confidence as learners. This can cripple children's ambitions and desire to go to college. This in turn, can force these children to end up with low-paying jobs for the rest of their lives if and when they graduate high school.

13. Public schools force millions of Christian parents to hand over their children to public schools which are decidedly anti-Christian. For example, many social studies textbooks used in public schools have censored out references to such words as 'family,' 'marriage,' 'religion,' 'fidelity,' etc. Many textbooks today refer to a family simply as people choosing to live together.

14. Public schools force children to witness sometimes shocking or obnoxious sexual material in sex-education classes, without parents' knowledge or consent.

15. The public-school near monopoly and compulsory-attendance laws cripple parents right and ability to choose a quality, low-cost school in an education free-market that has been squashed by the public-school monopoly. As a result, parents and their children have to settle for a usually third-rate public school education.

The scariest thing about our public schools is that many of them are so good at deceiving parents into thinking they are giving our kids a decent education. If parents knew the real truth about public schools and the many ways these public schools can seriously harm their children, they would abandon the public schools in droves.

Public schools stay in business not only because they are compulsory and propped-up by taxes, but because they can systematically deceive parents so well that most parents have become complacent. When parents are complacent, they don't see any problem with their public schools, so they don't get angry enough to find other education alternatives for their kids.

Also, parents settle for a third-rate, often mind-numbing education for their kids in public schools because they think these schools are "free" or low-cost. A person tends to settle for less and complain less if they think they are getting something for "free." So many parents are willing to put up with failing public schools because the schools, in effect, at least provide "day care" services for these working parents, even if the schools dumb-down their kids in the process.

Yet, public schools now spend an average of $8000 per student that comes from parents' pockets in the form of income taxes or school taxes (if the parents own a home). If public schools were scrapped, parents would not have to pay these taxes and could use the hefty tax refunds they got to pay for tutors or low-cost private schools for their kids.

The truth is, public schools are rolling in money. If you divide the U.S. Department of Education's figure for total spending on K-12 education by the department's count of K-12 students, it works out to about $10,000 per student.

Think about that! For a class of 25 kids, that's $250,000 per classroom. This doesn't include capital costs. Couldn't you do much better than government schools with $250,000? You could hire several good teachers; I doubt you'd hire many bureaucrats. Government schools, like most monopolies, squander money.

America spends more on schooling than the vast majority of countries that outscore us on the international tests. But the bureaucrats still blame school failure on lack of funds, and demand more money.

In 1985, some of them got their wish. Kansas City, Mo., judge Russell Clark said the city's predominately black schools were not "halfway decent," and he ordered the government to spend billions more. Did the billions improve test scores? Did they hire better teachers, provide better books? Did the students learn anything?

Well, they learned how to waste lots of money.

The bureaucrats renovated school buildings, adding enormous gyms, an Olympic swimming pool, a robotics lab, TV studios, a zoo, a planetarium, and a wildlife sanctuary. They added intense instruction in foreign languages. They spent so much money that when they decided to bring more white kids to the city's schools, they didn't have to resort to busing. Instead, they paid for 120 taxis. Taxis!

What did spending billions more accomplish? The schools got worse. In 2000, five years and $2 billion later, the Kansas City school district failed 11 performance standards and lost its academic accreditation for the first time in the district's history.

A study by two professors at the Hoover Institution a few years ago compared public and Catholic schools in three of New York City's five boroughs. Parochial education outperformed the nation's largest school system "in every instance," they found -- and it did it at less than half the cost per student.

"Everyone has been conned -- you can give public schools all the money in America, and it will not be enough," says Ben Chavis, a former public school principal who now runs the American Indian Charter School in Oakland, Calif. His school spends thousands less per student than Oakland's government-run schools spend.

According to state data, boys in Utah drop out at a higher rate than girls, even though they fare the same on math and science standardized testing.
   Across the nation, more than 80 percent of school disciplinary actions are aimed at boys and they take more medication for attention disorders, according to Kathy Stevens, co-author of the book The Minds of Boys: Saving Our Sons from Falling Behind in Life and School. She believes problems boys face often can be traced to the fact that they learn to read later and often never develop a love of reading.
    On Utah's most recent statewide Criterion Reference Test, 79 percent of girls showed proficiency in reading while only 73 percent of boys did. Federal tests of Utah students show similar gaps.
    That many boys struggle to be attentive in classrooms is not a new idea. Even Mark Twain highlighted the tendency in The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. However, researchers and teachers hadn't really noticed how much boys struggled until girls only recently started to gain equality in the classroom. Once girls began out-succeeding boys, researchers such as Stevens began to wonder why.
   "The school system is not very boy-friendly. We revamped the system when our girls weren't doing well, and now we need to take a look at boys," Stevens said.
   Worth noting is the fact that boys learn differently than girls.
   The differences are both sociological and biological. Boys' brains tend to shut down when they aren't being constantly stimulated. Brain scans have shown that blood flow in boys' brains decreases, according to Stevens. Girls have an advantage because they have a 15 percent higher blood flow than boys, and higher estrogen levels keep them attentive even when they are bored by a lesson.
   Small changes can help engage boys, though. When a teacher stands in front of the class lecturing, boys will often stop listening and instead gaze out a window. Stevens says having the teacher walk around the room while lecturing helps.

...public educators in Milwaukee believe choice has helped improve all the city's schools. "No longer is MPS a monopoly," says Milwaukee Public Schools superintendent William Andrekopoulos. "That competitive nature has raised the bar for educators in Milwaukee to provide a good product or they know that parents will walk." The city's public schools have made dramatic changes that educators elsewhere can only dream of. Public schools now share many buildings with their private counterparts, which helps alleviate the shortage of classrooms. Teachers, once assigned strictly by seniority, are now often hired by school selection committees. And 95% of district operating funds now go directly to schools, instead of being parceled out by a central office. That puts power in the hands of teachers who work directly with students.

Milwaukee schools are still struggling, but progress is obvious. Students have improved their performance on 13 out of 15 standardized tests. The annual dropout rate has fallen to 10% from 16% since the choice program started. Far from draining resources from public schools, spending has gone up in real terms by 27% since choice began as taxpayers and legislators encouraged by better results pony up more money.

Why did the federal government give $25,511,064 to a non-government organization last year to prepare the textbooks for teaching civics to schoolchildren? Since 1997, the Center for Civic Education has received at least $110,418,717 from the government and has succeeded in essentially taking over the supply of materials for teaching civics in American schools.

Of the many questions that surround this program, the first to be addressed must be the appropriateness of government funding of any textbook. Public education is not among the enumerated powers of the federal government. But, of course, the feds long ago discarded the notion that "The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people."

"Proponents of the CCE program agree that the federal funding is, indeed, appropriate and necessary. Even if there were universal agreement on the appropriateness of federal funding, should there not be competitive bidding? Should local school boards not be able to choose from among several possible texts? Government funding of textbooks is bad enough, but when the money is specified to go to a single non-government organization – without competition or bids – to produce materials for a subject as important as civics education, it causes a very bad smell to surround the entire project.

Officials who run the D.C. school voucher program are calling it a success, though they said yesterday that it has been more expensive to operate than expected.
    Still, the Washington Scholarship Fund (WSF) is hoping Congress will reauthorize the program -- the first federally funded program in the U.S. -- and has offered its experience as a blueprint for expanding the program to other cities.
    "We now are serving 1,700 students, and we will be giving out about $12 million in scholarships to those students," said Sally Sacher, president of the nonprofit group administering the program for the D.C. government and the U.S. Department of Education.
 

"All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.” -- Edmund Burke, "Public schools have led the way in not teaching children to read, and they are responsible for the devastation wrought on the lives of Americans; on the American way of life."

Yes, you are very right about the power elites and the hidden agendas manipulating public schooling, however...more teachers could have joined ranks with people like me and fought back from within the walls, rather than following unlawful laws; using curriculum and methods that have obviously damaged children, families and...YES!... America. The herd mentality has been too prevalent among teachers and the teacher unions for far, far too long, and all at the expense of the children. Why are families falling apart? Why is the culture sick? Why is the nation weakening? How has national sovereignty been lost? Answer: Our schools have failed to educate astute future citizens, and our schools have failed to do so for a long, long time.

Clearly defining what constitutes a “ good school” Taylor and Ryan elaborate on the “ qualities of excellence” of high performing schools. They clearly demarcate the fourteen crucial ways that headmasters or principals can turn schools into orderly centers of learning.

In a most realistic way, Taylor and Ryan discuss how to turn schools around. They review the importance of long range planning. They elaborate on some of the subtle nuances that seem to affect students and the learning environment- and they deal with the crucial issues of long term goals, assessment and planning. They indicate quite simply that “ the details matter”…and the details can be everything from “ the queues being too long at the lunchroom” to “ the boilers don't work or the toilets are in a bad state”.

Recruitment of good teachers is paramount. And Taylor and Ryan are keen on this task and insist that no blunders be made in this regard. Staff appointments, staff induction, staff expectations and staff support are all imperative.

Utilizing a case study approach Taylor and Ryan take us to various schools in the mother country and illuminate some of the facets that led to success. These factors are everything from an emphasis on behavior to pride; from mentorships and sponsorships to “ we try to light the fire within , not the fire below” as one head teacher put it.

Some headmasters share their formula for success-Hugh Howe indicates that “ leadership and vision, raising expectations, better teaching and improved discipline” are the paramount four elements to improving schools, but at the same time recognizing that there is no “magic formula”

Last week, Florida's supreme court ruled that public money can't be spent on private schools because the state constitution commands the funding of only "uniform . . . high-quality" schools. How absurd. As if government schools are uniformly high quality. Or even mostly decent.

Apparently competition, which made even the Postal Service improve, is unconstitutional when it comes to public education in Florida.

Remember when the Postal Service said it couldn't get it there overnight? Then companies like FedEx were allowed to compete. Private enterprise got it there absolutely, positively overnight. Now even the Post Office guarantees overnight delivery sometimes. Competition works.

Why can't education work the same way? If people got to choose their kids' school, education options would be endless. My tiny brain can't begin to imagine the possibilities, but even I can guess there soon would be technology schools, cheap Wal-Mart-like schools, virtual schools where you learn at home on your computer, sports schools, music schools, schools that go all year, schools with uniforms, schools that open early and keep kids later, and, who knows? If there were competition, all kinds of new ideas would bloom.

This already happens overseas, and the results are good.

For "Stupid in America," a special report ABC will air Friday, we gave identical tests to high school students in New Jersey and Belgium. The Belgians trounced the Americans. We didn't pick smart kids in Europe and dumb kids in the United States. The American students attend an above-average school in New Jersey, and New Jersey kids' test scores are above average for America. "It has to be something with the school," said a New Jersey student, "'cause I don't think we're stupider."

She was right: It's the schools. At age 10, students from 25 countries take the same test, and American kids place eighth, well above the international average. But by age 15, when students from 40 countries are tested, the Americans place 25th, well below the international average. In other words, the longer American kids stay in American schools, the worse they do. They do worse than kids from much poorer countries, like Korea and Poland.

This should come as no surprise since public education in the USA is a government monopoly. If you don't like your public school? Tough. If the school is terrible? Tough. Your taxes fund that school regardless of whether it's good or bad.

Government monopolies routinely fail their customers.

Kaat Vandensavel runs a Belgian government school, but in Belgium, school funding follows students, even to private schools. So Vandensavel has to work hard to impress the parents. "If we don't offer them what they want for their child, they won't come to our school." That pressure makes a world of difference, she says. It forces Belgian schools to innovate in order to appeal to parents and students. Vandensavel's school offers extra sports programs and classes in hairdressing, car mechanics, cooking, and furniture building. She told us, "We have to work hard day after day. Otherwise you just [go] out of business."

"That's normal in Western Europe," Harvard economist Caroline Hoxby told me. "If schools don't perform well, a parent would never be trapped in that school in the same way you could be trapped in the U.S."

Vandensavel adds, "America seems like a medieval country . . . a Communist country on the educational level, because there's no freedom of choice -- not for parents, not for pupils."

In kindergarten through 12th grade, that is. Colleges compete, so the United States has many of the most prestigious in the world -- eight of the top 10 universities, on a Chinese list of the world's top 500. (The other two are Cambridge and Oxford.)

Accountability is why universities and private schools perform better. Every day they are held accountable by parents and students, and if they fail the kids, school administrators lose their jobs. Public school officials almost never lose jobs.

Government schools are accountable only to their fellow politicians, and that kind of accountability is virtually no accountability.

The public schools are cheating the children.

Self-esteem used to mean being proud of your talents, satisfied with yourself as an honest person. It's been changed to mean whatever makes you at happy about how much credit you get, how much you can be admired, how much wealth you can accumulate in a short time. Self-esteem has built a Catch-22 society where everyone cannot be No. 1, but everyone is taught to believe they deserve to be.

Every student in almost every school in the country, has been conditioned to aim for the highest and quickest recognition, most awards, most tangible prizes, and the public acclaim that comes with it all. They're led to expect to land high-paying, "fun" jobs that require personality more than the ability to bring other skills to the workplace, and to have rapid promotions and salary jumps. They expect to travel in elite circles, and be known for their quick route to the top, with its high-finance deals, its tough tactics, and its retinue of aides and hangers-on. They've been conditioned to expect to retire at a fairly young age, with a life of luxury before and after retirement, courtesy of whatever company they graced with their presence.

Along the way, they see nothing wrong with currying favor, fawning, wheeling and dealing however it's needed to beat out the competition. They flaunt their coups with displays of lavishly tasteful, or lavishly outrageous lifestyles. Success without accompanying celebrity is not success. Success is measured by how ostentatiously you live, by how much publicity or notoriety you garner. It's not achieved by what you stand for or accomplish, and definitely not by how you operate. It's how things are today!

Are American kids stupid or are they being cheated out of a quality education?

American students fizzle in international comparisons, placing 18th in reading, 22nd in science and 28th in math – behind countries like Poland, Australia and Korea. But why? School officials complain that they need more money, but as John Stossel reports, most of the countries that outperform us spend less per student than we do.

There are many factors that contribute to failure in school, but according to some, foremost is the government's monopoly over the school system, which means that most parents don't get to choose where to send their children. In other countries, choice fosters competition, and competition improves performance.

Paula Irving said she started to consider home schooling as a teacher. She'd experienced how parental involvement and smaller classes improved students' learning and social experience. "Home schooling really is a lifestyle," Paula Irving said. "Any family who wants to put the effort into it can be successful at it. It's just not going to happen on its own."

Colorado Department of Education data show home schooling enrollment has had an up-and-down nature. In the fall of 2000, 241 Montrose County School District students were receiving home-based education; this number jumped to 258 in 2002 and dropped to 156 in 2003. It leapt again to 190 in 2004, a 21.8 percent increase, bucking a statewide 17.6 drop in home school enrollment.

Favorable public opinion of home schooling has also been slowly growing. In 2001, the annual Phi Delta Kappa/ Gallup Poll on the public’s attitude toward public schools showed only 41 percent of respondents saw home schooling as a good thing, but that figure is up from 16 percent when the question was first asked in 1985.

Reading mastery is mainly a function of a massive exposure to words. Read this article, "The Matthew Effects," by Dr. Kerry Hempenstall (1996)

The Matthew Effects are not only about the progressive decline of slow starters, but also about the widening gap between slow starters and fast starters.

There is ample evidence that students who do not make good initial progress in learning to read find it increasingly difficult to ever master the process. Stanovich (1986, 1988, 1993) outlines a model in which problems with early phonological skills can lead to a downward spiral where even higher cognitive skills are affected by slow reading development.

Stanovich (1986) uses the label Matthew Effects to describe how, in reading, the rich get richer and the poor get poorer. Children with a good understanding of how words are composed of sounds (phonemic awareness) are well placed to make sense of our alphabetic system. Their rapid development of spelling-to-sound correspondences allows the development of independent reading, high levels of practice, and the subsequent fluency which is critical for comprehension and enjoyment of reading. There is evidence (Stanovich, 1988) that vocabulary development from about Year 3 is largely a function of volume of reading. Nagy and Anderson (1984) estimate that, in school, struggling readers may read around 100,000 words per year while for keen mid-primary students the figure may be closer to 10,000,000, that is, a 100 fold difference. For out of school reading, Fielding, Wilson and Anderson (1986) suggested a similar ratio in indicating that children at the 10th percentile of reading ability in their Year 5 sample read about 50,000 words per year out of school, while those at the 90th percentile read about 4,500,000 words per year.

Unfortunately children without good phonemic awareness tend to fall into a downward spiral of achievement in which initial lack of success in reading can develop into widespread cognitive deficits (Ceci, 1991). The sequence begins with large differences in reading practice. Allington (1984) in a study of Year 1 students noted similar exposure ratios to those described above. In this case the number of words per week read ranged from 16 in the less skilled group to 1933 in the upper group. Exacerbating this problem of differential exposure is the finding that struggling readers are often presented with reading materials which are too difficult for them (Stanovich, 1986). Slow, halting error-prone reading of difficult material, unsurprisingly, militates against comprehension and leads to avoidance of reading activities and further disadvantage. Language skills such as vocabulary knowledge, general knowledge, syntactic skills, and possibly even memory, rely heavily on reading for their development. These skills impinge on most areas of the curriculum and hence what began as a narrow deficit becomes progressively larger, amplified by the negative motivational consequences of failure. Contrary to the hope that initial slow progress is merely a maturational lag to be redressed by a developmental spurt at some later date, typically even relatively minor delays tend to become increasingly major over time (Stanovich, 1993). A study by Juel (1988) reported a probability that a poor reader in Year I would still be so classified in Year 4 was 0.88. Jorm, Maclean, Matthews & Share (1984) in their longitudinal study noted similar outcomes. A performance difference in reading of 4 months in Year I had increased to 9 months in Year 2 in favour of the phonemically aware group (who had been matched in kindergarten on verbal IQ and sight word reading), over a low phonemic awareness group.

Further support for the Matthew effects is provided by McGee, Share & Silva (1989), and Share & Silva (1987) in their New Zealand longitudinal study. They matched reading disabled and non-disabled groups on their vocabulary scores attained at age 3. At age eleven, marked differences were noted in vocabulary, listening comprehension and general language skills in favour of the non-disabled group. Using a hierarchical multiple regression they demonstrated that changes in IQ between ages 7 & 13 were predicted by changes in reading over that period. Growth in reading ability between the ages of 7 and 13 accounted for some of the IQ score variability even after attributing variability due to IQ and reading ability at age 7. The notion that intellectual development can be markedly influenced by literacy attainment is not new but empirical research is increasingly supportive (Ceci, 1991; Stanovich, 1993).

The implications of these findings are both disturbing and instructive. That there may be a specific cause of most inadequate reading progress is encouraging. Early intervention has the potential to preclude failure with its attendant personal and social cost. That an initially modular deficit rapidly broadens into generalised language, intellectual, and motivational deficits is worrying for those attempting to alleviate the reading problems of students in mid-primary school and beyond. In these cases the consequences of the reading failure may remain even if the cause of the reading problem was successfully addressed. For teachers trying to provide effective remedial assistance to such pupils the Matthew effects help explain (a) why progress is painfully slow, (b) the lack of significant change in general classroom performance consequent upon improved reading, (c) why teaching only phonemic awareness to older children may not necessarily have a great impact.

Many researchers have noted the cost-beneficial effects of early intervention, and stressed the importance of primary prevention - for a variety of reasons - from pragmatism to social justice. While early intervention has long been regarded as logical, even programs as intensive as Head Start have not achieved the outcome success that was sought. The value of empirical research since that time has been in the narrowing of the focus of the early intervention for reading - from a broad range of "readiness" activities to a specific emphases on (1) phonemic awareness as a screening tool and an intervention focus, and (2) the critical role of structured, explicit phonics in initial reading instruction.

The system and the state are co-defendants in a lawsuit filed in 1984 by lawyers for children with disabilities. In August, Garbis ordered the state to send managers to oversee eight school system departments affecting special education, a decision the system is appealing to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit.

At a Board of Public Works meeting yesterday, Gov. Robert L. Ehrlich Jr. expressed outrage over the legal fees the system is incurring for an appeal when special-education students still are not receiving services.

"This appeal has set me off," he said. "Appealing what? Dysfunction? ... We have a situation where we're paying money to the city to pay for a lawsuit to oppose a judge who has had the guts to bring the state in to fix a system that fails 99 percent of students."

Later yesterday, the chairman of the city school board, Brian D. Morris, said in response: "We're not going to run this school system based on some politicians' polling data. The ongoing grandstanding that's been focused on tearing down the children of Baltimore City is both sad and reprehensible. Our motivation is increased outcomes" for students.

The system acknowledged last summer that it was in contempt for failure to provide services to which special-education students are legally entitled because of their disabilities.

Estimates show about 9,000 children are owed between 90,000 and 112,000 hours of services, but state officials have expressed frustration that the system is constantly changing those figures.

The thought is at the root of an effort by a new advocacy group - First Class Education - to compel school districts to spend at least 65 percent of their operating budgets on classroom instruction.

The goal, Mr. Mooney said, is not to reduce school spending but to shift what he views as inefficient expenditures on administration and support services to teachers and students. "If you did this in all 50 states, it's $14 billion more a year," Mr. Mooney said. "It's enough for a new computer for every student in the country, or 300,000 new teachers."

Unlike their counterparts in most other professions, education professionals are responsible for evaluating their own performance. Educators collect, disseminate, and interpret the statistics by which educational progress is measured. Educators conduct the studies that evaluate the success of education initiatives. Current educators train future educators, in education schools. And, these activities are funded by naive, and mostly uninformed or uninterested, taxpayers rather than demanding shareholders or skeptical, prying investment analysts, as they would be in the private sector.

The number of Spanish-speaking students coming to the district continues to rise, said Anne Ramirez, the district's English language acquisition coordinator. Since 2000, the number of English-language-learners has doubled in the school district to about 4,100 students. Of those students, 9 percent were born outside the United States.

Educators struggle to teach those students fast enough to score well on standardized tests. "We have to teach these kids from square one," said Juan Verdugo, principal of East Memorial Elementary School in Greeley. "So, that already pushes us back."

Dr. Mark Wallace, a former school board president in Greeley, said children of illegal immigrants bring two challenges to the classroom. First, they're English-language learners. Second, they often come from low-income, migratory families. Verdugo said many of those parents are incapable of supporting their children in their studies. "They can't take homework home and get help from parents because they don't have the education in either language," he said.

District 6 in Greeley spends $2.7 million - less than 1 percent of its total budget - on programs to reach illegal immigrants: second-language programs and migrant education programs.

But Wallace said children of illegal immigrants represent only a small percentage of these children who come to school with little or no English. Even though some argue that these children became U.S. citizens because their parents entered illegally, District-6 school officials don't blame illegal immigrants for the low test scores.

CONSPICUOUSLY missing from the debate over the No Child Left Behind Act is a discussion of how it has hurt many of our most capable children. By forcing schools to focus their time and funding almost entirely on bringing low-achieving students up to proficiency, NCLB sacrifices the education of the gifted students who will become our future biomedical researchers, computer engineers and other scientific leaders.

Particularly in math and the sciences, Texas’ school children are lagging behind.

At first glance, results from the state achievement test, the TAKS, paint a positive picture, as scores have steadily increased across grade levels and subjects since the test was implemented.

But the TAKS may not be the best measure of student achievement. While 81% of Texas fourth-graders exhibited proficiency on the Math TAKS this year, only 40% exhibited proficiency on the National Assessment of Educational Progress. This discrepancy between the Texas and national tests is one of the largest in the nation.

And the problem is not just one of quality, but also of quantity.

“In Texas, more students graduate with a degree in Parks and Recreation than with one in Engineering,” said one Texas businessman at an education forum in October. He and his fellow panelists were concerned – “panicked” might be a better description – about the dwindling supply of quality engineers coming out of Texas’ colleges and universities.

On the same panel, it was noted that Fort Worth-based Lockheed Martin alone needs to hire 90,000 engineers in the next five years – more than Texas will even produce in that time.

    The proposal, endorsed Wednesday by Daniels and the state superintendent of public instruction, aims to cut administrative costs by unlocking financial regulations that bind school administrators.

 

     Some education officials and key Democrats expressed skepticism, but supporters say the plan would give school administrators the kind of spending flexibility enjoyed by their charter school counterparts.

In return, school districts would be expected to:

Work together to buy products and services, including employee insurance, buses, computers, textbooks and food.

Share food service workers, janitors, payroll and legal services, student activities and other areas with other schools, government agencies or groups.

    Gov. Mitch Daniels said diverting even 1 percent more money to classrooms statewide would free up an additional $100 million, which could pay for 1,500 teachers or cover most of the cost of a full-day kindergarten proposal.

Every day of the school year an average of 3,000 innocent civilians drop out of high school and very few take notice. America's greatest crisis is a silent one. While a majority of these youngsters are white, African America and Latino students are conspicuously over-represented. By the end of the school year as many as 500,000 tenth to twelfth graders will have "disappeared". My estimate is that this horrendous statistic is matched by an equal number of those who never appear in any drop-out data because they have never made it into high school. They are the victims of failed middle schools using high stakes testing as an admission barrier into failing high schools.

Fourteen million diverse children in poverty represent the overwhelming majority of the miseducated. The seven million in urban poverty, disproportionately represented by children of color, attend school in the 120 largest school districts. Every one of these districts is a failing school system in which greater size correlates positively with greater failure. Every miseducated child represents a personal tragedy. Each will have a lifelong struggle to ever have a job that pays enough to live in a safe neighborhood, have adequate health insurance, send their own children to better schools than they went to, or have a decent retirement. In most cases their lives are limited to dead end jobs, or wasted away in street violence or prison. Living in the midst of the most prosperous nation on earth, the miseducated will live shorter lives characterized by greater stress and limited life options. Miseducation is, in effect, a sentence of death carried out daily over a lifetime. It is the most powerful example I know of cruel and unusual punishment and it is exacted on children innocent of any crime. Most Americans avoid the personal tragedy aspect of this massive miseducation by not sending their own children to school in these failing urban districts. This includes a majority of the teachers who work in them! In effect, those with options cope with miseducation as a personal tragedy by fleeing the major urban districts in order to protect their loved ones from the contamination of miseducation. While flight can appear to be a successful strategy for coping with miseducation as a personal tragedy it does not address the question of how miseducating other people's children on this massive scale affects the survival of the total society. Every three years the number of dropouts and pushouts adds up to a city bigger than Chicago. For how long can a society continue to create cities the size of Chicago every three years filled with "no hopers" and still survive as either a free or a prosperous nation?

The paper argues that the growth and maintenance of 120 failed urban school districts miseducating diverse children in poverty for over half a century is a predictable, explainable phenomenon not a series of accidental, unfortunate, chance events. The extensive resources funneled into these systems are used for the purpose of increasing the district bureaucracies themselves rather than improving the schools or the education of the children. This massive, persisting failure has generated neither the effort nor the urgency which the stated values of American society would lead us to expect. Instead, the larger society provides the institutional and cultural setting which protects, preserves and enhances these failing urban school systems for the purpose of providing a broad spectrum of constituencies with a priceless set of unearned privileges. The most valuable of these is access to economically and ethnically segregated forms of schooling for middle-class whites which is effective and does lead to careers, higher education and improved life opportunities. Part I. of the paper provides examples of the processes used by dysfunctional urban school bureaucracies to survive and grow in spite of systematically destroying the life opportunities of seven million diverse children and youth in poverty. Part II. identifies some of the constituencies who derive real benefits from supporting these failed systems. Part III. analyzes the processes employed by failing urban districts to prevent change and maintain the distribution of unearned privilege. Part IV. presents an analysis of the role teacher education can play in making urban schools more effective. Part V. (plus Appendix A) concludes with a proposal for what might be done by states to stop the massive miseducation of diverse children in poverty in dysfunctional urban school districts.

Just what is a high school grad to do these days?

On the one hand, everyone and their guidance counselor will tell you that college is mandatory after graduating high school. It doesn't take an economics degree to see the pay stub difference between a college degree and a high school sheepskin.

But have you seen the cost of college these days? Tuition hikes have been averaging upwards of 10 percent for several years running, and that's only the half of it. Some online tuition calculators suggest that total costs for a private college might pass $100,000 a year by the time today's infants hit their ivory tower desks.

So a student's stuck in a Catch-22: Can't afford not to go to college, but can't afford to go to college.

The utility of a college education is widely embraced, and with good reason. Both private and public returns to higher education are considerable. When it comes to personal income, for example, the average college graduate can expect to earn about 73 percent more over a career than someone with a high school diploma (though that fluctuates depending on the degree), according to the College Board. Quite outside esoteric arguments for higher education—like the need for an educated electorate—a student's decision to attend college often starts and stops at this simple income argument: Go to college, get a better job and earn more money. If there's some extra stuff like culture and increased civic-mindedness—bonus, dude.

But an argument gaining traction is that students—particularly those of modest means—can no longer afford college. Much of the debate agonizes over rising tuition—the supposed offspring of cash-strapped universities, penny-pinching state legislatures and stagnant Pell grants—and secondary effects of increased student loans and rapidly rising student debt.

It makes for a good story. But these purported problems are not having quite the effect feared by many. Enrollments have been climbing (not receding), higher education revenue has exploded (not imploded) and student debt remains manageable for most. And the clincher: Research shows that even given its higher cost, college is still well worth the investment.

The majority of Maryland's fourth-graders are either reading whizzes or they are stumbling miserably. It all depends on who is doing the testing.

If it's the federal government, only 32 percent of Maryland's fourth-graders are proficient at reading. But if state educators are accurate, 81 percent of fourth-graders have met a passing standard.

A renewed debate over testing erupted across the country after the release of a new round of national assessments in reading and math that showed enormous gaps between the national tests and the state tests required under the No Child Left Behind Act.

Some educators say states might be setting standards that are too low, in essence dumbing-down their tests to meet a federal requirement that says 100 percent of schoolchildren should be able to pass the exams by 2014.

The federal law "has created an incentive for states to lower their standards," said Michael J. Petrilli, vice president of the Fordham Foundation, which does education research and supports educational reform projects.

Maryland officials acknowledge that their test is easier but say there are good reasons:

The state scores carry serious consequences for students and schools that the national test doesn't. And the standard set by the national test is "a very high bar," said Gary Heath, assistant state superintendent for accountability and assessment.

[New York] The Bloomberg administration's efforts to invest immense attention and resources on low-income students in low-performing schools are causing growing anxiety among parents from middle-class strongholds who worry that the emphasis is coming at their children's expense.

Some of the very changes that Chancellor Joel I. Klein has made his hallmark - uniform programs in reading and math for most schools; drilling that helped produce citywide gains last spring on standardized tests; changes in rules for admission to programs for the gifted and talented, designed to make them more equitable - have caused unease among that important constituency.

In interviews and at public meetings, dozens of parents from the middle class and upper middle class have complained of an increasing focus on standardized test preparation and remedial work, of a decreasing focus on science education and the arts, of large class sizes and of the absence of a powerful mechanism for parental influence.

      It's simple, says Rep. Dayton, R-Orem, the Utah County legislator known for helping lead Utah's resistance to President Bush's No Child Left Behind Act — despite the insistence of some in Utah's education community who think the federal law helps make sure that poor, disabled and ethnic minority students aren't, indeed, left behind.
      All schools need to do, Dayton says, is make tests so easy that all students pass or to make tests so difficult that all students fail. If students are tested on material appropriate for the grade, however, there will always be some students who do not perform well on the standardized tests, said Dayton, who moved a bill through the legislature last spring that requires educators to prioritize the state's standardized testing system ahead of the federal requirements.

Connecticut State Attorney General Richard Blumenthal filed a brief Friday opposing a U.S. Justice Department motion to dismiss the state lawsuit challenging the federal No Child Left Behind Act.

The Justice Department has asked a federal judge to dismiss the Connecticut lawsuit, arguing that state officials are wrong to claim that states should not have to spend their own money to meet the education law's mandates. State officials argued in a lawsuit filed in U.S. District Court in Hartford that the law is unconstitutional, an unfunded federal mandate costing more than the state receives in federal aid.

The June 23, 2005 commentary, Literacy Then and Now, presented an overview of literacy in the United States from Colonial days to the present.  It cited research and studies showing literacy was much higher in the colonial period, and generally through the 19th century but with a marked decline throughout the 20th century. This trend coincides with the creation of a public school system, dating from Pennsylvania's Common School Act in 1834 but slowly taking hold through the rest of the 1800s.  By 1900 formal schooling  for most students was limited to a few years, with only 6% getting as far as high school.          

While two things may occur at the same time without one causing the other, the growth of formal schooling accompanied by a decline in the literacy rate might have a cause and effect relationship.  At the very least more formal schooling didn't prevent the growth of illiteracy.         

The issue was brought to the fore last week, when Mark Schneider, Commissioner of the National Center for Education Statistics, released the results of the 2003 National Assessment of Adult Literacy (NAAL).

The news is not good.  The 20th century decline has continued and even accelerated. In this first NAAL study since 1992 adult literacy remained flat or dropped at every education level, from school dropouts through college graduates.  

It was rated according to four categories: Below Basic, Basic, Intermediate and Proficient.          

Those Below Basic could only perform the most simple literacy activities. They included 14%, or 30 million, of the adult population.  Forty-four percent did not speak any English before starting school while 55% did not graduate from high school.  In brief, they started out with major handicaps and schooling did not help the majority overcome them. Those at the Basic level, according to the report's definition, could at least understand a pamphlet for  prospective jurors.  While hardly a challenging standard, only 29%, or 63 million adults could read at this level.  The largest group, 44%, or 95 million individuals, could perform at the Intermediate level, which the report said meant they could find information in reference materials. Finally, only 13%, or 28 million adults are literacy Proficient.  NAAL says they "can do complex activities such as comparing viewpoints in two editorials, or interpreting a table about blood pressure and physical activity."  Good for them.  Note that the 2003 findings report that there were little or no improvements since 1992.          

One startling finding was featured in national network television news programs Friday evening, December 16th.  These noted that, in 1992, 40% of college graduates could read and comprehend at the Proficient level.  40%!! That meant that 60%, or three out of five, college graduates were incapable of comparing viewpoints in two different editorials or interpreting what their own blood pressure readings might mean.          

But, alas!  1992 can now be looked upon as the good old days.  In the latest study, by 2003 only 31% of college graduates - three out of ten - are literate at the Proficient level. If 31% of college graduates are proficient readers, that is a maximum.  It doesn't, in fact, prove that 31% do read at that, or any other, level. 

This study concludes that there is a measurable improvement for those kids who attend preschool in reading and math. Is this study is a convincing argument for establishing universal preschool for the whole country? Look at the attached qualifiers: Most state prekindergarten programs target children who are at elevated risk of school failure (often due to poverty), and programs for these children have been the most studied...possible selection bias due to unmeasured differences between the children who attend state- funded preschool programs and those who do not. (See the whole study here). There's no doubt that preschool can help kids who are not exposed to educational opportunities at home; but that doesn't mean that preschool should be universally expanded for everyone. That's committing the logical fallacy of generalizing from the specific. This is even a bigger problem when it displaces parents in a situation where it shouldn't.

Earlier studies have shown the value of high-quality, well-funded preschool programs for improving children’s short- and long-term success in school and in life (Barnett, 2002). Current state- funded prekindergarten programs are not as well funded as the most effective models studied, but are larger in capacity and serve a more diverse population. The standards and quality of state prekindergarten programs vary greatly. Most state prekindergarten programs target children who are at elevated risk of school failure (often due to poverty), and programs for these children have been the most studied. A few states have recently sought to make prekindergarten education available to all 4-year-olds. Less research has been conducted on the impacts of programs for children who are not economically disadvantaged. This study’s contribution to our knowledge about such programs is particularly important. As the number of state funded prekindergarten programs grows, it is important to determine how effective they are in improving children’s learning and development as they enter school. However, it has prove n difficult to conduct rigorous evaluations of state preschool programs that provide accurate estimates of effects. The most difficult problem faced by evaluators is possible selection bias due to unmeasured differences between the children who attend state- funded preschool programs and those who do not. In the case of universal programs, it is especially difficult to obtain an adequate comparison group since one is more likely to suspect that some unknown differences in the children and families lead to nonparticipation when a program is freely available to one and all.

We are deeply concerned that current trends in early education, fueled by political pressure, are leading to an emphasis on unproven methods of academic instruction and unreliable standardized testing that can undermine learning and damage young children’s healthy development.

Preschool education must not follow the same path that has led kindergartens toward intense academic instruction with little or no time for child-initiated learning. If such practices were effective for five-year-olds, we would have seen better long-term results by now. We call for a reversal of the pushing down of the curriculum that has transformed kindergarten into de facto first grade.

Education is not a race where the prize goes to the one who finishes first. To help young children develop literacy and a lifelong love of learning we need to respect and, when needed, to strengthen their individual abilities and drive to learn. Instead, current trends in early education policy and practice heighten pressure and stress in children’s lives, which can contribute to behavioral and learning problems. We call for research on the causes of increased levels of anger, misbehavior, and school expulsion among young children.

Here's a very interesting comparison of American engineering graduates vs. those of China & India. Duke Outsourcing Study: Empirical Comparison of Engineering Graduates in the United States, China, and India. A very informative read!  It seems as though we aren't as bad off as we were previously lead to believe. Also, "How any engineers do we really need?"

If preschool is a requirement for success, how did so many of us succeed without it? And why are so many students today failing with it? Preschool rates have soared from 15 percent in the 1960s to 65 percent today. Yet the Nation's Report Card shows no change in test scores after all this time. Children are spending an extra year (sometimes two) in school with nothing to show for it.

With a record like this, how did preschool go from being an optional "a la carte" to a mandatory "must-have"?

One reason is the misuse of research on children in stark circumstances. When one 1960s experiment showed that intense early intervention could give struggling children a leg up, the benefits of intervention were assumed for all children. That was a mistake.

Penicillin can help a sick patient, but it provides no benefit to a healthy body and may even be harmful. Likewise, most American children are not severely deprived, and for them, leaving a healthy home environment may be a costly tradeoff.

It is widely understood that early education can increase knowledge at school entry. There's no surprise there. But here's the rest of the story: "For most children, the cognitive benefits of prekindergarten quickly fade," the National Bureau of Economic Research says.

That is to say, children with and without preschool perform the same on tests over time.

With private and government estimates showing that home-schooling is growing at a rate of 7 percent to 15 percent each year, most people recognize home-schooling as the fastest-growing education trend today.
    But can home-schooling maintain this pace? According to a report released in November 2004 by the U.S. Census Bureau, there are an estimated 5.5 million "stay-at-home" parents. Home-schooling usually requires having a full-time parent at home, and even with an estimated 600,000 families already home-schooling, there still is significant room for growth.  

One of the goals of Home School Legal Defense Association is to encourage families to home-school. One program developed by Exodus Mandate, a group that promotes home-schooling, is called Homeschooling Family-to-Family. Experienced home-schoolers would encourage and mentor other families who are considering home-schooling or are just starting to home-school.
    One of the most effective ways of growing the home-school movement is for home-school families to spread the word about what they have discovered. They should be equipped with facts and figures that support home-schooling. They should be able to point people to "getting-started resources" and local support groups.

Michael Smith is the president of the Home School Legal Defense Association. He may be contacted at 540/338-5600; or send e-mail to media@hslda.org.

Shall the Missouri constitution be amended to fund elementary and secondary education and two years of college by:

· Allowing the use of public money for religious purposes and institutions;

· Changing the dedicated minimum amount of the state revenue from 25% to 33%;

· Funding school vouchers at 100% for public and 75% for non-public students and allowing tax credits for school donations;

· Prohibiting districts from imposing additional testing standards or raising funds through taxation;

· Reducing the amount of lottery and gaming revenues available for public education by dividing those funds equally among public and non-public students?

Funding for all public & non-public K-14 schools shall be the sole responsibility of the state legislature. The estimated state impact exceeds $3.5 billion annually. Because public K-14 schools shall no longer assess local taxes, the impact on local government is unknown, as they are subject to funding from the state legislature.

But can anyone credibly claim that even one urban district has responded systematically to competition from charters or vouchers? Most such school systems are still a mess; the latest National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) results show that millions upon millions of their students are still learning at dismal levels. It may be that big urban districts are simply incapable of making the painful changes that improvement requires. They still let the best veteran teachers congregate in their more affluent schools; they still pay phys ed teachers the same as physics teachers; they still send weak administrators to make-work jobs in the central office, rather than throwing them out. In other words, they still bow to the demands of established adult interests rather than making decisions based on what is good for kids.

 

Perhaps vouchers and charters haven't catalyzed systemic school reform because too few urban superintendents and school board members understand how they can use competition to drive their own reform agendas. Perhaps the "theory of action" of market-driven change is too complex and too slow. For it to work, a reformer would have to convince everyone that competition was bleeding the system of kids and funding, and that if they didn't figure out how to win parents and students back, many bad things would happen. Budgets would get cut. Teachers would lose their jobs. Class sizes would rise. Retirement benefits would fall. Only after doing this could the reformer say, "I need major concessions from you so as to avoid further pain." How much less painful to join the chorus of complaint that charters and vouchers are "draining the public schools" of funds—then demand that government put the competitors out of business.

The average American college graduate's literacy in English declined significantly over the past decade, according to results of a nationwide test released yesterday.

The National Assessment of Adult Literacy, given in 2003 by the Department of Education, is the nation's most important test of how well adult Americans can read. The test also found steep declines in the English literacy of Hispanics in the United States, and significant increases among blacks and Asians. When the test was last administered, in 1992, 40 percent of the nation's college graduates scored at the proficient level, meaning that they were able to read lengthy, complex English texts and draw complicated inferences. But on the 2003 test, only 31 percent of the graduates demonstrated those high-level skills. There were 26.4 million college graduates.

The college graduates who in 2003 failed to demonstrate proficiency included 53 percent who scored at the intermediate level and 14 percent who scored at the basic level, meaning they could read and understand short, commonplace prose texts. Three percent of college graduates who took the test in 2003, representing some 800,000 Americans, demonstrated "below basic" literacy, meaning that they could not perform more than the simplest skills, like locating easily identifiable information in short prose.