On Thu, 06 Dec 2007
Re: Survey: Young Americans are SCIENCE SISSIES
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First, Kill All the School Boards
in The Atlantic, by Matt Miller, January/February 2008.
Miller takes on the eternal question of "how do we fix our
schools ...
www.theatlantic.com/doc/200801/miller-education/2 - 28k -
Google Results about 6,130 for
"School Boards" "Matt Miller"
Matt Miller is the author of The Two Percent Solution:
Fixing America’s Problems in Ways Liberals and Conservatives
Can Love (2003). He is at work on a new book, The Tyranny of
Dead Ideas.
"The usual explanation for why national standards won’t
fly is that the right hates “national” and the left hates
“standards.” But that’s changing."
"Incompetent school boards and union dominance.
“In the first place, God made idiots,” Mark Twain once
wrote. “This was for practice. Then He made School Boards.”
"Local control essentially surrenders power over the
schools to the teachers’ unions. "
"Principals, for their part, are compliance machines,
spending their days making sure that federal, state, and
district programs are implemented. "
Congress erred big-time when NCLB assigned each state to
set its own standards and devise and score its own tests,
which causes a race to the bottom. "Wisconsin sets its
eighth-grade reading passing level at the 14th percentile
while South Carolina sets its at the 71st percentile."
===========
First, Kill All the School Boards
No problem left behind
Why is local control such a failure when applied to our
schools? After all, political decentralization has often
served America well, allowing decisions to be made close to
where their impact would be felt. But in education, it has
spawned several crippling problems:
No way to know how children are doing. “We’re two decades
into the standards movement in this country, and standards
are still different by classroom, by school, by district,
and by state,” says Tom Vander Ark, who headed the education
program at the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation from 1999
through 2006. “Most teachers in America still pretty much
teach whatever they want.”
If you thought President Bush’s 2001 No Child Left Behind
legislation was fixing these problems, think again.
True, NCLB requires states to establish standards in core
subjects and to test children in grades 3–8 annually, with
the aim of making all students “proficient” by 2014.
But by leaving standards and definitions of “proficiency”
to state discretion, it has actually made matters worse. The
Proficiency Illusion, a re****t released in October by the
conservative Thomas B. Fordham Foundation, details how.
“‘Proficiency’ varies wildly from state to state, with
‘passing scores’ ranging from the 6th percentile to the
77th,” the researchers found:
Congress erred big-time when NCLB assigned each state to
set its own standards and devise and score its own tests …
this study underscores the folly of a big modern nation,
worried about its global competitiveness, nodding with
approval as Wisconsin sets its eighth-grade reading passing
level at the 14th percentile while South Carolina sets its
at the 71st percentile.
The lack of uniform evaluation creates a “tremendous risk of
delusion about how well children are actually doing,” says
Chris Cerf, the deputy chancellor of schools in New York
City. That delusion makes it far more difficult to enact
reforms—and even to know where reforms are needed. “Schools
may get an award from their state for high performance, and
under federal guidelines they may be targeted for closure
for low performance,” Vander Ark says. This happens in
California, he told me, all the time.
Stunted R&D.
Local control has kept education from attracting the
research and development that drives progress, because
benefits of scale are absent. There are some 15,000
curriculum departments in this country—one for every
district. None of them can afford to invest in deeply
understanding what works best when it comes to teaching
reading to English-language learners, or using computers to
develop customized strategies for students with different
learning styles. Local-control advocates would damn the
federal government if it tried to take on such things.
Perhaps more im****tant, the private sector generally won’t
pursue them, either. Purchasing decisions are made by a
complex mix of classroom, school, and school board
officials. The more complicated and fragmented the sale that
a company has to make, the less willing it is to invest in
product research and development.
Incompetent school boards and union dominance.
“In the first place, God made idiots,” Mark Twain once
wrote. “This was for practice. Then He made School Boards.”
Things don’t appear to have improved much since Twain’s
time. “The job has become more difficult, more complicated,
and more political, and as a result, it’s driven out many of
the good candidates,” Vander Ark says. “So while teachers’
unions have become more sophisticated and have smarter
people who are better-equipped and -prepared at the table,
the quality of school-board members, particularly in urban
areas, has decreased.” Board members routinely spend their
time on minor matters, from mid-level personnel decisions to
bus routes. “The tradition goes back to the rural era, where
the school board hired the schoolmarm and oversaw the repair
of the roof, looked into the stove in the room, and
deliberated on every detail of operating the schools,” says
Michael Kirst, an emeritus professor of education at
Stanford University. “A lot of big-city school boards still
do these kinds of things.” Because of Progressive-era
reforms meant to get school boards out of “politics,” most
urban school districts are independent, beyond the reach of
mayors and city councils. Usually elected in off-year races
that few people vote in or even notice, school boards are,
in effect, accountable to no one.
Local control essentially surrenders power over the schools
to the teachers’ unions. Union money and mobilization are
often decisive in board elections. And local unions have
hefty intellectual and political backing from their state
and national affiliates. Even when they’re not in the
unions’ pockets, in other words, school boards are
outmatched.
The unions are adept at negotiating new advantages for their
members, spreading their negotiating strategies to other
districts in the state, and getting these advantages
embodied in state and sometimes federal law as well. This
makes it extraordinarily difficult for superintendents to
change staffing, compensation, curriculum, and other
policies. Principals, for their part, are compliance
machines, spending their days making sure that federal,
state, and district programs are implemented. Meanwhile,
common-sense reforms, like offering higher pay to attract
teachers to underserved specialties such as math, science,
and special education, can’t get traction, because the
unions say no.
Financial inequity.
The dirty little secret of local control is the enormous
tax advantage it confers on better-off Americans:
communities with high property wealth can tax themselves at
low rates and still generate far more dollars per pupil than
poor communities taxing themselves heavily. This wasn’t
always the case: in the 19th century, property taxes were
rightly seen as the fairest way to pay for education, since
property was the main form of wealth, and the rich and poor
tended to live near one another. But the rise of commuter
suburbs since World War II led to economically segregated
communities; today, the spending gap between districts can
be thousands of dollars per pupil.
But local taxes represent only 44 percent of overall school
funding; the spending gaps between states, which contribute
47 percent of total spending, account for most of the
financial inequity. Perversely, Title I, the federal aid
program enacted in the 1960s to boost poor schools, has
widened the gaps, because it distributes money largely
according to how much states are already spending.
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what would horace do?
I asked Marc Tucker, the head of the New Commission on the
Skills of the American Workforce (a 2006 bipartisan panel
that called for an overhaul of the education system), how he
convinces people that local control is hobbling our schools.
He said he asks a simple question: If we have the
second-most-expensive K–12 system of all those measured by
the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development,
but consistently perform between the middle and the bottom
of the pack, shouldn’t we examine the systems of countries
that spend less and get better results? “I then point out
that the system of local control that we have is almost
unique,” Tucker says. “One then has to defend a practice
that is uncharacteristic of the countries with the best
performance. “It’s an industrial-benchmarking argument,”
he adds.
Horace Mann wouldn’t have used this jargon, but his thinking
was much the same. In his time, the challenge was to embrace
a bigger role for the state; today, the challenge is to
embrace a bigger role for the federal government in
standards, funding, and other arenas.
The usual explanation for why national standards won’t fly
is that the right hates “national” and the left hates
“standards.” But that’s changing. Two Republican former
secretaries of education, Rod Paige and William Bennett, now
sup****t national standards and tests, writing in The
Wa****ngton Post: “In a world of fierce economic competition,
we can’t afford to pretend that the current system is
getting us where we need to go.” On the Democratic side,
John Podesta, a former chief of staff to President Clinton
and the current president of the Center for American
Progress (where I’m a senior fellow), told me that he
believes the public is far ahead of the established
political wisdom, which holds that the only safe way to
discuss national standards is to stipulate that they are
“optional” or “voluntary”—in other words, not “national” at
all.
Recent polling suggests he’s right. Two surveys conducted
for the education campaign Strong American Schools, which I
advised in 2006, found that a majority of Americans think
there should be uniform national standards. Most proponents
suggest we start by establi****ng standards and tests in
grades 3–12 in the core subjects—reading, math, and
science—and leave more-controversial subjects, such as
history, until we have gotten our feet wet.
According to U.S. Department of Education statistics, the
federal government accounts for 9 percent, or $42 billion,
of our K–12 spending. If we’re serious about improving our
schools, and especially about raising up the lowest, Uncle
Sam’s contribution must rise to 25 or 30 percent of the
total (a ****ft President Nixon considered). Goodwin Liu, a
University of California at Berkeley law professor who has
studied school financing, suggests that a higher federal
contribution could be used in part to bring all states up to
a certain minimum per-pupil funding. It could also, in my
view, fund conditional grants to boost school performance.
For example, federal aid could be offered to raise teachers’
salaries in poor schools, provided that states or districts
take measures such as linking pay to performance and
deferring or eliminating tenure. Big grants might be given
to states that adopt new national standards, making those
standards “voluntary” but hard to refuse. The government
also needs to invest much more heavily in research. It now
spends $28 billion annually on research at the National
Institutes of Health, but only $260 million—not even 1
percent of that amount—on R&D for education.
What of school boards?
In an ideal world, we would scrap them—especially in big
cities, where most poor children live. That’s the impulse
behind a growing drive for mayoral control of schools. New
York and Boston have used mayoral authority to sustain what
are among the most far-reaching reform agendas in the
country, including more-rigorous curricula and a focus on
better teaching and school leader****p. Of course, the
chances of eliminating school boards anytime soon are nil.
But we can at least recast and limit their role.
In all of these efforts, we must understand one paradox:
only by transcending local control can we create genuine
autonomy for our schools. “If you visit schools in many
other parts of the world,” Marc Tucker says, “you’re struck
almost immediately … by a sense of autonomy on the part of
the school staff and principal that you don’t find in the
United States.” Research in 46 countries by Ludger Woessmann
of the University of Munich has shown that setting clear
external standards while granting real discretion to schools
in how to meet them is the most effective way to run a
system. We need to give schools one set of national
expectations, free educators and parents to collaborate
locally in whatever ways work, and get everything else out
of the way.
Nationalizing our schools even a little goes against every
cultural tradition we have, save the one that matters most:
our capacity to renew ourselves to meet new challenges. Once
upon a time a national role in retirement funding was
anathema; then suddenly, after the Depression, we had Social
Security. Once, a federal role in health care would have
been rejected as socialism; now, federal money accounts for
half of what we spend on health care. We started down this
road on schooling a long time ago. Time now to finish the
journey.
PURE Republicanism?? It's now clear.
Six years of PURE Republicanism - BOTH houses
AND the Prez. Pure as it gets.
So?
Are you better off now than seven years ago?
Are you proud with what they have done to
America and her reputation? ...Your reputation?
....all that sleaze, lies and bribery? Proud?
If actions speak louder than rhetoric, then
name ONE good thing about Republicanism.
Just one.
Just one *real* thing.
Can't do it?
So? Your Republicanism more like a bad habit then?
Pure empty feelsgoodism?
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