Poll Shows Americans Completely Misunderstand, But Are Nontheless Angry About, the Federal Education Budget

The National School Boards Association recently released the results of a new poll focused on federal education spending. I'm a big, big supporter of increased federal support for education. But--NSBA press release to the contrary--the poll results say very little that's useful or new. The release said:

As members of Congress prepare to head home for the Memorial Day Holiday, a national poll from the National School Boards Association finds a majority of likely voters believe that Congress is out of touch with the public’s expectations when it comes to funding federal education programs and want Congress to fulfill its funding commitment to schoolchildren. Seven in 10 likely voters (70 percent) say that Congress should restore funding for No Child Left Behind and special education programs in next year’s budget to the authorized levels.

As is always the case with polls, it's absolutely crucial to read the specific questions asked. Let's start with the contention that Congress is "out of touch with the public's expectations when it comes to funding federal education programs." Here are the actual questions and results:

If you had to guess, what PERCENTAGE of the FEDERAL budget would you say is spent on education programs for PUBLIC elementary, middle and high schools? [MEAN=20.06% ]

Regardless of what PERCENTAGE of the FEDERAL budget you THINK is spent on education programs for PUBLIC elementary, middle and high schools, please tell me what PERCENTAGE in your opinion should be spent? [MEAN=36.64%]

In other words, the average person thinks that one-fifth of the federal budget is spent on K-12 education, and that more than one-third of the federal budget should be spent on education.

The thing is, only two percent of the federal budget ($57 billion out of $2.7 trillion) is spent on K-12 and higher education combined. So all this poll really shows is that when it comes to the federal budget, the average American doesn't know their ear from their elbow.

The fact that people wish a third of the money went to education is meaningless. If you conducted a series of identical polls that substituted words like "national defense," "health care," "retirement security," "transportation," "scientific research," and "support for veterans" for "public education," do you think the sum of all the preferred percentages would add up to 100? Of course not. You can't ask questions like this in isolation; you have to give people a sense of the competing priorities, difficult tradeoffs, and limited resources that define the process of making a budget.

The survey also asked this question:

Congress authorized spending $42 billion dollars NEXT YEAR to fund TWO of the largest federal education programs that aid public schools across the country – the No Child Left Behind Act and Special Education. However in the current budget proposal, Congress is providing only $23 billion for these two programs—a little more than HALF of the $42 billion they originally authorized and promised. Hearing that, what, in your opinion should Congress do?

Restore the funding for these education programs back to their authorized and promised levels for next year. [70%]

OR

Keep the proposed spending cuts for these education programs in place for next year regardless of what was originally authorized and promised [19%]

DK/Refused [11%]

Again, I bow to no one in my unhappiness with Congress' insistence on passing huge yearly tax cuts for extremely rich people while refusing to give NCLB more money. But an authorization level is not the same thing as a "promise." It's a ceiling, a limit on the most Congress can spend on a program, not an iron-clad guarantee of how much it will spend. To conflate the two gives the game away.

As does asking if Congress should "restore...back" funding to authorized levels. The clear implication is that funding was actually at those levels at some point, only to be taken away, creating a need for restoration. This simply isn't true. While federal education funding is down slightly from last year and has been stagnant for the last several years (again, much to my dismay), overall funding levels are significantly higher than they were five years ago, or at any other time in the past.

Budgeting is a serious, difficult business. Even in the best of times--and I've seen them, having been an assistant state budget director during the go-go late 1990s--the demand for needed, worthwhile public spending far exceeds available resources. Setting priorities isn't easy, and it's not made easier by meaningless polls like these.

Next They'll Say That Nigerian Guy Isn't Sending Me a Million Dollars...

Truth be told, I don't normally read the mass e-mail announcements I get from the U.S. Department of Education, which tend to deal with grant competitions, statements on Secretary Spellings' visit to Egypt, and the like. But yesterday one headline--Statement by Deputy Press Secretary Chad Colby Regarding "Certificate of Completion" Hoax EMail--caught my attention. When, I wondered, did the U.S. Department of Education get into the business of debunking chain letters? I was curious to see for myself what exactly this e-mail said that had so offended the Department as to require a formal press release. Thanks to the magic of Google, I was able to quickly find the hoax e-mail online. Its text is posted below, courtesy of About.com's urban legends site, which also offers a thorough debunking of the e-mail's claims as well as responses to it from the U.S. and Indiana Departments of Education (the e-mail appears to have originated in Indiana, and the tests to which it refers are part of Indiana's assessment system).

Subject: Certificate of Completion or Attendance

The "Certificate of Completion or Attendance" that is being offered in lieu of high school diplomas, is a part of Bush's "No Child Left Behind". This is how it works:

It is for students who are unable to pass both the Language Arts and Math portions of the 10th grade ISTEP. Students must take the same 10th grade test over in the 11th and 12th grades until they pass both portions. If they are unable to pass the 10th grade test by the 12th grade then they have two options:

1. Drop out and go to a GED program or,

2. accept a "Certificate of Completion" - it is NOT a diploma. Once a student accepts it, they cannot ever get a diploma or a GED. A certificate of completion means that a student can never (as long as they live):

1. go to the armed services
2. go to college
3. go to trade school
4. go to journeyman's school
5. go to beauty school
6. go to culinary arts school
7. get a federal loan in their lifetime

This is the portion of NO CHILD LEFT BEHIND (2001) that Bush slipped in during the 2004 revision of the NCLB bill. It has not been publicized. At a high school in Indiana, in 2005, there were 87 seniors in the graduation class. Five got diplomas and 82 got "Certificates of Completion".

This is being referred to as the "Paper Plantation". It is better for students to drop out and get into a GED program so they may seek other forms of education, later in life, if they desire to do so. All 50 states have "Certificates of Completion or Attendance".

Please pass this information along to EVERYONE you know who has school age children. Clergy, please preach it from the pulpits. Our people MUST know this information. Thank you & stay blessed.

Anyone who knows much about NCLB can see the serious factual flaws here, but it's just as easy to see how most people, who have no reason to know much about the law's details, might be deceived. (I won't get into pointing out the flaws or debunking here, since the folks at About.com and the Department of Education have already done a qutie thorough job of this. It's also fascinating to learn that NCLB has reached the level of cultural currency where it has its own chain hoax e-mail, or that anti-NCLB propaganda (and anti-Bush paranoia in some communities) has taken such hold that people would believe such sensational claims.

It's good that the Department's correcting rampant misinformation about the law. But, as my colleagues Kevin and Andy have noted elsewhere, misinformation about NCLB is also rampant in mainstream media coverage of the law, which is read by a lot more people and commands more respect than your typical chain e-mail.

I'm also curious to see if anyone out there knows more about the actual origins of the e-mail itself. It appears to have started in Indiana, and the "paper plantation" reference is also suggestive, but please send me info if you know anything more.

Scientific Method?

New 2005 NAEP science scores came out today. A familiar pattern -- elementary school scores up since the last test in 2000, middle and high school scores steady. But the high school scores are down from 1996, which is obviously cause for much concern. That said, this--per today's NYTimes--really doesn't make any sense at all:

Some teachers blamed the decreasing amount of time devoted to science in schools, in part because of the No Child Left Behind Law, whose requirements for annual testing in reading and math during the elementary grades have led many schools to decrease the time spent on science or to abandon its teaching altogether.

"Overall interest in science is down," said P. John Whitsett, a physics teacher at Fond du Lac High School in Wisconsin, who has taught physics and chemistry for 36 years. "When kids are given the opportunity to do science in elementary school, it excites them. But when the elementary and middle schools neglect science because of their focus on math and reading, it turns them off, and that disinterest carries on into high school."

So, NCLB has supposedly forced elementary schools to focus on reading and math and "abandon" science, so much so that elementary school science scores have gone--up? The fourth graders who took the NAEP science exam in 2005 have been living under NCLB for most of their academic careers, and their scores were the only ones that increased, at a statistically significant level to boot.

2005 12th graders, by contrast, entered high school in 2001, which means they took their one and only NCLB test just as the law's provisions were coming into effect, and long before they might have been subject to the allegedly disinteresting effects of curricular narrowing in elementary school.

If anything, these numbers support exactly the opposite conclusion: that focusing on getting all students up to speed in reading and math results in higher science scores, but current 12th graders suffered from the lack of that focus in the early grades.

Shouldn't these anti-NCLB criticisms be a little more, I don't know--scientific?

Pre-KPalooza

Lots of action on the Pre-K front this week:

A new report from Pre-K Now summarizes state governors' preschool proposals for the 2007 fiscal year. Additional analysis from Stateline here, along with some coverage of the debate over Proposition 82, the California ballot initiative that would establish voluntary universal preschool in that state. Californians are scheduled to vote on Prop. 82 on June 6, and both proponents and opponents of the initiative are going into overdrive. On Sunday, the Los Angeles Times editorial page came out opposing Prop. 82, largely because of design flaws (I happen to share some of these concerns--particularly about bureacracy and requirements that preschool teachers obtain a special credential). And today the paper ran an op-ed by preschool researcher Art Reynolds arguing that Prop. 82 would be a wise public investment. Reynolds is not only the primary investigator for the Chicago Longitudinal Study, one of the most impressive studies finding positive impacts from large-scale preschool investments, but he's also an expert in cost-benefit analysis who has studied the returns to a variety of public investments in child health, education, and well-being, so his views on the subject are well-worth consideration.

If you really want to get a grip on this issue, though, I suggest you check out this website, created as part of the follow-up to a national conference on univeral preschool held at Berkeley earlier this spring. I was fortunate to be able to attend this conference, which featured as speakers many of the nation's leading thinkers on early childhood education and offered some of the most thoughtful discussion I've heard on this issue. You can watch streaming video of the presentations and discussions, or read research by participants at the website.


And stay tuned for an Education Sector online debate on the merits of universal preschool later this month.

Even-Handed to a Fault

As a rule, it doesn't make sense to criticize newspapers that publicize reports you write. There's a lot going on in the world, some of which is arguably more interesting than how states inflate their performance under NCLB. One appreciates all the ink one can get.

But I'm going to make an exception in the case of this editorial from today's Fort Wayne News-Sentinel, which said:

Here’s what happens when the federal government, through the No Child Left Behind act, takes over so much control of local education. Indiana, says a new national analysis by the nonprofit Education Sector research group in Washington, ranks eighth in the nation “in the degree to which education leaders exaggerate statistics to make schools look better under federal accountability laws.” The state, says the report released by Kevin Carey of the organization, uses data that “defy reality and common sense,” falsely claiming that every teacher receives top-notch training, that student test scores are well above average and that nine of 10 students graduate from high school.

Not so, say state education officials. The federal government ensures states such as Indiana stick to reporting guidelines, said Mary Jane Michalak, a spokeswoman for the state Department of Education. But, Carey counters, Washington lets states define their own terms of success, which fuels embellishment.

This will all get sorted out, and it will be found that Carey is partly right and the state is partly right. But what does any of it, really, have to do with teaching children?

I was basically with them until the last graf. "It will be found"? That's a pretty strong statement, given that at no point has the Indiana State Department of Education said why it disagrees with the report's findings. It just disagrees on principle, because the people there are smart enough to realize that this is usually all it takes to trigger the lamentable journalistic tendecy to fall back on nominally objective, judgement-free "he said she said" presentations of public policy debates.

Then comes the final pox-on-both-their-houses flourish, "what does any of it, really...." Maybe there are people out there who really don't think that reporting accurate public information about the success of the school system has anything to do with the success of the school system. I just didn't expect to find newspapers among their number.

Principals: The Next Generation

Last year I spent a Saturday morning participating in a mock interview process designed to help New Leaders for New Schools participants prepare to get their first jobs as school principals. I left with two strong impressions: (1) being a principal is an even harder job than I'd thought, and (2) the candidates, many of whom were 30 or younger, seemed exceptionally bright, focused, and up to the challenge.

So I was glad to see the article in today's NYTimes focusing on the rapidly growing number of young principals in the New York City school system. This is an important issue--the long-awaited demographic turnover driven by retiring baby boomers has arrived, with potentially seismic consequences for education.

But the article's focus--whether youthful principals are up to the considerable challenge of running an urban school--is too narrow. The most important question is not whether new principals are better than retiring principals in the short term. The real issue is the long-term impact of a new generation of leaders who may have very different ideas about how to lead public schools.

Harvard's Susan Moore Johnson has done some great work focusing on inter-generational difference between teachers, and the same questions apply at the leadership level. While public education is often characterized as a huge, immobile blob, impervious to reform, this may turn out to be the long-sought-for unstoppable force to change things--not new laws or policies but the steady accumulation of new people implementing new ideas, one by one.