The House Appropriations committee passed a version of the FY 2007 federal education budget earlier this week (details here). There weren't a lot of differences from the budget President Bush submitted earlier this year. But one small change is worth noting.
The administration's proposal to increase funding for state data systems from $24 million to $54 million was reduced to an increase to $35 million. This is one of those low-profile items that's not going to generate a lot of news coverage--there won't be legions of data system administrators marching on Washington to protest (too bad--that'd be pretty funny). But it actually has potentially far-reaching implications for some of the biggest K-12 issues of the day.
There's a great deal of talk right now about the potential for altering the core accountability provisions of NCLB to include "value added" measures, to shift attention from absolute performance levels to the change in performance from year to year. It's an important and complicated debate. But for many states it's also largely theoretical, and will remain so for some time. Why? Because they don't have the longitudinal data systems needed to calculate value-added measures accurately.
Those are precisely the systems this money is designed to develop and support. By failing to do all it can to build state data capacity today, Congress is potentially severely limiting its options to reform and improve NCLB in the future.
Saturday, June 17, 2006
Thursday, June 15, 2006
The Democrat's Dilemma: Leftist Hooey in Higher Education
InsideHigherEd reported a few days ago on recent paper from a conservative advocacy group titled "How Many Ward Churchills?", referring to the University of Colorado professor who basically said that the thousands of innocent victims of 9/11 got what was coming to them. The report suggested that the halls of academia are rife with similar folk.
Now, I generally don't give much credence to conservatives moaning about liberal bias in higher education, not because I don't accept the basic premise that the academy leans left but because I don't think it matters nearly as much as they think it does.
That said, there's a big, big difference between garden-variety liberalism and extreme Churchillian leftist nonsense. The unwillingness of Democrats to confront this distinction is a problem.
For example, a few years ago I presented at a conference in Chicago tied to the 50th anniversary of Brown v. Board. My subject was school funding, specifically how Illinois has among the largest funding gaps in the nation for school districts serving low-income and minority students, and how that was probably one of the reasons Illinois has the largest achievement gaps in the nation for the same kids. Lots of numbers and PowerPoint charts, followed by a few audience questions and polite applause.
Next up was a professor from DePaul. We had chatted briefly while waiting for our turn to go up on stage. I told her what I was going to say, she nodded and said she was going focus more on the "larger context." She was friendly but kind of reserved. Her speech went something like this:
"All those things the previous person said about funding inequities this and property tax rates that is all well and good, but it doesn't really matter, because as I tell my students, what we really need to address is capitalism and the racist, hegemonic patriarchy (which are, of course, the same thing), because none of this is going to change until the revolution comes. I want to be clear, just in case anyone working for Attorney General Ashcroft is in the room, that I'm not suggesting violence in the streets is needed to start that revolution, I'm not inciting anyone, but you know, that wouldn't be the worst thing." And so on and so forth in that vein for another half hour; I'm really not doing the sheer militant craziness of the speech justice.
I remember thinking "I didn't know people still said stuff like that," and then "man, her poor students."
To be sure, universities should be places of maximum diversity when it comes to different ways of seeing the world. They should support people with unpopular ideas, because the radical thinkers of today sometimes become the dominant paradigm-setters of tomorrow.
But what about the radical thinkers of yesterday, or decades ago, whose wacky ideas have been found wanting? Should college campuses be the last refuge of discredited Marxist thinking? Universities should be bastions of debate and thriving marketplaces of ideas, but at some point the market needs to be allowed to do what markets do--sort out ideas that exceed a certain threshold level of ridiculousness.
And Democrats and liberals have to admit that the population of college professors espousing such ideas is not evenly split between the right and the left. If they're not willing to say so, other people certainly will.
Now, I generally don't give much credence to conservatives moaning about liberal bias in higher education, not because I don't accept the basic premise that the academy leans left but because I don't think it matters nearly as much as they think it does.
That said, there's a big, big difference between garden-variety liberalism and extreme Churchillian leftist nonsense. The unwillingness of Democrats to confront this distinction is a problem.
For example, a few years ago I presented at a conference in Chicago tied to the 50th anniversary of Brown v. Board. My subject was school funding, specifically how Illinois has among the largest funding gaps in the nation for school districts serving low-income and minority students, and how that was probably one of the reasons Illinois has the largest achievement gaps in the nation for the same kids. Lots of numbers and PowerPoint charts, followed by a few audience questions and polite applause.
Next up was a professor from DePaul. We had chatted briefly while waiting for our turn to go up on stage. I told her what I was going to say, she nodded and said she was going focus more on the "larger context." She was friendly but kind of reserved. Her speech went something like this:
"All those things the previous person said about funding inequities this and property tax rates that is all well and good, but it doesn't really matter, because as I tell my students, what we really need to address is capitalism and the racist, hegemonic patriarchy (which are, of course, the same thing), because none of this is going to change until the revolution comes. I want to be clear, just in case anyone working for Attorney General Ashcroft is in the room, that I'm not suggesting violence in the streets is needed to start that revolution, I'm not inciting anyone, but you know, that wouldn't be the worst thing." And so on and so forth in that vein for another half hour; I'm really not doing the sheer militant craziness of the speech justice.
I remember thinking "I didn't know people still said stuff like that," and then "man, her poor students."
To be sure, universities should be places of maximum diversity when it comes to different ways of seeing the world. They should support people with unpopular ideas, because the radical thinkers of today sometimes become the dominant paradigm-setters of tomorrow.
But what about the radical thinkers of yesterday, or decades ago, whose wacky ideas have been found wanting? Should college campuses be the last refuge of discredited Marxist thinking? Universities should be bastions of debate and thriving marketplaces of ideas, but at some point the market needs to be allowed to do what markets do--sort out ideas that exceed a certain threshold level of ridiculousness.
And Democrats and liberals have to admit that the population of college professors espousing such ideas is not evenly split between the right and the left. If they're not willing to say so, other people certainly will.
Wednesday, June 14, 2006
Curdled Cheese, Continued
Last Friday, the Commission on No Child Left Behind met in Madison, Wisconsin to discuss "how NCLB is impacting schools which are academically struggling (not making AYP)." The subject was worthy but the choice of venue strange, given that last year Wisconsin, through a series of statistical manipulations, identified fewer schools (on a percentage basis) as not making AYP than all but a handful of states, and identified only one out of 426 districts (Milwaukee).
Wisconsin Superintendant of Public Instruction Elizabeth Burmaster was on the agenda to speak at the meeting, so I was looking forward to hearing her elaborate on Wisconsin's super-efficient approach to tackling the difficult, contentious issue of what do with under-performing schools and districts: pretend that virtually none of your schools and districts are under-performing.
Instead, she offered a "spirited defense" of the state's policies, insisting that "We have in no way tried to game the system." She also promised that the new list of schools missing AYP, due out this week, would be longer.
She was right, the new list is longer, upping the number of schools identified from 49 to 92. But before any congratulations are offered, it's important to keep in mind that this mostly just represents an extension of the state's general attitude/approach to public education, which is "Everything here is just fine, in fact fact better than fine, except for Milwaukee, which doesn't really count, in that Milwaukee is (A) A city, and (B) Populated with people who aren't...like the rest of us."
Of the 92 schools identified, the majority (58) are in Milwaukee. And the number of districts identified statewide changed from 1 out 426 to...(drum roll)...1 out 426. Still just Milwaukee.
Wisconsin Superintendant of Public Instruction Elizabeth Burmaster was on the agenda to speak at the meeting, so I was looking forward to hearing her elaborate on Wisconsin's super-efficient approach to tackling the difficult, contentious issue of what do with under-performing schools and districts: pretend that virtually none of your schools and districts are under-performing.
Instead, she offered a "spirited defense" of the state's policies, insisting that "We have in no way tried to game the system." She also promised that the new list of schools missing AYP, due out this week, would be longer.
She was right, the new list is longer, upping the number of schools identified from 49 to 92. But before any congratulations are offered, it's important to keep in mind that this mostly just represents an extension of the state's general attitude/approach to public education, which is "Everything here is just fine, in fact fact better than fine, except for Milwaukee, which doesn't really count, in that Milwaukee is (A) A city, and (B) Populated with people who aren't...like the rest of us."
Of the 92 schools identified, the majority (58) are in Milwaukee. And the number of districts identified statewide changed from 1 out 426 to...(drum roll)...1 out 426. Still just Milwaukee.
Monday, June 12, 2006
David Brooks on Gender=Fourth Stomach in Cow
Yesterday's David Brooks column on "The Gender Gap at School" ($-sorry) manages to combine three elements that are guaranteed to make me want to bang my head against a wall in frustration: sweeping generalizations about gender; gross oversimplification (and abuse) of brain research; and sweeping, non-empirically correct generalizations about public education. Goody!
To paraphrase Brooks: "Golly, isn't it interesting that men's and women's favorite books are different? Completely ignoring any social or cultural reasons why this might be the case [like, I don't know, most guys I know would be subjected to serious abuse if their friends caught them reading Jane Eyre], I'm going to blame their brains. You see, modern science has shown us that men and women are not identical!!! Unfortunately, schools are still stuck in the mindset of the seventies--the dark ages before we realized that men and women are different--and insist on subjecting boys to a girly, "sensitive" curriculum that forces them to read books about girls and their feelings. What red-blooded young American male would put up with that? Clearly our schools are forcing boys to HATE READING."
I'm not kidding. (Seriously, if you have access to Times Select, read it yourself.)
Leave aside the dubious wisdom of taking educational advice from someone who thinks that "Hemingway, Tolstoy, Homer, and Twain," are the kind of books we should be using to turn boys on to reading (Tolstoy?!? Really, Dave? Have you read Tolstoy? Do you know any teenage boys?). A quick look at recommended and required summer reading lists for schools in Montgomery County, Md., where Brooks lives, reveals that Twain, Hemmingway and other "boy-friendly" authors like Jon Krakauer or Stephen Crane have hardly been excluded from public schools. By a similar token, recent research from the Department of Education finds that, contrary to Brooks' assertions and everyone's common knowledge, recess hasn't been eliminated from public schools--nearly 90 percent of elementary schools have recess and most do so daily.
But these are quibbles. The real irritant about this piece, for me, is the way Brooks lightly tosses out some pop culture factoids about brain research and the proceeds to make sweeping recommendations for the education system based on them. Never mind that the full body of research is a lot more complicated than Brooks makes it out to be (check out this excellent book by Diane Halpern if you want an honest picture here), that the practical implications of many findings are far from clear (what would the practical implications of differences between little girls' and little boys' crayon color preferences be, anyway?), or that variations within each gender are typically much greater than the difference between the averages for each gender. David Brooks has read the pop literature on gender differences, and he is now going to pass this information (which has already been redigested from the original research more times than if it had passed through a cow's digestive system--with about the same result) on to the rest of us.
And it's not just Brooks--the basic flavor of Brook's article is the same one that permeates the current spate of articles about why boys are falling behind in school. Contrary to Brooks' assertions, plenty of people--including educators--seem plenty willing to talk about how boys and girls are different and boys are in crisis. They're just not talking about it all that thoughtfully.
UPDATE: It's come to my attention that David Brooks has a teenage son, suggesting Brooks does, in fact, know at least one teenage boy. Guess the kid must love him some Anna Karenina...
To paraphrase Brooks: "Golly, isn't it interesting that men's and women's favorite books are different? Completely ignoring any social or cultural reasons why this might be the case [like, I don't know, most guys I know would be subjected to serious abuse if their friends caught them reading Jane Eyre], I'm going to blame their brains. You see, modern science has shown us that men and women are not identical!!! Unfortunately, schools are still stuck in the mindset of the seventies--the dark ages before we realized that men and women are different--and insist on subjecting boys to a girly, "sensitive" curriculum that forces them to read books about girls and their feelings. What red-blooded young American male would put up with that? Clearly our schools are forcing boys to HATE READING."
I'm not kidding. (Seriously, if you have access to Times Select, read it yourself.)
Leave aside the dubious wisdom of taking educational advice from someone who thinks that "Hemingway, Tolstoy, Homer, and Twain," are the kind of books we should be using to turn boys on to reading (Tolstoy?!? Really, Dave? Have you read Tolstoy? Do you know any teenage boys?). A quick look at recommended and required summer reading lists for schools in Montgomery County, Md., where Brooks lives, reveals that Twain, Hemmingway and other "boy-friendly" authors like Jon Krakauer or Stephen Crane have hardly been excluded from public schools. By a similar token, recent research from the Department of Education finds that, contrary to Brooks' assertions and everyone's common knowledge, recess hasn't been eliminated from public schools--nearly 90 percent of elementary schools have recess and most do so daily.
But these are quibbles. The real irritant about this piece, for me, is the way Brooks lightly tosses out some pop culture factoids about brain research and the proceeds to make sweeping recommendations for the education system based on them. Never mind that the full body of research is a lot more complicated than Brooks makes it out to be (check out this excellent book by Diane Halpern if you want an honest picture here), that the practical implications of many findings are far from clear (what would the practical implications of differences between little girls' and little boys' crayon color preferences be, anyway?), or that variations within each gender are typically much greater than the difference between the averages for each gender. David Brooks has read the pop literature on gender differences, and he is now going to pass this information (which has already been redigested from the original research more times than if it had passed through a cow's digestive system--with about the same result) on to the rest of us.
And it's not just Brooks--the basic flavor of Brook's article is the same one that permeates the current spate of articles about why boys are falling behind in school. Contrary to Brooks' assertions, plenty of people--including educators--seem plenty willing to talk about how boys and girls are different and boys are in crisis. They're just not talking about it all that thoughtfully.
UPDATE: It's come to my attention that David Brooks has a teenage son, suggesting Brooks does, in fact, know at least one teenage boy. Guess the kid must love him some Anna Karenina...
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