Are Test Scores Inflated?

Though this next story is a few months old, it’s still worth reading. Stateline.Org noted that some states take a rather lax approach to standardized tests while others take a more rigorous approach.

- The reading test in Texas (2006) was multiple choice.

- The reading test in Ohio (2005) had several short-answer questions

- The reading test in Massachusetts (2007) required answering open-response questions.

One reason cited for the multiple-choice questions: It takes a lot less time (and thus money) to grade them.

States complain that the federal government requires them to test students for NCLB, but then doesn’t pay enough money to pay for the testing. Shouldn’t states be interested in measuring the results anyway? Besides, the feds do give states a great amount of leeway in which standards they use, and what counts as making “adequate yearly progress” for a given year.

One interesting fact from the article: Since NCLB was enacted, the amount spent on tests has nearly tripled. One reason for the increase: more students are tested. Another: an additional subject test (science).

Another interesting fact, according to author Pauline Vu, is that NCLB has actually resulted in making it harder to compare states. There’s been a tendency to abandon the use of the Stanford Achievement Test and other tests that have been used by many states, and instead create state-specific states reflecting the various state standards.

This has resulted in “credential creep.” It’s now possible for the same student who be “proficient” in one state and “not proficient” in another–all depending on how states set the curve. (See Grading on the Curve, a commentary from the Flint Hills Center for Public Policy on this phenomenon.) The implications are stark: “to be considered proficient readers in Wisconsin, for example, fourth-graders needed to answer questions about as difficult as one that asked them to note a few differences between cats and dogs. But fourth-graders in Massachusetts faced more difficult questions such as those about a written passage by Russian author Leo Tolstoy.”

What Happens When Schools Consolidate?

What happens in schools and school districts consolidate? Some scholars at the University of Arkansas ask that question, and find some results that are both predictable and interesting.

A Phenomenological Study of School Consolidation

How Good is Your Public School?

Richard John Neuhaus writes that school choice is a moral issue, but that many middle-class families, with some justification, fear that vouchers would harm their own children’s schools. We certainly think those fears are misplaced, but the question got us thinking: How good are those schools, anyway?

The Pacific Research Institute asked that question of schools in some of California’s upscale cities. Granted, there are many differences between California and Kansas, but the findings of the Institute’s recent book Not as Good as You Think: Why the Middle Class Needs School Choice is illuminating, and suggestive.

First, the authors consist of individuals with deep roots in education. One, who has taught mathematics in high school and middle school, has also served as a principal and district superintendent. Another taught elementary school children for 18 years, and also worked in both talented and gifted as well as Title I programs. A third, who has taught school for two years, is currently a Ph.D. student in American history. A fourth has a Ph.D. in political science, and has taught at the U.S. Military Academy (West Point). The fifth author, who is actually the lead author, has written extensively on education policy and has worked in a number of public offices, such as the governing board of California’s community colleges.

So these folks know research, and they know education.

In their conclusion–not a bad place to start reading the book, by the way–the authors point out that the wealth of the coastal communities such as Orange County and San Francisco do not translate into superior test scores. Neither do conservative social values of the Central Valley and other inland areas of the state.

Part of the blame, they say, goes to an inappropriate model of management and labor relations. Principals lack the ability to assign teachers on the basis of need, and they can’t get rid of inept teachers. Further, wealthy communities are certainly not immune to having school officials who embezzle, commit fraud, and simple manage poorly. Existing reform efforts such as the state accountability system and No Child Left behind are inadequate and subverted.

A Key to Better Charter School Performance

When the laws governing charter schools allow for a diversity of authorizers, charter schools tend to have stronger academic performance. That’s the conclusion of the Center for Education Reform in this (PDF) report.

Pre-K Recommendations

The Texas Public Policy Foundation offers some recommendations on pre-K programs that might be of interest to Kansans. It comes from a new report published this month. The title, Do Small Kids Need Big Government? (PDF) may strike some observers as unnecessarily antagonistic. But the report offers up a history of pre-K initiatives

And the Top Public High School is … A Charter School

If you think we’re on an all-charter all-the-time routine here, fear not; it’s just that there’s a lot of interesting stuff in our in-box these days.

But moving on, did you know that the top public high school in the country is a charter school? You can read about it in Newsweek. The Arizona Daily Star has more on this school.

Not all charter schools can be #1, and there’s certainly not all in the top half. But they do present parents and community members an opportunity to reinvent and improve education.

Charter Schools Work in Chicago; Georgia

The Rand Corporation has come out with a new study of charter schools in Chicago.

The results? Charter school students are more likely to graduate from high school and attend college. Link here.

There’s also some evidence that charter schools in Georgia are outperforming their peers. Click here.

More than 115,000 New Students in Charter Schools

The public demand for charter schools keeps growing:

“In the past four years, 1,600 new public charter schools opened and 500,000 additional public school students chose to enroll in public charter schools. This past fall, more than 350 new public charter schools opened and an additional 115,000 public school students enrolled in these schools.”

You can download the survey here.

Public Support for School Choice

A national survey conducted for the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools shows some significant support for school choice: “More than three out of four voters (77%) favor giving parents more options when choosing a public school for their children.”

Regulations Governing Private Schools

It’s commonly assumed that private schools are not subject to regulations. Not so, says the Friedman Foundation, which offers a review of the laws governing private schools in the 50 states.

(To the extent that private schools face a competitive advantage due to a lighter regulatory burden, that might serve as an argument for cutting some red tape in public schools.)

The State of Online Schools in the State of Washington

How are online schools doing? The Washington Policy Center takes a look (PDF) at online schools.

Charter School Database

The Center for Education Reform has released a new database that lets you find a charter school near you. Take a look at the front page of YourCharterSchool.com, and you’ll see that Kansas is underserved by charter schools.

Vouchers Help Special Education Kids

A new report from the Manhattan Institute says that special education vouchers have helped children in Florida. Some programs of choice in that state have been struck down due to lawsuits, but the McKay Scholarship Program lives on–and appears to have some benefits.

Accountability and Open Records

The demand for accountability from public officials is rising across the country. A number of states have already put their spending–or at least some of it–online. (See, for example, the Nevada Open Government Initiative).

Without transparency, citizens cannot know if government agencies are doing their jobs well–or if corruption is taking place.

It does take some cost to be transparent. It take staff time to assemble records, for example, and make them in a format that is widely accessible.

But who should bear the cost? Too often, it’s individual taxpayers, who may be scared off by quotes for excessive charges under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA).

Bob Weeks, the blogger behind Wichita Liberty, recently tried to get budget information from USD 259 Wichita (see here), with less than assuring results. He points to the example of a school district in exurban Chicago as a model for disclosure.

A group in Michigan has put together some online databases for school districts in that state. Kansans would benefit if someone put together a similar, publicly available source of information.

Expansion of Charter Schools — in Georgia

Gov. Sonny Perdue (R-Georgia) has put his approval on three laws to make more use of charter schools. Among the measure: The state will create a state charter commission to review charter school applications. It also does more to make sure that charter schools get a fair share of public money spent on schools.

Innovative Charter School Operator

Want to see what sorts of innovations a charter school can allow? The Washington Post has a profile of a married couple who head Imagine Schools, which operates over 50 charter schools.

Leave Some Children Behind?

The ever-iconoclastic Charles Murray says in a new essay that both conservatives and liberals live in “the age of educational romanticism.”

He defines it as “the belief that just about all children who are not doing well in school have the potential to do much better.” And of course, you’ll find teachers and people who write in the field of education saying that it’s vital for teachers to have such a belief,” and act on it.

Murray heaps scorn on the No Child Left Behind Law: “The United States Congress, acting with large bipartisan majorities, at the urging of the President, enacted as the law of the land that all children are to be above average. I do not exaggerate.”

Now, when politicians, especially those far away from the situation, make grand promises, some skepticism is in order.

But then we must ask: If Murray is right, what does that mean for policy? If you belief in the moral value of enhanced school choice, not much. It’s still valuable in and of itself, regardless of how far specific children can advance themselves. In fact, school choice and the competitive market for education, in which schools keep on their toes for the right to educate children, may be even more important in such a setting.

He has this to say about No Child Left Behind:

In the early years, I didn’t need the experts to tell me [that the law was causing trouble]. I was watching the demoralized teachers in my children’s school, wearied by endless preparation for the exams and frustrated by demands from on high to concentrate on students who were at the cusp of being able to pass the state’s proficiency benchmark at the expense of everyone else.

That rings true with what other observers have said, and shows the limits of standards-based reform efforts.

Murray also uses the NAEP (”the nation’s report card”) as a checkmark against No Child Left Behind:

If students were progressing at the rate implied by the Act, more than 60 percent of them would have been at the proficient level by 2007. In math, the actual percentages for NAEP were 39 percent for fourth-graders and 32 percent for eighth-graders.

And yet how many schools have been restructured in response to poor scores, as the law demands? Very few.

Home Schools Under Attack

As you’ve probably heard, a court in California has ruled that laws in that state require all home-schooling parents to have state certification as teachers.

There is no shortage of commentary on the subject. Here’s one article by Liam Julian, who works at the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation. Here’s a key paragraph dealing with the “hard case” nature of this situation, which is the allegation of child abuse:

Some adults abuse their children. It’s awful, but it’s not a compelling argument for criminalizing home schooling. Limiting parents’ ability to home school in order to combat child abuse is a crude solution for a more specific problem. It is also, perhaps, not much of a crude solution: the high rates of truancy in many public schools; the anonymity that can pervade at some of the larger, more impersonal ones; and the migration of students between states and cities and classrooms render it possible that abusive parents may be just as abusive for just as long regardless of whether their child attends the local school or stays at home. Moreover, there is evidence to suggest that students have a greater chance of being abused at school than at home — in fact, that’s precisely why many parents home school in the first place.

And of course most parents, homeschooling or not, do not abuse their children–a fact that makes the rationale for exerting a large burden on parents who wish to homeschool indefensible.

Meanwhile, the Flint Hills Center for Public Policy has released an op-ed on the question, too. It’s called Homeschooling in California and the Good Society in Kansas (PDF).

A key thought:

As it goes about its business, then, government must operate within limits. The Supreme Court has affirmed this principle many times. Other limits include the Bill of Rights; a division of power between the national government and the state governments; and checks and balances among the executive, legislative and judicial branches. Limits on government are an essential part the American fabric.

Equally important to American life is the recognition that the political sphere is only one of several vital institutions in society. Others include the family; religious communities; the world of commerce; and voluntary organizations.

Each of these institutions is valuable, providing something necessary for life. Each has its own purposes and operating principles. “Treat everyone the same” may be a good principle for public programs, for example, but most parents will find that it’s not a good idea for childrearing.

Trouble results when one institution acts like another.

Plato’s Republic on the Plains

Plato wanted the children of the ruling class to be parented in common. Today’s would-be education reformers seem to be on the same path, hoping to expand the public school system from 7 year-olds (the current age of mandatory enrollment) down to 6-year olds.

In addition, there’s a great effort, starting from presidential candidates Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama on down, to greatly expand the depth and scope of government involvement in early children’s lives. In Kansas, Gov. Sebelius favors expanding preschool services to all children, at least on a voluntary basis.

Some preschool experiments cited by officials such as the Kansas governor take children from as young as infancy and put them into programs funded by taxpayers. Sometimes the money even goes directly into the budgets of government agencies, such as school districts.

There are several problems with this idea, however. The experiments used to justify universal preschool have serious methodological problems that call into question the value of expanding them to the entire population. In addition, the problems with K-12 education don’t occur in the earliest of years, but instead start showing up in middle schools and high schools.

So why the fascination with the early years? One reason may be that it’s easier to expand the current public (government-run) education system than it is to reform it.

As appealing as the logic of universal pre-K may be, there’s a final reason to cast a critical eye on it: putting all or even a majority of very young children into government-run programs threatens the balance of responsibilities among important institutions such as family, religion, business, and government. Some level of government is required, but too much distorts a society.

Read more on this topic in a new report issued by the Flint Hills Center for Public Policy. It’s called (PDF) Plato’s Republic on the Plains: Should Kansas Really Embrace State-Financed Early Childhood Education?

Do the Catholic Schools Expel All Their Troublemakers?

Sometimes advocates of school choice are faced with this question: “Well, if private schools do better than public schools, it’s because they kick out all the troublemakers. What are you going to do about that?”

Cast aside for the moment the question of what can be done to make government-run schools more orderly places for learning. Is it in fact true that private schools expel a large number of children?

Bob Weeks, author of Voice for Liberty in Wichita, looks at the numbers of the Catholic schools in Wichita. He looked into the numbers, and reported this: “As it turns out, the average number of students expelled from the Wichita Catholic Diocese schools is a little less than five per year.”

That’s not very significant, especially when you consider that the diocese expels students at a much lower rate than USD 259 does.

Here Today, Fad(ed away) Tomorrow

George F. Will takes on educational fads in a recent column available on Real Clear Politics.

An excerpt:

… the nation has expanded the number of teachers much faster than the number of students has grown. Hiring more, rather than more competent, teachers meant more dues-paying union members. For decades, schools have been treated as laboratories for various equity experiments. Fads incubated in education schools gave us “open” classrooms, teachers as “facilitators of learning” rather than transmitters of knowledge, abandonment of a literary canon in the name of “multiculturalism,” and so on, producing a majority of high school juniors who could not locate the Civil War in the proper half-century.

Reforms are necessary for the vitality of any endeavor, yet some reforms will be unsuccessful-remembered as fads. How to foster useful change and minimize the presence of wasteful fads? Diversification, diversification, diversification. Yet to much of education today takes a top-down approach.

KIPP Reports on Academic Gains

KIPP, one of the leading operators of charter schools, reports on its progress. The Washington Post has the news.

Little Gain in Philly Charter Schools

Not all charter schools are created the same. A new report from Philadelphia shows that charter schools there have had little effect.

Denver Union: Give us a Charter School

Here’s an interesting development: The Denver teacher union wants to start a charter school. Union officials say they’ve got lots of ideas for improving education. We say, let’s give them the chance, and parents another school to choose from the mix.

USD 259 Board Delays Bond Issue

Some people called on USD 259 to wait until the fall election to float its proposal for a bond increase. It refused, and scheduled an election for May 6. Now it has voted to move the election to … the fall, if not later.

Does the district need new money? Perhaps it does. Perhaps not. But if officials want to ask voters for it, they should put it on the ballot when the greatest number of voters are likely to show up.