With Brian Kisida and Jonathan Mills, I have a report on administrative bloat at American universities being released by the Goldwater Institute tomorrow. You should be able to find it at the Goldwater web site.
If you thought K-12 education was suffering under a large and growing bureaucracy, just wait until you see the results in tomorrow’s report. In your heart you know it’s right.
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higher education | Tagged: administrative bloat, Goldwater Institute, higher education | 
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Posted by Jay P. Greene
The LA Times used Freedom of Information requests to obtain student achievement data linked to teachers in LA unified. The students’ names were removed, but not the teachers. The paper then hired researchers at RAND to analyze the data and calculate the value-added of individual teachers. And then the paper published all of the results. WOW!
It’s no longer possible to hide the fact that there are some awful teachers who continue receiving paychecks and depriving kids of an education. School officials have had these data for years and never used them, never tried to identify who were the best and worst teachers, and never tried to remove bad teachers from the profession. It took a newspaper and a big FOI request.
Now the school district will be forced to do something about those chronically ineffective teachers. No one is suggesting that analyses of these test scores should be the sole criteria for identifying or removing ineffective teachers. But it is a start.
This is going to spread. As long as the data exist, there will be more and more pressure for school systems to actually use the information and develop systems for identifying and removing teachers who can’t teach.
It’s also worth emphasizing that this new reality is a huge accomplishment of No Child Left Behind. The accountability and choice provisions of NCLB could never work because school systems could never be asked to sanction themselves. But the one big thing that NCLB accomplished is getting every public school to measure student achievement in grades 3-8 and report results. NCLB made it so that these data exist so that the LA Times could FOI the results and push schools to act upon it. NCLB could never get schools to take real action, but the existence of the data could get others to force schools to act.
And what is the reaction of the teachers unions to all of this? They’ve called for a boycott of the LA Times. As usual, we see how much more they care about protecting incompetent teachers than protecting kids suffering from educational malpractice.
13 Comments | school accountability, teacher quality, teacher union | Tagged: LA Times, NCLB, teacher quality | Permalink
Posted by Jay P. Greene
I intend to vote for the school millage increase in Fayetteville on September 21. I know that my supporting a millage increase seems as likely as pigs flying, but both can happen — I support local taxes that are well-spent. I also believe those Razorbacks will soar this year.
I opposed the previous millage effort, but I did so because it seemed extravagant and wasteful. Much of the current high school is adequate and there was no need to demolish it entirely and replace it with a new Taj Mahal. Besides, there is no evidence that fancy buildings improve education. Buildings don’t teach kids, people do.
But the voters soundly rejected the previous millage by almost 2 to 1 and the school board got the message. They scaled back their plans, found clever ways to economize by keeping much of the current structure, and they took full advantage of federally subsidized loans.
Now the school board is asking for a more modest millage increase to take even more advantage of those federal loan plans and save $29 million in interest. Voting for this millage is a no-brainer. The only effect of rejecting it would be that we would pay$29 million more in interest payments on the same school construction loans we are going to take out anyway. We’ll have to pay that $29 million someday with a larger millage increase or force $29 million in operational cuts, which could be done but certainly won’t be comfortable.
I have to confess that I hesitated for a few moments in supporting even this no-brainer. The current school board has not earned my trust or confidence with their past bumbling on plans for the high school, their embrace of 21st Century Skills nonsense, and their phony public input cheer-leading events. I don’t even like the name of the pro-millage group, Smart Fayetteville Committee, since it is obviously manipulative and not-at-all smart to dub whatever you support “smart.”
I also have to confess that if I had my druthers we would have two, smaller high schools rather than remodeling one big one. I would gladly pay an even higher new millage for that. But that option is not on the table. The school district has moved forward with its remodeling plan and now our only choice is whether to pay more or less in interest payments. I prefer paying less in interest even if it means having a higher millage for a while.
1 Comment | politics | Tagged: Fayetteville, school buildings, school millage | Permalink
Posted by Jay P. Greene
(Guest Post by Sandra Stotsky)
In June 2010, the Common Core State Standards Initiative (CCSSI) offered the nation two sets of English language arts standards: one set called “college and career readiness anchor standards,” and the other, grade-level standards that build towards these anchor standards. With few exceptions, both sets of standards consist of content-empty and culture-free generic skills. Why are they so bereft of substantive content? In large part because they reflect a faulty diagnosis of why many American students are unprepared for authentic college-level work. The misdiagnosis comes from CCSSI’s reliance on the results of ACT surveys to guide the development of its standards.
Several years ago, ACT surveyed thousands of post-secondary instructors to find out what they saw as the chief problems in their freshman students. Not surprisingly, the chief complaint was that high school graduates cannot understand the college texts they are assigned to read. Without an explanation for its reasoning, ACT leaped to two conclusions: (1) college students are not expected to read enough complex texts when they are in high school; and (2) they are not given enough instruction in strategies or skills for reading complex texts in high school.
However, ACT’s survey did not (nor could it) show that most college students had not been assigned complex texts to read when they were in high school. Nor did it (or could it) show that more instruction in comprehension strategies or skills when in high school would have helped them to read complex texts then or later, in college. With much greater justification, ACT might have conjectured that inappropriate teaching methods, an incoherent and undemanding high school literature and reading curriculum, poor study habits, and/or perhaps an unwillingness to put in much time reading or studying on a regular basis were contributing to high school graduates’ inability to read their college texts. But ACT did not consider any of these quite reasonable hypotheses.
Nor did CCSSI question the validity or logic of ACT’s two unwarranted conclusions. Instead, it went one step further: it concluded that English teachers should be chiefly responsible for assigning nonfiction or informational texts, regardless of subject area, and for teaching students how to read them. Yes, it admitted that teachers of other subjects had a responsibility to assign and teach students how to read texts in their disciplines. But it still placed the major burden on English teachers: over 50% of what they assign should be nonfiction or informational texts.
The national sales pitch seems to be that the use of Common Core’s ELA standards will increase the number of high school graduates who can read the texts their college instructors assign. It is more likely that college instructors will find themselves compelled, for the sake of survival, to adopt texts at the middle and high school level of difficulty in order to ensure that the “college-ready” students our high schools will now be required to graduate (according to proposed US Department of Education regulations) can read what is assigned in college. So long as “college-ready” high school students must be placed in post-secondary credit-bearing freshman courses (another USDE requirement), their instructors (at least those who want to keep their jobs) will want to do whatever is necessary to enable these students to pass their college freshman courses.
Is it really the case that English teachers over-emphasize literary texts to the exclusion (or near-exclusion) of nonfiction? In fact, the National Council of Teachers of English’s own widely criticized “standards,” issued in the mid-1990s, revealed a strong de-emphasis on literary study even then. Many English teachers, often urged on by their own professional journals, began to downgrade literary study on their own several decades ago, assigning their students more non-literary reading, such as diaries, family chronicles, newspaper articles, biographies, and autobiographies, on the grounds that students needed more exposure to a greater diversity of nonfiction genres. Diversity in nonfiction genres is quite visible in major literature anthologies.
This trend—increasingly less time on imaginative literature in the high school English class—was confirmed by the surveys used in two reports completed in 2010: Literary Study in Grades 9, 10, and 11: A National Survey and its Arkansas counterpart, Literary Study in Grades 9, 10, and 11 in Arkansas. These two research projects found that high school English teachers spend much less time on literary study in 2010 than they did 40 years ago, according to the last national study published by the National Council of Teachers of English on this question. By requiring English teachers to spend over 50% of their reading instructional time on informational reading, not literary reading, CCSSI’s ELA standards will drastically accelerate a decline that has been taking place for almost half a century.
Nor is it the case that English teachers do not give students instruction in reading nonfiction. In both Literary Study in Grades 9, 10, and 11: A National Survey and its Arkansas counterpart, teachers report giving students instruction in reading nonfiction or informational texts and indicate that they draw on a range of approaches. The problem is that they mostly prefer the wrong kind of instruction. Teachers surveyed in both studies prefer non-analytical approaches (such as reader response or contextual approaches) to the study of literature and nonfiction. Students may well be asked to think “critically” about the texts they are assigned, but their critical thinking is unlikely to be based on a careful analysis of what is in them.
What changes are parents apt to see in English language arts classrooms as states implement Common Core’s ELA standards?
Common Core’s ELA standards assume that if English teachers are compelled to assign a lot of informational texts, students will learn how to read them. They won’t if these teachers don’t teach close, analytical reading. Moreover, students may not find them as enjoyable to read as a good story, novel, or play and may want to read even less than they now do. Nor is it at all clear that if English teachers assign high school students a variety of informational texts with no necessary substantive connection to what is being taught in other subject areas, students will acquire the vocabulary and content knowledge they need for authentic college work.
6 Comments | instructional reform | Tagged: common core, national standards, Sandra Stotsky | Permalink
Posted by Jay P. Greene
The teacher unions finally wore down the Senate and managed to get a $26 billion Edujobs bill to avoid layoffs of teachers and increase the federal share of state Medicaid costs. $10 billion is earmarked directly for teachers and the other $16 billion frees that money in state budgets to be used elsewhere — quite likely for teachers. This $26 billion is on top of the $100 billion that education received from the first wave of stimulus spending.
So much for my austerity idea, where real reform can only happen once the gusher of new money runs dry. The spigot is going to stay fully open for the foreseeable future, which will kill this opportunity for states and localities to restructure our education system and lower costs while improving outcomes.
The fact that the feds are bailing out schools and preventing reform doesn’t come as much of a surprise. But what is shocking is how the Senate bill proposes to pay for this extra $26 billion — cuts in food stamps. That’s right, we are literally going to take food out of the mouths of hungry people in order to keep upper-middle class teachers fully employed with their gold-plated pensions and health benefits.
And if that wasn’t outrageous enough, look at what the Milwaukee teachers union would like to do with their gold-plated health benefit. They want to restore a prescription benefit for Viagra, which had been cut in 2005 to save some money.
Let me get this straight — we are going to take food from poor people to keep Mr. Happy working for Milwaukee teachers. Talk about a stimulus plan.
(ht: BC)
4 Comments | teacher union | Tagged: Edujobs, stimulus spending | Permalink
Posted by Jay P. Greene
(Guest Post by Sandra Stotsky)
With an additional $30,000,000 to come to Marc Tucker’s NCEE from the USED’s “competition” for assessment consortia grants, his hare-brained scheme for enticing high school sophomores or juniors deemed “college-ready” by the results of the Cambridge University-adapted “Board” exams that he plans to pilot in 10 states (including Massachusetts now) comes closer to reality. The problems are not only with this scheme (and the exams NCEE will use to determine “college-readiness”) but also with the coursework NCEE’s America’s Choice is busy preparing to sell to our high schools to prepare students for these “Board” exams. (Try to find some good examples of the reading and math items and figure out their academic level.)
First, some background. NCEE’s scheme was originally financed by a $1,500,000 pilot grant from the Gates Foundation. It will now benefit from a sweetheart deal of $30,000,000–all taxpayers’ money. Having Gates pay for both NCEE’s start-up and the development of Common Core standards certainly helped America’s Choice to put its key people on Common Core’s ELA and mathematics standards development and draft-writing committees to ensure that they came up with the readiness standards Gates had paid for and wanted NCEE to use. NCEE has a completely free hand to “align” its “Board” exams exactly how it pleases with Common Core’s “college-readiness” level and to set passing scores exactly where it wants, since the passing score must be consistent across piloting states.
The first problem is that the exams NCEE will give are to be aligned to the academic level of Common Core’s mysterious “college-readiness” standards. Their academic level was apparently perceived as such a minor aspect of “rigor” by Fordham’s latest report that it was never mentioned in its evaluation design, rating system, or grades. Even though that academic level (where it was, what it was mathematically or in terms of cultural literacy, and where the research evidence and international benchmarks were to support it) was at the heart of the debate over Common Core’s standards ab initio.
The second problem is that the coursework that NCEE’s America’s Choice is to develop to prepare students for its “Board” exams is not at all clear, although its partner to profit from the development of the coursework now is <http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/national-center-on-education-and-the-economy-to-receive-endowment-99859049.html>. NCEE coincidentally announced a partnership with Pearson publishers just after California’s Board of Education on August 2, and Massachusetts’ Board of Education on July 21, voted to dump their superior standards for Common Core’s inferior standards.
The California and Massachusetts votes were clearly helped along by Fordham’s report, as will be the votes in many other states. Although Fordham trumpeted that “nearly a dozen states have ELA or math standards in the same league as Common Core,” the implicit message was not that these states should keep their own standards but the opposite. Since the “A” that Fordham had awarded California in math was not that much better than the “A-” it has awarded Common Core in math, and since the “B+” that Fordham had awarded Massachusetts in math was actually below the “A-”it had given Common Core in math, why shouldn’t both states fall in line and adopt Common Core’s math standards, especially if other reports like Achieve’s or WestEd’s made the case that Common Core’s standards were of about equal quality if not better than what these states already had. Similarly, since the “A-” that Fordham had awarded Massachusetts’s ELA standards was “too close to call” in relation to the “B+” that Fordham had awarded Common Core’s ELA standards, there was clearly no reason for Massachusetts to hold out for its own ELA standards, either. Even though, with forked tongue, Fordham also suggested that these states might want to keep their own good standards, it was clear to state board members, newspaper editorial writers, and reporters that these two states did not have much to lose, according to Fordham’s grades. Beautifully orchestrated!
It remains to be seen how close the new coursework that NCEE proposes to develop is to the “intervention” programs America’s Choice imposes on high schools (Ramp Up Literacy and Ramp Up Mathematics) as part of the package when a state agency has forced “underperforming” school districts (according to NCLB’s criteria) to contract with AC as a “turnaround” partner, a model we now know has no research evidence showing its effectiveness
We mention America’s Choice’s programs for high school remediation for several reasons—but mainly as a caveat emptor to piloting states. First, there is no body of research evidence supporting the effectiveness of its programs at the high school level (and there has been research). http://.www.cpre.org or http://www.cpre.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=58&Itemid=102
Second, the pedagogy used in its intervention programs (with texts judged at the grade 5 or 6 level by teachers using these programs) is imposed on every single English class in a high school (except AP courses, which are mostly safeguarded by teachers’ syllabi, all earlier approved by the College Board). Because so many negative comments were made by high school English teachers in Arkansas under the yoke of America’s Choice to three researchers at the University of Arkansas as part of their research on literary study in the state’s high schools in 2009, their report, completed in March 2010 and posted on the University of Arkansas’ website, provides a brief summary of the research on AC and the teachers’ comments. See pages 38-42 here. Perhaps the coursework NCEE is planning to develop with Pearson will not be like the intervention programs America’s Choice has used in states across the country to little effect. But with such a track record, it is amazing that AC has been given such a free pass by the USED.
Consortium for Policy Research in Education. (2009). A study of instructional improvement. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania.
DeForge, J. (2010). Holyoke touts school gains. The Republican. Tuesday, January 19.
Slavin, R., Cheung, A., Groff, C. & Lake, C. (2008). Effective reading programs for middle and high schools: A best-evidence synthesis. Reading Research Quarterly, July-September 43 (3), 290-322.
13 Comments | instructional reform, school accountability | Tagged: America's Choice, Sandra Stotsky | Permalink
Posted by Jay P. Greene
Paul Peterson and Marty West have a great piece in today’s WSJ showing how increasingly popular charter schools are among African-Americans. Despite that fact, the NAACP continues to oppose charters.
Given that 64% of African-Americans surveyed stated that they supported the formation of charter schools (up from 49% last year), Peterson and West remark that: “It’s time civil-rights groups listened to their communities.”
Unfortunately, Peterson and West tell us, the NAACP has picked their political allies in the teacher unions over their constituents:
By casting their lot firmly with teachers unions, the leadership of the NAACP and the Urban League hope to preserve their power and safeguard their traditional sources of financial support. Not only is this is a cynical strategy, it ignores where African-Americans and Hispanics are on the issue. Thankfully, the Obama administration is paying attention to the needs of low-income, minority communities and not to their purported leaders.
You can read more about the survey over at Education Next.
4 Comments | charter schools | Tagged: charter schools, Education Next, Martin West, NAACP, Paul Peterson | Permalink
Posted by Jay P. Greene
(Guest Post by Sandra Stotsky)
As the nation knows, the Massachusetts Board of Elementary and Secondary Education voted to adopt Common Core’s English language arts and mathematics standards on July 21. At least one Bay State English teacher is aghast at what the Board has imposed on the state’s English teachers. A member of the Blue Mass Group, she immediately blogged an open letter to Governor Deval Patrick, Secretary of Education Paul Reville, and Commissioner of Education Mitchell Chester the day after the vote, explaining: “There is no way that I, as a high school English teacher with a Master of Arts in English Literature, am going to be either interested or particularly successful in teaching kids to read primary documents in American history or assessing the content of Physics II papers (after I’ve had my intensive five-year retraining program). The idea is simply preposterous.”
Apparently, none of the reviews generated by the Commissioner of Education’s own staff and appointed committees, or funded indirectly by the Gates Foundation to elevate the quality of Common Core’s standards and demote the quality of the Bay State’s own standards, addressed this teacher’s overarching question: Do Common Core’s ELA standards reflect what English teachers typically teach or are trained to teach? At any rate, the Board never saw fit to discuss the matter on July 21 or earlier, after I called national attention to the problem in an invited essay published by the New York Times online on September 22, 2009.
We don’t know if most Board members even took the time to read Common Core’s ELA standards, in addition to the barrage of “crosswalks” sent to the Board within a week of the vote. The one Board member who called me before the July 21 meeting to talk about them (the night before the vote, as a matter of fact) said he had read them all but had not looked at Common Core’s mathematics or ELA standards themselves! Although he commented that Achieve, Inc.’s material read like propaganda, he unhesitatingly voted to adopt Common Core’s standards the next morning.
Achieve’s materials, however, were not the only problematic materials the Board received. The effort to elevate the quality of Common Core’s ELA standards and demote the quality of the Bay State’s current standards is apparent in Fordham’s report. Anyone reading the pages of critical comments on Common Core’s ELA standards would wonder how such a deficient document ever merited the B+ it was given, which meant that Fordham could say that the differences between Common Core’s ELA standards and those of Massachusetts (whose document was graded A-) were “too close to call.”
On the other hand, the only critical comments on Massachusetts’ ELA standards are as follows:
“Unfortunately, some of these excellent standards are difficult to track, due to a somewhat confusing organizational structure. As discussed above, the 2001 document provides standards by grade band only. The 2004 supplement provides additional standards, but only for grades 3, 5, and 7. While the intent of this supplement is to help teachers piece together grade-specific expectations for grades 3-8, the state doesn’t provide explicit guidance about how these standards fit together, leaving some room for interpretation.
Furthermore, no grade-specific guidance is provided for grades Pre-K-3 or 9-12. While the standards are clear and specific, the failure to provide specific expectations for every grade, coupled with a complicated and difficult-to-navigate organizational structure, earn them two points out of three for Clarity and Specificity.”
In fact, however, Massachusetts does provide explicit guidance in the supplement itself because these additional grade-level standards were developed for testing purposes for NCLB and have been used every year since 2004. There is no wiggle-room for interpretation and there has been nothing confusing to the Bay State’s elementary teachers about what standards were for MCAS and for them to teach.
Moreover, because of the supplement, there are specific grade-level standards for 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, and 8 in the Massachusetts document. Fordham demoted the Bay State’s ELA standards not only by setting forth an outright error in its critique but also by using a double standard. Massachusetts has standards for PreK-K, 1-2, and 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, and 8, as well as for high school, which are organized in two-year grade spans exactly as Common Core’s are: 9-10 and 11-12. But, Common Core’s standards were not criticized for not providing Pre-K standards or grade-level standards in high school—in either ELA or mathematics.
It is worth noting that, for full credit for “organization” in earlier Fordham reviews, standards had to be presented for every grade or two-year grade span. This definition for organization no longer appears in the criteria used by Fordham in 2010.
It should also be noted that the abandonment of this definition for “organization” as well as a puzzling approach to “rigor” clearly contributed to the rating of A- for Common Core’s mathematics standards. By themselves, its high school standards do not warrant that grade. They are not organized by grade level, by grade span, or by course. Instead, they are listed in five unordered categories of mathematical constructs, leaving it totally unclear which standards belong to each of the three basic courses of: Algebra I, Geometry, and Algebra II. Moreover, its high school geometry standards reflect a new approach with no record of effectiveness to support it. Thus one cannot say that they are rigorous because we don’t even know that they can be taught in grade 8 and high school. In fact, there is some evidence to the contrary.
In sum, one cannot discern the rigor of Common Core’s mathematics standards “for the targeted grade level(s)” in grades 9-12 since there are no grade level standards for grades 9 to 12. Nor, more important, can one readily discern the academic level, or rigor, of the high school standards addressing Common Core’s goal of “college readiness.” Nevertheless, Common Core’s mathematics standards as a whole received full credit on the “Content and Rigor Conclusion”
“The Common Core standards cover nearly all the essential content with appropriate rigor. In the elementary grades, arithmetic is well prioritized and generally well developed. In high school, there are a few issues with both content and organization, but most of the essential content is covered including the STEM-ready material. The standards receive a Content and Rigor score of seven points out of seven.”
There needs to be more public attention to the quality of Common Core’s ELA (and mathematics) standards. There also needs to be public attention to the methodology of the reports of several national organizations all claiming to show that Common Core’s ELA standards are among the best in this country, all being used to sway the vote of our state boards of education.
[Updated to correct typos]
14 Comments | politics, school accountability | Tagged: Achieve, Fordham, national standards, Sandra Stotsky | Permalink
Posted by Jay P. Greene
If you don’t believe me check out this political ad from Alabama. Robert Byrne was in a Republican primary contest for governor of Alabama, but the teachers unions didn’t want him to win. So they “gave $1.5 million to 10 PACs, which in turn gave nearly $1 million to True Republican PAC. Joe Cottle, a lobbyist for the teachers’ group, is the treasurer of five of the PACs, and Rudy Davidson, a former education lobbyist and a contributor to A VOTE, was treasurer of four others.”
Fueled with laundered teacher union money, “True Republican PAC” ran the following ad accusing Robert Byrne of believing in evolution and doubting that every word of the Bible was true:
The Alabama Education Association, the local affiliate of the NEA, admitted to funneling this money to True Republican PAC despite the fact that the NEA has repeatedly declared its support for the teaching of evolution.
Truth, consistency, educational excellence, honesty, the well-being of children — none of this matters to the teacher unions. The only thing that matters is winning so that they can extract as much money from the public as possible.
The teacher union-funded ad has attracted some funny parodies. Bill Maher fails to correctly describe the origin of the ad, but has this howler:
And as long as we are making fun of incredibly ignorant and embarrassing political ads from Alabama, which makes me feel less bad about the incredibly ignorant and embarrassing ads in Arkansas, check out this one by another gubernatorial candidates, Tim James:
And now check out this parody:
Oh. And in case you were worried, the teacher union-backed candidate for the Republican nomination was the one who won. Gives you confidence in democracy.
(Update: I can’t find the original Tim James ad without the editorial comments inserted, but this gives a a good idea of what the original ad looked like.]
5 Comments | politics, teacher union | Tagged: Alabama Education Association, Bill Maher, National Education Association, Robert Byrne, teacher union, Tim James | Permalink
Posted by Jay P. Greene
As Neal McCluskey revealed (and Greg highlighted), Checker made an excellent case against national standards… in 1997. The Weekly Standard has now allowed non-subscribers to link to the piece, so everyone can read it for him or herself.
Many of Checker’s arguments against national standards and assessments back in 1997 are remarkably similar to those of current critics.
… anything so sensitive as these tests must be run at arm’s length from the government and education-establishment tar babies. It also seemed that Congress should have something to say about the arrangements for so momentous a shift in American educational federalism….
As often in education-reform efforts, the procedure has been hijacked by the tar babies. The hijacking takes the form of contracts that are already being signed with neither congressional approval nor independent oversight.
The main contract so far is with the Council of Chief State School Officers to develop test specifications. “The chiefs,” as they’re known in educator- land, are the Washington-based association of state superintendents, and they form one of the establishment’s most change-averse crews. The chief of the chiefs, Gordon Ambach, is a former New York state commissioner of education, staunch advocate of a larger federal role in education — a key backer of Goals 2000, for example — and a veteran federal grant-getter. He and his group have an ancient and cozy relationship with the Education Department and can be counted on to do its bidding, down to such particulars as Spanish- language math tests and other worrisome wrinkles in the Clinton plan.
The current national standards and assessment craze has similarly not been authorized by Congress and is being spear-headed by the very same Council of Chief State School Officers that Checker denounced as “one of the establishment’s most change-averse crews.”
It’s hard to see what about the current national standards push is fundamentally different to justify Checker’s change of mind. I suppose people are entitled to change their views, but when they do so without being able to articulate the reasons for the change we might have to worry about how much we would trust their policy opinion.
Why was Congressional support essential then but not now? Why was the Council of Chief State School Officers unreliable back then but wonderful now?
8 Comments | school accountability | Tagged: Checker Finn, national standards | Permalink
Posted by Jay P. Greene
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