I was saddened to hear that Lovett “Pete” Peters passed away last week. Pete was a successful businessman, primarily in the energy sector, who went on to found the Pioneer Institute in 1988. He cared deeply about education reform and through the Pioneer Institute played a central role in creating the conditions for the “Massachusetts Miracle,” including charter schools, testing, and standards.
I remember meeting Pete Peters as well as his son, Dan, at education conferences over the years. Even as his age advanced (he lived to be 97), he remained sharp and insightful in his comments on research presentations. He will be missed but his work and ideas will live on.
Cheating in K-12 education appears to be a serious problem. Addressing that problem may not be helped by the allegations in this Chronicle of Higher Education piece that education students are themselves frequent cheaters.
The piece is written by Ed Dante, which the editors note “is a pseudonym for a writer who lives on the East Coast. Through a literary agent, he approached The Chronicle wanting to tell the story of how he makes a living writing papers for a custom-essay company and to describe the extent of student cheating he has observed.”
Here’s the money quote:
it’s hard to determine which course of study is most infested with cheating. But I’d say education is the worst. I’ve written papers for students in elementary-education programs, special-education majors, and ESL-training courses. I’ve written lesson plans for aspiring high-school teachers, and I’ve synthesized reports from notes that customers have taken during classroom observations. I’ve written essays for those studying to become school administrators, and I’ve completed theses for those on course to become principals. In the enormous conspiracy that is student cheating, the frontline intelligence community is infiltrated by double agents. (Future educators of America, I know who you are.)
I love how even Chinese communists understand the problems with local government monopolies and teacher union control of schools.
Update — As Chan noted in the comments, this was probably made in Taiwan, not communist China. No matter, I was just trying to be as over-the-top as the video. Gotta love Adrian Fenty with a machine gun.
I learned from Matt Ladner that you should never pass up an opportunity to see a performer who is thought to be excellent, even if you aren’t particularly interested in that performer’s work. It’s just great to see someone be excellent at what they do.
With this lesson in mind I went to see Merle Haggard last night at the Walton Arts Center. He may not quite sound or look like this:
But he still has it and you can sure see why people think he is excellent.
In Fayetteville I’ve seen Itzhak Perlman, Steve Martin, Fiddler on the Roof, Shakespeare, The Trey McIntyre Project, and much more. Now I feel like my cultural literacy is more complete.
With scores of funding opportunities for schools and districts targeting myriad programs, this is one of the few federal programs that go directly to individual parents to help provide specific and targeted academic assistance. Selecting from a list of screened providers from across the spectrum, from community groups and other nonprofit groups to companies that provide these tutoring opportunities to more-affluent families, under this program parents can take control of their children’s education to help them get the tools they need to succeed.
Florida has led the nation in creating a system to hold these providers accountable and ensure results.
And parents have been choosing. In Florida alone, nearly 80,000 low income students took part in this tutoring program during the 2008/09 school year.
Given Florida’s leadership in K-12 reform, I am not surprised to see that they managed to make something of the private tutoring NCLB program, and I agree the program should be maintained. Some serious thought should be given however as to how the program could be made easier for parents to access. The tutoring program unwisely relies upon school districts for implementation with predictably disappointing results in most places.
Why not emulate Florida’s accountability system, and cut districts out as the middle man? There has to be a better model than expecting McDonalds to hand out vouchers to buy milk shakes from Wendy’s or Burger King.
In 2003, when Klein became chancellor, only 21 percent of the city’s fourth-grade students were proficient in math, trailing the national average of 31 percent. By 2009, 35 percent of Gotham’s students were proficient at math, nearly catching the national average of 38 percent. New York City’s 14-percentage-point gain was twice as large as the 7-point gain nationwide.
The improvement in fourth-grade reading was similarly strong. Between 2003 and 2009 the percentage of the city’s fourth graders who were proficient at reading jumped from 22 percent to 29 percent. That 7-point gain far outstripped the national improvement, up just 2 points from 30 percent to 32 percent.
The performance of New York City’s eighth graders was less dramatic: Proficiency in the math NAEP rose from 20 percent to 26 percent, tracking the US rise from 27 percent to 33 percent. In reading, city eighth graders remained statistically unchanged, mirroring the national rate.
The large gains in fourth-grade performance and more modest improvements among eighth graders didn’t win over Klein’s fierce critics. The vitriol with which they denounced him was severe, even by New York standards.
I don’t know much about Ms. Black other than the fact that she apparently does not shy away from tremendous challenges. Newspapers in the age of a print death spiral and urban schools. What does one do for an encore- Middle East peace?
I wish Klein had another 8 years in him, but he leaves NYC schools significantly better than when he found them- a rare accomplishment for an urban superintendent.
Kevin Carey responded to my post from yesterday arguing that his opposition to the Arizona tax credit scholarship was inconsistent and not logically compelling. I’m afraid that his argument remains as inconsistent and unpersuasive as it was before.
He rejects the claim that I attributed to him that tax credits and deductions, in general, are corrupt. Instead, his argument is now that the AZ tax credit scholarship is “specifically” corrupt. If that is his argument, then we might wonder why he doesn’t advocate for regulatory reform to keep the program while reducing the potential for abuse. If tax deductions are not “inherently” corrupt, then we should be able to properly regulate this program to address his “specific” concerns. In fact, Arizona has already revised its regulatory scheme to address the types of abuses he raised and Carey provides no evidence that the regulations now in place are insufficient.
In addition, if his objection all along was to specific problems with the AZ tax credit scholarship, why did he bother to write at length about how “there’s a well-established process for spending public resources” from which the Arizona program deviates by using tax credits rather than direct appropriations? Methinks his argument doth shift after I pointed out that the tax code is a very common policymaking method to shape private behavior, and he wouldn’t want to object to the day care tuition tax credit, charitable donation deduction, etc…
And if his claim is that the AZ tax credit scholarship is particularly bad because it creates “private appropriators,” why does he not have the same objection to charities as “private appropriators.” After all, the tax credit scholarship organizations are just a specific type of charitable organization. Like all charitable organizations, they are facilitated in their efforts with private funds by features in the tax code. All such organizations then “appropriate” money to others. And there is a potential for abuse with all charitable organizations, including the tax credit scholarship organizations, that we try to control through appropriate regulations.
I can’t imagine that Carey would favor abolishing the tax deduction for charitable giving, so it is unclear why, based on his stated concerns, he should advocate for the elimination of the private school scholarship tax credit. Of course, Carey is not motivated by his stated objections, since he would not apply those principles consistently. Instead, his argument is really just that he opposes private school choice. I don’t know why he doesn’t just write about that rather than hide behind a convoluted argument about the dangers of tax credits or his inconsistently applied principles of democratic policymaking.
Lastly, I can’t resist responding to Carey’s strange argument about what money belongs to the government. He writes: “The government doesn’t own all of your money but it does own some of it.” I agree. Of course, the part the government owns does not include any of the portions for which I can receive a tax credit. If his argument is simply that the money I owe the government, after all tax deductions and credits, belongs to the government, then he should have no objection to the AZ tax credit scholarship because that money, by definition, does not belong to the government. The same is true for money I can keep after tax credits for day care tuition, energy-saving repairs on my house, etc…
Again, his argument has shifted to the point where it no longer advocates for the position he prefers. Pointing out that there are specific problems with the AZ tax credit scholarship suggests he should favor regulatory reforms, not eliminating the program. And pointing out that the government owns the money you owe it after all deductions and credits suggests that he should have no difficulty with the AZ tax credit scholarship.
Rob is not a researcher, but he is a very effective communicator of research. For the most part Rob was channeling the works of E.D. Hirsch and Dan Willingham. In particular, Rob was most effective in conveying the idea that reading is not a transferable skill. Once students have a basic understanding of phonics, which is not that hard, and once they have a few basic reading strategies, the greatest barrier to kids reading well is that they lack the content knowledge to understand what they are reading. Unless students know things it does them little good to spend more and more time focusing on abstract reading skills.
Check out this very handy illustration of why this is the case from Dan Willingham:
Unfortunately, the misconception that reading is a skill informs much of how elementary school instruction is organized. We are spending more and more time on reading, per se, but less and less on the content subjects, like history, science, art, and music, that would provide the knowledge to allow students to read with understanding.
To repeat, students don’t struggle with reading (for the most part) because they can’t sound out the words or because they lack reading strategies. They struggle because they don’t know enough about the world to put what they read into any context so that it would make sense to them. This is especially true for students from disadvantaged backgrounds who are exposed to less enriching content at home.
So what should we do to fix this? On this I think Rob Pondiscio hit a foul ball. Rob is doing the right thing in trying to convince people to focus more on enriching content and stop thinking of reading as a skill. But the Core Knowledge Foundation is making a mistake in backing national standards as a way to move their agenda forward.
Let’s think about the political logic of their strategy for a second. Ed schools and much of the rest of the edublob hate the idea of focusing on content. They think that content inevitably means an emphasis on dead white men. They think that expecting content knowledge sets some kids up for failure because they can’t or won’t learn it. They are more interested in advantaged kids who already possess a lot of rich content knowledge. For these reasons and more, the edublob is politically opposed to shifting the focus to content.
So how does Core Knowledge think we can sneak into national standards and the assessments a focus on content knowledge even while that approach is opposed by the edublob. The edublob will certainly control those standards and assessments over time. You can’t get the edublob to reform itself by sneaking your minority preferences into a regulatory regime that they dominate. If they don’t want to do it, they won’t. And they can either block your good ideas from national standards and assessment or alter them over time. Dan Willingham agrees that national standards are not a promising strategy.
Rather than centralize control over the education system via national standards and assessments and hope that your ideas will prevail, it is much smarter for Core Knowledge to push for greater decentralization over schools and the training of future teachers. They should want more vouchers, charters, and alternative certification. In doing so they could get kids and future teachers out of the edublob that still thinks reading is a skill and give them the freedom to pick schools where Core Knowledge’s good ideas have been adopted.
Yes, some people will pick bad schools with bad ideas. But at least Core Knowledge will be able to fight it out on the level playing field of the marketplace of ideas. With the status quo or even greater centralization, the edublob can enforce perpetuation of their bad ideas regardless of how effective your alternative is. They dominate the centralized institutions.
Members of a religious minority shouldn’t push for a state-sponsored church in the hopes that will embrace their minority view. They should push for religious freedom and try to make converts.
Posted by Jay P. Greene 
(Guest Post by Matthew Ladner)
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