Entries for July 2008

Congress took steps Thursday to pass the biggest reform of the nation's higher education laws in 10 years. The House passed the bill 380 to 49, and the legislation was winding its way through the Senate Thursday evening, where it also was expected to pass overwhelmingly. The 1,100-plus-page law would require that, among other things, colleges explain big tuition price hikes and would make it easier for students to find cheaper textbooks. President Bush is expected to sign the bill soon.

The Higher Education Opportunity Act is a product of seven years of negotiations, lobbying, and compromises. As a result, even the most innocuous-seeming provisions contain seeds of controversy.

When it comes to education, California likes to be ahead of most trends. But sometimes state lawmakers get a little carried away. Last week, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger vetoed two separate bills that, for better or for worse, would have firmly cemented California's reputation as an education trendsetter. One bill would have required schools to carve out time specifically for teaching kids about climate change; the other would have allowed teachers to hand out rewards—possibly movie and restaurant coupons or tickets to concerts and sporting events—for good scores on standardized tests. The two bills were introduced by state lawmakers who are Democrats. Schwarzenegger, a moderate conservative, says he supports climate change instruction in schools as well as the use of cash and other perks to motivate students but believes that such decisions should be left up to individual schools.

Oddly enough, he threw his support behind a separate similarly far-out-there proposal that will require all future eighth graders to take algebra. Critics, including teachers, point out that about half of all California eighth graders fail basic math and that the new requirement will set more students up for failure unless the state offers more assistance.

Indeed, without more resources, it will be difficult for California to remain at the forefront of education trends—at least the good ones. This week, U.S. News reported on a number of states that are taking extreme and potentially harmful measures to save on food and energy costs. Add California to the list. School districts there are ending or cutting back on home-to-school transportation, and now families are threatening to sue. Private shuttle buses have seized this opportunity to charge families $400 a month to transport kids.

Matthew Nuti is a top debater on his school's Model United Nations team, a starting player in junior varsity football, and a spirited member of the yearbook staff. He also has a 2.8 GPA, and Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology—which tops our list for America's Best High Schools—has called for his expulsion.

Nuti, who just finished 10th grade, was just one of five students expelled under the school's new policy, according to the Washington Post. It was last year that "TJ," a highly selective public magnet school in suburban Washington, D.C., first decided to require that all students have a 3.0 GPA—a B average—to continue at the school. But implementation is a different thing.

The notion that girls aren't as good at math as boys is unfounded, according to a new study by researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Girls perform as well as boys on standardized math tests in every grade, from second through 11th, though there is evidence of slightly greater variability in test scores for boys.

The study, funded by the National Science Foundation and published today in Science magazine, compares the performances of 7 million students from 10 states. It uses data from the annual math tests required by the No Child Left Behind legislation.

Margaret Spellings, the nation's education czar, made an appearance Tuesday night on The Colbert Report, a comedy show on cable TV known for its sarcastic bite.

There's a good deal of confusion about what it means to close the achievement gap in education. There's the question of what is being measured. Is it the difference in average standardized test scores? Is it grade-point averages? Is it dropout rates? Is it graduation rates? And there's the question of who is being measured. Is it students from wealthy families and those from low-income families? Is it black students and white students? Is it male students and female students? Different scholars use different definitions.

Further complicating the matter, the rhetoric suggests that closing the achievement gap is always good thing (indeed, it's a major goal if not the major goal in U.S. education reform). But logic tells us that's not necessarily the case. For instance, you could close the achievement gap and have all students performing at lower levels than ever. Or you could close the achievement gap by having low-achieving students perform a little better and high-achieving students perform much worse.

Several urban education leaders testified during a congressional hearing in Washington this week about key reforms that are helping their troubled school systems narrow the achievement gap. The panel included New York City schools Chancellor Joel Klein and D.C. public schools Chancellor Michelle Rhee, two mayor-appointed leaders whose work turning around failing inner-city schools is being closely watched by educators around the country. They were joined by their bosses and the mayors of their respective cities, Michael Bloomberg and Adrian Fenty, as well as the leaders of the Atlanta and Chicago public school systems.

There were few, if any, surprises during the testimony phase. But when the discussion turned to what can be done to improve the No Child Left Behind law, Klein and Arne Duncan, the chief executive officer of Chicago public schools, ripped on one of the unintended consequences of the law: the dumbing down of state curriculum standards. "I know this is hard for you to hear Chairman [George] Miller, but we need national standards and national assessments," Klein said. He pointed out that the country needs an accurate and uniform way to measure how students are doing across states and against students from other developed and emerging economies. For every state to have its own set of standards, Duncan added, "just doesn't make any sense." Miller, who has called for more rigorous standards but resisted federal intervention, didn't respond to Klein's challenge.

Randi Weingarten, the new president of the American Federation of Teachers, called this week for overhauling No Child Left Behind, saying the education law "has outlived whatever usefulness it ever had" and that "it is too badly broken to be fixed." Weingarten's sharp attack on NCLB puts her at odds with U.S. Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings, who in her last six months on the job continues to defend NCLB. Speaking to reporters after a meeting with business leaders in Washington, Spellings said she "vigorously disagreed" with Weingarten and expressed hope that a new administration won't abandon the law's goal of having every child read and do math at grade level by 2014. "We need more NCLB, not less," Spellings said during her remarks to the Business Roundtable group, which on the same day released a report expressing alarm about the stagnant number of U.S. scientists and engineers.

The education czar urged business leaders to resist the "lofty rhetoric" of the presidential candidates and other elected officials who may be trying to undermine the law's core principles of accountability and transparency. (The country's two biggest teachers' unions have said they don't oppose accountability but resent the punitive nature of NCLB and want other measures besides testing to gauge student learning.) Spellings credited the business community for its efforts to promote math and science education, though she took some indirect criticism because the federal government has not made good on its promise to fully fund the America COMPETES Act, which was passed three years ago and calls for more emphasis on preparing students and teachers in math and science.

A cheating scandal at one Southern California high school has prompted the College Board to invalidate the scores of 690 Advanced Placement exams. Now, hundreds of students from Trabuco Hills High School in Orange County are protesting the decision. The Los Angeles Times is calling the imbroglio "perhaps the most memorable in Southern California since 1982, when the scores of more than a dozen students in Jaime Escalante's AP calculus class at Garfield High School were invalidated because of suspected cheating. The students retook the exams and passed, and the events were later turned into the film Stand and Deliver."

The protesters are students who say they didn't cheat on the exams and who are worried about their college prospects if the scores are not made valid. They have formed a group on Facebook called "Justice for 375." The College Board and Educational Testing Services say there was rampant misconduct during the testing in May and have no intention of reinstating the scores. At least 10 students allegedly cheated on statistics and macroeconomics tests by exchanging text messages using cellphones. There was also little supervision while students took the tests, including proctors who were asleep.

A new round of testing has been scheduled for August. But that has done little to appease families who say they won't go down without a fight. Would anyone out there pay to see this embarrassing mess re-created for the big screen?

A study by the Center for Civic Innovation at the Manhattan Institute found that Florida elementary schools that were under pressure to improve their math and reading scores made greater gains in science than schools that didn't face similar pressure under that state's accountability system. The findings counter what many critics of No Child Left Behind and other high-stakes testing regimes have said for years: that the focus on reading and math comes at the expense of other subjects that are not tested, and that this crowding effect has led to lower achievement levels in "low stakes" subjects such as science, social studies, and the arts.

Marcus Winters, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute who coauthored the study, says it's difficult to pinpoint why science scores improved. He leans toward the "spillover effect" theory; that if students have strong math and reading skills, they are more likely to master other subjects, including science. David Figlio, a professor at the University of Florida who has reviewed the study's findings, says other factors may be at work. He says public pressure—the embarrassment that comes with being labeled a failing school—and a school's overall reforms, such as a longer school day, may have caused schools not to ignore science instruction. Whatever the reason, Figlio says, "We can feel a little more comfortable about the effects of global accountability given these results."