________________________________________  THE VERMONT EDUCATION REPORT March 22, 2004 Vol. 4, No. 13 ¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯  Covering education news in Vermont and beyond... Informative, provocative, unique... Published by Vermonters for Better Education  VBE is a nonprofit, nonpartisan organization whose mission is to enlist parents and the public at large in achieving quality educational opportunities for all the children of Vermont by monitoring the state of education in Vermont; promoting the value of educational freedoms for all parents; and giving parents the evaluative tools with which to identify excellence. Libby Sternberg, executive director: VTBetterEd@aol.com NEWS & ANALYSIS... THE OTHER SCHOOL CHOICE POLL In last week's VER, we reported the results of a school choice question on the "Doyle Poll," an unscientific survey conducted by Sen. William Doyle (R-Washington) every Town Meeting Day. Only 36 percent of respondents answered yes to a question on whether Vermont should allow for public school choice. The Doyle poll, however, can often be unreliable because it does not use a "random sampling" technique where all members of a population have an equal chance of being selected. In fact, in the Doyle poll, respondents with strong biases either in favor of or (more commonly) in opposition to an issue have more incentive to return the surveys, a common problem with such unscientific surveys.  When was the last scientific poll done on the school choice issue? Although VER has learned that some political polling has been done showing strong support (two-thirds of respondents in one case) for school choice, those polls have not been made public. The last scientific poll on school choice that was made public was done in 1999 by Vermont Public Radio. Below are excerpts from the Associated Press story on the 1999 poll: "A majority of Vermonters support the idea of allowing tax money to be used to pay for education at religious schools, according to a new poll. "Vermont Public Radio said 55 percent of respondents said 'yes' when asked whether parents should be allowed to use tax dollars to send their children to religious schools. Thirty-four percent said no and 12 percent were undecided. "Macro International conducted the poll...for VPR....and the results have a margin of error of plus or minus 5 percent. "The VPR poll found that 68 percent of respondents 18 to 24 years old supported full school choice, the highest of any age group. Support for the idea crossed party lines. VPR said 63 percent of those who described themselves as Republicans, 52 percent of independents and nearly half of all Democrats said yes..."  VT-NEA PREZ ON SCHOOL CHOICE VOTE The April issue of VT-NEA Today contains an interesting piece by Angelo Dorta, VT-NEA president, in which he describes the public hearing held by the State Board of Education as they discussed a resolution in support of public school choice. Pasted below is an excerpt. Notice how the head of the teachers union disparagingly refers to parents as "disgruntled" and school choice supporters as "minions." At the same time he uses this insulting language, he bemoans the "divisive, partisan" environment in which the issue is discussed! From VT-NEA Today, the monthly newsletter of the teachers union: "As expected, several of the antipublic school network's familiar leaders provided testimony during the brief hearing. They were backed by a small band of their customary minions: a disgruntled parent or two, a couple of sympathetic Republican state legislators, and a sprinkling of ideological 'free market fundamentalists' who always want to privatize nearly everything and who constantly proselytize using tell-tale phrases such as 'government schools,' 'monopoly,' etc. It wasn't even worth the time for Vermont- NEA representatives to attend and to testify, so we didn't... "When will these ever-present school choice advocates and freemarketeers learn one simple fact: Effective education policy can't and shouldn't be formulated in a divisive, politically partisan environment. So called school choice' currently is a tenet of primarily Republican orthodoxy, despite minority public support."  HOUSE AND SBOE AT ODDS? The House passed H. 73 recently, a bill that outlines procedures for local school boards that wish to allow students to be elected to their boards as voting members. However, the State Board of Education considered a resolution in support of this initiative and it failed to pass at the last SBOE meeting. The vote was 4-4. Since it was a tie, the motion failed.  EARLY ED BILL CONTINUES TO ROLL ALONG S.166, the early education bill, continues to move through the Senate and is likely to come before the House Education Committee in the next week or so. Here is a summary of the bill's provisions and its implications: The bill's stated purpose is to "authorize the allocation of state capital funds for building of a facility for a public preschool program; establish a partial ADM (average daily membership) weight for a pupil attending a part-day kindergarten program or a public preschool program; direct the state board to develop standards for preschool programs and licensing of preschool teachers; establish a uniform kindergarten entrance age of five years on or before September 1; and conduct a Vermont kindergarten readiness survey." The bill accomplishes those goals by making changes to current statute. The bill would add to the State Board of Education's (SBOE) authority, for example, by allowing them to make regulations governing the licensing and qualification of all public preschool teachers. It would also allow the SBOE to come up with content standards for public preschool. Under statutes governing standards of quality, the bill would direct all public schools to include in their action plans strategies "to address early education opportunities for young children." This is another "unfunded mandate" that requires local schools to address preschool issues. The bill allows public school districts to "maintain a public preschool program either by operating the program or contracting with one or more qualified service providers." Such preschool programs will provide at least 10 hours per week of educational services ("educational services" rules shall be defined by the SBOE). And, educational services will only be provided by teachers who have received a license to do so. Enrollments in preschool programs would count for "weighted" membership and thus would mean more money for school districts which choose to offer such programs.  The implications for private preschool and day care providers are serious. If public schools are given incentives (in the form of money for more students) and encouragement to begin preschool programs, more parents might choose them over private providers because the public ones will be free of charge. S.166 is based on the premise that early education programs prepare children to learn, and lead to greater success in higher grades. However, research has shown that any gains from early education programs come at a tremendous cost and the gains themselves tend to be lost over time - by third or fourth grade. For more on this, see the Ethan Allen Institute commentary below.  *   *   * COMMENTARY  THE PRESCHOOL BAIT AND SWITCH by John McClaughry, president, Ethan Allen Institute  http://www.ethanallen.org (February 2004) This year's major social policy initiative will be a dramatic taxpayer-funded expansion of "preschool education". The leading advocacy groups, the Child Care Fund of Vermont (CCFV) and the Vermont Business Roundtable, are mounting an all-out campaign to persuade legislators that quintupling the current state spending on preschool programs (ages 3 and 4) is a wise use of Act 68 tax dollars. Their legislative vehicle is S. 166, now in the Senate Education committee. The advocates argue that brain development is quite rapid among 3-5 year old children, so that's the time the public should spend money on them to maximize their development. Kindergarten teachers report that the pupils are coming to them are insufficiently "ready to learn." Finally, "investing" taxpayer dollars in preschool programs will pay enormous dividends down the road, in terms of better-adjusted students, higher test scores and high school graduation rates, and lower special education costs. The advocates like to cite "savings in the range of 4 to 7 dollars" for every dollar of public money spent on preschool programs. CCFV proposes to create a "public private partnership" called "Vermont's Alliance for Children". This would consist of a state-sanctioned nonprofit organization controlling "local entities" (that's the private part) spending millions of taxpayer's dollars (that's the public part). Children would attend public preschools ten hours a week, 36 weeks a year, at an annual cost to the Education Fund of $21 million, Church-centered preschools are of course not included. What's the evidence for the value of preschool programs? Well, here is where you have to watch out for the bait and switch. The advocates cite three famous experiments with preschool children, called Perry Preschool, Chicago Parent Child Center, and Abecedarian. The projects did in fact achieve some positive results in terms of later child performance. Case closed? Not so fast. All three projects dealt with seriously at risk children. The participants were almost all minority children with well below average intelligence. They overwhelmingly came from dysfunctional single parent welfare homes. The Perry project was deemed a success because by age 19 the Perry preschoolers clearly fared better than their peers in the control group. Only 33 percent had dropped out of high school, only 31 percent had been arrested, and the 25 girls had only experienced 17 pregnancies. The amount and cost of the resources consumed per child were staggering. For instance, in the Abecedarian program the government took charge of the seriously at-risk children not at age 3 years, but at age 5 months, with an initial ratio of one teacher to three children. The annual per pupil cost in 2004 dollars was $52,000. Pouring the resources to the most desperate children can hardly help but produce some benefits, and most people would probably agree that it's an inescapable public cost. But to proclaim "4 to 1" or "7 to 1" rates of return for investment in a program for all children is just not honest. There is no academic study that links costs and benefits for a preschool program other than a program serving the most desperately at risk children. Prof. Edward F. Zigler, Sterling Professor at Yale, has written "there is a large body of evidence that there is little to be gained by exposing middle class children to early education. Those who argue in favor of universal preschool education ignore evidence that indicates early schooling is inappropriate for many 4-year olds, and that it may even be harmful to their development." Far from being an isolated dissenter, Prof. Zigler, known as "the Father of Headstart", is chair of the Advisory Council of the National Institute for Early Education Research. The impetus for this movement comes from several different sources. A lot of sincere people believe that lavishing lots of dollars on preschoolers is the Next Big Thing in social progress. The Department of Education is obviously eager to expand the public school system. The NEA teachers' union will naturally be enthusiastic, anticipating that expanded public preschool programs will bring them hundreds of new dues paying members. A major driving force is Business. Universal preschool, especially when it expands from a ten hour a week to a 30 or 40 hour a week program, will be a boon to businesses. If the kids are in school at 3 and 4, their employee parents won't have to pay for day care, and the employer won't have to provide for or bargain about day care. So Vermonters are about to witness a major effort by Business, state Government's most expansion-minded bureaucracy, and Child Welfare Liberals, supported by the state's largest Union, to get the legislature to launch a major new program, of high cost and dubious value, and bill those costs to the Education Fund, two thirds of whose revenues come from the property tax. Somewhere somebody has to get real about balancing very significant taxpayer costs with largely fuzzy ("readiness to learn"), often distressingly transient, and for most children unnecessary benefits. Is anybody out there listening?  *   *   * ELSEWHERE  FROM THE TEACHERS QUALITY BULLETIN (http://www.nctq.org) HIGHLY QUALIFIED TEACHERS, A MATTER OF DEFINITION U.S. Education Secretary Rod Paige's Monday announcement of changes to No Child Left Behind's teacher quality provisions brought quick and passionate reactions from both sides of the debate. Three basic changes were made to the regs. First, teachers in rural schools who teach multiple subjects need only be highly qualified in one subject area by January 2006 and have an additional three years to become highly qualified in any other subject areas they teach. Second, states may decide if science teachers ought to be certified in a specific field of science or in a general science certification. Third, multi- subject teachers (particularly middle school and special education teachers) only have to submit to one process to meet the state's standards for highly qualified teachers. Up until now, a teacher who taught math and science would have to go through the state process twice, once for math and once for science. This also implies that states now have to establish new standard! s that describe the credentials expected of teachers of multiple subjects. The National Education Association, no friend of Secretary Paige, commented, "The debate is no longer on whether NCLB and its implementation is flawed and needs to be fixed, but on what needs to be fixed." Conversely, Ross Wiener, Policy Director at the Education Trust, warned, "The Department has done more today to show states how they can avoid addressing teacher quality problems than help them address the substance of these problems... Students from low-income families and students of color will disproportionately suffer the consequences." Our own sense is that folks at the Department are feeling dumped upon, weary of defending a law that was enacted under a proud and vocal bipartisan spirit. This spirit has evaporated for four reasons: 1) first and foremost, the upcoming November elections; 2) from the start, the total unwillingness of most state departments of education to serve as good foot soldiers for the law-instead they are out there fanning the flames of discontent in their school districts; 3) the Department was caught off guard, realizing only too late that people don't like change no matter how laudatory the goals are; and 4) a law that was passed in the middle of the night which contained language that even its primary authors knew nothing about has some flaws-surprise, surprise-that may ultimately have to be addressed. Could the NCLB teacher provisions use some revision? Yep, but the revisions ought not to be just about showing how flexible the feds are willing to be but about holding states' feet to the fire to get them to take this issue more seriously. Most states simply are not. The Department's actions may have been appropriate, but changes ought to be pursued only in the interest of doing what is right for students, not because states and teacher unions can't stop grumbling. "New No Child Left Behind Flexibility: Highly Qualified Teachers" The U.S. Department of Education http://www.ed.gov/nclb/methods/teachers/hqtflexibility.pdf "New flexibility tests teaching qualifications" The Post and Courier, March 16, 2004 http://www.charleston.net/stories/031604/sta_16nclb.shtml "Statement of Ross Wiener, Policy Director for the Education Trust on the U.S. Department of Education's Announcement of New Teacher Quality Policies" The Education Trust, March 15, 2004 http://www2.edtrust.org/edtrust/press+room "Department of Education responding to demands for improvement" NEA, March 16, 2004 http://www.nea.org/esea/debateshifts.html "U.S. Set to Ease Some Provisions of School Law" The New York Times, March 14, 2004 http://www.nytimes.com/2004/03/14/education/14CHIL.html?8br FROM THE U.S. FREEDOM FOUNDATION (http://www.freedomfoundation.us) THE PUBLIC SCHOOLS: MIRROR MIRROR ON THE WALL by David W. Kirkpatrick, Senior Education Fellow.  Perhaps no institution is more resistant to change than the nation's public schools. Decades of efforts to reform the system have failed. Even growing numbers within the system no longer believe real change is possible. The latest example is Howard Good, who recently completed serving six years on a school board in New York State, the last three as board president. In the March 17, 2004 edition of Education Week he notes that "The near-impossibility of true education reform has been documented in a number of studies." His own sentiments are stronger: "Now that I'm off the board and able to think more calmly, it is even clearer to me that the system can't be rehabilitated, only replaced."  Ironically, the public school system's wounds are largely self-inflicted. It has repeatedly demonstrated an inability to reform itself. Despite ever-increasing costs, it remains unable to adequately educate low-income and minority students. And countless citizens have experienced first-hand a cool, even antagonistic, response from school boards, educators and teacher unions when they question the status quo. Nonpublic schools currently enroll some five million students. This is nothing new and the sector is not experiencing rapid growth. Further, those utilizing the nonpublic sector do so for a variety of reasons, not all of which relate to unhappiness with the public schools.  But there are trends that are definitely related to dissatisfaction. The largest is homeschooling. In 1981an estimated 10,000 students were being homeschooled. Estimates now run as high as 2,000,000. And there are those who say the trend is growing at about 15 percent a year. Most importantly, studies consistently show homeschooled students perform well academically and socially. Prestigious colleges and universities not only willingly accept such students but actively recruit them. This challenges the rhetoric about the necessity for teacher certification. This embarrassment also helps explain the antagonism to home schooling by "professional" teachers.  A second development is charter schools. There were none in 1991. Today there are nearly 3,000, enrolling more than 700,000 students. Washington State today became the 41st state, plus the District of Columbia, to have such a law. Some state charter school laws are extremely weak. Others, in states such as Arizona, California and Michigan have resulted in the creation of hundreds of schools in each state. Some, like countless public schools, have problems. Unlike the traditional schools, however, charter schools with serious difficulties are likely to close. Still, their overall record is positive, and some have experienced success matched by few if any traditional schools. On a smaller scale there are scores of public and private voucher programs. Still, they make it possible for tens of thousands of mostly low-income and minority parents and their children to exercise their constitutional right to educational self-determination. In total then, something like 8,000,000 students who could be in the public system aren't. While that's small compared to 48,000,000 public school students, it is still significant. Nor does it count the millions, if opinion polls can be believed, who would leave the public schools if they could afford to do so. With public per-pupil funding now approaching $9,000 annually, a loss of eight million students gives a shortfall of nearly $70 billion public schools would otherwise receive. With the current pupil-teacher ratio of about 16-1, that's 500,000 public school teaching positions that don't exist. If 90 percent would join a teachers' union, a not unreasonable estimate, at annual dues of $500, that's $225 million less money in the union treasuries. An you may have wondered why teacher unions oppose alternatives. Already, the two major teacher unions face growing problems. In Georgia, Missouri, and Texas, the largest teacher groups are independent. In states such as Ohio and Indiana, a number of local teacher unions are totally and successfully independent, not part of any state group. Dissatisfaction with the public schools grows. Parents who insist upon their individual rights to determine their children's education, and educators who seek more independence in how they teach, should get together and pull in the same direction. Combined with the growing irrefutable success record of educational alternatives, their political clout could prove to be irresistible.  *   *   * The VERMONT EDUCATION REPORT is published by Vermonters for Better Education 170 Church Street, Rutland, VT 05701, 802.773.5240 Contact VTBetterEd@aol.com for more information.   Subscribe Here SubscribeRemove

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