________________________________________  THE VERMONT EDUCATION REPORT August 05, 2002 Vol. 2, No. 32 ¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯  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: MAILTO:LSternberg@aol.com STATE NEWS... SUMMERTIME The Vermont Education Report will not be published next week due to vacation schedules. We'll be back in subscribers' email boxes on August 19.  VERMONT NEA PREZ DISSES VOUCHERS While it's no surprise that the head of the Vermont NEA would decry the Cleveland voucher ruling from the Supreme Court, it is a little disconcerting to read negative comments about voucher programs from a man who has exercised choice in his personal life by sending his child to a private, parochial school this past year. In the August issue of Vermont-NEA Today, President Angelo J. Dorta claims that "despite our nation's need to unify diverse populations, school vouchers only will contribute to socioeconomic, ethnic, racial, and religious re-segregation and stratification." Ironically, that is precisely what happens WITHOUT school choice programs - only those who can afford to choose schools for their children are able to do so. The poor get left behind.  MESSAGE FROM INSTITUTE FOR JUSTICE RE: FLORIDA RULING Mere weeks before the start of the school year, a state judge in Tallahassee today decided that the Opportunity Scholarship program is unconstitutional, and he ordered the State not to issue voucher checks to parents for the upcoming school year. The Institute for Justice will appeal the decision and ask the judge to stay his decision so as not to force Pensacola children back into failing schools. Unless the decision is stayed, it will also mean that hundreds of newly eligible children in Miami-Dade, Palm Beach and elsewhere will be forbidden from using the scholarship program to escape from F-rated schools in those districts. As you may know, the Institute for Justice has been involved with this program since its drafting stages and has been defending it in court on behalf of Pensacola parents since the ACLU, the NAACP, the teachers' unions, and other organizations filed suit in June 1999. The court's opinion failed to address one of the central arguments in favor of the Opportunity Scholarship program-namely, that interpreting Florida's state constitution to require the exclusion of religious schools not only violates the federal Constitution's ban on viewpoint discrimination but interferes with the First Amendment right to the free exercise of religion as well. In addition, the trial judge did not explain how he would distinguish Opportunity Scholarships from the many other Florida programs in which state money ultimately ends up at religious institutions, including higher education scholarships and state health programs. Should the reasoning in today's decision be affirmed, the future of such programs would be in grave doubt. Neither Florida's corporate tax credit program for educational scholarships nor the McKay Scholarships for disabled students are affected by today's ruling. This decision is tragic and outrageous. The first concern is to lift the injunction so that children who desperately need the precious education they currently are receiving are not denied it as the case works its way through appeal. The Institute for Justice will move ahead aggressively on all fronts.  FOR PARENTS: READING TIPS The U.S. Department of Education has posted reading tips for parents to help them help their children become strong readers. The tips include specific things parents can do, plus a guide for determining if your child is enrolled in a strong reading program, plus a discussion of the "five essential components of reading." To access the information, go to: http://www.nclb.gov/parents/reading/  STUDY SHOWS CHOICE HELPS THE DISABLED Opponents contend that school choice will hurt disabled children. However, a recent study finds that just the opposite is true. According to a new international study by the Yankee Institute, school choice would greatly benefit disabled children in the United States. In other countries, special education children are thriving far beyond American standards with school choice. In Denmark, where the government's commitment to fund private education dates back to 1899, more than 99 percent of learning-disabled children are educated side-by-side with mainstream children.   The number of special school systems in the Netherlands has fallen from 14 to 4 since 1990, when the government began awarding educational stipends to parents of learning-disabled children to use at mainstream schools.   In Australia, a 1998 study found that intellectually and physically disabled children who studied in mainstream schools under the country's school choice program were achieving literary and math skills equal to their peers.   In contrast, Britain's attempt to limit parental choice to public schools has created special education ghettos, confining children to failing schools in poorer districts. The study also applauds Florida's "A+ Plan." Under the new law, parents of a special-needs child can receive $6,000 to $20,000 to place their child in a private school. The program has been extremely successful at integrating special-needs children into mainstream schools: During the 2000-2001 school year, 105 private schools enrolled more than 900 special education students.   During the recent academic year, officials estimated the number of learning-disabled students receiving private school assistance would quadruple to 4,000, while the number of participating schools will triple to more than 300. Instead of segregating disabled children in special education ghettos, school choice gave those children a chance to succeed. Source: Lewis M. Andrews, (Executive Director of the Yankee Institute for Public Policy), "More Choices For Disabled Kids: Lessons from Abroad," Policy Review, April & May 2002, Hoover Institution. For text: http://www.yankeeinstitute.org/papers/choices.php *    *    * ELSEWHERE... FURTHER FIDDLING WITH STANDARDS AND TESTS by Chester E. Finn, Jr., editor, The Education Gadfly,  a weekly e-newsletter from the Fordham Foundation, on the web at edexcellence.net Some weeks back, I used this space to describe ways that a state's academic standards may be lowered, including several that occur out of public view. (See "A field guide to low standards," May 16, 2002, http://www.edexcellence.net/gadfly/v02/gadfly20.html#checker1.) I explained how a state might simply set low standards, focus its tests on the easier skills covered by the standards, create deliberately easy test questions and generous rubrics, or establish low cut scores for passing the tests. That editorial prompted a number of reader comments. These revealed additional holes in existing state systems of standards-based accountability and further illumined why it is so hard to do right by this education reform strategy, notwithstanding the new oomph supplied by the No Child Left Behind Act. In some states, there's simply no strong commitment to the idea of clear standards that spell out what children should know or to accurate measures of what they DO know. As one writer put it, "I believe my home state of Vermont uses several of your suggested methods to defeat standards. In English, Vermont's 'portfolio' system makes almost any kind of scoring completely subjective. Even when considering a student's portfolio work in other subjects, the student actually polishes each portfolio submission, running it past his teacher several times before a highly unrepresentative sample of his or her work gets placed into the holy folder. "My wife and I have attempted to receive documentation of ANY curriculum for our children's schooling at several grade levels beginning with first grade and have only had success in getting any details from the system after our son reached high school. Four times we were given the generalized state standards document that you say can usually be found on the web. This is so incredibly generalized in Vermont that the best one can say of it is that it mentions various fields of learning." To this disgruntled dad, I say that Vermont is famous for not subscribing to the view that education standards should be concrete, assessments should be straightforward, and information about school expectations and student performance should be transparent. Indeed, Governor Howard Dean openly flirted with the possibility of rejecting all federal Title I funding rather than making the Green Mountain state alter its own standards-and-assessment system to comply with NCLB requirements. (He has since backed away from that threat and indicated that Vermont will accept at least the first year of No Child Left Behind moneys, then re-evaluate to see how much difficulty this causes it. He's also now openly running for President!) Secrets of a test-scorer In some states, tests are unreliable because those in charge of assessment don't really trust the more straightforward kinds and instead insist on using the formats that are hardest to score consistently and fairly. As one writer, put it: "Here's some inside information on the scoring of statewide exams. For the past several years, I have worked for one of the firms which has responsibility for writing and scoring statewide exams in such subjects as math, reading, writing, and social studies. The questions are 'essay' type. We don't score multiple-choice questions-presumably because scanners and computers handle them. Sometimes the scoring is done by hand (i.e., you are given the student's exam and you grade it on one of those SAT type fill in sheets); sometimes it's done by computer (you sit at a computer and see an image of the students' answers and grade the answer on the exam). Most of the individuals doing the scoring are college graduates, including people with graduate degrees; a few are college students and, rarely, some have no college education. "The scorers seem to be dedicated. The scoring can be at times monotonous. (How would you like to have to grade, say, 17,000 answers to a question such as: describe your favorite character in a novel?) Sometimes, as you might expect, the answers are hilarious (though not intentionally). Sometimes the kids say things like: 'We never studied this' or 'We studied this last year.' "The main problem I see is that the states set standards which are, at times, not consistent. For instance, on a Social Studies exam: some questions are easy to get a good grade and some questions are very hard. In the latter case, it is often because the state will require a student to use an exact word or phrase but not indicate in the question that some exact word or phrase is required. Sometimes the state will require the student to give, say, three reasons for something in order to get a high score but on the question only indicates that he must give "reasons." This obviously penalizes a student who gives two reasons and assumes that that is sufficient, though he might be completely capable of giving three or more reasons if that were called for. By the way, the questions on which it is hard to get a good score are not necessarily the 'hardest' questions on the exam. That is, they are not necessarily the questions that an outside observer would select as the most difficult to answer. "Although I understand the argument that multiple choice questions can't probe a student's complete understanding, after grading essay questions I am not certain that a student is fairly judged by using the latter type, either. I have discovered that in some states where the results have been terrible, somebody (either at the state, district or school level) has clamped down and the students have done better in the next year. This doesn't occur all the time or most of the time or even as often as I would like, but I have seen instances of it. Sometimes the essay questions ask facts about very specific events which probably take up no more than half a page in a 500 page reader." This test-scorer opened a grimy window and gave us a peek inside the process. It isn't pretty. Though he seems to remain bullish (as do I) about the potential gains to result from expecting high scores from students, his examples of the uneven and tricky (or maybe just inept) nature of state test items are troubling. Certainly, his experience gives us further reason to argue with those who insist that multiple-choice items are useless and that only the human-scored "extended response" items -famously difficult to judge reliably- deserve respect. Vermont was once notorious for the unreliability (in the eyes of such testing experts as Daniel Koretz) of its portfolio and "open response" assessments. More recently, North Carolina has had to junk the results of its fourth-grade writing test because last year's results were so uneven and inexplicable. Maryland was so daunted by the technical and political difficulties of its much-praised MSPAP assessment that it is now jettisoning that format entirely in favor of more "objective" tests. Now the College Board is plunging into this swamp with its revised SAT, which boasts a universal writing requirement. This will pose a whole new level of scoring challenge, both because of the huge numbers taking the SAT and because of the stakes associated (perhaps especially for middle and upper-middle class families) with those scores. Picture a system that tries to assign reliable numerical scores to millions of hand-written essays, year in and year out. I'm all for making kids show that they can write-and the SAT's proctored test setting will make it harder to submit someone else's composition and call it one's own-so the underlying impulse here is sound. But the test-scoring burden will be truly immense. (Watch for litigation. And watch SAT fees soar.) Perspective of a high school principal My previous column focused on the problem of setting up 50 state accountability systems without a common yardstick to measure them. One writer, a high school principal, had an idea for fixing this, an idea that, as it happens, relies on the SAT and its major competitor: "This account of the potential pitfalls in accountability is the most cogent set of arguments I have read about the ways politicians and educrats manipulate testing to serve their own ends. Probably the best way to establish checks and balances is by comparing a school's or state's own data to SAT or ACT scores, which fairly reliably predict success or failure in further learning. This means testing the entire high school population, rather than just the consciously college-bound, and it would involve some expense, but nobody ever said accountability would come cheap. At least we would know whether our schools are doing as well as they claim if we got feedback from testing organizations that have higher ed, rather than K-12, as their primary constituency." I agree that it would be interesting to see what we could learn by comparing state (or school-level) test results with those from a universal administration of the SAT or ACT. Congress followed similar reasoning when it opted, in No Child Left Behind, to require state participation in the National Assessment of Educational Progress. The idea is that a state's NAEP result will serve as an external audit of its own standards and test results. I believe that can work so long as NAEP retains its integrity, but state-level NAEP only covers grades 4 and 8 and therefore cannot function as an audit for a state's high school standards or exit tests. Perhaps something should! Other readers with views on this matter, pertinent experiences, or whistles to blow, should please get in touch. This is a conversation worth continuing. FED UP? DON'T BLAME THE SCHOOLS; YOU HAVE "ANGRY PARENT SYNDROME." From The Education Intelligence Agency COMMUNIQUE August 5, 2002 -- On the Web at http://www.eiaonline.com Last week, Penguin Books officially released The New Public School Parent: How to Get the Best Education for Your Child by outgoing NEA President Bob Chase. In an interview with U.S. News & World Report, Chase recounted how even he had communications troubles with his own daughter's math teacher. "Chase found himself just as frustrated and confused as any other parent," reads the item. Fortunately, Chase did not succumb to an affliction which, for some unknown reason, is reaching epidemic proportions in our nation's public schools. The disorder is "angry parent syndrome," described by the coiner of the phrase, Charlotte, North Carolina, attorney James G. Middlebrooks, as "a chronic condition involving widespread disenchantment with public education." Middlebrooks presented a workshop on the condition at the annual conference of the National School Boards Association last spring, and since then has been making the rounds of NSBA's state affiliates. "Public education is viewed as just another commodity," Middlebrooks told On Board, the publication of the New York State School Boards Association. "People have a consumer mentality and have learned to get what they want by pounding on the table." He told school board members to place a priority on anger management and to guard their own safety. On Board reports Middlebrooks saying that "some parents seem out of touch with objective reality, and no amount of placating will ever satisfy them."  *    *    * DO YOU ENJOY THE VER? For more than a year, Vermonters for Better Education has been publishing the Vermont Education Report and emailing it to our subscribers, providing you with information you can't get elsewhere in the Vermont media about a topic of great importance to the life of the state. Show your support of the VER by making a donation to VBE today! Mail contributions to: VBE, 170 Church Street, Rutland, Vermont 05701.  The VERMONT EDUCATION REPORT is published by Vermonters for Better Education 170 Church Street, Rutland, VT 05701, 802.773.5240 Contact LSternberg@aol.com for more information.

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