________________________________________  THE VERMONT EDUCATION REPORT September 27, 2004 Vol. 4, No. 33 ¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯  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... DOUGLAS EDUCATION PLANS Governor James Douglas finally has information on education policy posted on his campaign web site. As we have done with other candidates, we present excerpts of the Douglas education priorities: "...Vermont is second in the nation for education spending per capita and we have the lowest pupil/teacher ratio and the lowest pupil/staff ratio in the nation. Vermonters deserve to know that their property tax dollars are being spent wisely and with real results. "That is why I support the goals of the bipartisan No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB). This law establishes meaningful accountability standards, requires that states determine if every student is making adequate yearly progress, and establishes standards to ensure teachers are well versed in the subjects they teach. "...These are important steps, but in implementing this federal law we must make its requirements fit within the framework of our own Vermont education policy priorities, not the other way around.  "We have enough money to fund the elements of the law that we are currently required to meet, but we do not know how much full implementation will cost. As with any far-reaching legislation, we mush be patient as the intricacies of this new law are worked out, and I will continue to fight to ensure Vermont receives its full share of funding. "Here in Vermont, we must inject our system of education with innovation and more options for families. While Vermont’s public school system is strong and blessed with high quality, committed teachers, not every school meets the individual needs of every student. Today, only higher-income parents can afford to move their child to a more fitting school.  "But for low-income Vermonters who cannot afford tuition payments, their children remain trapped. I firmly believe that public school choice should not be a privilege reserved only for the wealthy. It should be the right of all Vermonters. I will work to advance full public school choice so that every child, regardless of economic background, has full access to the best education a strong public school system can offer. "... Since becoming Governor, I’ve increased funding for higher education by a total of $3.6 million so more young people could pursue education beyond high school." *  *  * The Democratic candidate for governor, Peter Clavelle, has the following posted on his web site about education: "Excellent Public Schools "Education policy and investment must strengthen, not undermine, Vermont's public schools. At the same time, we must commit to making our state colleges and the University of Vermont more affordable for Vermonters." Clavelle has been endorsed by the state’s teacher’s union, which cited his opposition to school choice as a factor in the endorsement. WORTH REPEATING: ECONOMICS WORKSHOP FOR TEACHERS Last week, the VER published information about a valuable workshop on teaching economics. We repeat the information this week with some important news – the $25 registration fee is refunded to teachers who complete the day’s events. Why? Because incentives matter, says one of the workshop’s coordinators, Art Woolf. Teachers who don't show up lose the money while those who do participate get the refund. Here’s the rest of the info: FOR EDUCATORS: REAL ECONOMICS EDUCATION The Foundation for Teaching Economics, in partnership with the Vermont Council on Economic Education, will offer a workshop specially designed for high school social studies teachers on Monday, November 15 in Burlington. The provocative title of the workshop is: "Is Capitalism Good for the Poor?" The workshop will include discussions of the following questions: What is poverty and who are the poor? What is capitalism? Property rights and the rule of law Degrees of market competition Incentives that generate invention and innovation Incentives that promote social cooperation The $25 registration fee is a bargain –- attendees will receive standards-based lesson plans and curriculum materials for high school students, as well as lunch, a continental breakfast, and activity rewards. "Is Capitalism Good for the Poor" is a program of the Foundation for Teaching Economics and is funded through a generous grant from the John Templeton Foundation.  In 2004, this program is being offered in Denver, Phoenix, Fairbanks, Phoenix, Newark (DE), Champaign-Urbana (IL), South Carolina, and Milwaukee, as well as in Burlington. Kathy Ratté will present the workshop with assistance from Art Woolf. Ratte retired from Jefferson County schools in suburban Denver in 1991 after 25 teachers as a high school economics, civics, and history teacher, and more recently as the district high school social studies resource teacher. She received the "Enterprising Teacher of the Year Award" in 1991 from the Colorado Council on Economic Education and earned the national first place award in 1994 and an honorable mention award in 1996 from the National Council on Economic Education’s "Excellence in Economic Education" competition. Art Woolf is an associate professor of economics at UVM and president of the Vermont Council on Economic Education. Contact Art Woolf at 802.656.0190 (or at vcee@uvm.edu) for more information and a registration form.  HELP GET THE MESSAGE OUT! Vermonters for Better Education has several radio ads ready to go. Listen to them on our web site (links on the home page) -- but they'll also be airing soon in Chittenden and Windham Counties. Want to hear more of them? Send a donation today to VBE at 170 Church Street, Rutland, VT 05701.  *   *   * ELSEWHERE  FROM THE FORDHAM FOUNDATION On the web at: http://www.edexcellence.net/ WHEN STANDING STILL IS MOVING BACKWARD Time magazine this week discusses the challenges, benefits, and pitfalls of "grade skipping"--moving extremely gifted students up to a higher grade. Critics have long maintained that moving children, however brilliant, into classes with older students will hurt them socially if not academically.  Citing statistics from A Nation Deceived, a study released this week, proponents are fighting back. According to authors Nicholas Colangelo and Susan Assouline of the University of Iowa, and Miraca Gross of the University of New South Wales, Australia, "accelerated students have performed almost as well on standardized tests as older classmates, even those with similar IQs" and "accelerants far outscore their equally gifted age-mates who did not move ahead." In addition, 63 percent of grade skippers were judged by their teachers to have adjusted "relatively well" or "very well" to school.  Despite this evidence, scores of parents who have tried to accelerate their gifted students have run into resistance from teachers, administrators, and counselors. In fact, the authors report, they are not aware "of any other education practice that is so well researched, yet so rarely implemented." It seems that many are convinced merely by anecdotal evidence of kids who have been forced ahead, only to face problems they were not prepared to handle, rather than relying on research indicating that grade skipping is a plausible answer to the perplexing question of how to keep gifted kids engaged and challenged when so many other students are falling behind. As Assouline points out, "we have every reason to believe that when the decision is carefully made, the student will do fine." "Saving the smart kids," by John Cloud, Time, September 27, 2004 A Nation Deceived: How Schools Hold Back America's Brightest Students, by Nicholas Colangelo, Susan G. Assouline, Miraca U. M. Gross, The Connie Belin & Jacqueline N. Blank International Center for Gifted Education and Talent Development, College of Education, The University of Iowa, September 2004. *   *   * FROM THE U.S. FREEDOM FOUNDATION On the web at: http://www.freedomfoundation.us THE SUPERINTENDENCY: NEITHER INEVITABLE NOR NECESSARY by David W. Kirkpatrick, Senior Education Fellow  The scientific law that says a body in motion tends to stay in motion applies to human institutions as well, not least of all the public school system and, within that system, the office of school superintendents. The first superintendent was appointed in Buffalo, New York in 1837 and the office became common within 50 years. However, as late as 1928 there were 150,000 school districts in the nation, with an average of less than 200 students and ten teachers each. Large districts in major cities contributed to those averages which means most districts were extremely small. In such districts a superintendent not only knows all of the staff but students as well. The office often was, and is, largely a one-person operation. An example is a 250-pupil one-school rural district where the superintendent has an office in the school and is the principal as well. Today, 60% of the nation's 14,500 school districts still have less than 1500 students. The 800 districts with 10,000 or more students enroll slightly more than half of the nation's 48 million k-12 students. That such a variety of organizations should have the same superficially similar administrative structure was neither inevitable nor necessary, as is demonstrated by ample evidence. Within the public sphere, as has been noted before, New York City has more administrators than the entire nation of France, and New York State has more than all of the nations in western Europe combined. Yet we are the ones who pride ourselves on our organizational efficiency and know-how. In this country, as but one example of many, the New York City public school system, with 1,000,000 students, has a central office staff of 6,000. The Archdiocese of New York with 200,000 has about 35. If the Archdiocese were a public school system it would be among the largest in the nation, all of which have bureaucracies proportional to New York City's rather than the Archdiocese.  Yet there are other large parochial systems, such as Chicago and Philadelphia and they are similar to the Archdiocese. They may have a superintendent of schools but the systems are so decentralized that individual schools, or parishes, have considerable autonomy and thus don't need an unwieldy and expensive administrative superstructure. That public schools are topheavy is due to empire building and government regulations not educational necessity. Nor are the parochial schools the only representatives of educational efficiency. There are some 25,000 nonpublic schools in the nation, including the parochial ones, most of which are largely autonomous if not totally independent. They do very well without administrative complexity.  Then there are the charter schools which have emerged in the past dozen years. They continue to grow in number, there now being more than 3,000 with some 700,000 students. Most of them are not only independent but many were started by teachers. They started the very first one, Minnesota's St Paul Academy in 1992. Superintendents as rare as the proverbial hen's teeth; many charter schools have no principal. The U.S. Department of Education does an annual review of charter schools and in its 4th annual report it noted that new ones had an average enrollment of 137 students. As one teacher-founder of the St. Paul Academy has said, when the teachers there have a problem they sit around a table and solve it. Which is as it should be. The ultimate in decentralization is homeschooling whereby an estimated 1,500,000 or more youngsters are freed from a rigid structure entirely. They are educated at an estimated average cost of $800 per pupil per year with very positive results. In other professions -- such as medicine, dentistry, and law -- practitioners determine the nature of their practice. Only in education are administrators given more authority and money. That this may have much to do with public school problems is recognized by few, not least of all public school teachers. They complain of lack of autonomy and respect yet resist the necessary changes which require -- as with other professions -- establishing a system of mutual choice between those providing the service and those being served. David Kirkpatrick is a Bennington native and former public school teacher who served as an officer in the Pennsylvania NEA. *   *   * FROM THE TEACHER QUALITY BULLETIN September 17, 2004 On the web at: http://www.nctq.org/ DIVERGING PATHS ON THE ROAD TO EDUCATION: STEINER V. BUTIN Washington's education world packed the Progressive Policy Institute's conference room last week to witness this town's modern equivalent of gladiatorial combat. Renegade school of education professor David Steiner, who turned against his own last year in a blistering study of education schools' coursework, debated Gettysburg professor Dan Butin, the lone scholar who has been willing to challenge Steiner's findings in writing (though others have engaged in less scholarly stealth tactics). Given the attention Steiner has gotten, Butin was probably correct when he observed that the uproar over Steiner's study (essentially an analysis of what students were assigned to read in education courses at the country's top schools of ed) signified more than mere technical disagreements over Steiner's analysis, but a referendum on whether ed schools deserve to exist. In his review, Steiner did not tread lightly, claiming to have disclosed the depth to which ed schools impart a leftist leaning "edu-dogma," where discourse is dangerously limited, where there is a lack of important historical and contemporary perspectives, and where pedagogical approaches are championed for their ideology rather than their effectiveness. While Butin deserves great credit for his honesty and effort, his defense of the ed school mindset fell flat with a resounding thud. Let's acknowledge, though, that it's pretty hard for academics to defend such a lopsided approach to education, where students frequently read such gurus as John Dewey and Jonothan Kozol but are not once challenged by the Black-White Test Score Gap, Eric Hanushek, or E.D. Hirsch. Butin's only hope of success was to prove that the approach taken by ed schools isn't lopsided—but he clearly wasn't able to do so. Steiner leaped on Butin's own findings, pointing out that Butin's replication study provided more evidence of bias, most notably within Butin’s list of nearly 400 reading assignments collected from the 89 courses he reviewed. Butin, insisting his list of readings was irrelevant and still incomplete, preferred instead to focus on his critique of ed schools as relying too heavily on textbooks over primary sources. "Most of the time," Butin argued, "[students] get pre-digested, pre-selected, pre-thought ideas" found in textbooks. Shall we bemoan the shallowness of ed school training or decry the death of academic pursuit that it represents? A marked man himself for his crusade, Steiner senses doom. "The whole history of liberalism is at stake in this disagreement. Butin's position is that you can read only left-wing texts and achieve an informed, critical, deep analysis. This is an embracing of fundamentalism... It is the exposure to different points of view that is at the core of liberal thinking." Perhaps not fundamentalism, but certainly absolutism. Butin's repeated assertions that balance is advisable but not necessary in a discussion of educational theories and policies is disturbing, but at least it explains how his colleagues could consider themselves scholars while not just disparaging but blocking ideas that they do not share. "This whole notion of balance seems theoretically suspect," he argued, and later criticized Steiner for "confusing balance as the goal rather than the means" to an end. Butin agreed that "on some theoretical level" it is important to represent the views of others, but argued that making sure his students "understand or agree with Hirsch" is simply not the point of an education program. "My point is for them to figure out who they are as teachers, what their philosophy is." Butin lost the opportunity to make some legitimate headway by not posing an important rhetorical question. If the shoe were on the other foot, that is, if ed schools espoused a conservative view at the expense of all others, would Steiner and company be so indignant? Steiner might claim so -— he in fact may not be altogether comfortable with his anti-ed school bedfellows these days -— but there would be far too many who would have to admit that they would relish such a scenario. Boiled down to its essence, Butin puts forward a view of teacher education as alchemy. He describes a process that denies students access to ideas and theories that challenge present orthodoxy, and that never offers the chance to question, challenge and debate education theory, but that he nonetheless thinks turns them into teachers who can think critically and are able to change their minds on the basis of new evidence. A full tape of the debate moderated by education journalist Tom Toch can be heard at http://www.contentinstitute.org. You'll need a password to get into the site; for user type in "guest"; for password, type in "content". *   *   * 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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