________________________________________  THE VERMONT EDUCATION REPORT October 11, 2004 Vol. 4, No. 35 ¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯  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... NADEAU TAKES DEAL Wayne Nadeau, the Lamoille County teacher who was recently reinstated as a teacher after a controversy involving having sex in a classroom, has resigned. According to a Vermont Press Bureau story by John Zicconi, Nadeau accepted a deal from school officials. They will pay him the rest of his $50,340 salary for this school year and $47,000 in pension payments over five years.  ASSESSMENTS DUE NEXT WEEK The Vermont Department of Education is poised to release statewide school assessment data on Monday, October 18 at a 12:30 p.m. press conference in the Commissioner's Office. Data to be released will include results from the Developmental Reading Assessment, the SATs, the New Standards Reference Exams in Math and English Language Arts, and the Vermont Partnership for the Assessment of Standards-based Science assessment. These results will determine if there are any schools that will receive the Title I Schools Needing Improvement label under the No Child Left Behind Act.  VOTING RECORDS ON LINE Except for discussions of education funding, education has not been front and center in the campaigns across Vermont. However, for a look at how legislators voted on the issue of whether the full House would get to consider school choice, go to the Ethan Allen Institute's web site and look at the Voters Report Card (http://www.ethanallen.org)  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/ 1. TAPPING THE NEXT "GREATEST GENERATION" IN EDUCATION  by Marc Porter Magee Everyone "knows" that we have a looming crisis in education staffing, as millions of Baby Boomers retire from teaching and school leadership posts and too few qualified people step forward to replace them. And everyone has a "solution" to this looming crisis. Some on the left deem the problem enormous and seek its remedy (or prevention) in more generous pay scales, greater benefits, and plenty of professional development to attract an ample supply of new candidates. On the right, many (including Gadfly) argue that this looming staffing crisis is confined mostly to America's tougher schools--those serving needy youngsters in poor urban and rural communities--and ascribe it to economic disincentives stemming from traditional pay scales that reward teachers and principals not for success at raising student achievement or a willingness to work in challenging situations but for seniority and credentials. The real problem, however, may have less to do with salary structures than with the changing characteristics of the rising generation from whom tomorrow's school leaders will emerge. The values, professional desires, career aspirations, and cultural norms of this generation are radically at odds with longstanding notions about the education profession. These people are constitutionally disinclined to serve in a traditional public bureaucracy characterized by top-down decision-making, political maneuvering, and incremental change. This fact could mean not only that the looming public-school teacher shortage problem is even worse than we imagine, but that all the conventional antidotes may be misguided. The Millennials--the "echo boom" of Baby Boomer children, born between 1977 and 1994--are nearly as numerous as the Boomers and have even greater confidence in their ability to change the world. Yet, while Millennials have demonstrated keener interest than their parents in taking jobs that serve the public, they show less interest in working in traditional governmental bureaucracies. Instead, public-spirited Millennials are drawn towards smaller nonprofit ventures where they can see the positive impact of their work first-hand and have more to do with shaping that work. The Millennials' interest in entrepreneurial, nonprofit-sector solutions to public problems results in part from a collective judgment about the questionable effectiveness of traditional public agencies. For example, while a 2001 Panetta Institute survey found that 50 percent of Millennials say working for a nonprofit organization that assists the needy can bring about "a lot of change," only 20 percent say that about a career in the public sector itself. Similarly, while four-fifths of Millennials say a job that "will make a positive difference in people's lives" is very important to them (compared to just 55 percent who say they place similar importance on finding a well-paying job), twice as many say they are very interested in working at a nonprofit organization as in traditional government bureaucracies. Harvard's Joseph Nye and John Donahue sum up the situation this way: "To the extent that the work is highly bureaucratized, hostile to initiative, rule-bound, and rigged into rigid career ladders, it is less appealing to young people today…. It is not surprising that many public-spirited young Americans view the nonprofit sector more favorably as a setting for doing good. . . ." What institution does that description remind you of? Just as business-oriented Millennials flocked to Internet start-ups seeking to revolutionize the business world, public-spirited young people are increasingly turning away from government bureaucracies like school systems and toward civic start-ups to revolutionize the solution to social problems. As an upcoming PBS documentary suggests in its title, "The New Heroes," these risk-taking civic entrepreneurs are increasingly the people we look to for innovative solutions to pressing public problems. While young idealists of the 1960s looked to government ventures and policies to solve our education woes, today's Millennials are more apt to draw inspiration from such pioneering civic ventures as Wendy Kopp's Teach for America and Mike Feinberg and Dave Levin's KIPP schools. The examples and success of the "new heroes" have inspired a growing number of would-be civic entrepreneurs in America's high schools and universities. Observing this strong interest among public-spirited Millennials, graduate programs in public policy, government, and even business are adjusting their curricula to place greater emphasis on courses that examine civic entrepreneurship and nonprofit innovations. The changes at Harvard's Business School are characteristic of this trend, with the number of faculty teaching courses on civic enterprise having increased from 10 to 40 over the past decade and enrollment in these courses having risen from 70 to 361 students per year. Yet despite these clear trends toward civic entrepreneurship among the generation that might have been expected to staff them, traditional public school bureaucracies remain resistant to any change that threatens the status quo--as we've seen, for example, with their staunch opposition to charter schools and programs that would relax certification barriers to bring highly qualified, civic-minded young leaders into classrooms and principals' offices. As the Boomers begin to retire en masse, this resistance will either exacerbate today's personnel shortages in hard-to-staff schools or will cause further deterioration in the quality of school leadership as less-talented people fill the gaps. To attract the high quality leaders that our schools will need to succeed in the coming decades, the traditional education bureaucracy will need to adapt to the attitudes and aspirations of the rising Millennial generation. With both voters and education reformers ever more supportive of entrepreneurial approaches to public education such as charter schools and with mounting evidence that such approaches can yield pupil achievement, cost savings, and greater citizen involvement, the zeal of public-spirited Millennials to tackle innovative solutions to education problems offers a tremendous opportunity to bring such new strategies to scale. For that to happen, however, policy makers will need to overcome the traditional focus on adult prerogatives and ingrained bureaucratic practices and instead push to bring the best and brightest of this rising generation into education by giving rein to their innovative and entrepreneurial spirit. Marc Porter Magee is director of the Progressive Policy Institute's Center for Civic Enterprise and author of a forthcoming PPI policy report on the Millennial generation and public service. *  *  * 2. CALLING A SPADE, A SPADE Hurrah for England's chief inspector of schools, David Bell, and his plain-spoken criticism of goofball progressivism in education. In a recent lecture at the Hermitage School in England, Bell argued that students need the return to a well-rounded curriculum that includes a focus on basic skills. "I saw too many incoherent or non-existent curriculums," Bell lamented, "too many eccentric and unevaluated teaching methods, and too much of the totally soft centered belief that children would learn if you left them to it. In particular, the notion that children learn to read by osmosis--and I suppose I exaggerate to make the point--was plain crackers." Would that America had more educators and public officials who lay the truth out so plainly. "Trendy teaching was 'crackers,'" BBC News, October 5, 2004 *  *  * 3. GRADUATION RATES FOR CHOICE AND PUBLIC HIGH SCHOOL STUDENTS IN MILWAUKEE by Jay P. Greene, School Choice Wisconsin September 28, 2004 -- In this brief report, the prolific Jay Greene comes to a remarkable conclusion: Students in Milwaukee's voucher program graduate at nearly double the rate of Milwaukee's regular public school students. Sixty-four percent of voucher students in the freshman class of 2000 ended up graduating in 2003 but just 36 percent of Milwaukee's regular public schoolers made it. To reduce the possibility of "selection bias," Greene also compares these voucher students to those at selective public schools. The result: voucher students still win, hands down. The graduation rate at Milwaukee's selective public schools is only 41 percent. The performance of voucher students is probably not due to background factors, then, or extra motivation, as students at selective public schools are likely to be "at least as advantaged as the students in the choice program." Greene doesn't speculate much as to what's going on, but he proves beyond dispute that youngsters taking part in America's largest voucher program are more apt to complete high school on time than the age mates who remain in district-run schools. You can find this report at: http://www.schoolchoiceinfo.org/data/research/grad_rate.pdf.  *   *   * FROM THE U.S. FREEDOM FOUNDATION On the web at: http://www.freedomfoundation.us/ SCHOOL FUNDING AS AN EXCUSE  by David W. Kirkpatrick, Senior Education Fellow On September 22 a coalition including the National Education Association (NEA) sponsored an estimated 3,800 "house parties" across the nation. Lightly attended, the intention was to promote support of the public school system but at least one meeting in Pennsylvania reportedly concluded that teacher unions are the major obstacle to improving the public schools. This is not what the NEA was looking for nor what it will promote. While there is no summary of all the meetings, news reports stressed such points as objecting to the No Child Left Behind Act and supporting smaller class sizes. But whatever the suggestions, the tendency was to call for Congress to provide more money. This presents problems. For one, the federal government only supplies a few percent of the funds for public schools. Most come from the state and local level. Thus, in the unlikely event that Congress should increase federal appropriations for public schools by 25 percent, that would raise total funding less than 3 percent. More importantly, demands for more money for public schools provide rhetoric rather than a rationale. And it is the rhetoric that is questioned here, not whether more money is needed. More commonly advocates demonstrate a numbing lack of knowledge on the subject. They do not mention, perhaps because they don't know, how much is being spent currently, whether nationally, in their state or in their district. Nor do they state how much is needed. It's always "more." In one debate a union president was asked how much money was needed. He didn't know. Then asked how he knew more was needed, he couldn't answer that either. The constant demand for more funds is usually accompanied by the assurance that such money will solve many or most problems. But the nation currently spends more money on the schools than ever before in history, both in total current dollars, and in dollars per pupil adjusted for inflation. Where are the gains compared to decades or even generations ago. There are more than 14,000 school districts. Where are those who say they have enough money? The highest spending district, in New York State, currently budgets more than $45,000 per pupil annually. It has one teacher for every 3.7 students. The smallest class has 5 students; the largest, 12. Yet its students score below average on some state tests. If money and small classes are the key, why isn't this district proof of it? And New York State has a number of other district spending in excess of $30,000 per pupil per year without magical results. Defenders of the status quo not only don't know this, they won't believe it. Similarly, advocates of the wonders of smaller classes not only ignore the majority of research on the subject, but the historic fact is that average class size is smaller today than ever before. In the mid-1800s, the New York City school superintendent recognized that his teachers, often young women with minimum education levels themselves, had classes that were too large. He gave as his opinion that no teacher should have more than 100 students in a class. He won. Today, no teacher has more than 100 students per class. The No Child Left Behind Act is the latest version of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act enacted in 1965. Federal funding for the multi-programs therein has increased more than during any presidency of the past 40 years, including the eight years Bill Clinton had that post. As for "underfunding," it is common practice for Congress to pass two proposals regarding funding any program -- an authorization and an actual appropriation. The latter is invariably less than the former. Furthermore, the proposed funding level for NCLB by Congressional Democrats, who charge the Bush administration with "underfunding" NCLB ignore the increases of the past four years and the fact that their own proposal for NCLB also calls for less than authorized. The calls for money, however, provide a convenient two-part excuse. First, it permits the argument that schools would be better if more money were available. Second, no matter how much is provided, it isn't enough. Failure is never the responsibility of the education establishment. It's because of the taxpayers. David Kirkpatrick is a Bennington native, former public school teacher, and former officer of the Pennsylvania NEA. He lives in Pennsylvania. *   *   * 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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