________________________________________  THE VERMONT EDUCATION REPORT November 10, 2003 Vol. 3, No. 42 ¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯  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: LSternberg@aol.com NEWS & ANALYSIS... VT-NEA MOUNTS ATTACK ON WCAX-TV This week, WCAX-TV begins a series of reports on school safety. The first one aired Monday night with a brief story about how easy it is for strangers to enter many Vermont schools. Reporter Joan Ritchie used a hidden camera to show just how quickly and easily entrance to some schools was gained. No schools nor students were identified in the report. Yet, according to the report and information obtained by Vermont Education Report, WCAX-TV has been under fire already for airing a series that might be critical of Vermont public schools - - even before anyone has seen the rest of the series. VT-NEA President Angelo Dorta issued a statement condemning the reports. And, according to one source, school administrators around the state have been calling Ritchie condemning her series and demanding it not be aired. In fact, this source says the VT-NEA has issued a statement to all districts asking them to issue "No Trespass" orders to WCAX so that television reporters cannot enter school property. Ritchie has aired many positive reports on Vermont public schools in the past. She can be reached at Ritchie@wcax.com; Marselis Parsons, WCAX-TV anchor, can be reached at parsons@wcax.com.  The script for the news report is available on-line at: http://www.wcax.com and the associated news story is here: http://www.wcax.com/Global/story.asp?S=1519323&nav=4QcRJ2EH TEACHER LICENSE SUSPENSIONS, REVOCATIONS ON-LINE Information on Vermont teachers who've had their teaching licenses suspended or revoked is now available on-line at the Vermont Department of Education web site. To view this part of the site, go to: http://www.state.vt.us/educ/new/html/licensing/disciplinary.html COST CONTAINMENT STUDY COMMITTEE TO HOLD PUBLIC HEARING Have something to say about containing costs in Vermont's schools? The Legislative Education Cost Containment Study Committee would like to hear from you. On Thursday, November 20, this committee will hold a public hearing at the State House in Montpelier from 5 to 7 p.m. Act 68, the new education funding law, created the committee to investigate possible education cost containment and report to the Legislature in the following areas: 1. special education uniform standards and litigation reduction 2. review district size for economies of scale in administrative services 3. review teacher-student ratios and class size 4. coordinated staff/teacher recruitment, state-funded assistance with bargaining 5. review state and local mandates 6. joint purchasing of services and supplies 7. health insurance and workers' compensation 8. technology savings 9. improved facilities utilization, including program colocation 10. technical education: efficiencies and alternatives in funding 11. financial implication of interplay between special education, technical education, and local schools 12. alternatives to the inflation index  WE NEED YOUR HELP! Week after week, we print a plea for support in the Vermont Education Report, and we're grateful to those who respond to our call for donations. This week, we make a special plea - if every subscriber to the VER gave as little as $5, we'd have enough money to fund a modest, but effective, radio ad campaign explaining the benefits of school choice and other education reforms. Recently, we reported on a radio ad campaign being planned by the Vermont NEA. We'd like to be able to match their effort with messages of our own, messages that educate the public about the important issue of school choice. Won't you help us? Please send donations to: VBE, 170 Church Street, Rutland, VT 05701. Thanks!  WHO COVERS EDUCATION IN VERMONT?  WE DO! Maybe you noticed that this is the third "volume" of the Vermont Education Report. That means we're in our third year of covering education stories in the state that you WON'T FIND ELSEWHERE. Education is a complicated and important topic. In Vermont, it's a nearly one-billion-dollar industry. Yet scant notice is given to it in the major newspapers and broadcast media in the state. Only in the VER will you find regular coverage of education issues - stories on what the department of education is doing, what is happening in the education committees in the legislature, and how the state really compares nationwide, as well as tidbits from around the country. Help us keep going - send a contribution today to: VBE, 170 Church Street, Rutland, VT 05701.  *   *   * ELSEWHERE FROM THE PUBLIC EDUCATION NETWORK WEEKLY NEWSBLAST EXAMINING THE CALL FOR UNIVERSAL PREKINDERGARTEN Good preschools have much to offer, but should they be universal? Some research suggests otherwise. Children's Defense Fund estimates that state-sponsored pre-kindergarten programs currently serve some 750,000 kids. These programs carry an annual price tag of $1.7 billion.  Per-capita costs for universal preschool are likely to rise as programs improve in quality and as better trained and newly accredited teachers receive higher pay. The Committee for Economic Development (CED), a group of blue-chip stock corporations that supports "preschool for all," says $4,000 to $5,000 is "a rough starting point" for a child attending a part-day, part-year program. If all eligible children attended publicly funded pre-kindergarten, CED officials say, annual costs could run as high as $41.5 billion.  Some politicians and early childhood advocates might like to provide pre-kindergarten programs for all of the nation's 8.3 million 3- and 4-year-olds. But current budget deficits appear to be dampening state governors' and legislators' enthusiasm for universal preschool. According to Susan Black, considerable evidence shows that impoverished kids -- compared to those from middle- and upper-income families -- gain the most from preschool. Benefits for well-off children are questionable, however, and that raises an important question: Should universal pre-kindergartens be offered to all preschoolers regardless of their family's socioeconomic status? Or should it be provided only to the most needy children? An excellent article on this topic was published by the American School Board Journal, a publication of the National School Boards Association. It can be found at: http://www.asbj.com/current/research.html  FROM THE U.S. DEPARTMENT OF EDUCATION  IT'S NOT ABOUT THE MONEY  The following op-ed by U.S. Secretary of Education Rod Paige appeared in the Wall Street Journal: A new semantic game is being played out in the corridors of the Capitol -- one that has been echoed in media outlets across America thanks to a campaign by special interests and their allies in the Democratic Party. Typical of Washington's Beltwayspeak, a cry has gone up, saying that the No Child Left Behind education reform bill is "underfunded." Nothing could be further from the truth. President Bush has increased K-12 education spending by 40% since he took office. That's more in two years than it increased during the eight previous years under President Clinton. In raw terms, this president has increased education spending by $11 billion. As a nation, we now spend $470 billion dollars a year on K-12 education locally and federally-more than on national defense. What is "underfunded" about that? But in Washington, the land of meaningless jargon, the educational establishment in favor of the status quo says that the law is underfunded because it was appropriated at a level below what was "authorized." As someone who is not a creature of Washington politics, let me translate this into plain English: An authorization is usually a "limiting" number-the legal maximum level of funding. To use a highway metaphor, it is a guardrail that keeps wildly spending appropriators from driving the federal budget over the cliff. Only those reckless enough to grind against the guardrail would want to reach those levels. The appropriation is usually a number that is closer to the median of the road, the realistic figure needed to do the job. Appropriations are rarely anywhere close to authorization levels, and that is true across the entire federal government. For example, back in 1994 (the last time the Elementary and Secondary Education Act was up for renewal), the bill had a fiscal-year 1995 authorization level of $7.4 billion for Title I (for economically disadvantaged students). The Democrat-controlled Congress appropriated just under $6.7 billion. Where was the Greek chorus of "underfunders" back then? Education should not be a spending race. Clearly, just throwing money into the educational system -- the modus operandi for three decades -- has left us with a legacy of public school systems where some children get a great education while others, mostly from poor neighborhoods, are being left behind. A recent report from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development shows that the U.S. is one of the top spenders in the world in education, yet our 15-year-olds rate merely average versus their peers on tests of reading, math and science. If money spent were the main indicator of a good education, we would see areas with the highest per-pupil expenditures record the highest test scores. The Jersey City school district (which overspends the U.S. average by $5,000 and the New Jersey state average by $2,000) participated in a Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study benchmarking study recently that compared eighth-graders across the world in a number of subjects. Jersey City students' scores in science, for example, are close to the bottom -- comparable to students in Iran, Indonesia, Jordan, Turkey and Tunisia. Jersey City kids also have double the dropout rate compared to kids in the rest of New Jersey. Looking closer to home in terms of comparisons, the District of Columbia, which spends near the top on its K-12 students, has the dubious distinction of having the lowest scores in the nation -- including U.S. territories like Guam and Puerto Rico-in reading and math. Thus, if money were the answer to getting a solid education, most students in Jersey City and D.C. would all be admitted to Harvard or Stanford. Don't be duped; it's not that we don't spend enough. We spend enough for better results. We spend more than virtually all other nations, and still get poor results. So now, for the first time, the federal government is doing something that is standard operating procedure for most private businesses and even non-profit grant-making institutions: holding recipients (here, public schools) of money-taxpayer money-accountable for their results. In other words, the money is coming with strings attached. As well it should. The days of money for nothing in education are over. But this new accountability isn't meant to be punitive -- it's meant to improve the prospects of our children. For the first time in our history, thanks to No Child Left Behind, every state has an accountability plan that holds all schools and students to high standards. Schools and teachers now have detailed information about their students' achievement so that they can adapt their lessons and better serve all their students. Parents are also getting information about how well their school is performing and about their teacher's qualifications. And parents of students attending high-need schools will receive a letter telling them they have options if their child's school hasn't made sufficient progress over the last couple years. Armed with information and options, parents are forcing change in the schools, just as schools will be forced to change by law. But the defenders of the mediocre status quo -- who are using the funding argument like a wolf in sheep's clothing as a way to attack the law when what they really don't like is that there will be accountability in education -- continue to use the typical refrain from the left on spending and "underfunding." But no matter how much we spend, it will never be enough for them. This law is a tough law, but it's a good law and it will work. This is a time to join together, not play semantic games for political posturing. We should all work to solve the educational inequities in this country. Education should not fall prey to partisan bickering and diversionary gamesmanship. The future of our children and our nation is too important for division and sparring by policy makers. Thanks to the president and the Congress we have the right tools for the job. Now, let's replace vitriol with vision, and wisecracks with wisdom -- for the sake of the children.  FROM THE U.S. FREEDOM FOUNDATION http://www.freedomfoundation.us WHAT WILL IT TAKE... by David W. Kirkpatrick, Senior Education Fellow Perhaps no institution in the nation is as resistant to change as the public school system. And it is arguable that no other one has been as studied as frequently, in such depth, and been found so in need of change. More than thirty years ago Colin Greer, in a 1969 Saturday Review article, wrote, "In virtually every study undertaken since that of Chicago schools made in 1898, more children have failed in school than have succeeded, both in absolute and in relative numbers." A year later, in a multivolume effort by the National Educational Finance Project, among the reported findings was a startling one by Herbert J. Kiesling. Time after time, studies have found that, despite the claims to the contrary by the public school establishment and its defenders, there is no automatic and direct correlation between the amount of money being spent and the quality of the results. But Kiesling said his work indicated it is even worse than that. He found "that for low socioeconomic status children the relationship between school expenditures and achievement was negative ... This finding supports the possibility that spending money on those school resources that improve the performance of middle-class children may have a deleterious impact on the performance of lower-class students by undermining the cultural attributes of the latter." If true, this is disheartening to say the least. It will, of course, be denied by the defenders of the system. And, admittedly, it may be a faulty conclusion. But it is a fact that low socioeconomic children tended not to be successful in school then, that is still true today, more than 30 years and hundreds of billions of dollars later, and is consistent with Greer's comment that more children fail in conventional schools than succeed. Similar conclusions have been arrived at in the past thirty years. The most famous is still A Nation at Risk twenty years ago from which the best-known comment is probably the statement that if another nation did to us what we are educationally doing to ourselves we would consider it an act of war. A report from the Urban Policy Research Institute in 1992, also found that "After controlling for family income and welfare rates, spending on public education in Ohio is negatively correlated with student achievement." Yet the system rolls on virtually unchanged. In law, unlike education, court decisions are with rare exceptions accepted into practice very quickly. Medicine, with which educators want to be compared, adopts new drugs and even complex new procedures, such as heart transplants, in rather short order. In business, when Ray Kroc opened the first McDonald's he didn't stay with just that one in the face of overwhelming acceptance and success. Nor did Bill Gates confine his new software to just a few computers. The public schools not only continue to resist new approaches, such as charter schools and school choice, long after their value is demonstrated but, unlike Kroc and Gates, they even resist wider application of their own successes. When a school district opens a successful magnet or other alternative school, why is it necessary for parents to line up days in advance seeking to have their child accepted, or hope for the luck of the draw in a lottery. Why don't districts create more such schools? But, too often, they don't. Yet they complain when someone else attempts to open schools to meet an obvious demand, including when the alternative is created by another district, such as a charter school where attendance is not limited to students in the founding district. The ultimate absurdity in such resistance was reported a few years ago by former U.S. Secretary of Education William Bennett. He noted a fairly sizeable school district that opened enrollment at all of its public elementary schools to district parents. As it happened, the district had a successful "back to basics" school, one that emphasized reading, writing, arithmetic and geography. The result was that 85% of the parents applied to that one school. The obvious solution for the district, as Kroc or Gates would have known (or anyone with common sense) would have been to adopt such a successful and popular approach in as many of its elementary schools as necessary to meet the demand. Being public school board members and administrators, they did no such thing. Instead, they abolished the successful program, on the grounds that it was drawing people away from other schools and was too disruptive. To paraphrase a common expression, with friends like these public schools need no enemies. What will it take for the taxpaying and parent public to stop accepting such attitudes and such dismal results?  *   *   * 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.   Subscribe Here SubscribeRemove

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