________________________________________  THE VERMONT EDUCATION REPORT October 17, 2005 - Vol. 5, No. 40 ¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯  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... STATE BOARD TO DISCUSS EARLY ED RULES AGAIN At the State Board of Education meeting this week (Tuesday, October 18), the agenda will include a discussion of early education rules submitted by the Vermont Department of Education earlier this year and put on hold when public concern about expanding the public school system to include universal pre-K surfaced. Now, however, the legislature has turned on the money spigot for universal pre-K by including funding language in this year's budget bill, effectively endorsing local districts' use of ADM money for public pre-K. The rules under discussion this time contain some small but significant changes. For example, they now state that school districts "SHALL" (emphasis added) collaborate with existing providers before establishing new programs. This is different from weaker language at the legislative level and previously at the rule-making level that merely encouraged collaborating with existing providers. Nonetheless, there is still no mandate to let money follow the child to the qualified preschool of the parents' choosing. And the rules don't contain any direction to fund preschool only for children "in need" or "at risk." Both rich and poor alike will be able to access this free service. The State Board will also peruse a "Summary of Responses from the Field Regarding Early Childhood Education." This summary was put together by the VDOE after the SBOE suggested in September that "comments be solicited from a variety of persons in communities who are currently planning or implementing publicly funded early education services." Only seven people responded to the VDOE's invitation for comment, however, and all of them are involved in early education programs. Their comments, summarized by the VDOE for the SBOE, urged the state to consider "community needs assessments," to "minimize the proliferation of programs beyond the level of need," and more. Nowhere in the summary are any concerns about cost or why taxpayers should be asked to underwrite the free preschool for children whose parents can afford to pay for it on their own.  COLCHESTER TEACHERS ON STRIKE While the SBOE discusses publicly-funded pre-K, an interesting example of the dangers of putting one's education eggs in one public basket is taking place in Colchester. There, public school teachers continue to strike, leaving most of the district's children without schooling. The Burlington Free Press has printed a list of childcare providers in the area who could take in children as a result of the Colchester strike. The major reasons for striking, according to newspaper articles, are health insurance and pay. Teachers want an average pay increase of 4.9 to 5 percent in each of the next three years while the district is proposing a 3.25 pay increase for next year. Teachers also want the district to back off of a proposed addition of a deductible of between $1,000 and $3,000 in their health plans and also want to reduce the percentage they currently pay (20 percent) on their health insurance premiums.  SPEAKING OF TEACHER'S PAY If you missed the appearance of education researcher Jay Greene on the True North with Laurie Morrow radio show recently, you missed a lively, intelligent and informative discussion of education "myths." Greene has written a new book on this topic (see below for an article on the myths) and presents them in a compelling and research-based way that is hard to ignore. Hard to ignore, that is, if you're anyone except many Vermont legislators. Greene's summary of research on school choice, for example, is regularly ignored by choice opponents on the Senate and House Education Committees while they continue to lap up slipshod reports put together by their ideological pals, most notably Superintendent William Mathis. Greene's latest effort puts the kybosh on the myth of teacher salaries, something the Colchester taxpayers might want to weigh as they strive to settle the teachers' strike there. The teachers' unions are fond of putting out figures that show teachers are underpaid compared to other professions. In fact, the VT-NEA printed a list of starting salaries for various professions that showed teachers at the bottom of a list that included management trainees, salespersons, financial analysts and more. But Greene uses U.S. LABOR BUREAU statistics to show this is, to put it bluntly, untrue. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, Greene points out, the "average elementary-school teacher in 2002 made $30.75 per hour." That's more per hour than the average chemist, dentist or even a nuclear engineer. And it doesn't include the benefits packages. The reason the hourly salary is so high, of course, is because teachers only work nine months out of the year. But that shorter working year is also a benefit, one that allows teachers the opportunity to supplement their salary with other work or to simply use the time for an extended vacation. While many teachers might use it for professional development, this is no different than any other worker taking the time to engage in professional development and educational activities, often without the benefit of a three-month hiatus in which to schedule it.  WILL WESTFORD LOSE SCHOOL CHOICE? Westford is one of Vermont's "tuition towns" - towns that operate almost like voucher systems with parents able to choose from public or private schools in and out of state. Westford, Essex Junction and Essex Town, however, have been studying ways to join together into one district and this plan might put Westford's choices in jeopardy. According to one source, this could result in Westford losing its tuition town status. Students would only be allowed to choose from PUBLIC schools under the new collaborative plan, despite reassurances from a local school board member and state representative to the contrary. VER will continue to follow this story.  *   *   * FROM ELSEWHERE... The National Review FIVE MYTHS . . . CRYING OUT FOR DEBUNKING By Jay P. Greene & Marcus A. Winters, October 2005 Everyone knows that schools are horribly underfunded, that classes are too big, that teachers are paid too little. Everyone knows that we need to expand financial aid and affirmative action to get more minorities and more financially disadvantaged students into college. And everyone knows that accountability testing under No Child Left Behind encourages little more than teaching to the test. Unfortunately, much of what everyone thinks about education is nothing more than a myth. While these are all plausible stories - with bits of supporting evidence - they are simply not consistent with the facts. Before we can make real progress toward repairing America's schools we have to clear away these often-repeated, but unsupported, claims. The Money Myth. Most people who assert with conviction that schools are in desperate need of money have no idea how much schools actually receive. Average federal and state spending is almost $500 billion each year for public K-12 schools, or about $10,000 per pupil per year. To put that amount in perspective, it is more than the $430 billion we spent on national defense in 2004. And while we always hear about school budget cuts, per pupil spending - adjusted for inflation - has doubled over the last three decades. Doubling school spending, however, has not yielded a doubling in student achievement. In fact, student achievement has remained virtually unchanged. Math and reading test scores for 17-year-olds are the same today as they were during the Nixon administration, and science test scores have fallen, along with graduation rates. If schools only needed more money to improve, then we should have seen some benefits from this increased spending. Without stronger incentives for schools to use money more effectively, there is little reason to think that the next doubling of per pupil spending will produce anything different from the last doubling. The Class-Size Myth. Asking parents whether they would like smaller classes for their children is like asking whether they would like a personal cook. Everyone would say yes, and assume that "cook" was synonymous with "gourmet chef." But if we have to hire a cook for all parents, they're more likely to get the fry guy from the local burger joint - there just aren't enough gourmet chefs to go around. The same problem frustrates broad class-size-reduction mandates. Princeton economist Alan Krueger found that reducing class sizes in a small pilot program in Tennessee led to improved student achievement, but adoption of similar policies on a large scale has produced no benefits. When schools go on hiring binges to satisfy class-reduction mandates, they are forced to dip deep into the labor pool. Intuitively, one imagines that the reduction in teacher quality could offset the benefits of smaller classes. This is exactly what an evaluation by the Rand Corporation of California's statewide effort to reduce class sizes found: Students in smaller classes experienced learning gains that were no greater than those of students in larger classes. We have also tried class-size reduction on a national scale with no visible effect. (Much of the spending increases over the last several decades went to hiring more teachers.) The average student-to-teacher ratio dropped from 22.3 in 1970 to 16.1 in 2002, yet student achievement on the national level did not improve during this time. Not only has class-size reduction failed to produce improvements when attempted on a large scale, but reducing class size is a very expensive reform strategy. A one-third reduction in class size requires roughly a one-third increase in spending, because schools have to hire more teachers and build more classrooms. The Teacher-Pay Myth. If it is teacher quality, instead of class size, that really matters, should we not raise the meager salaries many teachers receive, to recruit better-qualified candidates? Like other education myths, this seemingly plausible argument does not stand up to close scrutiny. Teacher pay, computed on an hourly basis, is not all that meager. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the average elementary-school teacher in 2002 made $30.75 per hour. That is considerably more than other public servants, such as firefighters ($17.91) and police officers ($22.64). It is even more than highly skilled professionals, such as biologists ($28.07), mechanical engineers ($29.76), and chemists ($30.68), and just shy of computer scientists ($32.86), dentists ($35.51), and nuclear engineers ($36.16). Not only do teachers reap benefits like shorter days and longer vacations, but these hourly rates do not include health and retirement benefits, which tend to be higher for public employees than for those in the private sector. Admittedly, these rates do not count hours worked at home, but there is no reason to believe that teachers bring home significantly more work than do other professionals. This is especially true since most professionals can increase their income by doing more preparation at home, while teachers who take work home cannot expect to earn any more than teachers who never do: Teacher pay is based almost entirely on the number of years taught and the advanced degrees held, not on teachers' effectiveness. Until we connect salaries to performance, with meaningful merit-pay systems that identify and reward excellent teachers, raising teacher pay is unlikely to have any meaningful effect on teacher quality. The College-Access Myth. Suburban parents suffering from tuition sticker shock assume that if sending their own children to college is a financial struggle, then it must be impossible for low-income families. The relative absence of low-income and minority students in college only confirms the belief that big increases in financial aid and more aggressive affirmative action are needed to make college accessible to all. The evidence indicates that the primary barrier to college for low-income and minority students is academic, not financial. To even be considered for admission at virtually any four-year college, students need to have graduated from high school and completed a college-prep curriculum - usually one that consists of four years of English, three years of math, and two years each of natural science, social science, and a foreign language. In a Manhattan Institute study, we calculated the number of students who meet these formal qualifications and found that there is no untapped reservoir of academically prepared students whom colleges could enroll if only there were enough financial aid available. About 4 million students enter high school each year, and of those 4 million only about 2.8 million will graduate. Because it is possible to graduate without having taken the college-prep requirements, only about 1.3 million students meet the formal qualifications to apply to college. The number of students who start college each year is also about 1.3 million. So no matter how much colleges increase financial aid, and no matter how aggressive they are with affirmative-action policies, they cannot significantly increase the number of students going on to college. The situation is akin to a leaking pipe: No matter how wide one opens the spigot, until we fix the pipe itself - the K-12 public-school system - no more water will come out. The High-Stakes Myth. High-stakes testing, where schools are rewarded or sanctioned based on results, has become universal with passage of No Child Left Behind. Some critics have alleged that attaching stakes to testing forces teachers to teach to the test, and not worry about whether students are really learning. While it is plausible that schools might attempt to polish their numbers without really improving student proficiency, the evidence doesn't support this claim. In many places around the country, students take a low-stakes standardized test in addition to the high-stakes one required by NCLB. Since schools have no incentive to teach to a low-stakes test, or otherwise manipulate the results, we ought to see a divergence between the two tests if the critics are right. But when we compared high- and low-stakes test results in two states and seven school districts, we found that the tests produced very similar results. The consequences of high-stakes testing may indeed put pressure on schools to teach the skills required by the test, but the evidence suggests that it does not encourage any type of manipulation. There are certainly other examples, and they all point to the same question: Just why are myths so prevalent in education? Part of the problem is that we are very familiar with our schools. We spend years in them, send our children to them, and many of us work for them. We think these direct experiences give us all the evidence we need. Unfortunately, our direct experiences are necessarily limited and distorted by our own participation. Another part of the problem is that education policy necessarily evokes strong emotions because it involves children. We have difficulty assessing rationally the evidence on school spending or teacher pay because we do not want to appear stingy or unsupportive. But perhaps more important, education policy is dominated by organized interests, such as teachers' unions, school-board associations, and education bureaucracies. These organizations masquerade as advocates for the well-being of children when in fact they are no different from most interest groups: They will advance their agendas with evidence if they can and myths if they must. We need to stop accepting the myths these groups promote, even though they may seem plausible, may be consistent with our direct experiences, and may affirm our emotional commitment to children. Myths certainly help the adults in the relevant interest groups, but they do real harm to children by misdiagnosing our schools' real problems - and by steering us away from real solutions. Mr. Greene is head of the Department of Education Reform at the University of Arkansas and a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute. Mr. Winters is a senior research associate at the Manhattan Institute. They are the authors of the book "Education Myths".   *   *   * WHO COVERS EDUCATION IN VERMONT? We do! Consider a gift to Vermonters for Better Education, the publisher of the weekly Vermont Education Report, Vermont's ONLY continual source of education news. Send donations to: VBE, 170 Church Street, Rutland, Vermont 05701. VBE is a nonprofit organization and contributions are tax-deductible.   *   *   * 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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