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________________________________________ THE VERMONT EDUCATION REPORT
November 14, 2005 - Vol. 5, No. 44
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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 HEAR ABOUT WESTFORD
On the agenda at Tuesday's State Board of Education meeting this week will be an update on the "Essex Town Unification Study." This study committee is examining the possibility of joining Essex Junction, Essex Town and Westford into a unified union governance structure.
As reported in previous issues of the VER, the tuition town of Westford has been advised that it would lose its school choice program under a unification plan with the non-tuition towns of Essex Junction and Essex Town. The latter two towns have public schools and therefore don't tuition students to other public or private schools.
The study committee was advised by Vermont Department of Education Legal Counsel William Reedy that Westford would have to give up its choice in the name of equality -- "common benefits" enjoyed by one group in one town but not by others in other towns raise constitutional and legal questions.
Why didn't Reedy advise the study committee to look into expanding choices in Essex Junction and Essex Town, however?
Reedy says that question never really came up. In a phone interview this Monday, he said that "we didn't go into this saying we wanted to restrict choice in Westford," but "there are certain legal and constitutional questions raised" when Westford retains choices that Essex Junction and Essex Town do not have.
Vermont statute, however, allows towns to tuition students even if the town has a public school. Reedy says this law would permit Essex Junction and Essex Town to tuition students "within limits."
"If they can find a way to do it," he said, "it would certainly alleviate those concerns (about equal disbursement of common benefits)."
The statute in question says that school boards "may both maintain a high school and furnish high school education by paying tuition to a public school as in the judgment of the board may best serve the interests of the pupils, or to an approved independent school if the board judges that a pupil has unique educational needs that cannot be served within the district or at a nearby public school."
The phrase "unique educational needs," could, of course, describe virtually all students. When this was pointed out to Reedy, he was quick to respond, "or none."
THE ELEPHANT IN THE ROOM: DRAMATICALLY DECLINING ENROLLMENTS
Last week, WCAX TV aired a segment on Vermont's "dwindling" younger population and what this will mean for the state's schools. It's an appropriate topic to be considering, yet one that's receiving scant attention from education leaders in the state.
In October, economist Art Woolf prepared a presentation for the Vermont Independent Schools Association that addressed this very subject. The numbers are dramatic.
Vermont's population is getting older and is growing much more slowly than in the past. Low birthrates, low net immigration and few international immigrants all add up to dramatic declines in population growth.
In fact, Vermont's birthrate is the lowest among all 50 states. While the US average is around 2.0, Vermont's birthrate is on the underside of 1.7. This combined with few international immigrations and small numbers of people moving into Vermont versus moving out means ever-decreasing numbers of school age children.
In fact, according to US Census bureau figures and projections, Vermont's shrinking student population looks something like this:
YEAR - SCHOOL-AGE POPULATIONThese numbers represent a 15 percent decline in school-age population in the next decade, and a nearly two-decade wait until numbers climb to what they are now.2000 - 115,000
2005 - 111,000
2010 - 101,000
2015 - 96,000
2020 - 99,000
2025 - 104,000
2030 - 106,000How will these precipitous declines affect schools? As the population ages and fewer and fewer people have children in school, it could mean less support for ever-expanding school budgets as well as school closures. Already, several small schools are shutting their doors, according to the WCAX story.
But the Vermont Department of Education doesn't appear concerned. In fact, Commissioner of Education Richard Cate was quoted on the WCAX program as saying "we don't know if we're really sure ...exactly where we're heading."
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FROM ELSEWHERE...The Fordham Foundation
On the web at: http://www.edexcellence.netSIMILAR STUDENTS, DIFFERENT RESULTS: WHY DO SOME SCHOOLS DO BETTER?
by Martin A. Davis, Jr.(EdSource, October 2005)
Old News: The higher the percentage of low-income students a school serves, the lower the school's overall achievement scores. New News: Schools with high numbers of low-income students aren't all the same. Of course, new news is old news to those who've watched over the years as high-poverty, high-performance schools such as the KIPP Academies outscore by wide margins schools with similar demographics. For those who haven't watched, you might want to have a glance at EdSource's new study.
EdSource, a California-based education policy group, noticed that among high-poverty schools in California, academic achievement was far from consistent. The top-performing schools in this demographic outscored the bottom schools by some 250 points (on a 200-1000 point scale) on the state's academic performance index (API). To find out why, EdSource polled principals and teachers at 257 state elementary schools serving similar populations of high-poverty children to try to determine what most affected student achievement.
The results show schools that 1) prioritized student achievement, 2) implemented a coherent, standards-based curriculum, 3) used assessment data to improve both student achievement and teacher instruction, and 4) ensured teachers and students have the requisite resources (books, supplemental material, etc.) greatly outperformed those schools that did not. What had less effect on student achievement? Involving parents in schools, teacher collaboration, and professional development. What's old is new, and what's new, is old.
Read the report here: http://www.edsource.org/pub_abs_simstu05.cfm
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PARENT AND STUDENT VOICES ON THE FIRST YEAR OF THE DC OPPORTUNITY SCHOLARSHIP PROGRAM
by Michael J. Petrilli
School Choice Demonstration Project, Georgetown University(Thomas Stewart, Ph.D., Patrick J. Wolf, Ph.D., and Stephen Q. Cornman, Esq., October 2005)
While choice opponents sometimes argue cynically that poor parents cannot be trusted to make good decisions for their children, these Georgetown researchers (and their funders at the Annie E. Casey Foundation) respected parents enough to ask them (in a series of focus groups) about their experiences in Washington, D.C.'s new, federally funded voucher program.
Their answers are illuminating. Most families' and students' experiences with the program were overwhelmingly positive, and many parents reported that, after receiving an Opportunity Scholarship their children were more confident, performed better academically, and demonstrated increased enthusiasm for school. Says one elementary school parent: "This is what I tell my kids. I tell them that this is an opportunity for you to strive, do your best, take advantage of it, that's what I tell my children."
Parents were especially enthusiastic about the rigorous standards of their children's new schools and the opportunity to get involved, though both presented challenges. Says one Hispanic parent, "For us there was a significant change more than anything because we were forced to go to English school to learn English ... when I realized all the homework was in English, so I had to stay awake all night with a translator and a dictionary."
There have been bumps, such as the incident in which a teacher told a scholarship student (whose involvement in the program was supposed to be confidential): "If you don't stop acting like this, remember, you are here on a scholarship and we could put you out." The principal quickly handled that situation (one of the few examples of ostracism that researchers could find) to the parent's satisfaction.
On the whole, participating private schools, including some of the nation's ritziest, are making the scholarship families feel like they belong. A middle school parent explains: "It's like the people there treat me like I'm a part of their family. The school is just so family-oriented. I mean I am so happy."
If Jonathan Kozol wants to see people of different races and classes coming together to educate their children together, he could do worse than to visit some of the schools participating in the D.C. voucher program. See it for yourself here: http://www.georgetown.edu/research/scdp/PSV-FirstYear.html.
The U.S. Freedom Foundation
On the web at: http://www.freedomfoundation.usSCHOOL SIZE - PAYING THE PRICE FOR IGNORING THE EVIDENCE
by David W. Kirkpatrick, senior education fellow
The issue of class size gets much more attention than that of school size yet few aspects of education have been more thoroughly researched than the latter. This deserves renewed emphasis since few findings have been more consistent; and few have been more consistently ignored. Some large schools, especially in major cities, were built many years ago, But the trend to grandiose schools grew rapidly beginning in the 1960s following the publication of James B. Conant's study of American high schools. His conclusion that many schools were too small was seized upon while his more explicit conclusion that the best schools that he saw had graduating classes of about 100 was ignored. In the grade 9-12 high schools of that day he was advocating optimum enrollments of about 400.
Roger Barker and Paul Gump, in their 1964 study, Big School, Small School, summarized hundreds of studies that concluded small schools are better, with the optimum size being about 400 to 500 students, a finding almost identical with Conant's more subjective conclusion. Norway, in 1978, passed a law establishing the maximum size of its high schools at 450 students.
Douglas Heath said an enrollment of 400 to 500 students is almost too large. Neil Postman and Charles Weingartner suggested 250 students. In 1992, Ted Sizer said no school -- elementary, middle, or secondary -- should have more than 200 students. The percentage of student participation has been shown to peak in high schools with 61 to 150 students.
A survey of 12,708 elementary teachers in Chicago found they believe there is more progress in small schools than in large ones. But, of course, no one listens to teachers.
Herbert J. Kiesling studied high schools enrolling from 100 to 4,000 students and found a direct but negative relationship between school size and student achievement. That is, as the schools got bigger, student achievement declined. Larger schools have higher rates of absenteeism, dropouts, discipline problems, disorder and violence. High schools with 2,000 students have an average dropout rate twice as high as those with 600. Most seriously, the highly publicized instances of killings in public schools in recent have mostly occurred in large centralized schools.
The nation's 25,000 nonpublic schools have an average enrollment of about 200. That of new charter schools is even fewer with some having less than 100. Yet both groups do at least as well academically, and better in other ways, such as dropout rates, as the larger public schools. The National Association of Secondary School Principals (NASSP) has adopted a position that no high school should have more than 600 students.
Since the mid 1970s the East Harlem District 4, the poorest of New York City's 32 K-8 subdistricts, and one of the poorest in the nation, has moved from last to about 15th by creating minischools, most with 200 to 300 pupils, and permitting students to choose which of the schools they will attend.
Many reasons have been given for the growing public school problems in recent decades, such as the growth of teacher unions. Perhaps such factors do play a role. But so, too, may be the building of larger schools.
Since the mid-1980s, the Kansas City School District and the state of Missouri, under the orders of a federal district court judge, spent more than $1.5 billion extra dollars to build magnificent new schools, among other measures recommended by educational experts. Yet dropout rates and other problems remained high and achievement rates low. Or visit Philadelphia's Edison High, built some years ago at a cost of $30 million. An article in The Philadelphia Inquirer found high absenteeism and dropout rates persisted and quoted a student who said she hated the school.
The usual questions that arise when a new large school is proposed, such as location, architectural style, and the like, are secondary. The basic question is whether to build a "Taj Mahal" at all.
The overwhelming evidence says no.
David Kirkpatrick is a Bennington native who now lives in Pennsylvania. A former public school teacher, he was also an officer in the Pennsylvania-NEA.
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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.
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