Legislation and Guidance
News
- Presidential Candidates Begin to Lay Out Education Platforms
- House Panel Looks at Local Education Reform Efforts
- High-Stakes Testing Shows Improvement in Low-Stakes Subjects
Reports
Legislation and Guidance
Republican Appropriators Willing to Break Logjam
Last month, the House Appropriations Committee came to a grinding halt when Republicans repeatedly tried to replace unrelated bills with legislative language aimed at addressing the rising cost of gasoline. When Congressman Jerry Lewis (R-CA), ranking Republican on the House Appropriations Committee, tried to do the same to the Labor-HHS-Education appropriations bill, Committee Chairman David Obey (D-WI) decided to shut the whole process down. With just two weeks left before the month-long August recess, Republicans now seem willing to meet the Chairman halfway.
With the November elections just around the corner, many lawmakers are focused on doing what will earn them the most points with their constituency. With recent polls showing that rising gas prices are the top priority for a majority of voters this year, Republicans and Democrats alike are looking into ways to address this problem. Republicans believe that specific energy policies are Congress’ only opportunity to remedy the issue and are doing everything they can to move forward with their proposals. While Senate Republicans are refusing to debate anything on the floor besides their energy proposals, House Republicans are focusing their efforts inside the Appropriations Committee.
On Thursday, June 26, the full House Appropriations Committee met to debate the Labor-HHS-Education bill. After Chairman Obey was unable to dissuade Republicans from trying to attach energy policies to the bill, he shut down the entire meeting. Chairman Obey chided his Republican counterparts, letting them know that he would not bring another bill to the full committee for a vote until they agreed not to bog down the process. With precious time slipping by, Republicans are now willing to abide by the Chairman’s wishes.
In a letter dated Tuesday, July 15, Congressman Lewis implored Chairman Obey, to move forward with the remaining appropriations bills before the August recess. Lewis promised to do whatever he could to help the process move along, including refraining from attempts to attach energy policies to unrelated spending bills. Chairman Obey has yet to give a public response, likely as a sign of his displeasure with the Republicans tactics over the last few weeks.
Even if Chairman Obey decides to move forward with the remaining bills before August, the long-term picture will not change significantly. Both Obey and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) have expressed their belief that this year’s appropriations process is going to take longer than usual. Aside from the usual delays associated with the abbreviated legislative schedules common in an election year, Democrats are looking to avoid the same losing battle they fought last year, when appropriators were forced to give in to the President’s spending requests. This time around, since a new Administration will take over in January, Congress can wait President Bush out. However, if Congress can at least get the individual bills through the committee process, the education community will have a better picture of what they have coming, when the final bill is passed.
Resources
Vicki Needham, “Top GOP Appropriator Makes Offer to Break Impasse Over Spending Bills,” Congress Now, July 15, 2008.
News
Presidential Candidates Begin to Lay Out Education Platforms
Senators John McCain (R-AZ) and Barack Obama (D-IL) will make many campaign promises from now until November. They are developing their positions on education and they have spoken, albeit vaguely, about what they would do with the reauthorization of No Child Left Behind (NCLB). While election promises are notoriously shifty, they are also valuable political fodder in negotiations with the next administration of the U.S. Department of Education. So, with the noble objective of building that arsenal, the Update will begin to track Obama’s and McCain’s positions on education as we seek to work closely with those we believe will be a part of the next administration.
This week, both McCain and Obama addressed the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and spoke about their education platforms. McCain’s main emphasis was on his support for school choice, a position that his campaign believes appeals to conservatives and urban parents alike because conservatives desire more market incentives in public education and urban school parents want immediate relief from dangerous and poor performing schools. McCain’s school choice agenda includes “opportunity scholarships” (or vouchers for public and private schools), charter schools, and the development of virtual schools options.
The choice theme carried over to teacher certification, where McCain stated his support for more alternative teacher certification programs. McCain said that teachers should have choices for getting into the profession and they should have more compensation options. Principals, argued McCain, should have more control over their schools and should be allowed to implement merit pay programs. Interestingly, McCain’s speech did not mention NCLB (which Representative George Miller has famously called the “most negative brand in America”) and it was not until the question and answer session that the law came up. In his reply to an NCLB funding question, McCain stated that his administration would “fully fund” programs under NCLB while revising NCLB by reducing the “needless restrictions” and increasing access to choice and supplemental educational services under the law. McCain’s response to the NCLB question is a bit unclear, but it certainly is consistent with his school choice mantra.
Senator Obama’s speech covered education but focused mostly on the role that parents must perform in their child’s education. In an effort to contrast himself from McCain’s focus on school choice, Obama stated that “we need to fix and improve our public schools, not throw our hands up and walk away from them. We need to uphold the ideal of public education, but we also need reform.” Focusing on teacher quality and pay will be a central part of that reform. Obama noted that the federal government could help states and districts recruit quality teachers and use the federal role to help pay teachers more and give them better support. But students need to be better prepared as well, so Obama stated that his administration would invest in early childhood programs and, on the back end, provide tax credits to make college more affordable. He stated that he would also increase funding for NCLB, but he did not go into any details.
Obama’s speech was more about the role of parents in their children’s schooling. “I know that nine little children did not walk through a schoolhouse door in Little Rock so that we could stand by and let our children drop out of school and turn to gangs for the support they are not getting elsewhere,” said Obama. Overall, Obama stated that parents must take responsibility for their children’s education.
The NAACP audience embraced Obama’s positions and applauded his focus on education reform, but what that means for NCLB remains unclear. Alyson Klein, who covers the campaign for Education Week, observed that the perception of change may be out of synch with Obama’s actual education platform. “Having parsed most of what he's said on the campaign trail, I'm still not sure if his prescriptions for changing [NCLB] would go as far as many voters I've talked to seem to think, especially since he's made it clear that he supports the idea of federal accountability.” This disjunction will be an important matter to monitor throughout the campaign.
Resources
John McCain's Plan for Strengthening America's Schools, JohnMcCain.com, Press Release, July 16, 2008.
Alyson Klein, “to NAACP, Obama Stresses Parental Theme,” Education Week, July 15, 2008.
House Panel Looks at Local Education Reform Efforts
On Thursday, the House Committee on Education and Labor held a hearing entitled “Mayor and Superintendent Partnerships in Education: Closing the Achievement Gap.” Witnesses included Mayor Michael Bloomberg of New York City, Mayor Adrian Fenty of Washington, D.C., and Arne Duncan, CEO of Chicago Public Schools. The Hearing focused on the progress that large cities such as New York, Washington, D.C., Atlanta, and Chicago have made in closing the achievement gap, and how the Federal government can further support such progress. Witnesses also discussed their experience with mayoral governance over the education system, a program that seems to work well for New York and Washington, while Beverly Hill, Superintendent of Atlanta Public Schools, expressed that the support and cooperation received from the school board are partially responsible for the city’s vast improvements in education. Committee Chairman George Miller (D-CA) commenced the hearing by stating that the typically honored time restrictions on witness testimony would be flexible, as committee members were extremely interested in the knowledge that the witnesses had to offer.
Witnesses shared statistics with committee members that clearly illustrated what improvements have been made in spite of the challenges that face many public school systems across the nation. Specifically, witnesses challenged the argument that significant strides in education cannot be made until the nation has championed poverty, an issue that unequivocally affects student learning. Though many believe that issues of poverty must be dealt with before education reform can be effective, witnesses testified that it must work in the reverse direction, with effective education being the solution to high rates of poverty and crime. Joel Klein, Chancellor of Education in New York City, stated, “We will never fix poverty if we don’t fix education,” and cited New York Charter Schools’ success as an example of the possibilities. The charter schools in the area serve a student population that is 90 percent Black and Hispanic, with over 80 percent of these students coming from disadvantaged homes. Although these children face challenges of poverty, they have managed to outperform the entire student population of the state of New York, a population made up of less minority students and with a broader range of socioeconomic backgrounds. It is clear from this example that poverty-stricken students can perform at very successful levels.
Chicago Public Schools’ CEO Arne Duncan works with a very similar student population, with 85 percent of students living below the poverty line, and 90 percent of students coming from a minority background. However, the district has seen the number of students meeting state standards rise from less than 40 percent in 2001 to over 66 percent in 2008. Mr. Duncan cited the various intervention services the district provides as a reason for such improvement. Students are now required to read two hours a day across all grade levels, and the district has implemented many extended day programs as well as mandatory summer school. Witnesses provided countless examples of successful programs, and provided the committee with various suggestions for improved federal support for education. Among these suggestions was a national standardized test; many witnesses expressed a great concern for the idea of fifty different sets of standards that are not transferable from state to state, and do not always carry the same weight. This concern stemmed from the fact that U.S. students are competing in an international job market against students from nations with very rigorous and strict national standards and guidelines.
Teacher performance-based pay was another common suggestion, and agreed upon by nearly all witnesses as a successful solution to a very serious problem regarding teacher quality. The need for human capital investment and the very serious strides that highly qualified teachers can help students make was brought up time and again. Mayor Bloomberg cited the 43 percent pay raise that teachers in New York received, but also noted the increased level of responsibility that those teachers will be expected to assume. He stated that districts must “treat teachers as the professionals they are.” For Bloomberg, that means increased salaries and the recently implemented performance pay system implemented in his school system, but also direct and serious consequences for teacher failure. He noted that the move to the performance pay system was embraced by the teacher’s union, as bonus decisions are placed in the hands of the schools and principals who witness teacher effectiveness first-hand.
Bloomberg believes that performance pay allows the district to retain the successful teachers that can close the achievement gap, and noted results of a recent study that showed if the best teachers taught the lowest achieving U.S. students, the achievement gap would be fully eradicated in five years. Chancellor Klein asked the committee not to “diffuse federal funding,” stating that the best support the federal government can provide to education systems is to “invest in high quality teachers.” The mayor also noted that teacher tenure must be seriously examined, and only sustained successful teacher performance must be rewarded with tenure. He noted that the nation should “want tenure to be a meaningful decision rather than a foregone conclusion.” While many believe Bloomberg’s views and the recent changes in New York Public Schools to be too radical, the district has made undeniable progress; a fact that was supported when the district won the Broad Prize for Urban Education in 2007.
In light of the discussion of human capital and quality teachers, Superintendent Hall, of Atlanta Public Schools, noted that in a survey, 90 percent of teachers who had left her district cited lack of preparation in college as their primary reason for leaving. Atlanta has also replaced 89 percent of the district principals since 1999. Similarly, Chicago has looked to help new teachers in their time of transition by implementing the Chicago New Teacher’s Program, and are looking to provide all new teachers with a mentor. With the need for quality professionals at all levels of the education system, these districts are also looking to professional development and support to make further strides and progress.
Witnesses agreed on the fact that No Child Left Behind initiated a great deal of improvement and progress in education through accountability systems, although many disagree with the manner in which the law is implemented. Mr. Duncan stated that while accountability is highly necessary, the law should be more strict in terms of goals that must be met by schools and less strict on how schools reach those goals. This would allow a review of best practices, more educational innovation, and more room for implementation of plans and programs individualized to the needs of a specific area while still meeting standards. While much progress is still needed, especially in large urban districts throughout the nation, witness testimony shows that education can succeed in light of the various challenges that school systems face today.
High-Stakes Testing Shows Improvement in Low-Stakes Subjects
On July 10, the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) hosted a conference based on a recent study released by the Manhattan Institute. The report, written by Marcus A. Winters, Ph.D., Jay P. Greene, Ph.D., and Julie R. Trivitt, Ph.D., discusses the implications that accountability assessments applied in specific subjects have on other subjects that are not monitored. While many people are concerned that accountability in some subjects will inevitably lead to the neglect of other subjects, the study found that this was not, in fact, the case.
The group used Florida’s A+ program as its central focus. Through the A+ program, Florida schools are assigned a grade from A to F based on student performance on standardized tests in reading and math, and while students are also tested in science, the reading and math performance results are what hold serious consequences for the school. Contrary to predictions in the educational community, it was found that the light accountability systems shine on schools is not limited to the tested subjects. Rather, the entire educational curriculum and student performance improved across the board.
While the panel of presenters concluded that it is difficult to attribute such improvements to specific causes, all agreed that such improvements are a success. The debate continues over whether accountability incentives and the behavioral responses are generally positive or detrimental, and it is most likely the case that such responses are a mixture of both. However, all agreed that the improvements seen through this study are to be applauded, especially in light of the negative predictions that many had for student performance in unmonitored subjects.
Resources
Marcus A. Winters, Ph.D., Jay P. Green, Ph.D., and Julie R. Trivitt, Ph.D., “Building On the Basics: The Impact of High-Stakes Testing on Student Proficiency in Low-Stakes Subjects,” Center for Civic Innovation at The Manhattan Institute, July 10th, 2008.
Reports
Business Leaders Report on Need for STEM Education Advancements
On Tuesday, Tapping American’s Potential (TAP), an association of U.S. business leaders, released a report entitled, “Gaining Momentum, Losing Ground.” The report assesses three years worth of progress in working towards doubling the number of students earning bachelor’s degrees in science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) by 2015. While the report seems to praise Congressional efforts to improve STEM education, it also points out that there is still much to do.
TAP is a coalition of 16 prominent business organizations that represent the largest and most innovative companies in America. In 2005, they set the goal of doubling the number of U.S. STEM graduates with bachelor’s degrees by 2015. The report indicates that despite growing support for the TAP agenda in recent years, little real progress has been made. The number of STEM degrees awarded to undergraduate students is 225,000, an increase of 24,000 since 2005. This is not on track to meet the TAP goal of reaching 400,000 by 2015.
The report praises Congress for passing the American COMPETES Act last year, which authorizes new federal investments in math and science education, teacher recruitment and training, and science and engineering research. TAP points out that Congress has failed to fully fund the new programs that have the potential to greatly expand the number of American students pursuing degrees in technical fields. TAP is actively lobbying Congress to fully fund the America COMPETES Act, helping to make sure the United States remains competitive in the global market. View the full report (Outside Source).
Resources
TAP Press Release, “Business Leaders Call for Progress in Advancing U.S. Innovation by Strengthening Science, Technology, Engineering and Math,” July 15, 2008.
Erin Uy, “Business Leaders: U.S. Must Graduate More STEM Students,” Education Daily, July 18, 2008.
