Original links are included though some may have expired.

In This Bulletin:

1.) Washington Update: ESEA
2.) Washington Update II: Gearing Up for IDEA
3.) Teacher Certification
4.) Size, Income and Achievement
5.) Overcoming Senioritis

Fact to Consider:

Only 44 percent of high school students take a demanding academic program. (National Commission on the High School Senior Year, "Raising Our Sights: No High School Senior Left Behind" October 2001. See item below.)

** Note: If you have a news item you think would be of interest to others involved in education reform, please feel free to e-mail your suggestions to Sara Mead at smead@dlcppi.org.

1.) Washington Update: ESEA

Work on ESEA continues, with lead negotiators meeting to resolve outstanding issues, including a number of controversial "social" provisions. Several key provisions remain to be resolved although it's increasingly clear this bill will get done this year.

The National Council of State Legislators recently published a letter attacking the bills on numerous fronts; a link to their letter is below. Though we disagree with the conclusion that the bill is irreparably flawed, we share some of their concerns, particularly with regard to testing. We still are concerned, as we were last Spring, that this bill may inadvertently roll back progress on standards, giving opponents of accountability their best arguments yet by increasing the quantity of testing without corresponding attention to quality.

It's worth noting that opponents of testing and accountability rarely state their opposition outright. Rather, they pay lip service to the idea of better accountability and higher quality standards and then proceed to attack the implementation of these ideas. Congress and the President must be careful not to give them more ammunition than they already have by allowing low quality, mismatched, or essentially meaningless tests to proliferate in order to simply have an agreement on "annual testing."

Some outstanding ESEA issues can't be divorced from the parallel track of the Labor-HHS-Education appropriations bill now moving through Congress, where an additional $4 billion (bringing this year's total education increase to $7 billion) appears to be smoothing over funding differences -- though some folks still want more. We think the direction of funds to Title I, IDEA and Limited English Proficient students is the way to go, but could be made more effective by improving the targeting of Title I to the neediest schools, as Senator Mary Landrieu has labored to do during the ESEA process.

Further Reading:

NCSL Letter to Congressional Conferees (09/26/01)

"Asking the Wrong Test Questions,"
Andrew Rotherham, Washington Post Editorial (05/29/01)

"Bush's Domestic Agenda Takes Back Seat,"
David S. Broder, Washington Post (10/15/01)

"State Officials, School Groups Worried About Education Bill,"
David S. Broder and Michael Fletcher, Washington Post (10/10/01)

"Spending Proposal Soars, But Some Seek More,"
Erik W. Robelen, Washington Post (10/10/01)

2.) Washington Update II: Gearing Up for IDEA

If Congress and the President think they're about to get a break from thorny education dilemmas with the completion of work on ESEA, they'll have to think again -- a more contentious issue awaits with special ed in the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA). The House education committee has already begun to consider IDEA, holding a hearing October 4. Adding further fuel to the fire, President Bush last week issued an executive order and appointed a commission to analyze and make recommendations concerning special education in the United States.

Several of the individuals named to the commission -- including Bryan Hassell, Reid Lyon, Jack Fletcher, and Wade Horn -- contributed to the special education policy volume published earlier this year by PPI and the Fordham Foundation, and overall the commission looks like a group that can offer fresh thinking and good ideas about IDEA reform. In addition, the ex-officio members from the Administration and the executive director are an impressive group.

That said, there is tough sledding ahead and many contentious issues to be addressed. The President ceded ground on ESEA reform early and often, and the results were predictable. We hope that will be chalked up as a lesson learned and not repeated with IDEA.

Further Reading:

Executive Order on Excellence in Special Education (10/10/01)

A listing of members of the Commission appears beginning in the third paragraph of this page: http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2001/10/20011003-13.html

Hearing on: "Overidentification Issues Within the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act and the Need for Reform,"
House Committee on Education and the Workforce (10/04/01)

"Bush Administration Gears Up to Revamp Special Education,"
Michael Fletcher, Washington Post (10/05/01)

"Lawmakers, Paige Debate Reform as IDEA Overhaul Looms,"
Joetta L. Sack, Education Week (10/10/01)

Rethinking Special Education for a New Century
Andrew J. Rotherham, Chester E. Finn, Jr. and Charles R. Hokanson, Jr., eds. Progressive Policy Institute and Thomas B. Fordham Foundation (2001)

3.) Teacher Certification

Last week, the Abell Foundation, a Maryland Foundation, released a study that will be of interest to those concerned with teacher quality. Abell Senior Policy Analyst Kate Walsh conducted an analysis of the roughly 150 studies often cited by certification advocates as evidence that teacher certification improves student achievement -- and found both the evidence and the studies themselves strikingly weak. Based on this analysis, the report recommends that Maryland eliminate education coursework requirements for teacher certification, report the average verbal ability score of teachers in each district, devolve responsibility for teacher qualification and selection to local districts, and rely more on other strategies for helping new teachers gain the instructional skills and knowledge to be effective. A link to this study appears below.

Not surprisingly, the National Commission on Teaching and America's Future, perhaps the most vocal advocates of teacher certification, harshly criticized Walsh's analysis on a number of fronts, and issued a rebuttal report Monday. A link to their response is below.

We don't think that the answer to the criticisms of teacher education is just to let anyone teach; in some ways that's a false choice, set up by those who defend current practices because such a prospect rightly scares parents. However, current teacher certification practices clearly are inadequate and must be reformed. It's bad enough that prospective teachers have to jump through so many hoops (that do deter some) and truly absurd when one considers that most of the barriers are not correlated with quality and are extremely basic and bereft academically. More than two-years after its release, the Education Trust report, "Not Good Enough: A Content Analysis of Teacher Licensing Examinations" is still very relevant to this debate. On the other hand, we're not convinced that verbal ability alone is an adequate measure and think that academic competence in a discipline is essential for middle and high school teachers. Stay tuned for Rick Hess's paper addressing these issues and some larger questions about teacher certification, due out in November from PPI.

Further Reading:

"Teacher Certification Reconsidered: Stumbling for Quality,"
Kate Walsh, the Abell Foundation (October 2001)

Response from National Commission on Teaching and America's Future

"Not Good Enough: A Content Analysis of Teacher Licensing Examinations,"
The Education Trust (Spring 1999)

"Assessing certification,"
Mike Bowler, Baltimore Sun (10/10/01)

4.) Size, Income and Achievement

Recently, we've highlighted a wealth of new research reports and developments on the "small schools" front. What's often not highlighted in these reports is the finding that the relationship between school size and achievement is most pronounced with regard to disadvantaged students (this is also true of class size). This is an interesting issue that Robert Bickel, Craig Howley, Tony Williams and Catherine Glascock focus on in a new study. Given the oft-heard argument that small schools are simply too expensive, the researchers also looked at the cost effectiveness of small versus large schools and found that small schools in their sample were both educationally- and cost-effective relative to larger schools. It's a fairly technical piece, and the authors themselves point out some of its limitations, but we think the results, and the varied levels of the analysis, will be of interest to both those making the case for smaller schools and those more generally concerned with improving achievement for disadvantaged students.

On this same issue, Education Week recently ran an interesting and extensive piece about the Bill & Melinda Gates foundation's recently launched initiatives supporting smaller high schools.

Further Reading:

"High School Size, Achievement Equity and Cost: Robust Interaction Effects and Tentative Results,"
Robert Bickel, Craig Howley, Tony Williams and Catherine Glascock,
Education Policy Analysis Archives (10/08/01)

"Breaking Up,"
David Hill, Education Week (10/10/01)

5.) Overcoming Senioritis

American High Schools have long been criticized for their "cafeteria-style" curricula and a focus on sorting the upper tiers of students into the appropriate tiers of colleges, rather than educating all students to high standards. The National Commission on the Senior Year of High School, created last year to address some of these concerns, recently released its final report. The report includes both troubling statistics and recommendations for change. Some of these ideas, such as aligning learning across the preschool-college spectrum, are common sense but still difficult to implement. Others, such as requiring parental consent to assign students to a non-college prep track, while developing more rigorous alternatives and making innovative use of service learning, could help to refresh an institution still bound in ideas more suited to the industrial than the information age.

Further Reading:

"Raising Our Sights: No High School Senior Left Behind,"
National Commission on the High School Senior Year (October 2001)

"Every Student Seen to Need College Prep,"
Debra Viadero, Education Week (10/10/01)