Morning Shots

As I came home from work on Friday afternoon, I just had to yell out to my daughter the one prevailing thought that I had since the minute I woke up that morning. "Yeah it’s the weekend, NO HOMEWORK!!!!!" To add to the effect, I even jumped up and down in my heels. Madeline too was happy, but she merely smiled at me and continued to play with her dolls. So why did my enthusiasm surpass that of my child’s? Well, given my daughter’s-or more appropriately my-first few months in the first grade, I’m rather surprised that I didn’t break a heel with the force of my leaps.

You see, my child has been designated by the board of education as one of many "subjects" who will be undergoing an experimental treatment called "Everyday Math," developed by the Chicago RESEARCH project. Now I’m not sure how things are done in education, but in medicine, a patient is usually informed if an experimental drug is going to be given to him and he has the right to refuse. And even if he does agree to be the guinea pig, he’s required to sign a consent form, essentially stating that he has been forewarned about the long list of possible side effects and questionable efficacy of this unproven treatment. Since the consent form for the Chicago RESEARCH project must have gotten lost amidst Madeline’s school supply list (the one that incidentally required a calculator in the first grade), I keep asking her to bring home another one.

But I guess I’m comparing apples and oranges because it’s not like Madeline is being given drugs. She’s just being taught one of the most essential disciplines to mankind by methods that have never been used in most states-or countries for that

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Conservative lawmakers on Capitol Hill have introduced a bill that would let states opt out of many of the mandates imposed by the federal No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB).

Under the new approach, states would be free to use federal education funds as they see fit, provided they maintain student testing to assess their progress and make the test results publicly available.

Some NCLB supporters charge that the conservative plan would undermine accountability.

Sandy Kress, a former Bush administration education adviser, protested: "Republicans used to stand for rigor and standards, but no money for education. Now they seem to be for the money, but no standards."

But a closer look suggests that the real threat to accountability and transparency in public
education is NCLB itself. Indeed, the conservative opt-out plan to restore state-level control may be the best option for salvaging accountability for parents and taxpayers.

The law requires states to test students annually and offers a menu of penalties for schools that fail to show progress on those exams. States must measure up against a baseline that rises every year up to 2014, at which point all students are expected to score "proficient" on the tests.

States, however, establish the content standards and passing thresholds of the tests — meaning there’s an incentive for states to lower testing standards to avoid federal sanctions.

Some are doing this already. Though states can use their own exams to assess performance among all students, they must also administer the"National Assessment of Educational Progress" (NAEP) to a sample of students. This makes it easy to compare proficiency rates in reading and math as measured by the NAEP with what the states report using their own tests.

Not surprisingly, the comparison sometimes unveils a huge disparity, with Tennessee and Oklahoma, for example, reporting high proficiency rates on their tests

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How do we ensure poor students attain grade level proficiency? Increasingly, policymakers are latching on to class-size reduction as a cure-all, imbuing smaller classes with the power to eradicate intractable achievement gaps. While shrinking class size can be a good thing (after all, what parent wants their child in larger classes with fewer teachers?), research suggests it’s no quick fix for struggling schools.

But that’s not stopping educators and lawmakers in North Carolina. Since 2000, the State Board of Education and the General Assembly have implemented class-size reduction with little effect on student performance. The Charlotte Mecklenburg School Board has just jumped on board after reviewing the 2007-08 school budget, adding another 40 teachers to high-poverty elementary schools.

If simply padding teaching staff at low-performing or low-income schools isn’t the answer, what is? For starters, we need to get back to basics, reexamining the kinds of teachers we put in the classroom. Rather than blithely ascribing to a "strength in numbers" philosophy of education, we need to pay more attention to teacher quality. Having more teachers doesn’t make a school successful, but having good teachers assuredly does.

That said, there’s a lot we can do to maximize teaching effectiveness and give low-income and struggling schools the leg up they sorely need. A 2006 report from the Hamilton Project proposes a system that would up-end current conventions, instead weighting flexibility and teaching effectiveness above teaching credentials. This makes good sense – after all, efficacy in the classroom is generally unrelated to teaching certification.

Specifically, the report’s authors advocate a raft of changes to identify good teachers: hiring more competent, but uncertified, instructors; making it increasingly difficult for bad teachers to earn tenure; providing bonuses to highly effective instructors at disadvantaged schools; establishing evaluation systems to measure teaching effectiveness; and implementing data

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