On Tue, 18 Nov 2008 23:13:34 -0800, the infamous Bob Summers
scrawled the following:

On Tue, 18 Nov 2008 06:23:19 -0800, Larry Jaques wrote:
I've never heard of these. 'Splain, please.

Singapore is noted for world class primary and secondary education,
particularly in Mathematics. If you Google for
"singapore mathematics", you'll get a quite a few hits.

Here's a quote from http://www.singaporemath.com:
"Singapore students were in first place in the 1995, 1999 and 2003
TIMSS. TIMSS (Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study)
is designed to measure trends in students’ mathematics and science
achievement in four-year cycles."

One of the official languages in Singapore is English. The Math
books are in English. Singapore school levels don't translate
easily to US grades, so the web site that I bought from had an online
placement test for the kids to take so that you could buy workbooks
of the right level.

I haven't looked at them for at least 5 years but I remember
being struck by the clear explanations and useful applications that
were woven into the workbooks. I thought that they were much
better than my kid's textbooks.

That's really great. I hope they're in high use somewhere.


My parents just told us that if we brought home Honor Roll report
cards, we'd get extra privileges. My sister always did and I most
often did, except in my senior year, where I goofed off quite a bit,
learning more about my alcoholism and such. I still aced the Business
Law classes. One memory of that is the word "usury", which the credit
card comapnies nowadays are using in spades. _33%_ interest? Off with
their @#$%^&* heads!

Colleges don't let students slack off like that in their senior year
anymore, so they can't spend quite as much time performing bio-assays
of various psychoactive chemicals. Some kids get their acceptances
revoked for such shenanigans.

I was talking about high school. I went to tech school instead of
college.


I remember when my daughter told me she didn't make the honor roll in
middle school. I told her that wasn't a problem. Then I found out that
only about 10% of students did not make the honor roll. That fact
changed my perspective on the situation!

Wow, you really were in a highly-motivated student area, weren't you?

--
Latin: It's not just for geniuses any more.

"Wayne C. Gramlich" wrote in message
...
Ed Huntress wrote:
"Wes" wrote in message
...
"Ed Huntress" wrote:

[snippage]

Most of the structural problems with public education, though, are the
result of the vast and mishandled bureaucracy of education. The fact
that
it's a bureaucracy is not actually the problem; the problem is that
it's a
bad one. And part of the reason it's a bad one is our antiquated and
counterproductive system of local school boards. They and other
interest
groups have layered the bureaucracy in education like a piece of filo
pastry.
Damn, Ed, I was going say you were getting it but I think you are saying
the central
government knows best. I was willing to agree on mishandled
bureaucracy. I believe the
closer to home the better but was willing to say keep it at the state
level.

"Closer to home" means dumber.

Virtually every country that has schools that are outperforming ours has
NATIONAL management and control of schools. Do you want to see the list?

In other words, with our "closer to home" management of schools, we
barely compare with even *mediocre* systems among the world's developed
countries -- and even some of the underdeveloped ones.

Do you think that maybe the problem isn't central management, but rather
our 19th century ideas about government? Or maybe something else
altogether? Hmm? One thing is su Nobody who beats us academically has
local control of teachers, curriculum, or anything else relating to
academics. Mostly they have parents' councils to complain to the
administration, and local management of the janitors.

My understanding is that New Zealand is doing pretty well
academically and they have strongly switched over to the
school board model and they seem to like it. Here is a
longish URL that describes the system a little:

http://www.nzsta.org.nz/RexDefault.aspx?PageID=3f0f7a18-c7d9-4047-8fe6-fddfb805f6b4

Here is the first paragraph:

All of New Zealand's state and state-integrated schools have
a board of trustees. The board of trustees is the Crown entity
responsible for the governance and the control of the management
of the school. The board is the employer of all staff in the
school, is responsible for setting the school's strategic direction
in consultation with parents, staff and students, and ensuring that
its school provides a safe environment and quality education for
all its students. Boards are also responsible for overseeing the
management of personnel, curriculum, property, finance and
administration.

I don't know all of the details, but my understanding is that
sometime in late 1980's, there was a large change in government
in New Zealand. The new administration had a large centralized
structure that added significant overhead. The new guy came in,
gutted the central office, and pushed the savings out to the local
schools. Having said that, it looks like centralization is coming
back.

Yeah, I've never looked into New Zealand's system, but this is the only
(supposedly) independent discussion of this point I found. This is from a
parent-teacher organization called QPEC:

"Measured against the theory of devolution, the devolved system in New
Zealand has been a resounding failure. Far from being the drivers of the
system, the boards of trustees are now largely irrelevant to it, and it is
not at all clear what work they do, except comply with a planning and
reporting framework imposed from above (which could just as easily be done
by the school staff)..."

"Administrative workloads (especially in the area of compliance) have
increased for all school staff, and it is reasonably clear that devolution
causes a huge increase in the overall amount of administration needed in a
school system. The system, far from being more efficient, appears markedly
inefficient. It may also be expensive, as schools lost system-wide
purchasing power which, in some areas, has never been regained."


What makes you think that a local school board is likely to have a clue
about how to teach, what curriculum to have, or anything else above the
level of how to keep the toilets running? Half of them are housewives and
small business owners who have crappy educations themselves.

When it comes to school boards, the details matter. As they are
currently structured in the US, they are typically just another
layer of paper pushers.

The system in New Zealand seems to suffer from the same problems we have
with incompetent school boards:

"There have been failures. Wealthy schools often attract lawyers,
accountants and financial and community experts onto their boards, while
poor schools, which have more problems to overcome, often struggle to
attract effective parent governors. Quite a large number of schools have
had to be put in the hands of statutory managers. More importantly, however,
there is a problem with each school having to 're-invent the wheel' when it
comes to innovative practices, especially in a market context which brings
conservatising influences and militates against change. In summary, it is
not clear that the system encourages quality local decision-making, or that
local management has improved New Zealand schools or student achievement."

Too much Milton Friedman, too little thinking-through -- just like here.


In the past, some states gave school
boards the ability to raise taxes (usually property taxes) and
hence properly fund their local schools. That ability is largely
gone now, and state centralized funding (and paper pushing) is the
norm now.

Here in NJ, funding, except for state support for poorer districts, is in
the hands of local municipalities, who fund schools almost completely by
means of property taxes. The main result is that it causes open political
war between parents of school-age kids and retirees.

--
Ed Huntress

"Ed Huntress" wrote:

Here in NJ, funding, except for state support for poorer districts, is in
the hands of local municipalities, who fund schools almost completely by
means of property taxes. The main result is that it causes open political
war between parents of school-age kids and retirees.


Same here. School funding via property taxes, no matter what level education policy is
set at is, totally wrong.

Probably worked fine when we were an agrarian society.


Wes

"Ed Huntress" wrote:

Sadly, it was not uncommon for many to have good paying jobs back then,
jobs that would require a degree today. For example, many of the
engineers on the Sergeant guided missile project had no degree, but could
do the work. That wouldn't happen today, but it gave me the hope of
landing a decent job. I was lucky. I landed on my feet.

I hold no one responsible for my lack of education but myself, but it
would be interesting to see how I might have turned out had I been
encouraged to study and to have gone on to college.

Well you probably wouldn't have been able to earn your living as a grinder.

When someone is doing the fine work on a very expensive part, I would think having a very
competent person doing the work would be worth paying a decent wage to.

Here engineer, you drew it, there it is, there is the machine, have fun. I don't think
his education is going to get him far enough.

Wes
--
"Additionally as a security officer, I carry a gun to protect
government officials but my life isn't worth protecting at home
in their eyes." Dick Anthony Heller

"Wes" wrote in message
...
"Ed Huntress" wrote:

Sadly, it was not uncommon for many to have good paying jobs back then,
jobs that would require a degree today. For example, many of the
engineers on the Sergeant guided missile project had no degree, but
could
do the work. That wouldn't happen today, but it gave me the hope of
landing a decent job. I was lucky. I landed on my feet.

I hold no one responsible for my lack of education but myself, but it
would be interesting to see how I might have turned out had I been
encouraged to study and to have gone on to college.

Well you probably wouldn't have been able to earn your living as a
grinder.

For the record, that was Harold talking, not me. d8-)


When someone is doing the fine work on a very expensive part, I would
think having a very
competent person doing the work would be worth paying a decent wage to.

Here engineer, you drew it, there it is, there is the machine, have fun.
I don't think
his education is going to get him far enough.

Wes
--
"Additionally as a security officer, I carry a gun to protect
government officials but my life isn't worth protecting at home
in their eyes." Dick Anthony Heller

"Ed Huntress" wrote:

For the record, that was Harold talking, not me. d8-)


I know it wasn't you. Harold has skills that are learned the long and hard way. Empirical
study. Not as pretty and clean as book learning but an education that earned him a living
and made his employer(s) a profit. Our system of placing value on contribution is way out
of wack. Too late for me tonight to explore that one though.

I hope you have an enjoyable evening Ed, I'm off to bed.


Wes

"Wes" wrote in message
...
"Ed Huntress" wrote:

For the record, that was Harold talking, not me. d8-)


I know it wasn't you.

Well, then, why did you leave the attribution to me on your post?

Harold has skills that are learned the long and hard way. Empirical
study. Not as pretty and clean as book learning but an education that
earned him a living
and made his employer(s) a profit.

That's good. But nearly all skills are learned the long and hard way.
They're rarely pretty or clean. And most are empirical.

Our system of placing value on contribution is way out
of wack.

That's a free market for you, Wes.

Too late for me tonight to explore that one though.

I hope you have an enjoyable evening Ed, I'm off to bed.

You too.

--
Ed Huntress

On Tue, 18 Nov 2008 09:27:15 -0500, "Ed Huntress" wrote:


"Bob Summers" wrote in message
news
snip

That's interesting, Bob. So, you've experienced the extreme, with the high
percentage of high-achieving Asians in your community setting the
expectations. I haven't seen that at work although I've read about it. We
have a lot of professional Koreans and the highest concentration in the US
of Asian Indians here, and they do help raise the bar, but not like that.

Somewhere in this range of experience lies the ideal balance. Unfortunately,
it's a pretty long reach from the US median.

More Indians than in Sunnyvale? Wow! For some reason the Taiwanese and
Chinese ended up mostly in Cupertino and the Indians mostly ended up in
Cupertino.

The Americans who were here before the Asian influx were a lot like
the Asians that moved in, IOW, they valued education and hard work but not
as intensely as the Asians seem to.

I once read a proposal for changing the college admissions process to put less
negative stress on kids. The idea was that college admissions processes will
never be able to reliably distinguish the 90th percentile college applicants
from the 95th percentile applicants and that the pressure to distinguish
themselves causes kids to shortchange themselves by focusing on academics. The
proposal was to have the admissions process determine whether applicants made
the cut or not. If you made the cut, then successful applicants would be
chosen randomly. For example, by law, the University of California system
recruits from the 87.5th percentile and above of high school graduates.
If the rule were something like "if you score in the top 94 percentile,
you have an 80% chance of being admitted but if you below the 94th
percentile but above the 87.5th percentile you have a 60% chance of
being admitted. It seems like introducing an element of chance like that
might retain the good aspects of a pure meritocracy while reducing the
incentive to study obsessively in high school.

Bob S

On Tue, 18 Nov 2008 11:47:44 -0500, "Ed Huntress" wrote:


"Wes" wrote in message
...
"Ed Huntress" wrote:
...

I don't know where you get your information about NEA, Wes, but I think
you're pointing a finger in the wrong direction. The problem with the NEA is
that they resist management of teachers that would improve their
performance, and weed out the bad ones. They had good reason years ago to
establish tenure systems and those reasons even exist in some places
today -- patronage employment and firings for teachers and arbitrary firings
based on political views -- but there are better ways to control the
problem. If you've been following events in Washington, DC, you'll see a
whole new approach to getting the unions out of the tenure business and it
has wide public support.


OK, so the NEA is a union with all that entails. Their goal is not
the education of the nation's youth, their goal is to get as good a deal
as possible for their members while being perceived as working
towards the education of our youth.

Most of the structural problems with public education, though, are the
result of the vast and mishandled bureaucracy of education. The fact that
it's a bureaucracy is not actually the problem; the problem is that it's a
bad one. And part of the reason it's a bad one is our antiquated and
counterproductive system of local school boards. They and other interest
groups have layered the bureaucracy in education like a piece of filo
pastry.

The fact that it is a bureaucracy is unavoidable. The bigger and
older a bureaucracy is, the more difficult it is to keep it aligned with
its external mission. The ways that I know to keep a bureaucracy in
check are keep it small, have competition between bureaucracies
(like businesses in a free market), and keep it new, i.e., occasionally
toss the existing moribund bureaucracy occasionally and replace it with a new
bureaucracy.

In California, I think a big part of the problem is the lack of local
school boards. Taking control away from parents, at least some of whom
care about their kids educations, and giving it to faceless bureaucrats
who care about feathering their own nests, just isn't a recipe for
good education.

Note that AFAIK, only the private school chains, like Challenger and
One World Montessori have anything that resembles the centrally developed
curricula developed by states like California and Texas. It seems to me
that those curricula really tie the hands of the school boards, teachers,
and administrators. For example, a school district can't really do something
like adopt the Singapore Mathematics curriculum. I don't see how things
would be made better by increasing the scope and reach of the state
education bureaucracies.

One small example is the centralized approval and purchasing of text books.
Since California, Texas and Florida are the main states that do this and
those three states buy huge quantities, ~25% of the total, of textbooks,
a handful of Californians, Texans, and Floridians essentially determine
the contents of all textbooks used in primary and secondary education
in the US.

Those three handfuls of people become the target of every pressure group that
thinks that a good strategy for achieving their goals is indoctrinating
our youth. Creationists (http://chesterfieldscience.blogspot.com), the
Council on Islamic Education (http://www.jewishjournal.com/world/a...nia_20051028/),
Barack Obama (http://realdebatewisconsin.blogspot....ook-with.html),
and many others try to slant the textbooks to achieve their agendas.

From their point of view, this is much more efficient that persuading 10,000
local school boards.

I think that the California textbook selection process described by
Richard Feynman has changed. He was the only member that actually read
the textbooks and evaluated them for accuracy.

I don't think there is any way to guarrantee integrity in the process but
I think teachers and small, local, school boards would be more likely to
choose textbooks that made it easy for them to teach the material and the
decision making process would not be quite so vulnerable to propogandising.
Especially if they were somehow accountable for improving their students'
knowledge. The only people in the situation that have an interest in getting
the youth educated are the parents.

Why should an even larger and even more powerful bureaucracy work better than
what we've got now?

Here's a short interview from the VOA on textbooks. The interviewee claims that
"hut" is on the forbidden words list. http://www.voanews.com/specialenglis...-05-07-3-1.cfm
A group that seems to be trying to improve things http://www.historytextbooks.org/publish.htm

You can argue this one till the cows come home but there's a bottom line
that cuts right to the point: All of the school systems in other countries
that are beating our pants off in performance and cost are NATIONAL systems
of PUBLIC schools. They don't have local school boards, with their petty
political interests and academic incompetence. And with a couple of
exceptions, they don't have vouchers.


They also don't pay their teachers in US dollars, have the cultural diversity
of the US, have the geographic scope of the US, or have the NEA. It's tenuous
at best to attribute differences that we're all agreeing have a large cultural
component to one factor.

This gets complicated but there are a couple of other things that should be
pointed out in regard to vouchers and similar ideas. First, the private
school system in the US is mostly religious schools, where tuition averages
something like $4.000/year, as opposed to $9,000/year in public schools. But
secular private schools run around $10,500/year. Religious schools,
particularly Catholic schools, which are the plurality of them, depend on
property tax breaks, vast philanthropic contributions, and grossly underpaid
teachers, plus a selective-admission system that lets them pick and choose
which kids they'll teach. Those schools can only survive in an environment
in which the majority of kids are in public schools. Left by themselves, the
entire private school system can handle only a small fraction of the
population of students. It isn't a matter of letting them grow to meet the
market; it's a matter of market selectivity and a variety of cost supports,
made possible by the larger public school system, that is extensive and
deep-rooted.

I'm ambivalent about vouchers. With government money comes government
control. Right now, private schools are fairly free to do what they
think is best and do a pretty good job on the average.

Here is an example of government pressure on a charter school
http://cssrc.us/web/17/news.aspx?id=...ookieSupport=1
It's hard to be too upset about that school being pressured, but the
initial steps of government control always are hard to get upset about.

I thought Catholic schools now pay their teachers better because it was
getting hard to recruit nuns. I don't see why we can't extend the same
property tax breaks to private schools, though that also would lead to
government control.

Also, I think there is an unstated assumption in your paragraph above;
that private schools would have to absorb all students who attend
public school now. It might be only 10% to 50% of students would
have to move to private school to put enough fear into the public
schools to break the log jam that forces them into mediocrity.

As to the selective admissions, is that really true? And if it is
true, maybe that's a big part of the answer.

An anecdote. My previous neighbor had a kid named Steven. He
attended the same competitive high school that I described in
another post. One day I saw him outside and our conversation went
like this.
me: "Steve, are you still in high school"?
Steve: "Yes, this is my FIRST year as a senior".
me: "How many years do you expect to be a senior"?
Steve: "I've got 25 units now but I need 200 units to graduate. Maybe I haven't made the best use of my time"

Every time that I saw Steve, my kids got more work to do. :-)

Anyway, the money that the state spent on his high school education
was just expensive babysitting. His mother got him diagnosed
as dyslexic to get him into special programs, council, & etc.
Around here, a more common reason to get your kid labeled as
dyslexic is to be able to take an untimed SAT.

It comes down to a philosophical choice; should we make an education
available to everyone who wants one or should we try to give them an
education whether they want it or not? Is this an investment for
the future or a moral imperative? Right now we try to give
everyone an "education" whether they want it or not. We are willing
to sacrifice the middle half of students to try to help the bottom 10%,
even if the return on that huge investment in the worst students is
much less than the return we'd get spending the money on normal kids.
It's usually better to write off losing investments early.

If you look at the successful part of our education system, our colleges
and universities they have selective admissions. There is also some
competition between universities though there is a lot of government
involvement. Maybe that's a clue on how to improve things at the lower
levels

But most of all, the best performing systems are the ones in which the
cultural attitudes toward education are vastly different from ours. It comes
back to parents and communities. That's where the critical issues lie.

For the best students, our system works pretty well probably better than
anywhere else in the world. We don't do so well with the rest.

Bob S

On Wed, 19 Nov 2008 13:44:55 -0500, "Ed Huntress" wrote:



Yeah, I've never looked into New Zealand's system, but this is the only
(supposedly) independent discussion of this point I found. This is from a
parent-teacher organization called QPEC:

"Measured against the theory of devolution, the devolved system in New
Zealand has been a resounding failure. Far from being the drivers of the
system, the boards of trustees are now largely irrelevant to it, and it is
not at all clear what work they do, except comply with a planning and
reporting framework imposed from above (which could just as easily be done
by the school staff)..."

"Administrative workloads (especially in the area of compliance) have
increased for all school staff, and it is reasonably clear that devolution
causes a huge increase in the overall amount of administration needed in a
school system. The system, far from being more efficient, appears markedly
inefficient. It may also be expensive, as schools lost system-wide
purchasing power which, in some areas, has never been regained."


What makes you think that a local school board is likely to have a clue
about how to teach, what curriculum to have, or anything else above the
level of how to keep the toilets running? Half of them are housewives and
small business owners who have crappy educations themselves.

When it comes to school boards, the details matter. As they are
currently structured in the US, they are typically just another
layer of paper pushers.

The system in New Zealand seems to suffer from the same problems we have
with incompetent school boards:

"There have been failures. Wealthy schools often attract lawyers,
accountants and financial and community experts onto their boards, while
poor schools, which have more problems to overcome, often struggle to
attract effective parent governors. Quite a large number of schools have
had to be put in the hands of statutory managers. More importantly, however,
there is a problem with each school having to 're-invent the wheel' when it
comes to innovative practices, especially in a market context which brings
conservatising influences and militates against change. In summary, it is
not clear that the system encourages quality local decision-making, or that
local management has improved New Zealand schools or student achievement."

Too much Milton Friedman, too little thinking-through -- just like here.


An in dependant report huh?

That report actually presents a mixed picture. It also contains a lot of
generalities and few examples. One thing that they mention is that there
is extra cost because each school buys supplies on its own. It seems to
me that should be an easily solvable problem with motivated superintendents
and principals. Other than the toilet paper example, they don't say much
about what central services are missing.

It mentions extra workload on teachers because of 'compliance' issues. I
don't speak New Zealandese but that sure sounds to me like mandated
paperwork from some central authority. Do these compliance issues
actually improve the education of New Zealand's youth?

The report also notes that there are still "calls for more parental
choice" and "less government involvement". So, I'll speculate that
what happened was that the original bureaucrats were unable to stop
the devolution but they were capable of inserting enough requirements
into it that devolution would not work. Dynasties come and dynasties
go but the civil service is forever. Maybe someone from New Zealand
can fill us in on the real situation.

That report does suggest a question. What is the optimal size for a
school district? I suspect that one school, which seems to be what
New Zealand did, is too small.

Another report from QPEC, http://qpec.org.nz/privatisation/par..._of_school.doc
notes :
"Contrary to the claim that parental choice "rolls back the state" and
therefore debureaucratizes and depoliticizes education, "choice" did not
reduce central state control of schooling in England or the United
States but, rather, reconstituted it at different levels (Carl, 1994) (p. 297)"

That seems to fit my speculation above.

The rest of that report reveals their biases towards central control:

"In marketised plans, more affluent parents often have more flexible
hours and can visit multiple schools. They have cars - often more than
one - and can afford driving their children across town to attend a better
school(Apple, 2001)(p. 415)"

I'm not familiar with New Zealand, but don't even low level workers
get vacation days or sick days that they could use to check out schools,
provided they felt it was important? And are cars really that rare in New
Zealand? I've always pictured New Zealand as much wealthier than that.
It sounds to me that parents who value education make the effort
to help their kids get educated and that the parents who do that often
have higher incomes because they themselves are educated.

Or this

"However, as noted below, while wealthy parents may be able to better
engage with choice systems, this does not mean that choices are made on
the basis of rational and detailed consideration of choice options. One
of the key factors emerging from the research on parental choice in
action is that choices are often made on the basis of fashion,
hearsay, 'network' knowledge and assumption, and parents often
deliberately ignore the official knowledge emerging from the school
sector."

So parents ignore the experts and use other sources of information and
the experts are miffed about being ignored. In my area, parents pour
over the test results of each school and school district but the way
they chose a house is by which schools their kids would go to.

"... the research is remarkably consistent in demonstrating that choices
are far more often made of the basis of who will my child be going to
school with?"

Who wants their kids to go to school with members of the Crips,
Bloods, and El Norte? I'd believe that parents want their kids
to associate with other kids who are likely to be successful in
life.

Then there is this insulting quote:

"Many of them believe that the "back-to-basics" parents are
really more interested in setting up schools in their own
image - in other words, schools that are generally conservative,
white, and middle- to upper-middle class. As one miffed neighborhood
school parent put it, "They just want schools for their own kids and
don't give a damn about anybody else." (Bomotti, 1998)."

I feel lucky that my kids got into the local back-to-basics grammar
school. About 3 times as many students apply as get in. It's a
real sign that the school district is not parent oriented that they
have not opened a second and third back-to-basics school.

I can assure you that the grammar school my kids went to was not
white (~10%) and middle of the road on the political spectrum. There
is a different school for the far left parents. I was
sometimes the only white parent at school functions. As
far as I can tell, my motives were the same as all of the other
parents I spoke to. We wanted our kids to get a good grounding in
the basics and we were willing to put in a lot of effort to give
our kids a good chance.

For parents who have had some success in life and want their children to do
at least as well, why shouldn't they try to have their children replicate
their success by following the same, proven trail? Would anything else
be rational?

The last sentence captures something important; parents want a great
school for their kid. Many of those parents are willing to put in
a lot of effort to achieve that. There must be some way to harness
that so that at least some kids of less capable parents can benefit.
For the poor folks mentioned above, their kids aren't getting a good
education under either system. Is their plight noticeably different
under either system?


In the past, some states gave school
boards the ability to raise taxes (usually property taxes) and
hence properly fund their local schools. That ability is largely
gone now, and state centralized funding (and paper pushing) is the
norm now.

Here in NJ, funding, except for state support for poorer districts, is in
the hands of local municipalities, who fund schools almost completely by
means of property taxes. The main result is that it causes open political
war between parents of school-age kids and retirees.

Our local schools actually get less money and perform better than many nearby
schools. It has to do with the way school funding was set up after
Proposition 13 passed. The funding formulas haven't changed since
then, though the population has shifted.

Bob S

"Bob Summers" wrote in message
...
On Tue, 18 Nov 2008 09:27:15 -0500, "Ed Huntress"
wrote:


"Bob Summers" wrote in message
news
snip

That's interesting, Bob. So, you've experienced the extreme, with the high
percentage of high-achieving Asians in your community setting the
expectations. I haven't seen that at work although I've read about it. We
have a lot of professional Koreans and the highest concentration in the US
of Asian Indians here, and they do help raise the bar, but not like that.

Somewhere in this range of experience lies the ideal balance.
Unfortunately,
it's a pretty long reach from the US median.

More Indians than in Sunnyvale? Wow! For some reason the Taiwanese and
Chinese ended up mostly in Cupertino and the Indians mostly ended up in
Cupertino.

Yeah. By the 2000 Census, Edison NJ was 18% Asian Indian. Sunnyvale was 10%.
Cupertino was 9%. I think Edison's percentage is higher now.

I live in a borough carved out of the middle of Edison, and the Indians own
close to half of the retail stores here. Curiously, though, they don't
actually live in my borough, which is almost lilly-white except for some
Korean professionals and a very small percentage of Asian Indians and
African-Americans. And if you look at the table halfway down this page:

http://www.epodunk.com/ancestry/Asian-Indian.html

....many of the other towns high on the list surround Edison, but Metuchen,
right in the middle of it, doesn't even make the list. So we're pretty well
surrounded by a very big Indian population.

The Indian women drivers are something to behold -- and to stay clear of.
It's really dangerous out there. d8-)


The Americans who were here before the Asian influx were a lot like
the Asians that moved in, IOW, they valued education and hard work but not
as intensely as the Asians seem to.

I once read a proposal for changing the college admissions process to put
less
negative stress on kids. The idea was that college admissions processes
will
never be able to reliably distinguish the 90th percentile college
applicants
from the 95th percentile applicants and that the pressure to distinguish
themselves causes kids to shortchange themselves by focusing on academics.
The
proposal was to have the admissions process determine whether applicants
made
the cut or not. If you made the cut, then successful applicants would be
chosen randomly. For example, by law, the University of California system
recruits from the 87.5th percentile and above of high school graduates.
If the rule were something like "if you score in the top 94 percentile,
you have an 80% chance of being admitted but if you below the 94th
percentile but above the 87.5th percentile you have a 60% chance of
being admitted. It seems like introducing an element of chance like that
might retain the good aspects of a pure meritocracy while reducing the
incentive to study obsessively in high school.

I don't know. There have been many such proposals. I recall that Asians in
California were up in arms a few years ago because they were being cut out
in college admissions because of what amounted to an affirmative-action
program for whites. There's irony for you.

--
Ed Huntress

On Wed, 19 Nov 2008 22:01:23 -0800, the infamous Bob Summers
scrawled the following:

On Tue, 18 Nov 2008 11:47:44 -0500, "Ed Huntress" wrote:


"Wes" wrote in message
...
"Ed Huntress" wrote:
...

I don't know where you get your information about NEA, Wes, but I think
you're pointing a finger in the wrong direction. The problem with the NEA is
that they resist management of teachers that would improve their
performance, and weed out the bad ones. They had good reason years ago to
establish tenure systems and those reasons even exist in some places
today -- patronage employment and firings for teachers and arbitrary firings
based on political views -- but there are better ways to control the
problem. If you've been following events in Washington, DC, you'll see a
whole new approach to getting the unions out of the tenure business and it
has wide public support.


OK, so the NEA is a union with all that entails. Their goal is not
the education of the nation's youth, their goal is to get as good a deal
as possible for their members while being perceived as working
towards the education of our youth.

Isn't a union's goal to rake off as much money and power as possible
while being _perceived_ as getting as good a deal as possible for
their members, all this while being _perceived_ as having lofty and
altruistic goals?

--
Latin: It's not just for geniuses any more.

"Bob Summers" wrote in message
...
On Tue, 18 Nov 2008 11:47:44 -0500, "Ed Huntress"
wrote:


"Wes" wrote in message
...
"Ed Huntress" wrote:
...

I don't know where you get your information about NEA, Wes, but I think
you're pointing a finger in the wrong direction. The problem with the NEA
is
that they resist management of teachers that would improve their
performance, and weed out the bad ones. They had good reason years ago to
establish tenure systems and those reasons even exist in some places
today -- patronage employment and firings for teachers and arbitrary
firings
based on political views -- but there are better ways to control the
problem. If you've been following events in Washington, DC, you'll see a
whole new approach to getting the unions out of the tenure business and it
has wide public support.


OK, so the NEA is a union with all that entails. Their goal is not
the education of the nation's youth, their goal is to get as good a deal
as possible for their members while being perceived as working
towards the education of our youth.

As with most cases of assigning scapegoats, that's hardly an accurate
picture. That's like saying the goal of your fire department is to ride fast
in big trucks and to play with big fires, while being perceived as saving
property.


Most of the structural problems with public education, though, are the
result of the vast and mishandled bureaucracy of education. The fact that
it's a bureaucracy is not actually the problem; the problem is that it's a
bad one. And part of the reason it's a bad one is our antiquated and
counterproductive system of local school boards. They and other interest
groups have layered the bureaucracy in education like a piece of filo
pastry.

The fact that it is a bureaucracy is unavoidable. The bigger and
older a bureaucracy is, the more difficult it is to keep it aligned with
its external mission. The ways that I know to keep a bureaucracy in
check are keep it small, have competition between bureaucracies
(like businesses in a free market), and keep it new, i.e., occasionally
toss the existing moribund bureaucracy occasionally and replace it with a
new
bureaucracy.

In California, I think a big part of the problem is the lack of local
school boards. Taking control away from parents, at least some of whom
care about their kids educations, and giving it to faceless bureaucrats
who care about feathering their own nests, just isn't a recipe for
good education.

Note that AFAIK, only the private school chains, like Challenger and
One World Montessori have anything that resembles the centrally developed
curricula developed by states like California and Texas. It seems to me
that those curricula really tie the hands of the school boards, teachers,
and administrators. For example, a school district can't really do
something
like adopt the Singapore Mathematics curriculum. I don't see how things
would be made better by increasing the scope and reach of the state
education bureaucracies.

Well, then, maybe it's time to look at those countries that keep beating our
pants off in reading and math, and see how they do it. Because, in almost
every case, central control is how they're structured.

So far, the only thing we can say about local control of education in the US
is that it's a part of the failed system. We put amateurs in charge of
school governance and expect an expert result. We'd might as well elect a
team of housewives and retired candy-shop owners to govern your local
electrical power grid. Then we'd blame the electrical workers' union for all
the blackouts.

Apply 19th-century solutions to 21st-century problems, and then find a
scapegoat to blame when it all goes bad. It's the American way.


One small example is the centralized approval and purchasing of text
books.
Since California, Texas and Florida are the main states that do this and
those three states buy huge quantities, ~25% of the total, of textbooks,
a handful of Californians, Texans, and Floridians essentially determine
the contents of all textbooks used in primary and secondary education
in the US.

As noted by the New Zealanders who have tried local governance, a key result
has been rising costs because they've lost large-scale purchasing power. So
it goes both ways. No matter what you do, there will be something to
complain about. d8-)


Those three handfuls of people become the target of every pressure group
that
thinks that a good strategy for achieving their goals is indoctrinating
our youth. Creationists (http://chesterfieldscience.blogspot.com), the
Council on Islamic Education
(http://www.jewishjournal.com/world/a...nia_20051028/),
Barack Obama
(http://realdebatewisconsin.blogspot....ook-with.html),
and many others try to slant the textbooks to achieve their agendas.

From their point of view, this is much more efficient that persuading
10,000
local school boards.

The problem is that the "problem," if there was one, is the opposite of what
you're suggesting. Short on time, I tracked just one of these to see what
actually happened. Textbooks in Racine, WI (your "Barack Obama" link) are
approved by the Racine Unified District School Board, not by the state.

This was a complaint by a dunderhead parent, but the selection of the
textbook was made by a textbook committee of teachers and a curriculum
committee, and approved by the Board. So the decision-making about the
choice of a textbook was local.

It caused a dust-up and if you want to see how it came out, look he

http://www.racine.k12.wi.us/?do=main...ils&newsID=743

Read at least the "Memo to the Board of Education." That explains the
process -- and also notes that there are multiple references to John McCain
in other school textbooks. The chapter in question was not *about* Obama. It
was *by* Obama. And it was germane to the curriculum; it was selected long
before he was running for president; and it's been well-regarded by real
literature critics.

I haven't seen any of George Bush's or John McCain's literary reviews, but
there's always hope...g


I think that the California textbook selection process described by
Richard Feynman has changed. He was the only member that actually read
the textbooks and evaluated them for accuracy.

I don't think there is any way to guarrantee integrity in the process but
I think teachers and small, local, school boards would be more likely to
choose textbooks that made it easy for them to teach the material and the
decision making process would not be quite so vulnerable to
propogandising.

See above.

Especially if they were somehow accountable for improving their students'
knowledge. The only people in the situation that have an interest in
getting
the youth educated are the parents.

Like the dunderhead mentioned above. Thanks, but no thanks. The teachers are
far better at it, and expert boards of education professionals are better
still. See "Europe, Educational Performance versus the United States of
America." Or Japan, if you prefer.


Why should an even larger and even more powerful bureaucracy work better
than
what we've got now?

Because it does, all around the world. Nothing is likely to be much worse
than our local boards of bored retirees and semi-literates. In my experience
(and my experience with school boards involves more than 100 hours of
sitting through their meetings, in three different districts, plus writing
several blistering op-eds and a much milder one I ghost-wrote for a local
activist that was published by the New York Times), they do best when they
keep their mouths shut as much as they can stand doing so -- which isn't
very much.


Here's a short interview from the VOA on textbooks. The interviewee
claims that
"hut" is on the forbidden words list.
http://www.voanews.com/specialenglis...-05-07-3-1.cfm
A group that seems to be trying to improve things
http://www.historytextbooks.org/publish.htm

You can argue this one till the cows come home but there's a bottom line
that cuts right to the point: All of the school systems in other countries
that are beating our pants off in performance and cost are NATIONAL
systems
of PUBLIC schools. They don't have local school boards, with their petty
political interests and academic incompetence. And with a couple of
exceptions, they don't have vouchers.


They also don't pay their teachers in US dollars, have the cultural
diversity
of the US, have the geographic scope of the US, or have the NEA. It's
tenuous
at best to attribute differences that we're all agreeing have a large
cultural
component to one factor.

Tenuous, indeed, then, to suggest that doubling-down on what we have would
result in an improvement. This is the irony of it. We can see what works,
but we then claim that it can't have anything to do with the way they
operate. See "19th century solutions to 21st century problems," above.


This gets complicated but there are a couple of other things that should
be
pointed out in regard to vouchers and similar ideas. First, the private
school system in the US is mostly religious schools, where tuition
averages
something like $4.000/year, as opposed to $9,000/year in public schools.
But
secular private schools run around $10,500/year. Religious schools,
particularly Catholic schools, which are the plurality of them, depend on
property tax breaks, vast philanthropic contributions, and grossly
underpaid
teachers, plus a selective-admission system that lets them pick and choose
which kids they'll teach. Those schools can only survive in an environment
in which the majority of kids are in public schools. Left by themselves,
the
entire private school system can handle only a small fraction of the
population of students. It isn't a matter of letting them grow to meet the
market; it's a matter of market selectivity and a variety of cost
supports,
made possible by the larger public school system, that is extensive and
deep-rooted.

I'm ambivalent about vouchers. With government money comes government
control. Right now, private schools are fairly free to do what they
think is best and do a pretty good job on the average.

Here is an example of government pressure on a charter school
http://cssrc.us/web/17/news.aspx?id=...ookieSupport=1
It's hard to be too upset about that school being pressured, but the
initial steps of government control always are hard to get upset about.

I thought Catholic schools now pay their teachers better because it was
getting hard to recruit nuns.

They pay their lay teachers poorly. That's the reason for the high turnover.

I don't see why we can't extend the same
property tax breaks to private schools, though that also would lead to
government control.

It's only a small part of it, and it wouldn't solve much of the larger
problem. I probably shouldn't have mentioned it because it's a distraction.


Also, I think there is an unstated assumption in your paragraph above;
that private schools would have to absorb all students who attend
public school now. It might be only 10% to 50% of students would
have to move to private school to put enough fear into the public
schools to break the log jam that forces them into mediocrity.

My wife teaches pre-school learning-disabled and handicapped kids. Some of
them cost our district over $20,000/each, and, if they have to go out of
district, up to $100,000/each. State and federal support picks up only a
part of the cost. That's part of the reason why public schools look costly.

Private schools won't touch these kids, nor other kinds of "problem" kids,
unless they're set up specifically to rake off some of that big money,
charging $30k - $70k tuition (the public school district pays the tuition
here, BTW). If you have a higher percentage of kids going to private school,
public school will wind up with a higher percentage of the precipitant, and
it becomes increasingly difficult to run a quality program. If private
schools take them, based on real experience with private schools for the
handicapped and disabled, costs will go through the roof. That's real-world
experience, not theory.

As to the selective admissions, is that really true? And if it is
true, maybe that's a big part of the answer.

Yes, it's true. And yes, that's a big part of the answer.

There are Catholic schools that go out of their way to take troubled and
poor kids. There are many more that don't take kids with real problems; they
actually avoid them. Their "reason" is that they don't have the resources to
handle them. Of course they don't, because they know the public schools have
to deal with them. On the average, Catholic schools, and private schools in
general, take very few problem kids.

The higher-end private schools are very selective about admissions. And they
raise the average performance level for private schools in general.

You may find this hard to believe, but in the better private schools in NYC,
parents compete to get their kids into kindergarten. No kidding.


An anecdote. My previous neighbor had a kid named Steven. He
attended the same competitive high school that I described in
another post. One day I saw him outside and our conversation went
like this.
me: "Steve, are you still in high school"?
Steve: "Yes, this is my FIRST year as a senior".
me: "How many years do you expect to be a senior"?
Steve: "I've got 25 units now but I need 200 units to graduate. Maybe I
haven't made the best use of my time"

Every time that I saw Steve, my kids got more work to do. :-)

Anyway, the money that the state spent on his high school education
was just expensive babysitting. His mother got him diagnosed
as dyslexic to get him into special programs, council, & etc.
Around here, a more common reason to get your kid labeled as
dyslexic is to be able to take an untimed SAT.

So, is he really dyslexic? And if so, why was he in high school before
anyone realized it? Someone let that kid down, big-time, if he was dyslexic.
If he wasn't, the school's certification screening board didn't do its job.
They tend to be VERY skeptical, because agreeing to a special certification
costs the district big money. And that hurts the teachers and everyone else
in the school, because there generally isn't more money to get.


It comes down to a philosophical choice; should we make an education
available to everyone who wants one or should we try to give them an
education whether they want it or not?

The latter. That is, if you want to live in a modern society. We could
always go back to share-cropping or feudalism, but you wouldn't get much
support for the idea. d8-)

Is this an investment for
the future or a moral imperative?

Both.

Right now we try to give
everyone an "education" whether they want it or not. We are willing
to sacrifice the middle half of students to try to help the bottom 10%...

I don't know how they're "sacrificed." What happens is that it just costs us
more money.

...even if the return on that huge investment in the worst students is
much less than the return we'd get spending the money on normal kids.
It's usually better to write off losing investments early.

Right. We'll just sell the worst students to foreign investors in a fire
sale, and write them off our books. Maybe we can arrange them in tranches,
toss in a couple of idiot savants with high math scores to sweeten the pot,
and get Moody's to rate them AAA. g

There's nothing like applying the business model to social issues to see
just how bankrupt it can be.


If you look at the successful part of our education system, our colleges
and universities they have selective admissions. There is also some
competition between universities though there is a lot of government
involvement. Maybe that's a clue on how to improve things at the lower
levels

But most of all, the best performing systems are the ones in which the
cultural attitudes toward education are vastly different from ours. It
comes
back to parents and communities. That's where the critical issues lie.

For the best students, our system works pretty well probably better than
anywhere else in the world. We don't do so well with the rest.

That's for sure. Now, what do you do with the rest, teach them to string
beads?

I think we agree that parental and community attitudes toward education is
the basic, overwhelming issue. But the irony is that we see other countries
with centralized education structures beating our pants off, and we somehow
come to the conclusion that going the other way, making our local governance
model even more extreme, is the solution. Like the Republicans who say their
problem is that they aren't conservative enough, but who fail to recognize
that the conservatives voted in high numbers and that it was the center that
they lost, we just want to put on blinders and double-down on our failed
approach.

Nobody seems able to step back and ask if we aren't looking at it the wrong
way around. I don't get it, except that we're locked into old models of
governance and business models that tell us to cut losses and set them
adrift (without telling us what we do when the "losses" wind up at our door
demanding help) -- when we know that education for all is the key to
thriving in a global economy.

It's a national affliction. When I think about it too much I become
depressed. Fortunately, I think we're in for some changes.

--
Ed Huntress

Ed Huntress wrote:
"Wayne C. Gramlich" wrote in message
...
Ed Huntress wrote:
"Wes" wrote in message
...
"Ed Huntress" wrote:
[snippage]

Most of the structural problems with public education, though, are the
result of the vast and mishandled bureaucracy of education. The fact
that
it's a bureaucracy is not actually the problem; the problem is that
it's a
bad one. And part of the reason it's a bad one is our antiquated and
counterproductive system of local school boards. They and other
interest
groups have layered the bureaucracy in education like a piece of filo
pastry.
Damn, Ed, I was going say you were getting it but I think you are saying
the central
government knows best. I was willing to agree on mishandled
bureaucracy. I believe the
closer to home the better but was willing to say keep it at the state
level.
"Closer to home" means dumber.

Virtually every country that has schools that are outperforming ours has
NATIONAL management and control of schools. Do you want to see the list?

In other words, with our "closer to home" management of schools, we
barely compare with even *mediocre* systems among the world's developed
countries -- and even some of the underdeveloped ones.

Do you think that maybe the problem isn't central management, but rather
our 19th century ideas about government? Or maybe something else
altogether? Hmm? One thing is su Nobody who beats us academically has
local control of teachers, curriculum, or anything else relating to
academics. Mostly they have parents' councils to complain to the
administration, and local management of the janitors.
My understanding is that New Zealand is doing pretty well
academically and they have strongly switched over to the
school board model and they seem to like it. Here is a
longish URL that describes the system a little:

http://www.nzsta.org.nz/RexDefault.aspx?PageID=3f0f7a18-c7d9-4047-8fe6-fddfb805f6b4

Here is the first paragraph:

All of New Zealand's state and state-integrated schools have
a board of trustees. The board of trustees is the Crown entity
responsible for the governance and the control of the management
of the school. The board is the employer of all staff in the
school, is responsible for setting the school's strategic direction
in consultation with parents, staff and students, and ensuring that
its school provides a safe environment and quality education for
all its students. Boards are also responsible for overseeing the
management of personnel, curriculum, property, finance and
administration.

I don't know all of the details, but my understanding is that
sometime in late 1980's, there was a large change in government
in New Zealand. The new administration had a large centralized
structure that added significant overhead. The new guy came in,
gutted the central office, and pushed the savings out to the local
schools. Having said that, it looks like centralization is coming
back.

Yeah, I've never looked into New Zealand's system, but this is the only
(supposedly) independent discussion of this point I found. This is from a
parent-teacher organization called QPEC:

[snippage]

I brought up the case of New Zealand to disprove your following
statement:

One thing is su Nobody who beats us academically has
local control of teachers, curriculum, or anything else relating to
academics.

In New Zealand, they both beat the US academically and they have local
control of teachers, curriculum and everything. Thus, your statement
above is a bit too strong.

The centralized vs. decentralized control is not the main issue.
What matters is results and accountability. When a principal can
not fire an incompetent teacher because of the teachers union, it
sure is hard to hold the principal accountable. When you have a school
board that just implements what the state mandates, is kind of hard
to hold the school board accountable. Accountability without
authority is the norm in the US, with the predictably dismal academic
results to show for it. It is kind of hard to improve the system
when the people in control, do not have their jobs on the line
when they fail.

In California, most of the academic improvement is occurs in
charter schools which are allowed to bypass the smothering
regulations from the state. There have been some dramatic
results in disadvantaged urban schools. In California, there
are now almost a quarter of a million students in charter schools,
many of which are significantly outperforming the neighborhood
schools next door. Maybe centralized control is not such a
good idea after all.

-Wayne

"Wayne C. Gramlich" wrote in message
...

[snippage]

I brought up the case of New Zealand to disprove your following
statement:

One thing is su Nobody who beats us academically has
local control of teachers, curriculum, or anything else relating to
academics.

In New Zealand, they both beat the US academically and they have local
control of teachers, curriculum and everything. Thus, your statement
above is a bit too strong.

I have no way to judge their accuracy, but let me repeat what QPEC says
about it:

"Far from being the drivers of the system, the boards of trustees are now
largely irrelevant to it, and it is not at all clear what work they do,
except comply with a planning and reporting framework imposed from above..."

Even if they're overly negative about it, New Zealand has only a short
experience with (supposed) local control. And they are *one* example, versus
many with central control and superior performance. If they truly have local
control, they're the exception that proves the rule.

We're another exception, and we sure as hell don't prove anything, based on
performance.


The centralized vs. decentralized control is not the main issue.
What matters is results and accountability. When a principal can
not fire an incompetent teacher because of the teachers union, it
sure is hard to hold the principal accountable. When you have a school
board that just implements what the state mandates, is kind of hard
to hold the school board accountable. Accountability without
authority is the norm in the US, with the predictably dismal academic
results to show for it. It is kind of hard to improve the system
when the people in control, do not have their jobs on the line
when they fail.

That's quite a few unsupported assertions in one place. I think that many of
them are incorrect assumptions. Most notably, principals and teachers have
been losing their jobs in the New York metro area and schools have been shut
down because of poor performance on standardized tests.


In California, most of the academic improvement is occurs in
charter schools which are allowed to bypass the smothering
regulations from the state. There have been some dramatic
results in disadvantaged urban schools. In California, there
are now almost a quarter of a million students in charter schools,
many of which are significantly outperforming the neighborhood
schools next door. Maybe centralized control is not such a
good idea after all.

A RAND study of California's charter schools suggests there is nothing much
to note: "Regarding student achievement, results are mixed. Students in
charter schools generally have comparable or slightly lower test scores than
students in conventional public schools, but there is variation among the
types of charter schools. With respect to governance, only a small
proportion of chartering authorities are collecting accountability
information such as student grades, promotion rates, and dropout rates."

The first point suggests that it's worth a big shrug, at best. The second
point suggests that there isn't enough good data to tell much.

In any case, there is nothing there that would help answer the question of
how local or centralized control should be for optimum performance. The top
official in Finland's school system, which is the highest ranked public
school system in the world, attributes part of their success to firm,
central control of the curriculum and performance measurement. I suspect
he's right, although the homogeneity of Finland's society makes it far
easier to deal with the country's schools as a whole.

I've seen nothing to suggest that local control is as competent as central
control. But in terms of governance, I strongly suspect that the quality of
that governance matters more than the scope of its control. And local school
boards are rarely up to the job.

--
Ed Huntress

Ed Huntress wrote:
"Wayne C. Gramlich" wrote in message
...
[snippage]

I brought up the case of New Zealand to disprove your following
statement:

One thing is su Nobody who beats us academically has
local control of teachers, curriculum, or anything else relating to
academics.

In New Zealand, they both beat the US academically and they have local
control of teachers, curriculum and everything. Thus, your statement
above is a bit too strong.

I have no way to judge their accuracy, but let me repeat what QPEC says
about it:

"Far from being the drivers of the system, the boards of trustees are now
largely irrelevant to it, and it is not at all clear what work they do,
except comply with a planning and reporting framework imposed from above..."

Even if they're overly negative about it, New Zealand has only a short
experience with (supposed) local control. And they are *one* example, versus
many with central control and superior performance. If they truly have local
control, they're the exception that proves the rule.

We're another exception, and we sure as hell don't prove anything, based on
performance.

The centralized vs. decentralized control is not the main issue.
What matters is results and accountability. When a principal can
not fire an incompetent teacher because of the teachers union, it
sure is hard to hold the principal accountable. When you have a school
board that just implements what the state mandates, is kind of hard
to hold the school board accountable. Accountability without
authority is the norm in the US, with the predictably dismal academic
results to show for it. It is kind of hard to improve the system
when the people in control, do not have their jobs on the line
when they fail.

That's quite a few unsupported assertions in one place. I think that many of
them are incorrect assumptions. Most notably, principals and teachers have
been losing their jobs in the New York metro area and schools have been shut
down because of poor performance on standardized tests.

In California, most of the academic improvement is occurs in
charter schools which are allowed to bypass the smothering
regulations from the state. There have been some dramatic
results in disadvantaged urban schools. In California, there
are now almost a quarter of a million students in charter schools,
many of which are significantly outperforming the neighborhood
schools next door. Maybe centralized control is not such a
good idea after all.

A RAND study of California's charter schools suggests there is nothing much
to note: "Regarding student achievement, results are mixed. Students in
charter schools generally have comparable or slightly lower test scores than
students in conventional public schools, but there is variation among the
types of charter schools. With respect to governance, only a small
proportion of chartering authorities are collecting accountability
information such as student grades, promotion rates, and dropout rates."

I find the statement above hard to believe. Could you give a better
reference than just the quote? California Charter schools get to
cut out of most of the state clap trap, but they have to take
the same standardized tests as everybody else. Their API (Academic
Performance Index) scores are reported along with all the other
schools. In addition, California now has a state-wide student id
system that tracks the movement of individual students through the
various schools. The inability to collect the information about
grades, promotion rates, and dropouts means they are not trying.
I honestly, do not know what the RAND study is talking about.

The first point suggests that it's worth a big shrug, at best. The second
point suggests that there isn't enough good data to tell much.

In any case, there is nothing there that would help answer the question of
how local or centralized control should be for optimum performance. The top
official in Finland's school system, which is the highest ranked public
school system in the world, attributes part of their success to firm,
central control of the curriculum and performance measurement. I suspect
he's right, although the homogeneity of Finland's society makes it far
easier to deal with the country's schools as a whole.

I've seen nothing to suggest that local control is as competent as central
control. But in terms of governance, I strongly suspect that the quality of
that governance matters more than the scope of its control. And local school
boards are rarely up to the job.

I do not disagree with most of what you say. Accountability seems
to be what drives success. The US school boards are a waste of
time. The centralized system that I'm familiar with (California)
is a pathetic joke. The New Zealand system may be an exception;
I certainly do not advocate that the US switch over to the New
Zealand system.

-Wayne

"Wayne C. Gramlich" wrote in message
...
Ed Huntress wrote:

snip


A RAND study of California's charter schools suggests there is nothing
much to note: "Regarding student achievement, results are mixed. Students
in charter schools generally have comparable or slightly lower test
scores than students in conventional public schools, but there is
variation among the types of charter schools. With respect to governance,
only a small proportion of chartering authorities are collecting
accountability information such as student grades, promotion rates, and
dropout rates."

I find the statement above hard to believe. Could you give a better
reference than just the quote?

The quote comes from an abstract of the report:

http://www.rand.org/pubs/monograph_reports/MR1700/

There also is a 3-page brief that discusses the results in slightly more
detail:

http://www.rand.org/pubs/research_br...005/RB8022.pdf

If you read the latter, be aware that the report says that charter schools
are less likely to be Title 1, which means they have fewer distressed
students. And they have fewer special education students. There's no
indication in the brief that results were controlled for these variables.
Indeed, considering what they say about the lack of accountability measures
in charter schools, there's probably no way to do so, until they improve
their reporting. But both factors suppress overall performance of schools.

California Charter schools get to
cut out of most of the state clap trap, but they have to take
the same standardized tests as everybody else. Their API (Academic
Performance Index) scores are reported along with all the other
schools. In addition, California now has a state-wide student id
system that tracks the movement of individual students through the
various schools. The inability to collect the information about
grades, promotion rates, and dropouts means they are not trying.
I honestly, do not know what the RAND study is talking about.

The study is from 2003, so some things may have changed.


The first point suggests that it's worth a big shrug, at best. The second
point suggests that there isn't enough good data to tell much.

In any case, there is nothing there that would help answer the question
of how local or centralized control should be for optimum performance.
The top official in Finland's school system, which is the highest ranked
public school system in the world, attributes part of their success to
firm, central control of the curriculum and performance measurement. I
suspect he's right, although the homogeneity of Finland's society makes
it far easier to deal with the country's schools as a whole.

I've seen nothing to suggest that local control is as competent as
central control. But in terms of governance, I strongly suspect that the
quality of that governance matters more than the scope of its control.
And local school boards are rarely up to the job.

I do not disagree with most of what you say. Accountability seems
to be what drives success. The US school boards are a waste of
time. The centralized system that I'm familiar with (California)
is a pathetic joke. The New Zealand system may be an exception;
I certainly do not advocate that the US switch over to the New
Zealand system.

-Wayne

There are things to learn from New Zealand's system, as from Finland's,
because they have two of the best-performing public school systems in the
world. It just isn't clear what to compare from this little bit of data. It
doesn't appear to be related to centralization, or at least to a lack of it.

But the fact that we keep focusing on peripheral things like local control
should tell us that we're on the wrong track and we're looking at the wrong
things. In terms of popular understanding and the political nonsense, I find
it disheartening that people are ready to rush off to ideological solutions
without really picking the facts apart first.

--
Ed Huntress

Ed Huntress wrote:
"Wayne C. Gramlich" wrote in message
...
Ed Huntress wrote:

snip

A RAND study of California's charter schools suggests there is nothing
much to note: "Regarding student achievement, results are mixed. Students
in charter schools generally have comparable or slightly lower test
scores than students in conventional public schools, but there is
variation among the types of charter schools. With respect to governance,
only a small proportion of chartering authorities are collecting
accountability information such as student grades, promotion rates, and
dropout rates."
I find the statement above hard to believe. Could you give a better
reference than just the quote?

The quote comes from an abstract of the report:

http://www.rand.org/pubs/monograph_reports/MR1700/

There also is a 3-page brief that discusses the results in slightly more
detail:

http://www.rand.org/pubs/research_br...005/RB8022.pdf

If you read the latter, be aware that the report says that charter schools
are less likely to be Title 1, which means they have fewer distressed
students. And they have fewer special education students. There's no
indication in the brief that results were controlled for these variables.
Indeed, considering what they say about the lack of accountability measures
in charter schools, there's probably no way to do so, until they improve
their reporting. But both factors suppress overall performance of schools.

Some charter schools cherry pick for the best students with parents
that really care and others are actually targeted for the "disadvantaged".
I do not know what the mix is. I do know where many of the charter
schools are in my area and they are consistently the higher ranked
schools within the same school district. However, this is not a
heavily researched result.

As a single data point, my niece is in a charter school (she is
a white minority in a heavily hispanic schoool). Her school
significantly out performs the school across the athletic field
(where my wife used to teach.) I would categorize my neice's
school as a cherry picker school, so the improved scores are not
too surprising. Having parents that care is such a huge
determinant of how well the students do. The school district
in question is consistently in trouble with the state over
academic performance.

California Charter schools get to
cut out of most of the state clap trap, but they have to take
the same standardized tests as everybody else. Their API (Academic
Performance Index) scores are reported along with all the other
schools. In addition, California now has a state-wide student id
system that tracks the movement of individual students through the
various schools. The inability to collect the information about
grades, promotion rates, and dropouts means they are not trying.
I honestly, do not know what the RAND study is talking about.

The study is from 2003, so some things may have changed.

In California, things have changes substantially. Indeed, the state
listened to the RAND report and implemented the recommendations
(go figure.) The API measurements are state wide and the student
tracking is state wide. So, RAND did the best they could in 2002.
If they were to repeat the examination, they would have a far easier
time of it. Anyhow, that explains the disconnect.

The first point suggests that it's worth a big shrug, at best. The second
point suggests that there isn't enough good data to tell much.

In any case, there is nothing there that would help answer the question
of how local or centralized control should be for optimum performance.
The top official in Finland's school system, which is the highest ranked
public school system in the world, attributes part of their success to
firm, central control of the curriculum and performance measurement. I
suspect he's right, although the homogeneity of Finland's society makes
it far easier to deal with the country's schools as a whole.

I've seen nothing to suggest that local control is as competent as
central control. But in terms of governance, I strongly suspect that the
quality of that governance matters more than the scope of its control.
And local school boards are rarely up to the job.

I do not disagree with most of what you say. Accountability seems
to be what drives success. The US school boards are a waste of
time. The centralized system that I'm familiar with (California)
is a pathetic joke. The New Zealand system may be an exception;
I certainly do not advocate that the US switch over to the New
Zealand system.

-Wayne

There are things to learn from New Zealand's system, as from Finland's,
because they have two of the best-performing public school systems in the
world. It just isn't clear what to compare from this little bit of data. It
doesn't appear to be related to centralization, or at least to a lack of it.

I totally agree. Having a system that cares about results, irrespective
of whether it centralized or decentralized is probably more important
than organizational method in and of itself. The centralized system I
am most familiar with (California) is not the recipe I would choose
for a good centralized system; far from it actually.

But the fact that we keep focusing on peripheral things like local control
should tell us that we're on the wrong track and we're looking at the wrong
things. In terms of popular understanding and the political nonsense, I find
it disheartening that people are ready to rush off to ideological solutions
without really picking the facts apart first.

Trying to figure out what makes the education system tick is pretty
hard, and most people are not up to the task. Unfortunately, like
most topics, most people do not even try. Thus, we get bunch of crazy
ideas proposed that are unlikely to help things.

-Wayne

"Ed Huntress" wrote:

For the record, that was Harold talking, not me. d8-)


I know it wasn't you.

Well, then, why did you leave the attribution to me on your post?


Can I blame it on my newsreader threading? Going to anyway.

Wes