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The 11th Bracey Report on The Condition of Public Education By Gerald W. Bracey Mr. Bracey takes a close look at our national mania for testing, at new NAEP data, at international comparisons -- and, alarmingly, at where it could all end up. |
A LOT of people think I defend schools reflexively. Not so. But a little more than a decade ago, I found a lot of data that proved that the people who make up what I have come to call the Education Scare Industry were wrong, and I said so. When I have thought the schools have been wrong, I have said that, too.
I begin this report with three of the most despicable, totalitarian acts by school authorities known to me in the 34 postdoctoral years I've been in education. These are the attacks by Gwinnett County, Georgia, on Susan Ohanian; by the Massachusetts Department of Education on Alfie Kohn; and by the Chicago Public Schools (CPS) on George Schmidt. I presume Ohanian and Kohn are known to Kappan readers from their bylines in this journal. Schmidt was a teacher in Chicago. All three of their stories are dirty -- but informative -- tales about deeds done in the name of high-stakes testing. The beginning of the Schmidt and Ohanian stories were recounted in the 10th Bracey Report. They continue here.
In addition to being a longtime teacher of English and journalism, Schmidt also publishes a muckraking (not a pejorative term in my lexicon) monthly newspaper called Substance. One day, a plain brown envelope delivered to the Substance offices was found to contain copies of the CASE (Chicago Academic Standards Examinations). Schmidt thought the test items were awful and, rather than write an editorial to that effect, published them in his paper. CPS suspended him without pay and sued for $1.4 million, which it claimed would be necessary to write new tests. CPS subsequently fired him.
When I saw the tests, I tried to imagine what would have happened had I produced them back in the days when I was director of testing for the Virginia Department of Education. Someone would have leaked the tests to the Richmond-Times Dispatch. The Dispatch would have published the worst questions, along with a scathing editorial mocking the state department's incompetence. The department would have summarily sacked me and deservedly so. This is what should have taken place in Chicago. The Chicago Tribune should have picked the tests up from Schmidt, published the worst items, and written a scathing editorial. Then CPS should have fired Carole Perlman, director of testing. Instead, the Tribune backed the tests and demanded that Schmidt be fired. Perlman testified against Schmidt at his hearing.
These tests were more than just a set of "trivial pursuit" items, although most of the items were that, too. The tests contained items that had no right answer, items that had multiple right answers, and items to which the official right answer was wrong. It also contained items for which an earlier item cued the answer for a later one. In short, these tests were garbage.
At a hearing on the issue (at which I testified in support of Schmidt), Perlman had the effrontery to defend the tests and even cajoled Tom Kerins, former Illinois director of testing, to testify on behalf of the tests and to confirm the cost estimate to replace them. Shame on you, Tom.
The $1.4 million, by the way, works out to about $12,000 an item. Chicago schoolteachers, not professional item writers, wrote the questions. At $12,000 per question, every four items cost the equivalent of a Chicago teacher's annual salary. How could they possibly cost so much? Well, it is true that CRESST (Center for Research on Evaluation, Student Standards, and Testing) liberated $500,000 from CPS, but it claimed to have provided only a little technical assistance in teaching teachers how to write items. How CRESST could charge so much money for so little work could also spark an investigation. The CPS suit is ongoing, as is Schmidt's countersuit involving First Amendment arguments.
Some educators in Western Massachusetts invited Alfie Kohn to be the keynote speaker at a conference. When the Massachusetts Department of Education (MDE) heard that Kohn would be the keynoter, it told the organizers that, if Kohn spoke, the money for the conference would be withdrawn. The organizers caved, even though the money to pay Kohn was not from MDE funds. Officially, the reason for denying Kohn the right to speak was that his topic was beyond the theme of the conference. Kohn was invited to speak on standards and assessment, and the organizers titled the speech "The Case Against Standardized Testing."
The purpose of the conference was for charter schools and other public schools to share information about common issues. But, as Chester Finn and his colleagues have observed, "Charter school discussions are saturated with talk about accountability."1 And talk about accountability usually includes talk about testing. Other sessions at the conference covered testing, and many had nothing to do with charter schools.
Kohn was paid -- not to speak. He says that the MDE's action was not surprising: "It's a small step from saying, 'Pass this test or you don't graduate,' to saying, 'Renege on this speaker or you don't get funded.'" The ACLU is progressing toward a suit.
The Ohanian saga, which she discussed briefly in her January 2001 Kappan article, remains murky with regard to who is behind it and what they hope to accomplish -- other than to frighten her and make her spend money on lawyers in two states. I spoke to Alvin Wilbanks, the school superintendent in Gwinnett County, who advised me that there was an "ongoing investigation" but steadfastly refused to tell me who was conducting it. Jim Keinard, the Gwinnett School Police officer in charge of the investigation, has not returned phone calls or replied to e-mails. Ohanian has recently been ordered to supply fingerprints and a writing sample. Georgia law does not permit officers to ask for a writing sample.
More than most high-stakes tests, the one in Gwinnett County had roiled many waters. Given the enormous amount of testing already present in the district, many Gwinnett citizens simply saw no need for it. Some saw malice and maybe even malfeasance in a memo from Assistant Superintendent Gale Hulme. Hulme claimed it was "human error" that caused some RFPs for the Gateway exam not to be sent to most bidders on time. It is not clear that only CTB/McGraw-Hill received the RFP on time, but only CTB bid. Harcourt Educational Measurement declined, in a memo from then-Vice President Phillip Young, dated three weeks after the deadline.
Finally, some Gwinnett teachers were upset that the passing scores on some tests were set very close to 25% correct. This, of course, is the chance level, uncorrected for guessing, and strongly suggested that the whole enterprise was a political game.
Based on information provided by Gwinnett School Police, Vermont detective Timothy Bombardier in an affidavit accused Ohanian of attending a meeting of the "Alfie Kohn Group." Bombardier wrote that "The Alfie Kohn Group trains people in how to disrupt and prevent the implementation of high-stakes testing. On 31 March 2001, the Alfie Kohn Group met at Columbia University in New York, and Lisa Amspaugh was in attendance. [Amspaugh is a former resident of Gwinnett County and a critic of the test.] An attendee at the meeting advised investigators that a session was held specifically to plan strategies to disrupt the Gateway test."
This would be hilarious if it did not come from an agent of the law. The conference was organized by Columbia University faculty members and FairTest. I spoke at it, sharing a session with noted radical Ted Chittenden of the Educational Testing Service. One day was indeed devoted to developing strategies to counter the negative effects of high-stakes testing, but it dealt with topics like how to get the message to the media, to politicians, etc. No one ever mentioned the Gateway test, and no one said anything about disrupting any test administration or committing any acts of civil disobedience. Neither Ohanian nor Kohn attended the meeting.
The tale began with someone who pilfered the county's high-stakes test. Among the events that followed was the spectacle of all schools having to count, in front of a policeman, their copies of the test.
Testing, Testing, and More Testing
A couple of decades ago, I formulated Bracey's Paradox: test scores mean something only when you don't pay any attention to them. Lately, a lot of people have been paying a lot of attention to them.
If 2000 was the year that testing went crazy, 2001 was the year it went stark raving mad. I have already recounted three of the most outrageous incidents. Others merely reflect the tyranny of testing. What say we take a moment to consider a few of the personal qualities that standardized tests do not measure: creativity, critical thinking, resilience, motivation, persistence, humor, reliability, enthusiasm, civic-mindedness, self-awareness, self-discipline, empathy, leadership, and compassion.
Events in New York and Virginia reflected testing's ascent to dominance. In New York, 37 small alternative schools had built their curricula around portfolios as a means of assessment. They wanted to use these in lieu of the state tests for graduation. No can do, said New York Education Commissioner Richard Mills.2 Alternative school students have to take the tests just like everyone else.
In Virginia, people pressured the state board of education to permit alternatives to the board's own tests, then the sole determinant of eligibility for high school graduation. Okay, said the board -- and added more tests: the SAT, the Advanced Placement tests, and the International Baccalaureate. Grades and teacher recommendations were deemed too subjective. We should note that, for all their subjectivity and alleged variation in meaning and rigor from place to place, high school grades still predict first-year college grades at most universities better than the SAT.
"NewsHour with Jim Lehrer" also acknowledged testing's prominence with a long segment. (A transcript of this "NewsHour" segment can be found at www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/education/jan-june01/testing_2-15.html.) Monty Neill of FairTest and Alfie Kohn squared off against Bill Evers of the Hoover Institution (an education advisor to President Bush) and Lisa Graham Keegan, then the state superintendent for Arizona. Evers and Keegan mumbled platitudes and generalities, most of which had no basis in data. Said Evers, "What we want to do with these tests is know where these children are and if we do it year by year, we can see progress, we can see gains, we can see the growth, we can see problems with teachers as well as students."
Can we now? Thomas Kane of the Hoover Institution and Douglas Staiger of Dartmouth College concluded that between 50% and 80% of the "improvement" in annual test scores for a school was temporary and caused by fluctuations that were not related to an increase in achievement.3 David Grissmer of the RAND Corporation put the implications of these findings this way: "The question is, are we picking out lucky schools or good schools, and unlucky schools or bad schools? The answer is, we're picking out lucky and unlucky schools."4
Kane and Staiger made a telling statement: "Most of these [school accountability] systems have been set up with very little recognition of the strengths and weaknesses of the measures that they're based on."5 The reason they have been set up that way, of course, is that the people who set them up, the Keegans and Everses of the world, have an agenda. It is all about ideology, power, and control and not at all about children, learning, and education.
Neill and Kohn pointed out a number of other weaknesses of tests, as well as some of the negative outcomes they produce. They didn't mention that, in Virginia Beach, the board of education called a special session to decide if it needed to mandate recess for the district's elementary schools, because many of the schools had eliminated recess in favor of additional test preparation. The problem extends well beyond Virginia Beach.6
Washington Post reporter Liz Seymour found that Virginia's tests not only flunk a lot of children but also have created a new class of dropouts: teachers. Some have taken early retirement, some have fled to private schools, and some have requested transfers to grades that are not tested.7 Seymour interviewed teachers only in some of the highest-scoring districts in Virginia, those who would have the least to fear from the tests. The high-stakes fourth-grade test in New York is having a similar effect. Because tenured teachers can choose their assignments, fourth grade has become the province of the least-experienced teachers.8
Seymour quoted Virginia state board president Kirk Schroder, who claimed, "People miss the big picture here. The reality is that accountability is changing the culture of public education, and in some respects that has created some very positive achievement in some places where student achievement did not exist." Schroder offered no examples. Surely, he did not have in mind the performance of students in algebra I in Richmond schools. On the third administration of the algebra I test, Richmond's high schools had these passing rates: 19.8%, 10.3%, 9.0%, 5.8%, 4.6%, and 2.6%. Only three small, selective, affluent schools did better.
The techniques for setting passing scores reveal the purely political nature of these programs. Virginia employed the widely used Modified Angoff procedure. The process generates a recommended cut score from each of the 20-odd judges who participate. Usually, a cut score in the middle of the full range of recommended scores is taken as the official passing score. For 19 of 21 tests, the Virginia board selected the highest recommended cut score. For the two others, it set the passing score higher than any of the judges had recommended.
But at least the Virginia judges had some training and used a generally accepted procedure. In California, a panel of 100 people were given a dictionary definition of "competence" and told not to worry about setting a high passing score because eventually students would get there.9 The judges recommended a cut score of 70%. State Superintendent Delaine Eastin overruled the judges and set the passing score at 60% for one test and 55% for the other. Still, a majority of the students failed, and the media scratched their heads over how so many students could flunk such an "easy" test, a test that, after all, required students to get barely more than half of the items right. (Recall that norm-referenced tests are composed mostly of questions that about half of the students get wrong; the percent correct on a test says nothing about its difficulty.)
The Alliance for Childhood, a loose coalition of psychiatrists, pediatricians, and educators, attempted, with little success, to bring some sanity to the situation with a position paper on high-stakes testing. The section headings summarize the paper's story: "The Technology of Testing Is Flawed"; "Test Scores Have Meaning Only in the Context of the Whole Child"; "Evidence Is Growing of Harm to Children's Health"; "More High-Stakes Testing Means More Dropouts, Fewer Good Teachers"; and "Standardization Is the Enemy of Effective Public Schools."10
Into the existing nuttiness over testing, Bush injected an unworkable and self-contradictory plan for chaos. In the name of giving states more freedom and flexibility, the President proposed to force them to test all students every year in reading and math in grades 3 through 8. Schools would be required to make "adequate yearly progress," a concept that caused everyone's eyes to roll back in their heads -- even those who hadn't seen the article by Kane and Staiger on the instability of annual gains. The initial House version would have labeled most schools as "failing schools."
When Shadow Secretary of Education Sandy Kress rewrote the "adequate yearly progress" formula, he called his own work "Rube Goldbergesque."11 Chester Finn said the legislators had rendered the notion of adequate yearly progress so "complexified" that it defied explanation to parents and teachers.12
In addition to "adequate yearly progress," the Bush plan calls for all students to reach the "proficient" level on state assessments, said assessments to be confirmed by the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) or by a nationally normed test. As FairTest noted in its analysis of the many problems in the Bush plan, this would require rates of progress never before seen in education (www.fairtest.org/nattest/bushtest.html).
In most states, fewer than one-third of fourth-graders currently attain the NAEP proficient level, and performance on state assessments often differs widely from NAEP. In Texas, for example, 89% of youngsters are proficient on the state reading assessment, but just 29% are proficient on the NAEP. Only 12% of black students scored proficient or better on the 2000 NAEP reading assessment. Sixty-three percent scored below basic. If the NAEP were administered in the third grade, similar results would probably be found. Currently, the House plan comes in 10-year and 12-year versions. Suppose the 10-year version becomes law. An average of 6.3% of American third-graders must move from below basic to proficient each year for 10 consecutive years.
New York Times education writer Jodi Wilgoren interviewed education leaders in all 50 states and found them complaining about the Bush proposal because it ignores an entire decade of work to develop standards and tests.13 But what has this decade of work gotten us? Falling test scores.
Aside from the SAT, only the Iowa Tests of Basic Skills and the Iowa Tests of Educational Development provide evidence of long-term trends. By Iowa law, each new form of the test must be equated to the old form. Scores rose from 1955 to about 1965, fell for about a decade, and then rose to mostly record highs by the mid- to late 1980s. After the 2000 renorming, though, the scores fell. No one seems to understand why. I would place my own bet primarily on changing demographics. The 2000 census paints a very different picture of America from the one painted by the 1990 census -- much less the earlier ones.
Now for a quick summary of the best of the rest of this year's news about tests. Richard Atkinson, president of the University of California System, set tongues wagging by proposing that the university do away with the SAT as a college admissions requirement. He proposed temporarily using the College Board Achievement Tests until something better and more appropriate could be developed. The media made it a big deal when Mount Holyoke banished the SAT, but Joanne Creighton, Mount Holyoke's president, said that the test never counted for more than 10% in the admissions decision anyway.
Many stories covered cheating scandals. Many others documented the major errors made by companies that develop and score tests and explored the injurious impact of these errors on students. Resistance to the tests also grew. Parents in several states boycotted state-mandated tests. The Business Roundtable felt the resistance sufficiently to issue a monograph on how to counter the testing "backlash."14
Eugene Paslov, CEO of Harcourt Educational Measurement, garnered a fair amount of ink by saying that tests such as the ones his company produces should not be used as graduation requirements. He said his company could not tell school districts how to use the tests, but "we do have a responsibility to tell policy makers how we feel."15
New NAEP Data
The most disturbing thing about the 2000 NAEP reading and math assessments was the way media and state officials covered and interpreted them.
The reading data, which did not show any change, received little in the way of headlines. Nevertheless, in a Wall Street Journal op-ed piece, former Delaware Gov. Pete du Pont called the results "disastrous."16 Recall again that American students finished second in an international comparison of reading achievement. Theoretically, we could be suffering an international literacy crisis, but no one has claimed so.
Few papers carried the math results on the front page. Many of the nation's leading papers, including the Washington Post, New York Times, Chicago Tribune, Chicago Sun-Times, and USA Today, buried the story deep in Section A. This is disturbing because the results were generally positive. The 12th-grade scores dropped three points from the 1996 level, leaving them well ahead of the scores in 1990. Both fourth- and eighth-graders showed improvements. If their scores had dropped, a couple of journalists admitted to me, the story would have garnered page-one placement.
Most papers treated the results as a state, not a national, story. The national results appeared mostly in national papers and in papers in states that did not participate in the assessment. In some states, the newspapers and state officials bragged -- Connecticut, Indiana, Iowa, Maryland, Massachusetts, Minnesota, North Carolina, Texas, Vermont, and Virginia. In other states, they lamented the low performance -- Arkansas, California, Nebraska, Oklahoma, Utah, and Wyoming. Still others did a little of both, pointing out gains but mentioning below-average performance -- Alabama, Idaho, Illinois, Kentucky, Louisiana, Michigan, and Ohio. The headline in the Biloxi Sun Herald was the most sorrowful: "Mississippi Improves Scores, but Finishes Last on Test."
This kind of coverage is disturbing because the utility of the NAEP depends on its invisibility. (See Bracey's Paradox, above.) As soon as you start paying attention to a test, you introduce all kinds of corrupting influences that invalidate the scores. State officials attributed gains to their state's reform efforts. Although the NAEP likes to bill itself as "the nation's report card," it is increasingly becoming the states' report card to be used for bragging or to goad educators to greater effort and achievement. Thus it will not be usable to "confirm" Bush's testing program or any other program.
No Child Left Behind
The Bush education plan as presented to Congress in the document "No Child Left Behind" begins with three falsehoods: "Today nearly 70% of inner-city fourth-graders are unable to read at a basic level on national reading tests. Our high school seniors trail students in Cyprus and South Africa on international math tests. And nearly a third of our college freshmen find they must take a remedial course before they are able to even begin regular college-level courses."
There are no published data to support the 70% contention. (In an August 1 speech to the Urban League, Bush amended the figure to "almost two-thirds." In an earlier speech, First Lady Laura Bush had used the better figure of 60%.) The 2000 NAEP results in reading show that 47% of students in central cities score below basic. Sixty percent of students eligible for free and reduced-price lunches score below basic.
As for high school seniors trailing Cyprus and South Africa, these are the two countries that the U.S. outscored, not trailed. Of course, to consider these data at all, one has to accept the results of the Final Year Study of TIMSS (Third International Mathematics and Science Study), which, as I hope I have made clear before, one should never do.17 The flaws in the data render them virtually uninterpretable. When I parsed the results and found groups most comparable to the students in other countries, American high school seniors remained about average, which is where they were as eighth-graders.
The statement on college remediation makes it seem that college freshmen are showing up at Harvard lacking basic skills. Maybe. But I doubt that sound national figures exist because "remedial" means different things in different states and on different campuses. In Virginia, for instance, remedial courses are not offered at the flagship institutions. You won't find them at William and Mary, the University of Virginia, Virginia Tech, or most of the other four-year universities. They are offered by three urban universities, by two historically black universities, and, especially, by the community colleges. If students did not take algebra II in high school, then decide that they want to go to a four-year college and so take algebra II at a community college, does that make the course remedial? Isn't providing such opportunities a core function of community colleges?
The President's statement also overlooks the inconvenient fact that about two-thirds of high school graduates go on for further education. Shouldn't we be applauding this?
Paul Gigot -- soon to be editoral page editor of the Wall Street Journal -- said that the signal quality of the legislation was that "Teddy Kennedy is happy, and Checker Finn is not."18 Certainly, most conservatives did not care for the Bush plan. The Heritage Foundation slammed it. So did the Family Research Council, Focus on the Family, Phyllis Schlafly's Eagle Fo-rum, and Paul Weyrich's Free Congress Foundation. Analysts concluded that Bush had given the conservatives so much of their agenda in his first 100 days that he could afford to anger them now on a few issues.
"Missing in action" in all of the contentiousness has been Roderick Paige, the new secretary of education. The Houston Chronicle noted that "according to his official schedule, the secretary spends the bulk of his time meeting with foreign dignitaries, going to dinners and receptions, or traveling around the country."19 The New Republic observed, "In any Administration, the blatant marginalization of the only African American domestic Cabinet secretary would be noteworthy. In an Administration that loudly trumpets its commitment to Cabinet government and racial diversity it's stunning. . . . From the beginning the White House seems to have expected him to be the education plan's public face -- and nothing more. . . . Ah, the soft bigotry of low expectations."20 Paige has denied rumors that he is unhappy with Bush and is planning to resign.21 He has now declared that he is "at the table" and will seek a higher profile, but Jack Jennings of the Center on Education Policy still has him filed under "I" -- for "irrelevant."22
As this is written, Congress is in recess. Everyone is predicting cantankerous debates to resolve the differences between the House and Senate versions of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) when legislators return this fall. The June 20 issue of Education Week carried a side-by-side comparison of the competing versions.
New International Data
Early 2001 brought the release of the TIMSS-R (R for Repeat) and TIMSS Benchmarking Studies. The media greeted these studies with a collective yawn in the first instance and with silence in the second. Actually, the TIMSS-R report contained what I call "microcosmic data" -- a small set of statistics that reveal the condition of education writ large.
The U.S. Department of Education disaggregated the TIMSS-R data by ethnicity. I wondered what the results would have looked like if the entire U.S. sample had consisted of students of only one ethnicity. In the TIMSS sampling system, Asians and Native Americans constitute too small a group to generate a reliable estimate. The scores from blacks, whites, and Hispanics and those from the 38 participating nations (adding an ethnic group makes a total of 39) generate these results:
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| Whites | 525 | 547 | 13 | 6 |
| Blacks | 444 | 438 | 32 | 32 |
| Hispanics | 457 | 462 | 30 | 29 |
| Int'l average | 487 | 488 | ||
These results look drearily familiar. Unfortunately, TIMSS has no direct measure of poverty, only such indicators as the number of books in the home. The data above are stark enough, but if we could show data by ethnicity and poverty level, we'd see even more dramatic evidence of savage inequalities.
Of somewhat more interest than TIMSS-R was what I will call TIMSS-B, the TIMSS Benchmarking studies. Taking all 38 nations together, TIMSS-B calculated what proportion of students attained certain "benchmark" levels: 90th percentile, 75th percentile, 50th percentile, and 25th percentile. In addition to the 38 nations, 13 states and 14 school districts or consortia of districts participated.
The 38 nations generated an international mathematics average of 487. U.S. students scored 502. All 13 states (Connecticut, Idaho, Illinois, Indiana, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Missouri, North Carolina, Oregon, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, and Texas) scored higher than the international average, and all but four of them scored at or above the U.S. average. Idaho, Maryland, Missouri, and North Carolina scored lower. Michigan, Texas, and Indiana topped the list. (Yes, Texas, but more about that in a moment.) Note that none of the states that scored highest in the first TIMSS (Iowa, Nebraska, Maine, Minnesota, Montana, North Dakota, and Wisconsin) participated in TIMSS-B. Here are the results for math:
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| 90th | 75th | 50th | 25th | |
| International Texas Connecticut Illinois Massachusetts Michigan Oregon South Carolina Indiana Pennsylvania Maryland North Carolina Idaho Missouri United States Singapore South Africa |
10 13 11 10 10 10 10 10 9 9 8 7 5 4 9 46 0 |
25 32 31 29 31 33 32 30 28 28 27 25 24 20 28 75 1 |
50 66 67 65 68 70 69 60 65 65 57 57 61 58 61 93 5 |
75 90 91 92 92 92 91 88 88 91 87 88 88 89 88 99 14 |
TIMSS-B did not offer competition as tough as TIMSS. Some industrialized nations that took part in TIMSS did not participate in TIMSS-B, and a few more developing countries did. In the original TIMSS, none of the seven highest-scoring states named above placed more than 6% of students at the 90th percentile in math.
Still, there were 37 countries, plus Taipei, in TIMSS-B, including such high flyers as Singapore, Japan, Korea, and Hong Kong. Seven states had percentages of students at the international 90th percentile that were as high as or higher than these 37 nations. All but two states had at least 25% of their students scoring at the 75th percentile, and all 13 states had higher percentages scoring at or above the 50th percentile or at or above the 25th percentile than these 37 countries.
The United States had almost as high a proportion of students at the international 90th percentile, 9%, as the top-scoring states, and only 14 of the 37 nations had as high or higher proportions at this level. The U.S. had a higher percentage than average on the three other benchmarks. The contrast between the highest-scoring nation, Singapore, and the lowest, South Africa, shows the great gulf between the First and Third Worlds.
A Nation at Risk tightly yoked the test performance of students to the economic health of the nation. However, on 10 July 2001 Singapore declared its economy officially in recession.23 Meanwhile, observers worry that Japan will experience a second decade of recession. These facts should end any further assertions that high scores produce a competitive economy. By the way, education alone doesn't produce jobs. If it did, India wouldn't have tens of thousands of unemployed software engineers waiting for visas to the U.S.
The results for the American districts and consortia reveal contrasts almost as stark as those between the highest- and lowest-scoring nations. In math, only the five Asian nations finished ahead of Naperville, Illinois, and the First in the World Consortium, a group of 19 suburban Chicago districts. Only seven countries bested Montgomery County, Maryland, which has a lot more poverty than people realize and which also has more than 100 foreign languages to cope with. And only eight nations outscored the Michigan Invitational Group.
At the bottom, only five countries scored lower than the Miami-Dade school district. Only eight trailed Rochester, New York, and Chicago surpassed only 10. (In the original TIMSS, only three of 41 countries scored lower than Mississippi; only one scored lower than Washington, D.C.)
As with the first TIMSS, American students fared better in science than in math. The international average was again 488, but the U.S. average in science was 515. All states scored higher than the international average, and four scored below the U.S. average. Here are the benchmark results for science:
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| 90th | 75th | 50th | 25th | |
| International Michigan Oregon Indiana Connecticut Massachusetts Pennsylvania Texas Illinois Missouri Idaho South Carolina Maryland North Carolina United States Singapore South Africa Naperville |
10 22 19 18 17 17 15 15 14 14 13 13 12 11 15 32 0 33 |
25 47 43 41 39 40 38 35 36 36 37 34 31 30 34 56 2 64 |
50 75 73 72 69 71 70 61 66 67 70 60 59 60 52 80 6 90 |
75 91 91 92 90 92 91 83 88 89 91 85 84 85 85 94 13 98 |
The results from TIMSS, TIMSS-R, and TIMSS-B clearly indicate the need for something that people like me, David Berliner, Bruce Biddle, Harold Hodgkinson, and Michael Casserly of the Council of the Great City Schools have been calling for for years: a "Marshall Plan" for the inner cities and poor rural areas. Reforms predicated on the dire state of the typical American public school or on the "crisis" in public education are wholly misguided.
My declarations about the inadequacy of the TIMSS Final Year Study stand. Still, those data yielded some interesting information. The College Board compared the scores of American students taking Advanced Placement (AP) exams in calculus and physics with the TIMSS scores of the various countries.
In calculus, AP students outscored all 16 countries, averaging 573 points, compared to 557 for France, the highest nation (this difference was not statistically significant, but the other 15 were). Students who took the AP Calculus AB test (a test of first-year calculus) and received a score of 3 or better (considered passing) scored 586 on the TIMSS Advanced Math. Those who scored lower didn't fare much worse: 565. Students who took the AP Calculus BC test (a test of second-year calculus) and scored 3 or better aced the TIMSS test at 633. Roughly two-thirds of the students taking each test scored 3 or better.
In physics, AP students finished fourth, behind Norway, Sweden, and Russia. But recall that the Scandinavian students had studied physics for three years. Russia tested only 2% of the student population and only those in Russian-speaking schools. Those who achieved a 3 or better on the AP Physics test scored 586 on the TIMSS physics test, five points ahead of top-ranked Norway. Students with AP scores in physics of less than 3 scored substantially lower: 511. This ranks them ninth among the 17 countries in the TIMSS Final Year Study of physics.
The study also revealed a different aspect of the ethnic achievement gap: virtually no blacks or Hispanics took either AP test. The calculus group contained just 1% black and 3% Hispanic students. Seventy-two percent were whites, and 21% were Asians/Pacific Islanders. The physics group was made up of 1% blacks, 4% Hispanics, 66% whites, and 26% Asians/Pacific Islanders. In both groups, 4% of the students checked "other."
Vouchers, R.I.P.
In his 1962 book, Freedom and Capitalism, Milton Friedman developed the modern concept of school vouchers -- influencing, among others, Ronald Reagan, who made them part of his education agenda. Friedman and his wife Rose lead a foundation dedicated to the propagation of vouchers. On the website's FAQ (Frequently Asked Questions) section, one question is "Are vouchers popular?" The site says unequivocally yes and then provides a lot of survey data to try to bolster the claim (the survey data are more equivocal than Friedman would have you believe). Interested readers should visit www.friedmanfoundation.org and click on Frequently Asked Questions.
Survey data about vouchers, however, have always proved wrong when the issue becomes meaningful -- as in a vote. This is how it happened in 2000. The 2000 election saw voucher proposals in California and Michigan go down in flames by large margins in both states. Silicon Valley entrepreneurs sponsored the California proposal and funded it generously. In Michigan, voucher advocates outspent opponents 2 to 1. I asked Friedman how he interpreted this debacle, and he said that the "defeats are highly relevant to the question of political tactics." But he also said that he retained his faith in the efficacy of vouchers.
Along with generous funding, voucher proponents garnered support from conservative pundits. George Will declared that facts about voucher successes had "pummeled" opponents; William Safire concluded that vouchers would wipe out the black/white achievement gap.24 It didn't help.
Both pundits, interestingly publishing on the same day, drew mostly on the work of Harvard's Paul Peterson, who has allowed his voucher theology to cloud his vision. Early on, Peterson characterized voucher advocates as "a small band of Jedi attackers" who were engaged in a fight with the unified might of "Death Star forces."25 Usually, researchers write up a research report, have some friends read and review it, then pass it on to a journal, where three or four anonymous reviewers will pass judgment on its merits. Peterson gave his study of vouchers in Milwaukee to the Associated Press. The resultant story just happened to appear on the same day that Peterson and his frequent publishing companion, Jay Greene, now of the Manhattan Institute, published an op-ed piece on the same subject in the Wall Street Journal, which characterized John Witte's original evaluation of the Milwaukee voucher program as "bad science." This just happened to be the same day that Republican Presidential candidate Bob Dole proposed vouchers to the Republican National Convention. As the Church Lady might say, "How convenient."
Deception by the Numbers, a booklet produced by People for the American Way, describes many of the inadequacies of Peterson's work. For instance, using data from his studies in New York City, Dayton, and Washington, D.C., Peterson has claimed that vouchers work for African American children, but not for other ethnicities.26 This is a most curious finding that Peterson has never attempted to explain. In fact, black children in New York City showed gains only in the sixth grade, not in grades 3, 4, or 5. However, grade-6 gains were so large that, when Peterson averaged the four grades, the average was significant. Peterson's description of the results led David Myers of Mathematica Policy Research, Inc., a co-investigator with Peterson in the New York study, to call the claim "premature." "Right now you come away saying, 'No there's no impact,'" said Myers.27
A later press release, available on the Mathematica website (www.mathinc.com/3rdLevel/school.htm), makes this clear: "The report shows no overall differences in test scores between 3rd through 6th graders who were offered vouchers and those who were not. However, there were large and statistically significant impacts for African American 6th graders who were offered vouchers."
Indeed, the results from Dayton are not significant even for African Americans.28 Peterson has not explained this anomaly, either.
Meanwhile, back on the referendum front, the California proposal from Silicon Valley entrepreneur Timothy Draper would have provided a $4,000 voucher for all children, including the 600,000 students already enrolled in private schools. A wide spectrum of groups opposed the proposal. The plan for subsidizing those wealthy families whose children already attended private schools offended some. Some worried about draining money from the public schools. Some private schools said that they would not accept voucher students who scored below grade level, and others expressed no interest in expansion. And even if private schools were of a mind to grow, one estimate has contended that the nation's existing private schools could absorb only 4% of public school children.29
Michigan put a more complex proposal before the people. In addition to providing vouchers worth $3,200 to students in "failing districts," it established a teacher testing program and set a minimum funding level for schools. Supporters claimed that the legislation would affect more than 30 districts, but the Michigan Department of Education put the figure at seven.30 Post mortems attributed the defeat to the complexity of the proposal, to the fear of taking money away from public schools, and to the fact that people could not easily read the proposal's position on the political spectrum by looking at supporters and opponents. Popular Republican education reform Gov. John Engler opposed it. So did former Gov. James Blanchard, a Democrat.31
In the wake of the defeats, voucher advocates, such as Peterson, Jeanne Allen, and Trent Lott, decided that the word "voucher" should be dropped from the lexicon of school choice. "I think maybe the word is part of the problem," Lott said. "Maybe the word should be 'scholarship.'"32 At his confirmation hearings, Rod Paige told the committee that "the word 'vouchers' has taken on a negative tone."33
Given these events and sentiments, President Bush's voucher proposal was quickly removed from both the House and the Senate education bills. As proposed by Bush, the plan would have transferred wealth from taxpayers of all denominations to the Catholic Church. Journalist and voucher advocate Matthew Miller argued that, in cities, a voucher would have to be worth at least $6,000 to interest people.34 Bush's vouchers were, in Miller's word, "puny," worth just $1,500. Only the heavily subsidized Catholic schools, which have been hemorrhaging students (12.6% of all students in 1960, 4.7% in 2000), could have afforded to accept them.35
Meanwhile, the Bush Administration asked the U.S. Supreme Court to hear the Cleveland voucher case. A federal appeals court, noting that 96% of the students using vouchers attended Catholic schools, had declared the program unconstitutional.
Charter Schools
Accountability burbled to the top of the pot of charter school issues this year. In his 1996 book on charter schools, Joe Nathan wrote, "Hundreds of charter schools have been created around this nation by educators who are willing to put their jobs on the line, to say, 'If we can't improve students' achievement, close down our school.' That is accountability -- clear, specific, and real."36 And nonexistent. If this all-or-none test were applied to charters, precious few would still stand.
Charter operators have often resisted producing financial or achievement data, even when this information falls under a state's freedom of information law. An RPP International report for the U.S. Department of Education found that just 37.3% of charter schools sent a progress report to the chartering agency. Some 60.9% did send a report to the charter board, but only 41.2% sent one to the students' parents, and only 25.3% delivered one to the community.37 A review of accountability in 10 active charter states found little activity and few trends toward tightening accountability requirements.38
But people are talking about accountability. Chester Finn and his colleagues wrote in 1996 that they had "yet to see a single state with a thoughtful and well-formed plan for evaluating its charter school program."39 Finn and his colleagues returned in late 2000 to observe, "Charter school discussions are saturated with talk about accountability. Some view it as the third rail of the charter movement, some as the holy grail."40 They proposed something they call "accountability by transparency," whereby "the school routinely and systematically discloses complete, accurate, and timely information about its program, performance, and organization." Their system, though, requires so much information in the form of various test scores, progress toward goals, student standards, curriculum, instructional methods, demographic characteristics, and more that it would seem to eviscerate the original concept of a charter school.
In any case, it will not be adopted. No state has a true formal accountability program. Several, among them Colorado, Florida, Massachusetts, New York, and Ohio, have formal annual reports that call for specific information, but the reports don't always contain all the information required. And even if they did, states lack any decision rules to permit the sponsoring agency to determine whether a charter has or has not met its goals, especially in the academic arena. Massachusetts comes closest, with on-site visits that last several days, but the rigor of the process is not matched by equally rigorous decisions.
Some states, such as Michigan, appear to be moving away from accountability. Evaluations of Michigan charters by Public Sector Consultants/MAXIMUS, by Jerry Horn and Gary Miron of Western Michigan University, by Eric Bettinger, and by Randall Eberts and Kevin Hollenbeck have all reached the same basic conclusion: while some individual charters achieve at high levels, Michigan charter schools, as a group, perform below demographically comparable Michigan public schools.41 These evaluations appear to have had zero impact on the governor (a charter advocate) or the legislature. Indeed, the only charter school bill currently before the legislature simply increases the number of charters that public universities can operate.
Tepid achievement by charter schools in Michigan is especially troubling because Michigan might well be a bellwether state with regard to charters. Over a period of a few years, private, almost exclusively for-profit education management organizations (EMOs) have come to dominate the Michigan charter scene. EMOs now operate 71% of Michigan charters, enrolling 75% of the state's charter students. Five years ago, EMOs controlled only 16% of Michigan charter schools.
The percentage of EMO charters could well increase. People who start "mom and pop" charter schools often do not have any experience running a school. They soon discover that even a small school -- and most charters have fewer than 300 students -- is a lot of work. People with no training in accounting suddenly have to manage the books. People with no training in administration have to hire and fire and manage the faculty and staff. People with limited "people skills" now have to win the acceptance of diverse constituencies.
In addition, Michigan charter sponsors, mostly public universities, encourage charter operators to team up with EMOs. The EMOs, presumably, have the skills and experience that the individual charter operators lack. Charter authorizers also favor EMOs because they are known quantities. This reduces the risk that some idiosyncratic, visionary charter operators will mismanage or steal money, develop a curriculum bereft of intellectual content, or otherwise mess up. Finally, working through an EMO gives the charter operators access to start-up capital. The lack of capital poses the biggest problem for charter founders.
Interestingly, a little-noticed provision in California's Proposition 39 might have solved or greatly ameliorated this problem. The proposition generated much debate because it lowered the size of the majority of voters needed to approve school bonds. But the proposition also directed school districts to provide charters with facilities that are "reasonably equivalent" to those provided by the public schools. All districts must comply by 2003.
One might anticipate an EMO takeover similar to Michigan's in Ohio. The most recent report from Ohio's Legislative Office for Educational Oversight (LOEO) had this to say about charters, called "community schools" in Ohio, and EMOs:
LOEO found that community schools benefit significantly from the assistance of management companies in areas such as financial management, curriculum development, teacher inservices, and general support and guidance. Directors [of charter schools] remarked to LOEO that the management company is the first place they turn when they have questions.
Community schools not operated by a management company must be responsible for all aspects of running the school, ranging from curriculum design to staff hiring and evaluations to planning budgets. The director of one community school without a management company commented that "schools operated by a management company have the assistance I was looking for this year."42
Turning to EMOs might be practical, but it defeats some major purposes of the charter school movement: to stimulate innovation in curriculum and instruction and to give the people in the school building and the parents in the community ownership and control over what goes on in the school.
In fact, accountability for charters has proved more complicated than such early advocates as Joe Nathan, Albert Shanker, Ted Kolderie, and Ray Budde envisioned. Most state-level evaluations have concluded that no single instrument serves appropriately for all schools. It is clear in these evaluations, though, that the charter authorizers, boards, and the school operators haven't thought much or clearly about what would serve as appropriate instruments.
Bruno Manno has outlined some of the difficulties:
Today, it's hard to know how well charter schools are actually doing. . . . There are three predominant reasons for this situation.
First, the charter strategy is so new that it's difficult to measure results. There's just not much data out there. Second, today's charter accountability systems remain underdeveloped, often clumsy and ill-fitting, and are themselves beset by dilemmas. A final reason for the dearth of charter school accountability information lies with authorizers and operators. Truth be told, they are often content to leave accountability agreements nebulous and undefined. Leaving accountability agreements indeterminate is fraught with danger because over the long term this approach is more likely to lead to a charter school being subjected to the rule- and compliance-based accountability practices that characterize conventional schools.43
Rutgers University researcher Katrina Bulkley finds four factors that make it difficult to revoke or not renew a charter:
1. Educational performance is not simple to define or measure, nor is how good is "good enough" in educational quality. In this context, authorizers sometimes turn to "proxies" to assess school quality.
2. Other aspects of a school's program, often more difficult to measure than test scores, are also important for families and authorizers.
3. Teachers, parents, and students become very invested in particular schools, and destroying a community is more difficult than serving a diffuse public interest (like the one that would be served by closing a low-achieving school).
4. Charter schools have become a highly politicized issue on both sides, and some authorizers are concerned about their decisions (to close schools) reflecting poorly on charter schools as a reform idea.44
These four challenges form what Bulkley calls "the accountability bind." Proxies for achievement include parent and student satisfaction, accreditation by some national accrediting agency, and, in the case of EMOs, a possible "halo effect" -- if authorizers view one school managed by the EMO as successful, they are likely to see the EMO's other schools that way as well.
As regards the fourth challenge, those who authorize charter schools are often favorably disposed to the charter concept. This gives them an additional reason to let the charter continue. Bulkley observes further that, "while authorizers have difficulty determining what is and is not a successful charter school, they have even more difficulty deciding that a charter school is unsuccessful enough to justify as high a sanction as closure."45
Not many charters have suffered the indignity of a revoked or nonrenewed charter. Nationally, just 4% of all charters have closed. Texas has the highest rate at 8%. And some situations there have received devastating publicity. No doubt that publicity served as one reason why the Texas House of Representatives wanted to declare a moratorium on new charters. In a compromise, the legislature, over Gov. Rick Perry's objections, capped the number of allowable charters at 211 (192 operated in 2001-02). Perry allowed the bill to become law without signing it.
When charters do close, it is not always clear why. Authorizers seldom list academic reasons as the principal cause. Usually money problems dominate, but this might be misleading. Eric Premack of the Charter School Development Center at California State University, Sacramento, outlines the problems very well in an e-mail message to me:
Pinpointing the primary cause of a revocation is a lot more difficult than one might think. Difficulties of schools academically, legally, financially, and at the school governance level tend to be very closely related. For example, if a school is unable to offer the academic program at the level promised to parents, it only takes a small number of parents disenrolling their children to send the school into a financial tailspin. This financial pressure, in turn, tends to lead to infighting at the governance and administrative level.
When districts revoke, they usually focus on the financial and legal issues because they tend to be much easier to document. District staff prefer to bring clear and unambiguous reasons to their boards. As you [referring to me] know from your years of research in this area, measuring academic growth and progress is a dismal and slippery "science." It's a lot easier for districts to document that a charter school's budget is out of balance than it is to document declines in test scores or poor implementation of some promised academic program.
Premack refers to "districts" because, in California, the local school districts authorize charter schools. In some states, authorizers include universities, community colleges, the state department of education or, as in Arizona, a separate state charter school board.
Bulkley's and Premack's descriptions make it seem unlikely that anything like "accountability by transparency" will appear in the near future. In any case, accountability by transparency is a concept remote from the realities of schools. More important, it conflicts with human nature: everyone wants to look good.
Incidentally, when charter laws list their purposes, one purpose is to stimulate competition among the public schools. In some states that permit private schools to convert to charter status, this produces increased competition among private schools. The laws that permit private schools to convert also forbid them to charge tuition beyond the public funds they receive. They can offer the same educational program as in the past, but they now can offer it essentially for free.
EMOs
The first full school year in the new century treated some of the most visible EMOs unkindly. From the TesseracT Group, nee Educational Alternatives, Inc. (EAI); to Advantage Schools, Inc.; to the Edison Schools, it was not a good year.
As EAI, TesseracT had managed schools in poor urban areas -- Baltimore, Hartford, and Miami-Dade County. After losing those contracts, EAI changed its name to TesseracT, moved its headquarters from Minneapolis to the toney Phoenix suburb of Scottsdale, and, despite charging $8,500 in tuition and as much as $1.95 per mile for pupil transportation, went broke. Founder John Golle came out of retirement but couldn't stanch the bleeding.
Boston-based Advantage went into 2000-01 led by Steve Wilson, a former aide to former Massachusetts Gov. John Weld. Wilson had helped write Massachusetts' charter school law and raised a few eyebrows when he jumped from government into the government-sponsored charter school business. In April 2001 Advantage released a report claiming large gains in the test scores of its students. The largest gains came in kindergarten through grade 2 and looked more than a bit unrealistic. Later grades showed much smaller gains. Wilson got fired. In June Advantage sacked 40 headquarters staff members and, a few days later, announced that it was being taken over by Mosaica Education, Inc.
Advantage appears to have lost more contracts than any other EMO, five out of 14. But, like other EMOs, it has never turned a profit. Both Advantage and Mosaica had claimed that they would make black-ink entries on their ledgers if they operated 30 or more schools. Neither had more than half that number. It remains to be seen whether 30 schools will constitute the critical mass these companies need. Readers might recall that New York Times reporter Michael Winerip savaged Advantage in the New York Times Magazine. The Eighth Bracey Report summarized his findings. Advantage's pedagogy also received some more recent skeptical attention in the New Yorker.46
Thirty schools certainly held no magic for Edison Schools, Inc. It managed 113 in 2000-01. (Edison counts each level of schooling under the same roof as a separate school.) Edison still lost $1.36 for every dollar it took in.47 Edison has now signed new contracts in Las Vegas, in Indiana, and in Pennsylvania and has been hired by Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Ridge to develop a "plan" that might privatize all or part of Philadelphia's schools. Many people cried "foul." Brandon Dobell, a senior analyst with Credit Suisse First Boston Corporation, said, "It's like putting a fox in charge of the hen house." Arizona State University researcher Alex Molnar was harsher: "This stinks of conflict of interest from top to bottom."48 When I "debated" Edison founder Chris Whittle in the fall of 2000, he predicted that Edison would be profitable by 2004. Whittle had earlier claimed that Edison would come close to profitability in 1998 and would certainly attain that status by 1999-2000.49
I put debate in quotes above because, although billed as one, the usual debate never occurred. The event took place at the annual meeting of the Educational Leaders Council, a D.C.-based group of conservative school reformers now headed by Lisa Graham Keegan, formerly state superintendent in Arizona. The traditional debate format is pro, con, and rebuttal. The ELC required me to present the negative case first. It mattered little. Whittle did not address any of the issues I raised and simply delivered a 20-minute infomercial for Edison.
Readers might want to watch the Education Leaders Council because it now has an inside track to the White House. President Bush named one of its leaders, Eugene Hickok, as undersecretary of the U.S. Department of Education. Perhaps that is why Keegan testified before Congress a few weeks after her arrival in town. Hickok previously served as secretary of education in Pennsylvania.
As noted, EMOs have virtual hegemony over the charter school movement in Michigan and appear poised for a similar assault in Ohio. This is disturbing. Evaluations of charters in Michigan referred to EMO schools as "cookie cutter" schools. Others have likened them to fast food franchises. As one Advantage teacher (actually a receptionist filling in and teaching the top-level math class) said to Michael Winerip, "You just have to remember to stay on script."50
Teachers in San Francisco charged that Edison was too scripted. Across the continent in New York, Edison headquarters responded, "Maybe our model is not for you."51 When Edison expressed an interest in teacher preparation, an anonymous individual said that the company would teach skills useful only in Edison schools, thereby binding its graduates to the company.
Where It Could All End Up
The 16 November 2000 Straits Times (Singapore) described the run-up to national examination day in Korea, a day that seals the fates of high school seniors.52 Many mothers go to temple for a few hours for 99 consecutive days to pray for their children's success. On the 100th day, they arrive around 8 p.m. and pray all night: hands up; clasp hands in prayer; bow; down on knees; head to floor; back on haunches; clasp hands in prayer. Repeat 3,000 times.
Many stores and kiosks sell chocolate axes and forks to help students "spear" the right answers. Bands and cheering throngs meet the seniors as they approach the test sites. Workers report an hour later for work -- to ensure that rush hour traffic jams don't prevent the seniors' timely arrival. In Seoul, takeoffs and landings at Kimpo International Airport are banned for certain periods. The U.S. military halts training at all 90 South Korean bases for nine hours.
The students are not exactly happy. "I've been preparing for college since elementary school, and it all comes down to just one day that will decide my future," said one. Stakes are indeed high. The people who end up with the most prestigious jobs and who hold public offices are those whose test scores admit them to one of the three most prestigious universities. These three institutions will enroll 15,000 of 873,000 applicants. That's 1.7%.
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One WASL geography item required students to arrange four imaginary towns on a school bus route from west to east. The correct sequence was Mayri, Clay, Lee, Turno. The students in Lacey, a small town near Tacoma, noticed that this sequence taken together sounded a lot like Mary Kay LeTourneau, whom the New York Times identified as "perhaps the state's most infamous teacher."1 LeTourneau became sexually involved with one of her 12-year-old students, bore him two children, and is currently in jail for child rape. John Laramy, the president of Riverside, said that the firm reviewed the questions for racism, sexism, and other inappropriate biases. "It's clear we need to put in another check for malicious intent," he said. The item's hidden meaning had eluded other item writers and the firm's fairness committee, as well as the teachers and professors who reviewed it. The state said it would not count the item in the scoring. 1. Sam Howe Verhovek, "Test Answer Calls to Mind a Scandal," New York Times, 29 April 2001. |
 The
Walk a Mile in My Shoes Award goes to Barbara Ehrenreich
for Nickel and Dimed (Metropolitan Books, 2001). Part of the
June 2001 Research column discussed the difficulties that working
poor parents have in leaving their workplaces to handle their
children's school problems. I cited bland statistics about the
desperate plight of the working poor in helping their children
in school, but they didn't give the flavor of what it's like
to try to get by on $7 an hour. That works out to $14,000 a year
for 50, 40-hour weeks.Ehrenreich went "slumming," but, unlike the usual brief affluent-visit-the-poor trips, she conducted her experiment for two years, trying to get along by working at minimum-wage jobs from Florida to Maine to Minnesota. She discovered that there is no such thing as "unskilled" labor. Every job -- and she held a bunch -- required the mastery of new terms, new machinery, new techniques. For a person "well into my fifties" with a Ph.D. in biology, she says, the unskilled jobs posed quite a challenge. "It is a shock to realize that 'trailer trash' has become, for me, a demographic category to aspire to" (p. 12). Ehrenreich had it both easier and tougher than people who live on minimum wage: easier because she didn't have any children to worry about, tougher because she was unable to see how the permanently poor make use of family, friends, and the community in their attempts to get by. Still, her glimpse of low-wage workers is illuminating. The end of "welfare as we know it" probably isn't working, but we don't really know, in part because Congress appropriated no funds to see what happened to the poor after the law took effect. In addition, the Democrats did not eagerly look for flaws during the period of "unprecedented prosperity," which they took credit for, and the Republicans, having passed the legislation, have lost interest. Those of us who are not poor do whatever it takes to make the poor invisible. We don't ride public buses, live in mixed housing, or shop in consignment stores. We don't see, as Ehrenreich did, working people working with injuries because their employer offers no health insurance and a day off is not an option because "the loss of one day's pay will mean no groceries for the next." Perhaps Ehrenreich's most stunning conclusion is that "the 'working poor' as they are approvingly termed are in fact the major philanthropists of our society." They give of themselves so that the rest of us can enjoy our lifestyles as the nonpoor. The effects of these particular savage inequalities show up, of course, in the schools. |
| The
Keeping My Priorities Straight Award goes to Eugenia
Sitaras, a kindergarten teacher in Brooklyn, New York. Sitaras
failed to claim immediately her half of $130 million from the
New York Lotto because she had responsibilities to take care
of. "I had to finish preparing for my parent/teacher meetings."
Sitaras eventually took a one-time lump sum of $31 million. As
this is written, she is vacationing in Greece and says she plans
to continue teaching. |
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Last updated 24 October2001
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Delta Kappa International