Sunday, August 24, 2008

McCain Is the Pro-Choice Candidate -- in education

Obama would do the bidding of the teachers unions, and children would pay the price.

By PETE DU PONT

America's first charter school opened in Minnesota in 1992. Sixteen years later, there are 4,128 charter schools educating 1.24 million students in 40 states and the District of Columbia. Another 300 to 400 are expected to open in the coming school year.

Charter schools are public schools, but they are very different. The Center for Education Reform's 2008 Annual Survey reports that responding charter schools are one-third smaller than conventional public schools, with about 348 students, compared with 521. They spend less-about $7,625 per student, compared with $9,138 in public schools-and they receive only about 61% of the per pupil government funding that other public schools receive. They nevertheless offer longer school days, longer school years, often performance-based pay for teachers and more innovative curricula than conventional public schools. The majority of charter school students are classified as minority (52%), at risk (50%) or low income (54%).

Most important, charter school students often outperform other public school students. The Center for Education Reform reports that last year in Colorado, 73.3% of third- through eight-grade charter school students "performed at or above proficiency in reading, as opposed to 67.7% of conventional public school students." In California charter middle school's median Academic Performance Index was 767, compared with 726 in traditional middle schools.

Access to better schools can be aided by the availability of vouchers. Four years ago President Bush signed into law the Washington, D.C., Opportunity Scholarship Program, which made federally financed school choice available to disadvantaged children of low-income families in the capital. They can receive vouchers worth up to $7,500 a year to attend private schools of their choice. Some 1,900 students, from families with an average income of $23,000 a year, are now participating in the voucher program. They are attending better schools, they are doing better educationally (after just a few years), and their parents are more satisfied. So popular is the program that there are about four applicants for every school choice opening, meaning that 7,000 Washington families would like to have their children attend better schools of their choice. Even those families that do not benefit from the limited voucher scholarship program can benefit from attending charter schools. Some 25,000 Washington students are expected to do so this fall.

The contrast between the Washington public and charter schools is dramatic. The District of Columbia spends $13,400 per public school student, the third highest in the nation. According to the National Assessment of Educational Progress, the district ranked last in math scores and next to last in reading scores among all urban public school systems in the U.S. The Center for Education Reform found that students in charter elemtary schools were more proficient in math than conventional students by nine percentage points, 38% to 29%, and in reading by five percentage points, 43% to 38%.

Washington is the best example of three important educational conclusions: School choice (charter schools and vouchers) is improving the education of students; it is wildly popular among parents with children in public schools; and it provokes vigorous opposition from by teachers unions and the liberal political establishment. And it is an issue that deeply divides the Democratic and Republican presidential candidates, which means the November election may well determine its future.

School vouchers do not drain money from the district's public schools, for they are funded by federal government appropriations (and in any case represent only about 1.5% of its education spending). But congressional Democrats vigorously oppose the Opportunity Scholarship Program and are working to end it. The program expires at the end of the 2009-10 school year, and if it is not renewed, the 1,900 students who have been given an opportunity to get out of failed public schools would be sent back to schools that are doing much worse than the charters they attend. Eleanor Holmes Norton, the District of Columbia's nonvoting House delegate is strongly opposed to vouchers--"I can tell you that the Democratic Congress is not about to extend this [the Opportunity Scholarship] program"--and all but four Democrats voted against the voucher bill when in 2003 it passed the House on a 205-203 vote.

Teachers unions are also opposed. The National Education Association says "there is no need to set up new threats to schools for not performing" (they have that backwards); that "vouchers were not designed to help low-income children" (but they do); and "despite desperate efforts to make the voucher debate about school choice and improving opportunities for low-income students, vouchers remain an elitist strategy." But of course there is nothing elitist about helping low-income children leave failed public schools.

Barack Obama's thinking matches the NEA's. In February he said, "If there was any argument for vouchers, it was, 'Let's see if the experiment works.' And if it does, whatever my preconception, you do what is best for the kids." But when that drew public attention, his campaign reminded us "that throughout his career he has voted against voucher proposals" and his education plan "does not include vouchers, in any shape or form." Earlier this summer he spoke of his opposition to vouchers and the "tired rhetoric about vouchers and school choice"--very similar to the language the NEA president used in criticizing John McCain for embracing "the tired old rhetoric on vouchers."

Mr. Obama's 15-page education plan does not mention vouchers or charter schools, yet he, like 45% of other senators, has chosen to send his daughters to a private school. The Obamas may receive a voucher of sorts: The University of Chicago, where Michelle Obama works, offers discounts to employees who send their children to the university's Lab School.

Sen. McCain is of the opposite judgment; he is strongly for school choice. His Web site says, "Public education should be defined as one in which our public support for a child's education follows that child into the school the parent chooses," and "school choice for all who want it, and expansion of Opportunity Scholarships . . . will all be a part of a serious agenda of education reform."

School choice and charter schools are today the most important example we have of how to create better schools and improve children's education. That charter schools are less expensive and academically superior to public schools is what we need to understand about our education system.

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Britain's top universities 'favouring the poor'

Leading universities have been accused of discriminating against middle class pupils by favouring less-qualified students from poorer backgrounds. An investigation by The Daily Telegraph reveals five out of 20 elite institutions in the UK make lower grade offers to sixth-formers from poor-performing schools and deprived homes. The London School of Economics, Bristol, Nottingham, Newcastle, and Edinburgh all allow staff to choose students with worse grades. Overall, almost two-thirds of the elite Russell Group - which represents research-intensive universities - attach weighting to candidates' schools, home postcodes and whether family members also attended university as a tiebreaker during the application process.

The findings will fuel allegations of "social engineering" at the most sought-after universities. It comes just days after Oxford was criticised for using postcodes to identify students from less well-off areas when interviewing candidates. Under Government rules, all higher education institutions have a duty to encourage more students from non-traditional backgrounds to apply.

But Martin Stephen, high master of St Paul's, a fee-paying school in west London, branded the move "immensely dangerous and hugely unfair". "One is in very close danger of punishing a child for coming from a good home or going to a good school," he said. Alan Smithers, professor of education at Buckingham University, said: "There would be uproar if we tried to take into account this data when selecting our Olympic team. We don't seem to be able to recognise talent and develop talent as we do in the sporting arena."

At present just a fifth of students at Russell Group universities come from deprived backgrounds, compared to almost a third at other institutions. Three-quarters are from state schools, even though they account for 93 per cent of children educated in the UK. The Telegraph analysed admissions policies at all 20 universities.

Documents reveal that students from poor homes can receive vastly differing advantages depending on where they apply. Twelve universities instructed tutors to use some form of routinely gathered data about students' socio-economic or educational background as a standard part of the admissions procedure. An admissions policy drawn up by the LSE says: "The lower the average performance of the school, the more weight may be given to the candidate whose past examination performance significantly exceeds their school's average performance." Five universities also allow staff to use flexible grade offers to take applicants' backgrounds into consideration.

Newcastle University says: "Admissions tutors have discretion to make conditional offers which differ from the typical entry requirement, if in their judgement the typical entry requirement would not be appropriate because of the particular circumstances of an applicant." A spokesman for Bristol laid out a scenario in which two candidates apply for the same place, "one of whom is predicted to achieve AAB at A-level while the other is heading for AAA".

"The first attends a school that is dealing with many educational challenges and where AAB is exceptional," he said. "The second attends a school where AAA is not unusual. He or she has an uninspiring reference and a lacklustre personal statement. We think that offering a place to the first candidate rather than the second is both fair and in tune with our desire to recruit the students with the strongest academic qualities."

All of the universities who make use of personal information defended their decision, claiming that it allows them to operate a fair policy by identifying potential and not just prior achievement. But eight Russell Group universities - including Birmingham, Cardiff, Imperial, Queen's University Belfast and Southampton - consider the use of such information to be unfair. Some also said it breached their equal opportunities policies and could trigger a decline in academic standards.

An Imperial College London spokesman said: "Admission is based on academic merit... the College will not lower its admission standards as a means of widening access."

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Australia: School choice is 'guesswork' says Federal education boss

Julia Gillard says parents have no guarantee their child's school meets a minimum standard of education, acknowledging that choosing the best school is little more than guesswork. In an interview with The Weekend Australian, the Deputy Prime Minister and Education Minister said parents choosing a school for their child were forced to rely on rumour and prejudice, rather than being able to make a decision based on facts. "A lot of guessing goes into the decision and there should be more objective information," she said. "Giving full information to people would mean that they can actually know what's going on and, rather than judging individual schools or school systems on the basis of myths, rumour, prejudice or perception, people would have the facts,"

Ms Gillard called on the states and territories to agree to greater transparency of school results and features. Inspired by the changes made in New York City by the education chancellor Joel Klein, Ms Gillard is proposing schools make public as much information as they can, from the qualifications of their teachers to comparing their students' performance and improvement against groups of similar schools.

One of the features of the New York system is that schools consistently failing to meet benchmarks are closed, giving parents confidence that their child's school is meeting expected standards. Asked whether parents could have the same confidence in Australian schools, Ms Gillard agreed they could not. "I'm not sure that is the case at the moment. Perhaps as worrying as that statement is, from the point of view of being the federal Education Minister, I couldn't tell because the amount of information that's available doesn't enable me to make that judgment in a meaningful way," she said. "So I think the more information that's available to parents, the better. "People will still make choices for a wide variety of reasons."

Speaking at his Manhattan office yesterday, Mr Klein said he and Ms Gillard spoke at length about the need for federal governments to set clear national standards in education. "There should be very strong national standards and national assessments so we can say what it actually means to graduate from a high school, rather than letting each state set its own benchmark," he said. "Australian children are going to have to compete with kids all over the world, so the opportunity to set really strong standards and make the information about them transparent to parents, to educators, to everybody, seems to me to be a very intelligent central government function."

He conceded that letter grading of schools, while important, was not fundamental to the transparency process. "Put it this way, if she (Ms Gillard) were to make everything transparent, showing progress, tying it to meaningful national assessments but without putting a letter grade on schools, she would have accomplished a great deal," he said. "I think the power of letter grades is that they focus the mind. But data and information will also focus the mind, and you never want the best to be the enemy of the good."

Ms Gillard envisages a system in which schools report their students' achievements and the progress they are making, which would be compared with a group of peer schools with a similar student population. She said school reports should also include the staffing numbers and qualifications, welfare indicators about the students and how it defines its mission. The Government is still determining how to report student and school achievement, whether as performance bands or levels of proficiency as in New York.

"Peer grouping methodologies are very important to enable genuine comparisons of like with like," she said. "We know that kids across the nation go to schools with a set of abilities and challenges and we know that schools that cater for disadvantaged communities tend to be working with more students who need extra assistance."

Ms Gillard said the purpose was not to shame schools and students, but to identify those in need of extra assistance, and share the methods used by the most successful schools. "What's got a negative reaction from many around the place is the sense that was pushed very strongly by the Howard government that all of this was going to be about raw scores," she said. "School leaders and schoolteachers I think would respond well to feeling there is going to be an objective measurement and understanding of the nature of the particular task they face."

The New York system is underpinned by giving schools resources, giving the principals the autonomy to spend them, and then hold the principals accountable for meeting their own goals. Schools must set goals each year and are expected to show an improvement in their students every year, so that even the top-performing schools will not receive the highest rating if their students show no improvement. Schools failing to meet benchmarks year on year are restructured or closed while those that perform well receive financial rewards.

Ms Gillard ruled out a system of rewards and penalties in Australia and said the Government was looking to direct extra resources to the areas of most need. "We're looking at a model about supplementing resources to make a difference for disadvantaged schools rather than a rewards-based model," she said. "One would be in a better position to work out which schools need extra assistance, a better position to then measure the difference that the extra assistance and implemented programs make. That evaluation would enable us to identify and spread best practice."

Ms Gillard said bringing greater transparency to school performance and characteristics would confer greater accountability in the system, and motivate schools to improve each year. "I do think transparency of information in and of itself will spur people to do better and they will all want to be seen to be doing better," she said.

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