Rough Draft
Rodolfo F. Acuña, author of OCCUPIED AMERICA
On February 2, 1848, Mexico and the United States signed the Treaty of
Guadalupe Hidalgo, ending the Mexican American War. Very few places in
the United States or Mexico will be memorializing this date. Try
quizzing your parents or your peers. Even ask teachers what happened on
February 2, 1848 and I’ll bet 99 percent won’t know why February 2 is
important.
February 2 is the day when the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo was signed.
It ended the Mexican American War and the borders shifted south. This is
what Chicanos mean when the say the “borders crossed them.” The war was
not popular with all Americans. Ulysses S. Grant called it an unjust
war. Abraham Lincoln questioned the invasion of Mexico. And, Benito
Juarez opposed signing the treaty. Years later, Mexican President
Porfirio Díaz would lament, Pobre México tan Lejos de Díos y tan cerca a
Los Estados Unidos!
The War cost Mexico over half its land and made Mexicans a conquered
people. However, it is a date that most Americans and Mexican politicos
currying favor with the United States would like to forget. For
instance, there is no rush in either country to declare February 2 a
holiday. Holidays are supposed to be special days that mark special
dates. More often than not we celebrate important historical dates
without really thinking about them. A holiday makes it special.
We can all appreciate holidays. From the beginning of time, rulers
marked special days. The ancient Maya would chisel them on use glyphs to
mark the importance of events in their lives.
But, not all important dates are chosen as holidays. The truth be told,
may dates that are not holidays are more important than the holidays and
they affect our lives much more than the so-called special days.
For instance, February 2 takes on special meaning in the context of what
is happening today. Arizonans recently passed Proposition 200 which
requires state and local employees to verify the immigration status of
people applying for public benefits and report undocumented immigrants
or face possible criminal prosecution. It makes snitches out of teachers.
If we isolate Proposition 200 from the past, the Treaty of Guadalupe
Hidalgo has no relation to it. Some would say it is the mixing of apples
with oranges. However, what happens today is an extension of yesterday.
And while I do not want to get bogged down in the merits of the war,
because like my sainted mother used to say, Palo dado ni Díos lo quita,
what would the world look like if Mexico had not lost more than fifty
percent of its land? Would Mexicans and Central Americans be clamoring
to cross the border?
The fact is Mexico ceded vast mineral deposits to the United States.
Playing what if, if Mexico today had California and Texas, it would have
more oil than Saudi Arabia. Mexico would today be one of the richest
nations in the world. This wealth would have allowed Mexico to build an
infrastructure to give employment to its citizens.
This is relevant to Proposition 200 because Mexicans do not migrate to
the United States for democracy, free medical services or handouts. They
migrate to the United States because of a lack of jobs. It is part of
the global economy that moves poorer countries to richer ones.
Mexico has a population of more than a 100 million people. It is larger
than Spain and most European countries. Because of its vulnerability,
small family farms have been declining. The last time I looked 30
percent of Mexicans lived in rural areas. But, because Americans want
cheap fruits and vegetables, Mexican farmers don’t grow as much for
locally consumed products. U.S. companies pay more for strawberries so
they produce berries and not beans or corn. The commercialization of
farm land means that machines have replaced the small farmer. The result
is that in the next twenty-five years the rural population of Mexico
will decline from 30 to 5 percent. So where will 25 to 35 million
displaced Mexicans go?
Logically we can ask, what role February 2 play in these phenomena and
whether Proposition 200 will stop Mexicans from coming over. Once they
are over here, do we as compassionate human beings have a duty to feed,
cloth and care for undocumented workers? The Catholic Bishops have said
that it was a mortal sin to discriminate against immigrants.
Unfortunately, the Church has not enforced this dictum. For example, to
my knowledge it has not withheld the sacraments to any politico
supporting Proposition 200.
As I have raised in past articles, thirty years ago, Spain was the
principal exporter of workers in Europe. Today, it is one of the main
importers of labor. Why? Because it has jobs. The European Union taxes
the richest countries and gives subsidies to poorer European nations
have used that money to industrialize. In contrast, the United States
has a policy of keeping Latin American dependent. It gives money to the
military of Latin America who in turn keep the poor poorer. In 2000,
Mexico received $15 million in aid from the US. Egypt received a
billion; Egypt has a population of 76 million. It gave Israel $6billion.
Israel has a population of six million. Mexico has a population of 106
million.
Logically, if Americans wanted a solution, they would as in the case of
Europe try to strengthen the economies of Mexico and Central America.
History shows that quite the contrary the United States has frustrated
the development and reforms of the region.
Another fact is that Mexico’s economy and that of all Central America
would have collapsed without the migration to the United States. This
would have meant turmoil which the United States would have reacted with
military force. A case in point is the Central American revolutions of
the 1980s in which the US supported death squads.
Mexican workers send remittances to Mexico as do Central Americans.
Mexicans send more than $8 billion annually to relatives in Mexico.
Salvadorans another billion. Unlike the cases of Egypt and Israel, these
remittances do not cost the American taxpayer a cent. However, without
the remittances millions more undocumented workers would be forced to
come to the United States.
February 2, 1848 will continue to haunt Americans and Mexicans alike as
long as the Proposition 200s continue to be passed in the context of a
historical limbo. The past is the present.
Tuesday, January 25, 2005
An Apology to Neeley
Jan. 25, 2005, 10:37PM
By RICK CASEY
Copyright 2005 Houston Chronicle
I have a confession to make. In some previous columns I have been
entirely too hard on Texas Education Commissioner Shirley Neeley.
I have not properly appreciated her self-proclaimed role as head
cheerleader for our public schools.
Who else could respond to news reports indicating evidence of cheating
on the all-important Texas Assessment of Knowledge and Skills test at
more than 200 schools by asking the public to "please keep in mind that
no problems have been found at an additional 7,500 campuses"?
The boldness of that statement became clear when she announced at the
same time that her agency was hiring an outside expert because it had no
system for monitoring the administration of the test.
Now, I'm happy to say, Neeley's cheerleading efforts are going to be
amplified. Last night she was in Houston to speak at a fund-raiser for a
new Texas schools organization called the Friends of Texas Public
Schools.
Grass roots are greener
This "grass-roots organization" was founded and is headed by Scott
Milder, who used to be director of public relations for Galena Park ISD.
That's Commissioner Neeley's old district.
Now Milder works in Dallas for SHW Group Architects.
On his résumé, Milder says the firm hired him to help increase its
market share in school architecture, and that the firm's revenues in
that field have doubled to more than $40 million.
He says he's accomplished that by "getting involved in the world of
education, to see the world through their eyes. Exhibition, sponsoring
and attending sessions at educational conferences, for example have
opened opportunities to meet decision makers. Involvement on educational
association committees has opened doors for SHW Group as well."
Right to know
SHW Group's CEO, Gary Keep, is on the advisory board of the Friends.
According to its Web site (www.fotps.org), the organization has a noble
goal that eclipses that of opening doors:
"We at Friends of Texas Public Schools believe that the people and
businesses of Texas have a right to know that their money is being spent
wisely in our public schools."
The media, as you know, have conspired to keep that truth from the
people and businesses of Texas, and I, for one, am ashamed of my role in
that conspiracy.
To right that wrong, Milder has recruited an impressive board of
directors and corporate sponsors.
One of their principal goals is to raise money to conduct an advertising
and public relations campaign to get out the good news about schools.
Milder told Chronicle reporter Jason Spencer he plans a campaign that
includes billboards and radio and television advertising.
I'm impressed with the level of ambition, but I'm afraid Mr. Milder has
not been paying attention to the latest trends in educational public
relations, as pioneered by one of the all-time masters of the field, Rod
Paige.
It was Paige, after all, who produced the national image of the Houston
ISD as the nation's best large urban school district. He did it so well
that he went from being superintendent here to, until recently,
secretary of education in Washington.
In that role, Paige spawned a breakthrough in education public relations.
In selling President Bush's "No Child Left Behind" plan, Paige's
Department of Education didn't waste money on expensive billboards and
radio and TV advertising.
It quietly slipped $240,000 to columnist and commentator Armstrong
Williams to plug the controversial program. It was a brilliant
stratagem, given the credibility that columnists and talking head
commentators have these days.
It did come under some criticism, most of it terribly unfair. One
objection, however, had merit.
Williams himself said he was already in favor of "No Child Left Behind"
even before he got the cash and spoke favorably about it from his heart.
So the money was wasted.
Milder and his group can get much more bang from their buck if they can
obtain the services of, say, a columnist from the state's largest
newspaper whose coverage of the Texas school establishment has sometimes
trampled on the rights of people and businesses to know that their tax
money is well spent.
One who feels, or can be made to feel, very sorry. (See contact
information below.)
You can write to Rick Casey at P.O. Box 4260, Houston, TX 77210, or
e-mail him at rick.casey@chron.com.
http://www.chron.com/cs/CDA/ssistory.mpl/metropolitan/casey/3009642
By RICK CASEY
Copyright 2005 Houston Chronicle
I have a confession to make. In some previous columns I have been
entirely too hard on Texas Education Commissioner Shirley Neeley.
I have not properly appreciated her self-proclaimed role as head
cheerleader for our public schools.
Who else could respond to news reports indicating evidence of cheating
on the all-important Texas Assessment of Knowledge and Skills test at
more than 200 schools by asking the public to "please keep in mind that
no problems have been found at an additional 7,500 campuses"?
The boldness of that statement became clear when she announced at the
same time that her agency was hiring an outside expert because it had no
system for monitoring the administration of the test.
Now, I'm happy to say, Neeley's cheerleading efforts are going to be
amplified. Last night she was in Houston to speak at a fund-raiser for a
new Texas schools organization called the Friends of Texas Public
Schools.
Grass roots are greener
This "grass-roots organization" was founded and is headed by Scott
Milder, who used to be director of public relations for Galena Park ISD.
That's Commissioner Neeley's old district.
Now Milder works in Dallas for SHW Group Architects.
On his résumé, Milder says the firm hired him to help increase its
market share in school architecture, and that the firm's revenues in
that field have doubled to more than $40 million.
He says he's accomplished that by "getting involved in the world of
education, to see the world through their eyes. Exhibition, sponsoring
and attending sessions at educational conferences, for example have
opened opportunities to meet decision makers. Involvement on educational
association committees has opened doors for SHW Group as well."
Right to know
SHW Group's CEO, Gary Keep, is on the advisory board of the Friends.
According to its Web site (www.fotps.org), the organization has a noble
goal that eclipses that of opening doors:
"We at Friends of Texas Public Schools believe that the people and
businesses of Texas have a right to know that their money is being spent
wisely in our public schools."
The media, as you know, have conspired to keep that truth from the
people and businesses of Texas, and I, for one, am ashamed of my role in
that conspiracy.
To right that wrong, Milder has recruited an impressive board of
directors and corporate sponsors.
One of their principal goals is to raise money to conduct an advertising
and public relations campaign to get out the good news about schools.
Milder told Chronicle reporter Jason Spencer he plans a campaign that
includes billboards and radio and television advertising.
I'm impressed with the level of ambition, but I'm afraid Mr. Milder has
not been paying attention to the latest trends in educational public
relations, as pioneered by one of the all-time masters of the field, Rod
Paige.
It was Paige, after all, who produced the national image of the Houston
ISD as the nation's best large urban school district. He did it so well
that he went from being superintendent here to, until recently,
secretary of education in Washington.
In that role, Paige spawned a breakthrough in education public relations.
In selling President Bush's "No Child Left Behind" plan, Paige's
Department of Education didn't waste money on expensive billboards and
radio and TV advertising.
It quietly slipped $240,000 to columnist and commentator Armstrong
Williams to plug the controversial program. It was a brilliant
stratagem, given the credibility that columnists and talking head
commentators have these days.
It did come under some criticism, most of it terribly unfair. One
objection, however, had merit.
Williams himself said he was already in favor of "No Child Left Behind"
even before he got the cash and spoke favorably about it from his heart.
So the money was wasted.
Milder and his group can get much more bang from their buck if they can
obtain the services of, say, a columnist from the state's largest
newspaper whose coverage of the Texas school establishment has sometimes
trampled on the rights of people and businesses to know that their tax
money is well spent.
One who feels, or can be made to feel, very sorry. (See contact
information below.)
You can write to Rick Casey at P.O. Box 4260, Houston, TX 77210, or
e-mail him at rick.casey@chron.com.
http://www.chron.com/cs/CDA/ssistory.mpl/metropolitan/casey/3009642
Monday, January 24, 2005
On Charter Schools: Either believe the ultra right or believe educational experts
Commentary by Elsa Salazar Cade
January 24, 2005
According to the GAO report (The United States Accountability office) January 2005: http://www.gao.gov/cgi-bin/getrpt?GAO-05-5: Nearly all of the 39 states in our survey reported that they released charter schools from some traditional public school requirements. - All but 2 states offered release in one or more of 30 areas that states identified, from reporting requirements to staffing practices to student discipline. The greatest number of states released charter schools from teacher termination procedures and length of school day (21 states), teacher compensation and benefits (22 states), collective bargaining procedures (22 states), and requirements established for local school boards (23 states). Officials in 6 states reported that the state released charter schools from almost all traditional public school requirements, while a few requirements, such as the minimum number of teachers required, the use of district-approved text books, and graduation requirements, were released in only a few states. Most states released charter schools from some traditional school requirements.
The most that the report said was that we needed more data. According to the report a school may fail to meet the improvement targets for three years before our kids get extra help!
"If a school does not meet the target for a third year, students must be offered supplementary educational services, such as tutoring. " page 26 of the report GAO-05-5. Three years is a HUGE amount of time in a child's life. The tutoring would not start until the child's fourth year in school. Who would deliver the tutoring the same school that fell down in educational delivery?
On top of that, The study by the National Assessment Governing Board, which examined data for about 6,500 charter school students and 376,000 regular public school students—found that charter school children taught by teachers with four years of experience or less performed significantly worse in both reading and math than students in regular public schools with similarly inexperienced teachers. And students at charter schools were far more likely to have such teachers
It also found that far more teachers in charter schools lacked regular teaching credentials. Charter schools have poor infrastructure, and lack educators with credentials. This sounds a lot like failing neglected public schools.
If lack of credentials and release of traditional requirements look like a winning ticket for your child, go to it I guess. To me it looks like more of the same. Poor people of color are given the same choice they had before. The right wing ideologues propose withdrawing funding from already poorly funded schools and sending it to charter schools with a variety of mandates.
But, we need more data before we find out they don't work. This gives the appearance of reestablishing the separate but equal system. Charters schools with fundamentalist Christian mandates get federal funding and the have-nots get to go to "other" schools that don't have to meet the requirements of regular schools. Catholic schools and other private schools have to charge tuition in order to run their schools. Those folks know that if they want their children to get religious education or elitist education,
they have to pay for it.
The charter system sets up publicly funded private schools and at the same time off loads minority children on to schools that don't have to meet requirements. This sounds like "separate but equal" to me.
They won't "throw" money at public education, but they are willing to spend money on collecting data on charter schools to see if they work or not.
Frankly, common sense tells you that to release charter schools from having to meet the requirements of a public school doesn't really make sense. Yeah, in a time when public education is establishing standards of education for all Americans, we are sitting back and letting the Bushies tell you that less is more for Hispanic children.
Don't take it sitting down write your congressman! Demand equity in education for Hispanic American children. Racist educational policy remains entrenched regardless of what you call it!
For a view from the left go to......... Conservatives flip flop on research standards: http://www.prospect.org/web/page.ww?section=root&name=ViewWeb&articleId=8638
http://www.gao.gov/cgi-bin/getrpt?GAO-05-5
January 24, 2005
According to the GAO report (The United States Accountability office) January 2005: http://www.gao.gov/cgi-bin/getrpt?GAO-05-5: Nearly all of the 39 states in our survey reported that they released charter schools from some traditional public school requirements. - All but 2 states offered release in one or more of 30 areas that states identified, from reporting requirements to staffing practices to student discipline. The greatest number of states released charter schools from teacher termination procedures and length of school day (21 states), teacher compensation and benefits (22 states), collective bargaining procedures (22 states), and requirements established for local school boards (23 states). Officials in 6 states reported that the state released charter schools from almost all traditional public school requirements, while a few requirements, such as the minimum number of teachers required, the use of district-approved text books, and graduation requirements, were released in only a few states. Most states released charter schools from some traditional school requirements.
The most that the report said was that we needed more data. According to the report a school may fail to meet the improvement targets for three years before our kids get extra help!
"If a school does not meet the target for a third year, students must be offered supplementary educational services, such as tutoring. " page 26 of the report GAO-05-5. Three years is a HUGE amount of time in a child's life. The tutoring would not start until the child's fourth year in school. Who would deliver the tutoring the same school that fell down in educational delivery?
On top of that, The study by the National Assessment Governing Board, which examined data for about 6,500 charter school students and 376,000 regular public school students—found that charter school children taught by teachers with four years of experience or less performed significantly worse in both reading and math than students in regular public schools with similarly inexperienced teachers. And students at charter schools were far more likely to have such teachers
It also found that far more teachers in charter schools lacked regular teaching credentials. Charter schools have poor infrastructure, and lack educators with credentials. This sounds a lot like failing neglected public schools.
If lack of credentials and release of traditional requirements look like a winning ticket for your child, go to it I guess. To me it looks like more of the same. Poor people of color are given the same choice they had before. The right wing ideologues propose withdrawing funding from already poorly funded schools and sending it to charter schools with a variety of mandates.
But, we need more data before we find out they don't work. This gives the appearance of reestablishing the separate but equal system. Charters schools with fundamentalist Christian mandates get federal funding and the have-nots get to go to "other" schools that don't have to meet the requirements of regular schools. Catholic schools and other private schools have to charge tuition in order to run their schools. Those folks know that if they want their children to get religious education or elitist education,
they have to pay for it.
The charter system sets up publicly funded private schools and at the same time off loads minority children on to schools that don't have to meet requirements. This sounds like "separate but equal" to me.
They won't "throw" money at public education, but they are willing to spend money on collecting data on charter schools to see if they work or not.
Frankly, common sense tells you that to release charter schools from having to meet the requirements of a public school doesn't really make sense. Yeah, in a time when public education is establishing standards of education for all Americans, we are sitting back and letting the Bushies tell you that less is more for Hispanic children.
Don't take it sitting down write your congressman! Demand equity in education for Hispanic American children. Racist educational policy remains entrenched regardless of what you call it!
For a view from the left go to......... Conservatives flip flop on research standards: http://www.prospect.org/web/page.ww?section=root&name=ViewWeb&articleId=8638
http://www.gao.gov/cgi-bin/getrpt?GAO-05-5
An Inauguration Day Betrayal on Civil Rights: The Heart of Texas
Note: Recent important editorial on how the language in Judge Dietz’ ruling may compromise the current school finance battle. -Angela
Texas Civil Rights Review
Weekend Edition January 22 / 24, 2005
By GREG MOSES
In late December, Texas media headlined the State Attorney General's
announcement that he would go directly to the Texas Supreme Court to
overturn a trial-court order for reform in school funding. On that same day,
the same media did not report on a motion filed in the trial court by the
Mexican American Legal Defense Fund (MALDEF) asking for an even stronger
ruling.
And this week, as well-fed Texans feted their first family in Washington,
the pattern of selective perception continued. On Wednesday, as the high
rollers of Texas power tightened their ties and buffed their boots for a
pre-inaugural orgy of schmooze, the State Attorney General repeated his
request for a fast track hearing before the Texas Supreme Court. And all
those things made headlines.
But with the news agenda hijacked by inaugural or anti-inaugural activities
on Thursday, the property-rich districts in the school funding trial broke
ranks with their poorer cousins at MALDEF and asked the Texas Supreme Court
to get double busy for them, too. As this story goes to press, there is no
mention of this significant event in the usual places Texans look for hot
buzz.
So that makes two times in two months that the State Attorney General was
crowned king of the media battle against school funding reform in Texas,
getting all His Majesty's Ink, without even a fair or balanced notice, not
even in nine-point type, that something else is going on.
"I'm surprised altogether by the State and the West Orange Cove Plaintiffs
efforts to circumvent the laws we have in place," says MALDEF attorney David
Hinojosa, speaking by telephone from his San Antonio office Friday evening.
While MALDEF and other allies for equity were openly cheering the original
trial-court ruling that ordered the state to reform its school funding
during the upcoming legislative session in Austin, a closer reading revealed
that the judge had written a small puzzle.
At one point in the Findings of Fact and Conclusions of Law handed down on
Nov. 30, District Judge John Dietz found that the state fails to provide
constitutionally guaranteed education to Texas children because "the current
funding capacity of the Texas school finance system, in conjunction with the
inequitable access to revenue in the system, does not provide property-poor
districts with sufficient access to revenue" (FOF 294). This phrasing
suggests that not only is the state funding too low to be constitutional
overall, but also that the property-poor districts can't get their hands on
their constitutionally equitable share.
About 20 pages later, however, the judge says that "a structural disparity
in access to revenues, that, while not reaching the level of a
constitutional violation at this time, still puts property-poor districts at
a financial disadvantage when compared to Chapter 41 districts [the legal
definition of a property-rich district under Texas law]" (FOF 435). Which is
to say, what? That "inequitable access" to funds among property-poor
districts is pretty bad, but not really a constitutional concern for Texas
at this time? In its Dec. 28 motion to the trial court, MALDEF asks to have
this language revised.
All through this latest round of the school funding trial, property-rich
districts allied with property-poor districts because both sides said out
loud in court that they supported each other's claims. The property poor
districts agreed to the property-rich argument that Texas needed more money
overall in absolute dollars. If this argument prevailed in court the
property-rich districts would get to raise and spend more money from their
gilded tax bases at home.
In return for this kind of support from the property-poor side, the
property-rich districts gave lip service to the claim that inequities
between rich and poor districts also deserved the court's attention. Any
court-ordered increase in overall revenues should be accompanied by enough
re-distribution of wealth to keep the tax bases equitable, so said the
rich-district attorneys in court.
Smells like catfish bait in August when the property-rich districts suddenly
join the state's effort to get inside the jurisdiction of the all-Republican
Supreme Court, as MALDEF is trying to finish up its equity advocacy at the
trial-court level. The rich districts already have the ruling they need from
the trial court, don't they? They've got their constitutional issue in the
pocket that mandates more overall funding at higher tax rates. Why do they
suddenly need to speed up the appeal?
"The issue of equitable access to revenues for maintenance and operations
funding has yet to be fully rendered by the trial court, yet the
property-rich districts think certain issues should be yanked up by the
Supreme Court?" asks Hinojosa in a question punctuated by 500 years of
exasperation.
Hinojosa wears his tired voice like a black-tie tuxedo some days, and he was
formally weary in tone and cadence as he talked about the one-two punch of
Wednesday-Thursday motions filed by state attorneys and rich districts who
are suddenly rushing into each other at the Supreme Court door.
It's plain as day to us lowly observers of Texas politics that a deal has
been cut to enrich the richies and cut the poor folks out at the final
buzzer. It's the only theory that makes sense. Only thing at this point for
us know-nothings is to ask: is it a done deal yet? When everybody gets back
from the parties in Washington, we'll see. But you won't get the headline
from the usual media publishers, so please stay tuned.
Meanwhile the solidarity chant of the moment seems pretty clear to me:
finish the trial court business you black-boot Texas lawyers, before you go
the appeal.
Note: motions filed by the Texas Attorney General and the West Orange Cove
Plaintiffs are available in pdf format at the Downloads section of the Texas
Civil Rights Review: http://texascivilrightsreview.org/phpnuke
Greg Moses is editor of the Texas Civil Rights Review and author of
Revolution of Conscience: Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Philosophy of
Nonviolence. His chapter on civil rights under Clinton and Bush appears in
Dime's Worth of Difference, edited by Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St.
Clair. He can be reached at: gmosesx@prodigy.net
Texas Civil Rights Review
Weekend Edition January 22 / 24, 2005
By GREG MOSES
In late December, Texas media headlined the State Attorney General's
announcement that he would go directly to the Texas Supreme Court to
overturn a trial-court order for reform in school funding. On that same day,
the same media did not report on a motion filed in the trial court by the
Mexican American Legal Defense Fund (MALDEF) asking for an even stronger
ruling.
And this week, as well-fed Texans feted their first family in Washington,
the pattern of selective perception continued. On Wednesday, as the high
rollers of Texas power tightened their ties and buffed their boots for a
pre-inaugural orgy of schmooze, the State Attorney General repeated his
request for a fast track hearing before the Texas Supreme Court. And all
those things made headlines.
But with the news agenda hijacked by inaugural or anti-inaugural activities
on Thursday, the property-rich districts in the school funding trial broke
ranks with their poorer cousins at MALDEF and asked the Texas Supreme Court
to get double busy for them, too. As this story goes to press, there is no
mention of this significant event in the usual places Texans look for hot
buzz.
So that makes two times in two months that the State Attorney General was
crowned king of the media battle against school funding reform in Texas,
getting all His Majesty's Ink, without even a fair or balanced notice, not
even in nine-point type, that something else is going on.
"I'm surprised altogether by the State and the West Orange Cove Plaintiffs
efforts to circumvent the laws we have in place," says MALDEF attorney David
Hinojosa, speaking by telephone from his San Antonio office Friday evening.
While MALDEF and other allies for equity were openly cheering the original
trial-court ruling that ordered the state to reform its school funding
during the upcoming legislative session in Austin, a closer reading revealed
that the judge had written a small puzzle.
At one point in the Findings of Fact and Conclusions of Law handed down on
Nov. 30, District Judge John Dietz found that the state fails to provide
constitutionally guaranteed education to Texas children because "the current
funding capacity of the Texas school finance system, in conjunction with the
inequitable access to revenue in the system, does not provide property-poor
districts with sufficient access to revenue" (FOF 294). This phrasing
suggests that not only is the state funding too low to be constitutional
overall, but also that the property-poor districts can't get their hands on
their constitutionally equitable share.
About 20 pages later, however, the judge says that "a structural disparity
in access to revenues, that, while not reaching the level of a
constitutional violation at this time, still puts property-poor districts at
a financial disadvantage when compared to Chapter 41 districts [the legal
definition of a property-rich district under Texas law]" (FOF 435). Which is
to say, what? That "inequitable access" to funds among property-poor
districts is pretty bad, but not really a constitutional concern for Texas
at this time? In its Dec. 28 motion to the trial court, MALDEF asks to have
this language revised.
All through this latest round of the school funding trial, property-rich
districts allied with property-poor districts because both sides said out
loud in court that they supported each other's claims. The property poor
districts agreed to the property-rich argument that Texas needed more money
overall in absolute dollars. If this argument prevailed in court the
property-rich districts would get to raise and spend more money from their
gilded tax bases at home.
In return for this kind of support from the property-poor side, the
property-rich districts gave lip service to the claim that inequities
between rich and poor districts also deserved the court's attention. Any
court-ordered increase in overall revenues should be accompanied by enough
re-distribution of wealth to keep the tax bases equitable, so said the
rich-district attorneys in court.
Smells like catfish bait in August when the property-rich districts suddenly
join the state's effort to get inside the jurisdiction of the all-Republican
Supreme Court, as MALDEF is trying to finish up its equity advocacy at the
trial-court level. The rich districts already have the ruling they need from
the trial court, don't they? They've got their constitutional issue in the
pocket that mandates more overall funding at higher tax rates. Why do they
suddenly need to speed up the appeal?
"The issue of equitable access to revenues for maintenance and operations
funding has yet to be fully rendered by the trial court, yet the
property-rich districts think certain issues should be yanked up by the
Supreme Court?" asks Hinojosa in a question punctuated by 500 years of
exasperation.
Hinojosa wears his tired voice like a black-tie tuxedo some days, and he was
formally weary in tone and cadence as he talked about the one-two punch of
Wednesday-Thursday motions filed by state attorneys and rich districts who
are suddenly rushing into each other at the Supreme Court door.
It's plain as day to us lowly observers of Texas politics that a deal has
been cut to enrich the richies and cut the poor folks out at the final
buzzer. It's the only theory that makes sense. Only thing at this point for
us know-nothings is to ask: is it a done deal yet? When everybody gets back
from the parties in Washington, we'll see. But you won't get the headline
from the usual media publishers, so please stay tuned.
Meanwhile the solidarity chant of the moment seems pretty clear to me:
finish the trial court business you black-boot Texas lawyers, before you go
the appeal.
Note: motions filed by the Texas Attorney General and the West Orange Cove
Plaintiffs are available in pdf format at the Downloads section of the Texas
Civil Rights Review: http://texascivilrightsreview.org/phpnuke
Greg Moses is editor of the Texas Civil Rights Review and author of
Revolution of Conscience: Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Philosophy of
Nonviolence. His chapter on civil rights under Clinton and Bush appears in
Dime's Worth of Difference, edited by Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St.
Clair. He can be reached at: gmosesx@prodigy.net
Sunday, January 23, 2005
First Things First on School Funding
By Kent Grusendorf
Special to the Star-Telegram
Once again, the Texas school finance system has been found unconstitutional.
Mark Yudof, chancellor of the University of Texas System, said in the early 1990s that school finance is "like a Russian novel -- it takes a long time, is very dull and boring, and everyone dies in the end."
Harvey Kronberg, editor of the online Quorum Report, recently said of school finance, "There really isn't any solution that's risk-free, or even low-risk."
There are no easy answers to school finance -- just tough choices.
I know we can do it right in 2005. Virtually every state leader has acknowledged the importance of the issue, and it is at the top of the legislative agenda.
We have thousands of dedicated, hard-working educators in Texas. They have made tremendous strides in recent years. We must give them the support and freedom necessary to do what is best for all Texas students.
I believe that we will put more money into public education. I believe that legislators will make the tough decisions necessary to solve the problem. Nothing we do is more important than the education of youth.
However, we owe it to the public to do first things first.
During the past 18 months, we have heard from hundreds of state and national experts on this subject. We have taken endless hours of testimony.
Most of the discussions have been about money: How much is enough? What is adequate funding? The focus has been on money rather than results and the tough choices necessary to attain the best results.
Before we decide how much new money we will put into education, we must first examine how the $30 billion we are currently spending is being allocated.
Are we getting maximum benefit from each dollar spent? Are we receiving $30 billion worth of results? Until we answer such questions, it is inappropriate to calculate how much additional money is needed.
School superintendents statewide are fairly unanimous in voicing the need for additional funding. A minority of educators, however, tell me that we need to spend our current resources more wisely and that more money should not be allocated until greater efficiency is attained. Business leaders tend to send a similar message.
All three groups are right.
How much is enough? During the past decade, we have increased educational spending in Texas significantly. In fact, when the first Edgewood decision came down, we were spending an average of about $3,800 per student. Today we spend well over $8,000 per child.
The truth is that there will never be enough. Regardless of how much we increase spending, there will always be a demand for more. There will always be another good program, another wonderful vendor, another potential employee or consultant, always something else to do or try.
Individuals and institutions must make tough choices in order to allocate scarce resources in the most effective manner to achieve the best possible results. Allocate scarce resources effectively, and you will find success. Allocate them poorly, and you will suffer failure.
Our school finance study has found that some schools are doing a much better job of resource allocation than others. Some are spending most of their education dollars wisely to produce classroom results; others are wasting too much on administrative expenses or just making poor decisions.
In a statewide study of school efficiency last year, Lori Taylor of Texas A&M University found that, if all school districts were as efficient as the most efficient district in Texas, we would save approximately $1.5 billion statewide. If all were as efficient as the Arlington district, we would save about $400 million statewide.
Conversely, if all districts were as inefficient as West Orange-Cove (one of the lead plaintiffs in the lawsuit for more money), we would be required to spend another $4 billion statewide.
Recently, an Austin judge ruled that certain parts of the school finance system have created a de facto statewide property tax. I believe this is a valid argument that probably will be upheld by the Texas Supreme Court.
However, the remainder of his ruling was significantly more activist in nature. He defied all historical data and ruled that the Legislature should appropriate more money for education.
I believe that we will put additional money into our schools, but I do not believe that this is a decision for a Travis County judge to make.
During the past few years, some school districts have spent millions of dollars -- money intended for the education of kids -- on legal fees to sue the state. In effect, the districts in the recent school case are using taxpayer dollars to sue the taxpayers for more money. In the opinion of many, those millions should have been spent on classroom efforts, not courtroom efforts.
In addition to waste at the local level, we have some built-in inefficiencies driven by the state. For example, the Wilmer-Hutchins district superintendent was sent home on Nov. 1 after being indicted the previous week. However, he was sent home on paid leave.
State law requires that an educator remain on the payroll until all due process is afforded. Districts can waste thousands of classroom dollars and spend months trying to get someone off the payroll.
Keeping an ineffective educator on the payroll -- administrator or teacher -- is an injustice to students and is a built-in statewide inefficiency.
We grossly underpay our best teachers. However, there will never be enough money to pay every teacher what the best teacher is worth. Great teachers are frustrated when they receive the same money and respect as someone across the hall who is not doing as good a job.
We lose many of our best teachers to the private sector or to school administration because we treat them all the same. Few other professions are treated this way, with the best and the worst all receiving an annual step increase. We must find a fair and equitable way to reward those who are doing a great job.
During a hearing in Austin, one panel of experts told us that it would be wiser to put $1 billion of new money into performance incentives than to put an additional $10 billion into the status quo. Spending more money to buy the same thing that we are currently purchasing may go a long way to purchase votes, but it is not at all beneficial for our students.
We must revamp the system and empower local educators to make common-sense decisions that will benefit their students.
We must have greater transparency and financial accountability to ensure that taxpayer money is spent wisely to benefit Texas students.
We must establish clear consequences for failing schools to ensure that every Texas student has a fair opportunity for success.
And we must make the tough choices necessary to reward success.
We must focus on the results that we want to achieve and spend our scarce resources in a manner that will achieve those results.
That requires tough choices by the Legislature, and it also will require tough choices by school administrators statewide. Texas students are just too important for us to accept anything less.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Kent Grusendorf is chairman of the House Public Education Committee.
Republican Kent Grusendorf has been an Arlington state representative since 1987.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
© 2005 Star-Telegram and wire service sources. All Rights Reserved.
http://www.dfw.com
Special to the Star-Telegram
Once again, the Texas school finance system has been found unconstitutional.
Mark Yudof, chancellor of the University of Texas System, said in the early 1990s that school finance is "like a Russian novel -- it takes a long time, is very dull and boring, and everyone dies in the end."
Harvey Kronberg, editor of the online Quorum Report, recently said of school finance, "There really isn't any solution that's risk-free, or even low-risk."
There are no easy answers to school finance -- just tough choices.
I know we can do it right in 2005. Virtually every state leader has acknowledged the importance of the issue, and it is at the top of the legislative agenda.
We have thousands of dedicated, hard-working educators in Texas. They have made tremendous strides in recent years. We must give them the support and freedom necessary to do what is best for all Texas students.
I believe that we will put more money into public education. I believe that legislators will make the tough decisions necessary to solve the problem. Nothing we do is more important than the education of youth.
However, we owe it to the public to do first things first.
During the past 18 months, we have heard from hundreds of state and national experts on this subject. We have taken endless hours of testimony.
Most of the discussions have been about money: How much is enough? What is adequate funding? The focus has been on money rather than results and the tough choices necessary to attain the best results.
Before we decide how much new money we will put into education, we must first examine how the $30 billion we are currently spending is being allocated.
Are we getting maximum benefit from each dollar spent? Are we receiving $30 billion worth of results? Until we answer such questions, it is inappropriate to calculate how much additional money is needed.
School superintendents statewide are fairly unanimous in voicing the need for additional funding. A minority of educators, however, tell me that we need to spend our current resources more wisely and that more money should not be allocated until greater efficiency is attained. Business leaders tend to send a similar message.
All three groups are right.
How much is enough? During the past decade, we have increased educational spending in Texas significantly. In fact, when the first Edgewood decision came down, we were spending an average of about $3,800 per student. Today we spend well over $8,000 per child.
The truth is that there will never be enough. Regardless of how much we increase spending, there will always be a demand for more. There will always be another good program, another wonderful vendor, another potential employee or consultant, always something else to do or try.
Individuals and institutions must make tough choices in order to allocate scarce resources in the most effective manner to achieve the best possible results. Allocate scarce resources effectively, and you will find success. Allocate them poorly, and you will suffer failure.
Our school finance study has found that some schools are doing a much better job of resource allocation than others. Some are spending most of their education dollars wisely to produce classroom results; others are wasting too much on administrative expenses or just making poor decisions.
In a statewide study of school efficiency last year, Lori Taylor of Texas A&M University found that, if all school districts were as efficient as the most efficient district in Texas, we would save approximately $1.5 billion statewide. If all were as efficient as the Arlington district, we would save about $400 million statewide.
Conversely, if all districts were as inefficient as West Orange-Cove (one of the lead plaintiffs in the lawsuit for more money), we would be required to spend another $4 billion statewide.
Recently, an Austin judge ruled that certain parts of the school finance system have created a de facto statewide property tax. I believe this is a valid argument that probably will be upheld by the Texas Supreme Court.
However, the remainder of his ruling was significantly more activist in nature. He defied all historical data and ruled that the Legislature should appropriate more money for education.
I believe that we will put additional money into our schools, but I do not believe that this is a decision for a Travis County judge to make.
During the past few years, some school districts have spent millions of dollars -- money intended for the education of kids -- on legal fees to sue the state. In effect, the districts in the recent school case are using taxpayer dollars to sue the taxpayers for more money. In the opinion of many, those millions should have been spent on classroom efforts, not courtroom efforts.
In addition to waste at the local level, we have some built-in inefficiencies driven by the state. For example, the Wilmer-Hutchins district superintendent was sent home on Nov. 1 after being indicted the previous week. However, he was sent home on paid leave.
State law requires that an educator remain on the payroll until all due process is afforded. Districts can waste thousands of classroom dollars and spend months trying to get someone off the payroll.
Keeping an ineffective educator on the payroll -- administrator or teacher -- is an injustice to students and is a built-in statewide inefficiency.
We grossly underpay our best teachers. However, there will never be enough money to pay every teacher what the best teacher is worth. Great teachers are frustrated when they receive the same money and respect as someone across the hall who is not doing as good a job.
We lose many of our best teachers to the private sector or to school administration because we treat them all the same. Few other professions are treated this way, with the best and the worst all receiving an annual step increase. We must find a fair and equitable way to reward those who are doing a great job.
During a hearing in Austin, one panel of experts told us that it would be wiser to put $1 billion of new money into performance incentives than to put an additional $10 billion into the status quo. Spending more money to buy the same thing that we are currently purchasing may go a long way to purchase votes, but it is not at all beneficial for our students.
We must revamp the system and empower local educators to make common-sense decisions that will benefit their students.
We must have greater transparency and financial accountability to ensure that taxpayer money is spent wisely to benefit Texas students.
We must establish clear consequences for failing schools to ensure that every Texas student has a fair opportunity for success.
And we must make the tough choices necessary to reward success.
We must focus on the results that we want to achieve and spend our scarce resources in a manner that will achieve those results.
That requires tough choices by the Legislature, and it also will require tough choices by school administrators statewide. Texas students are just too important for us to accept anything less.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Kent Grusendorf is chairman of the House Public Education Committee.
Republican Kent Grusendorf has been an Arlington state representative since 1987.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
© 2005 Star-Telegram and wire service sources. All Rights Reserved.
http://www.dfw.com
Keeping Public Schools Public
Testing Companies Mine for Gold
by Barbara Miner
There's gold in them there tests.
Thanks to the testing mandated by the federal No Child Left
Behind (NCLB) legislation, private companies are mining the
testing field with all the power their accountants, test-
makers, and marketers can muster.
States are likely to spend $1.9 billion to $5.3 billion
between 2002 and 2008 to implement NCLB-mandated tests,
according to the non-partisan Government Accounting Office
(GAO).
Those GAO figures cover just the direct costs of six years
of developing, scoring, and reporting the tests˜which is
performed under contract with private companies. Add in
indirect costs, such as the amount of classroom teacher
time devoted to coordinating and giving the tests and,
increasingly, preparing students with ongoing "practice"
tests, and testing experts say the figure could be 8 to 15
times higher.
The amount of education money devoted to standardized tests
is only part of the problem. Invariably, the private
testing companies that control standardized testing operate
behind closed doors with little to no public
accountability. They function as subsections of
multinational conglomerates that view the U.S. testing
industry as just one tentacle of publishing and
entertainment empires that span the globe.
"There's very little oversight of the testing industry,"
notes Walt Haney, an education professor at Boston College
and a senior researcher at its National Board on
Educational Testing and Public Policy (NBETPP). "In fact,
there is more public oversight of the pet industry and the
food we feed our dogs than there is for the quality of
tests we make our kids take."
Where's the Outcry?
There has been little public outcry over the fact that
private, multinational companies operating beyond public
oversight are determining which students, schools, and
districts in the United States are deemed "failures" and
which are deemed "successes." Given the secrecy that
shrouds testing company operations, information is
negligible. What the public doesn't know, the public
doesn't complain about.
Critics of standardized testing also point to a third
problem beyond the amount of money and the secrecy. That's
the problem of missed opportunity. There's little doubt
that the Bush administration's obsession with standardized
tests as the sole determinant of school success has
undermined reforms that focus on teaching children to think
and to do more than fill in circles on test forms.
"The amount of money spent on standardized testing is not
the real problem," notes Monty Neill, executive director of
the Boston-based group FairTest. "The real problem is how
it distorts teaching and learning."
The Testing Explosion
NCLB, introduced two days after George W. Bush took office
and passed a year later, instituted an unprecedented level
of federal mandates for testing public school students. The
mandates built on bipartisan support for a corporate-
influenced agenda of increased standardized testing. But
NCLB carried that agenda to new levels, both with the
number of tests and the harsh sanctions for those schools
not meeting predetermined levels of test progress.
NCLB requires annual testing of students in third through
eighth grades in mathematics and reading or language arts,
and testing once in high school. Beginning in 2007-08,
states will also be required to give tests in science at
least once in elementary, middle, and high school. All
told, there will be 17 NCLB tests each year for school
districts. This translates into unfathomable amounts of
school time devoted to standardized testing and teaching to
those tests. It also creates untold business opportunities
for the companies that produce the tests. (If you add in
district- and state-mandated tests on top of NCLB
requirements, and the growing number of "practice" tests
given to students so they will do well on the "real" tests,
the number of tests schools must administer skyrockets.)
Shrouded in Secrecy
Ironically, although Bush has used the rhetoric of
accountability to justify NCLB, the finances of the testing
companies are almost impossible to uncover, the tests
themselves are generally not made public, and mistakes in
the tests often come to light only when angry parents,
students, or school administrators threaten to sue over
mistakes in scoring. (See sidebar.)
While the public knows little of the testing companies,
lobbyists have ensured that legislators are well aware of
those corporate interests. Following Bush's first election
and his unveiling of NCLB, testing company representatives
descended on Congress to push for the type of standardized
testing that Bush had made so popular in Texas.
"I've been lobbying on education issues since 1982, but the
test publishers have been active at a level I've never seen
before," Bruce Hunter of the American Association of School
Administrators said at the time. "At every hearing, every
discussion, the big test publishers are always present with
at least one lobbyist, sometimes more."
And of course, there are the personal connections between
the Bush Administration and the testing industry. A January
2002 article in The Nation points out that the Bush
administration has a particularly "cozy relationship" with
the testing company run by McGraw-Hill. The heart of this
relationship, the article notes, "lies the three-generation
social mingling between the McGraw and Bush families. The
McGraws are old Bush friends, dating back to the 1930s."
In fact, on the first day he assumed his job at the White
House, Bush invited Harold McGraw III into his office,
according to The Nation .
The Testing Companies
Three companies have traditionally dominated the market for
developing tests: Harcourt Educational Measurement, CTB
McGraw-Hill, and Riverside Publishing. All are part of
larger conglomerates, and their financial data generally
are not reported separately from the controlling
corporation.
A fourth, little-known company, Pearson Educational
Measurement out of Iowa City, Iowa, has significantly
increased its market share in recent years. According to
the Dec. 1, 2004 Education Week , Pearson has for now
overtaken Riverside as the third main testing company.
With the testing frenzy engendered by NCLB, the testing
industry is going through a shake-up and newer companies
are competing for state contracts. Some of the newer
players: Measured Progress out of Dover, N.H., Data
Recognition out of Minnesota, and Educational Testing
Service based in Princeton, N.J.
"It's a very competitive landscape right now, and I'd say
it's undergoing a fair amount of change," Jeff Galt,
president and CEO of Harcourt told Education Week .
According to the Education Week survey, CTB/McGraw Hill
currently dominates the market, with contracts in 23
states. Harcourt Assessment has contracts in 18 states,
Pearson in 13, and Riverside in 12. The survey does not
indicate the dollar amounts of the contracts or the number
of students tested.
As with any business, the testing companies are driven by
the need to make profits, not to improve education. They
will do what the market requiresthem to do˜nothing more,
nothing less.
"These companies are really only interested in making
money, and under NCLB they will make more money, while
essentially remaining unaccountable," notes Neill of
FairTest. "In other words, you keep the pain public and you
privatize the profits."
Following is a brief summary of the major companies.
Harcourt Assessment
Harcourt publishes the Stanford Achievement Test series
such as the SAT-9 (not to be confused with the SAT college
entrance test). In 2002, more than 15 million students took
the SAT-9, according to a special on "Frontline," the PBS
program.
The company is based in San Antonio, Texas, and employs
more than 1,200 people at its headquarters. Among its other
products are clinical tests, such as the
Wechsler "intelligence" tests. It is affiliated with the
Harcourt book publishing companies, which range from
Harcourt School, publishers of kindergarten materials; to
Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, publishers of middle- and high-
school materials; to Harcourt Trade Publishers, which
publishes novels.
But that's only the tip of the conglomerate iceberg. All of
these endeavors are part of Reed Elsevier, a London-based
publisher that has a variety of separate legal entities,
subsidiaries, associates, and joint ventures. Reed Elsevier
is also known for its legal products such as LexisNexis,
medical and science publications, and more than 130
business-to-business publications, ranging from the
entertainment industry magazine Variety to Luxury Home
Builder to Soho Today .
In 2001, Reed Elsevier had $5.6 billion in sales, according
to "Frontline."
CTB/McGraw-Hill
CTB/McGraw-Hill is best known for its TerraNova tests,
especially its Terra-Nova CTBS tests for grades one to 12,
and its California Achievement Tests (CAT). The company
currently leads the testing industry in terms of number of
state contracts, and says that it serves more than 15
million students in 8,500 school districts in all 50
states. (Some contracts are with districts, not with
states.) Like Harcourt, the company is part of a larger
conglomerate; its parent company is McGraw-Hill, based in
New York. Among the general public, McGraw-Hill is better
known for enterprises such as Business Week magazine and
Standard & Poor's, the financial and investment analysis
company. It also owns four television stations. Overall, it
has 280 offices in 40 countries.
For the nine months ending on September 30, McGraw-Hill had
revenues of $3.84 billion with net profits of $566 million,
according to Reuters.
If these numbers aren't enough to make you realize that the
testing business is big business, consider the pay for
McGraw-Hill president and CEO, Harold McGraw: $3.14 million
in 2003.
Like many companies, CTB/Mc-Graw-Hill realizes that
developing and selling the tests is only the beginning of
the testing goldmine. These tests also need to be scored
and reported, and then districts have to figure out how to
store and evaluate data over several years in order to
prove they have made the "Adequate Yearly Progress" that
NCLB requires. Hence, there is an explosion in scoring,
reporting, and database services as well.
In June, CTB/McGraw-Hill acquired TurnLeaf Solutions, "a
national provider of customized online reporting and data
analysis."
Pearson Educational Measurement
Pearson was previously seen as a niche player emphasizing
data processing and scoring of tests. In 1968, for example,
it began scoring test items for the National Assessment of
Educational Progress (NAEP.)
With NCLB, Pearson has begun to develop a range of services
that also includes test development. Pearson touts its
ability to quickly turn around score reports as one of its
advantages. According to Education Week , in Texas the
company turns around results for some high-stakes tests in
five to seven days.
Riverside Publishing
Riverside, based near Chicago in Itasca, Ill., is best
known for its Iowa Test of Basic Skills (ITBS).
Approximately four to five million students in eight states
took the ITBS in 2001, according to "Frontline."
Riverside also publishes a variety of reading assessments
designed to meet the "Reading First" phonics-oriented
mandates of NCLB, which will provide federal dollars only
for specific reading programs. Among the materials being
promoted by Riverside are the Gates MacGinitie Reading
Tests and the Basic Early Assessment of Reading (BEAR, with
a silly-looking bear as the trademarked product icon).
Riverside has one of the most-well-known corporate parents:
Houghton Mifflin Company, which is owned by HM Publishing
Corp., which is owned by a consortium of private investment
firms comprised of Thomas H. Lee Partners, Bain Capital,
and funds managed by the Blackstone Group. Company press
releases say Houghton Mifflin has more than $1 billion in
sales annually.
Houghton Mifflin is also venturing into the database field.
In December 2003 it bought Edusoft, a San Francisco-based
company that provides web- and computer-based tests˜and
databases to store test results. Among its marketing
promises: Edusoft can help classroom teachers develop "mini
tests" that will gauge how close students are to passing
the state tests. Edusoft's website says that more than 300
districts are currently using its services to comply with
NCLB and that the Edusoft data warehouse currently stores
more than 100 million student scores across more than
500,000 assessments.
Not to Be Forgotten . . .
Given the NCLB-driven explosion in standardized testing,
smaller companies are also trying to increase their market
share. One of the most successful has been the nonprofit
Educational Testing Service, best known for the SAT college-
entrance exam and its Advanced Placement program. In 2003,
for example, ETS flexed its power and won a three-year,
$175 million contract to oversee California's testing.
There are also companies that hope to make their money on
scoring the tests. The federal GAO report on state spending
on NCLB assessments from 2002-08, for example, used $5.3
billion as a high-end figure for tests that included essay
or open-ended questions. If only multiple-choice questions
are used on a test, costs could fall to $1.9 billion.
The reason is not so much in the tests as in the scoring,
administering, and reporting. The GAO report, for instance,
notes that in Colorado, developing the tests accounts for
only 11 percent of the expenditures for the state test,
with the remaining 89 percent going for test
administration, scoring and reporting.
Open-ended and essay questions˜which require more
analytical skills than multiple-choice questions and which
are considered educationally more sophisticated and
worthwhile˜cost far more to score. In Massachusetts, which
the GAO says uses more open-ended questions in its tests,
the cost was about $7 to score each test in 2002. In
Virginia and North Carolina, which used mostly multiple-
choice tests, the cost was less than $1 per test.
Given the financial crisis facing most state education
budgets, and the consistent complaints that NCLB does not
provide enough federal money to cover test costs, it's not
outlandish to predict that financial pressures may force
states to adopt dumbed-down multiple-choice tests
emphasizing rote memorization and regurgitation of
disconnected bits of information.
Which, of course, the testing companies will be happy to
provide.
Barbara Miner (barbaraminer@ameritech.net) is a freelance
writer and former managing editor of Rethinking Schools.
Winter 2004/2005
http://texas.teachers.net/chatboard/topic7391/1.23.05.12.30.04.html
by Barbara Miner
There's gold in them there tests.
Thanks to the testing mandated by the federal No Child Left
Behind (NCLB) legislation, private companies are mining the
testing field with all the power their accountants, test-
makers, and marketers can muster.
States are likely to spend $1.9 billion to $5.3 billion
between 2002 and 2008 to implement NCLB-mandated tests,
according to the non-partisan Government Accounting Office
(GAO).
Those GAO figures cover just the direct costs of six years
of developing, scoring, and reporting the tests˜which is
performed under contract with private companies. Add in
indirect costs, such as the amount of classroom teacher
time devoted to coordinating and giving the tests and,
increasingly, preparing students with ongoing "practice"
tests, and testing experts say the figure could be 8 to 15
times higher.
The amount of education money devoted to standardized tests
is only part of the problem. Invariably, the private
testing companies that control standardized testing operate
behind closed doors with little to no public
accountability. They function as subsections of
multinational conglomerates that view the U.S. testing
industry as just one tentacle of publishing and
entertainment empires that span the globe.
"There's very little oversight of the testing industry,"
notes Walt Haney, an education professor at Boston College
and a senior researcher at its National Board on
Educational Testing and Public Policy (NBETPP). "In fact,
there is more public oversight of the pet industry and the
food we feed our dogs than there is for the quality of
tests we make our kids take."
Where's the Outcry?
There has been little public outcry over the fact that
private, multinational companies operating beyond public
oversight are determining which students, schools, and
districts in the United States are deemed "failures" and
which are deemed "successes." Given the secrecy that
shrouds testing company operations, information is
negligible. What the public doesn't know, the public
doesn't complain about.
Critics of standardized testing also point to a third
problem beyond the amount of money and the secrecy. That's
the problem of missed opportunity. There's little doubt
that the Bush administration's obsession with standardized
tests as the sole determinant of school success has
undermined reforms that focus on teaching children to think
and to do more than fill in circles on test forms.
"The amount of money spent on standardized testing is not
the real problem," notes Monty Neill, executive director of
the Boston-based group FairTest. "The real problem is how
it distorts teaching and learning."
The Testing Explosion
NCLB, introduced two days after George W. Bush took office
and passed a year later, instituted an unprecedented level
of federal mandates for testing public school students. The
mandates built on bipartisan support for a corporate-
influenced agenda of increased standardized testing. But
NCLB carried that agenda to new levels, both with the
number of tests and the harsh sanctions for those schools
not meeting predetermined levels of test progress.
NCLB requires annual testing of students in third through
eighth grades in mathematics and reading or language arts,
and testing once in high school. Beginning in 2007-08,
states will also be required to give tests in science at
least once in elementary, middle, and high school. All
told, there will be 17 NCLB tests each year for school
districts. This translates into unfathomable amounts of
school time devoted to standardized testing and teaching to
those tests. It also creates untold business opportunities
for the companies that produce the tests. (If you add in
district- and state-mandated tests on top of NCLB
requirements, and the growing number of "practice" tests
given to students so they will do well on the "real" tests,
the number of tests schools must administer skyrockets.)
Shrouded in Secrecy
Ironically, although Bush has used the rhetoric of
accountability to justify NCLB, the finances of the testing
companies are almost impossible to uncover, the tests
themselves are generally not made public, and mistakes in
the tests often come to light only when angry parents,
students, or school administrators threaten to sue over
mistakes in scoring. (See sidebar.)
While the public knows little of the testing companies,
lobbyists have ensured that legislators are well aware of
those corporate interests. Following Bush's first election
and his unveiling of NCLB, testing company representatives
descended on Congress to push for the type of standardized
testing that Bush had made so popular in Texas.
"I've been lobbying on education issues since 1982, but the
test publishers have been active at a level I've never seen
before," Bruce Hunter of the American Association of School
Administrators said at the time. "At every hearing, every
discussion, the big test publishers are always present with
at least one lobbyist, sometimes more."
And of course, there are the personal connections between
the Bush Administration and the testing industry. A January
2002 article in The Nation points out that the Bush
administration has a particularly "cozy relationship" with
the testing company run by McGraw-Hill. The heart of this
relationship, the article notes, "lies the three-generation
social mingling between the McGraw and Bush families. The
McGraws are old Bush friends, dating back to the 1930s."
In fact, on the first day he assumed his job at the White
House, Bush invited Harold McGraw III into his office,
according to The Nation .
The Testing Companies
Three companies have traditionally dominated the market for
developing tests: Harcourt Educational Measurement, CTB
McGraw-Hill, and Riverside Publishing. All are part of
larger conglomerates, and their financial data generally
are not reported separately from the controlling
corporation.
A fourth, little-known company, Pearson Educational
Measurement out of Iowa City, Iowa, has significantly
increased its market share in recent years. According to
the Dec. 1, 2004 Education Week , Pearson has for now
overtaken Riverside as the third main testing company.
With the testing frenzy engendered by NCLB, the testing
industry is going through a shake-up and newer companies
are competing for state contracts. Some of the newer
players: Measured Progress out of Dover, N.H., Data
Recognition out of Minnesota, and Educational Testing
Service based in Princeton, N.J.
"It's a very competitive landscape right now, and I'd say
it's undergoing a fair amount of change," Jeff Galt,
president and CEO of Harcourt told Education Week .
According to the Education Week survey, CTB/McGraw Hill
currently dominates the market, with contracts in 23
states. Harcourt Assessment has contracts in 18 states,
Pearson in 13, and Riverside in 12. The survey does not
indicate the dollar amounts of the contracts or the number
of students tested.
As with any business, the testing companies are driven by
the need to make profits, not to improve education. They
will do what the market requiresthem to do˜nothing more,
nothing less.
"These companies are really only interested in making
money, and under NCLB they will make more money, while
essentially remaining unaccountable," notes Neill of
FairTest. "In other words, you keep the pain public and you
privatize the profits."
Following is a brief summary of the major companies.
Harcourt Assessment
Harcourt publishes the Stanford Achievement Test series
such as the SAT-9 (not to be confused with the SAT college
entrance test). In 2002, more than 15 million students took
the SAT-9, according to a special on "Frontline," the PBS
program.
The company is based in San Antonio, Texas, and employs
more than 1,200 people at its headquarters. Among its other
products are clinical tests, such as the
Wechsler "intelligence" tests. It is affiliated with the
Harcourt book publishing companies, which range from
Harcourt School, publishers of kindergarten materials; to
Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, publishers of middle- and high-
school materials; to Harcourt Trade Publishers, which
publishes novels.
But that's only the tip of the conglomerate iceberg. All of
these endeavors are part of Reed Elsevier, a London-based
publisher that has a variety of separate legal entities,
subsidiaries, associates, and joint ventures. Reed Elsevier
is also known for its legal products such as LexisNexis,
medical and science publications, and more than 130
business-to-business publications, ranging from the
entertainment industry magazine Variety to Luxury Home
Builder to Soho Today .
In 2001, Reed Elsevier had $5.6 billion in sales, according
to "Frontline."
CTB/McGraw-Hill
CTB/McGraw-Hill is best known for its TerraNova tests,
especially its Terra-Nova CTBS tests for grades one to 12,
and its California Achievement Tests (CAT). The company
currently leads the testing industry in terms of number of
state contracts, and says that it serves more than 15
million students in 8,500 school districts in all 50
states. (Some contracts are with districts, not with
states.) Like Harcourt, the company is part of a larger
conglomerate; its parent company is McGraw-Hill, based in
New York. Among the general public, McGraw-Hill is better
known for enterprises such as Business Week magazine and
Standard & Poor's, the financial and investment analysis
company. It also owns four television stations. Overall, it
has 280 offices in 40 countries.
For the nine months ending on September 30, McGraw-Hill had
revenues of $3.84 billion with net profits of $566 million,
according to Reuters.
If these numbers aren't enough to make you realize that the
testing business is big business, consider the pay for
McGraw-Hill president and CEO, Harold McGraw: $3.14 million
in 2003.
Like many companies, CTB/Mc-Graw-Hill realizes that
developing and selling the tests is only the beginning of
the testing goldmine. These tests also need to be scored
and reported, and then districts have to figure out how to
store and evaluate data over several years in order to
prove they have made the "Adequate Yearly Progress" that
NCLB requires. Hence, there is an explosion in scoring,
reporting, and database services as well.
In June, CTB/McGraw-Hill acquired TurnLeaf Solutions, "a
national provider of customized online reporting and data
analysis."
Pearson Educational Measurement
Pearson was previously seen as a niche player emphasizing
data processing and scoring of tests. In 1968, for example,
it began scoring test items for the National Assessment of
Educational Progress (NAEP.)
With NCLB, Pearson has begun to develop a range of services
that also includes test development. Pearson touts its
ability to quickly turn around score reports as one of its
advantages. According to Education Week , in Texas the
company turns around results for some high-stakes tests in
five to seven days.
Riverside Publishing
Riverside, based near Chicago in Itasca, Ill., is best
known for its Iowa Test of Basic Skills (ITBS).
Approximately four to five million students in eight states
took the ITBS in 2001, according to "Frontline."
Riverside also publishes a variety of reading assessments
designed to meet the "Reading First" phonics-oriented
mandates of NCLB, which will provide federal dollars only
for specific reading programs. Among the materials being
promoted by Riverside are the Gates MacGinitie Reading
Tests and the Basic Early Assessment of Reading (BEAR, with
a silly-looking bear as the trademarked product icon).
Riverside has one of the most-well-known corporate parents:
Houghton Mifflin Company, which is owned by HM Publishing
Corp., which is owned by a consortium of private investment
firms comprised of Thomas H. Lee Partners, Bain Capital,
and funds managed by the Blackstone Group. Company press
releases say Houghton Mifflin has more than $1 billion in
sales annually.
Houghton Mifflin is also venturing into the database field.
In December 2003 it bought Edusoft, a San Francisco-based
company that provides web- and computer-based tests˜and
databases to store test results. Among its marketing
promises: Edusoft can help classroom teachers develop "mini
tests" that will gauge how close students are to passing
the state tests. Edusoft's website says that more than 300
districts are currently using its services to comply with
NCLB and that the Edusoft data warehouse currently stores
more than 100 million student scores across more than
500,000 assessments.
Not to Be Forgotten . . .
Given the NCLB-driven explosion in standardized testing,
smaller companies are also trying to increase their market
share. One of the most successful has been the nonprofit
Educational Testing Service, best known for the SAT college-
entrance exam and its Advanced Placement program. In 2003,
for example, ETS flexed its power and won a three-year,
$175 million contract to oversee California's testing.
There are also companies that hope to make their money on
scoring the tests. The federal GAO report on state spending
on NCLB assessments from 2002-08, for example, used $5.3
billion as a high-end figure for tests that included essay
or open-ended questions. If only multiple-choice questions
are used on a test, costs could fall to $1.9 billion.
The reason is not so much in the tests as in the scoring,
administering, and reporting. The GAO report, for instance,
notes that in Colorado, developing the tests accounts for
only 11 percent of the expenditures for the state test,
with the remaining 89 percent going for test
administration, scoring and reporting.
Open-ended and essay questions˜which require more
analytical skills than multiple-choice questions and which
are considered educationally more sophisticated and
worthwhile˜cost far more to score. In Massachusetts, which
the GAO says uses more open-ended questions in its tests,
the cost was about $7 to score each test in 2002. In
Virginia and North Carolina, which used mostly multiple-
choice tests, the cost was less than $1 per test.
Given the financial crisis facing most state education
budgets, and the consistent complaints that NCLB does not
provide enough federal money to cover test costs, it's not
outlandish to predict that financial pressures may force
states to adopt dumbed-down multiple-choice tests
emphasizing rote memorization and regurgitation of
disconnected bits of information.
Which, of course, the testing companies will be happy to
provide.
Barbara Miner (barbaraminer@ameritech.net) is a freelance
writer and former managing editor of Rethinking Schools.
Winter 2004/2005
http://texas.teachers.net/chatboard/topic7391/1.23.05.12.30.04.html
School Finance Plaintiffs United Front Splinters Over Equity Issues
Property rich districts want fast track to Supreme Court, property poor want Dietz to reconsider equity issues
The first cracks in the education coalition that took the state’s school finance case to court have appeared in the last week as the group has split on the question of equity.
The lawyers from the Mexican-American Legal Defense and Education Fund, which represents the Edgewood interveners, are disappointed that the other plaintiff groups agreed with Attorney General Greg Abbott’s statement of jurisdiction, asking the Texas Supreme Court to expedite the school finance case and hear the case as soon as possible. Even in a best-case scenario, the case will not make it to Court before the session ends.
MALDEF Attorney David Hinojosa told the Quorum Report he was not ready to give up on the equity claims they want Dietz to reconsider. That reconsideration, which could mean a trip to the Third Circuit Court of Appeals, could significantly delay the case.
On Friday night, Hinojosa told the online Texas Civil Rights Review he was surprised by the West Orange-Cove plaintiffs’ agreement with Abbott’s office that the case should move forward. The Texas Civil Rights Review, edited by Greg Moses, spoke of the West Orange-Cove brief as "an Inaugural Day Betrayal," when the property-rich districts who gave "lip service" to maintaining Robin Hood finally tossed aside their property-poor cousins.
"I'm surprised altogether by the State and the West Orange-Cove Plaintiffs efforts to circumvent the laws we have in place," says MALDEF attorney David Hinojosa, according to a posting at the Texas Civil Rights Review website, http://texascivilrightsreview.org. Later in the posting, Hinojosa is quoted saying,
"The issue of equitable access to revenues for maintenance and operations funding has yet to be fully rendered by the trial court, yet the property-rich districts think certain issues should be yanked up by the Supreme Court?"
The Texas school finance case actually is three separate groups of plaintiffs with discrete claims, although those claims tended to overlap at trial. The West Orange-Cove plaintiffs, for instance, represented the property-wealthy districts that claimed they no longer had discretion once they reached the state-imposed $1.50 tax cap.
The Alvarado plaintiffs, which represented many of the member districts of the Equity Center, argued some equity questions but also a whole lot on the cost of an adequate education. And the Edgewood interveners, represented by the Mexican-American Legal Defense and Education Fund, argued the gap between wealthy and poor districts had opened to the point that equity was, once more, an issue in Texas schools.
It’s to the credit of the plaintiff attorneys that such disparate claims were brought under a single tent for the trial in District Judge John Dietz’s last summer. The attorneys, for their part, made a point of never saying Robin Hood was the enemy given MALDEF’s substantial concerns that the end of Robin Hood would mean the end of real equity.
But that common good has taken a hit over the last couple of months as the plaintiff groups have filed their appeals with Dietz’s court. MALDEF’s filings clearly indicate the Edgewood interveners want to send the case back to Dietz so he will recommend that the current school funding needs further equalization. The logic is that no new school finance system should be laid over an inequitable system. That just memorializes the current inequities of the system, which continues to widen the funding gaps.
For its part, the Equity Center also has continued the push for 98 percent equity in Tier I funding for the school districts in the state. In a dose of reality, the center’s December newsletter pointed out it would take billions to correct long-neglected areas such as updating formulas for transportation, small-sized school districts and bilingual education. And the main point of the Texas Federation of Teacher’s school finance plan was that the inequities of the current system must be corrected before new money is counted.
The Alvarado plaintiffs asked Dietz to consider the inclusion of additional evidence in the case, but they plaintiffs did not ask for further reconsideration of the equity issue. Dietz’s court has jurisdiction over the Texas school finance case until Feb. 14.
The West-Orange Cove plaintiffs have less to gain by delaying the case. Any school finance formula passed by the Legislature is likely to moot the statewide property tax claim, if it’s done correctly. Privately, those familiar with the case say that equalizing school facility funding should cut the gap between property-poor and property wealthy school districts in half, putting the gap within an "acceptable range" of inequity that could be corrected by other remedies that have popular acceptance, such as updating the cost-of-education index, or CEI, which has not been updated since 1990.
For its part, MALDEF always has the option to pursue its claim through the appeals court process, even if the rest of the case moves to the Texas Supreme Court. – Kimberly Reeves
January 23, 2005 http://www.quorumreport.com/
The first cracks in the education coalition that took the state’s school finance case to court have appeared in the last week as the group has split on the question of equity.
The lawyers from the Mexican-American Legal Defense and Education Fund, which represents the Edgewood interveners, are disappointed that the other plaintiff groups agreed with Attorney General Greg Abbott’s statement of jurisdiction, asking the Texas Supreme Court to expedite the school finance case and hear the case as soon as possible. Even in a best-case scenario, the case will not make it to Court before the session ends.
MALDEF Attorney David Hinojosa told the Quorum Report he was not ready to give up on the equity claims they want Dietz to reconsider. That reconsideration, which could mean a trip to the Third Circuit Court of Appeals, could significantly delay the case.
On Friday night, Hinojosa told the online Texas Civil Rights Review he was surprised by the West Orange-Cove plaintiffs’ agreement with Abbott’s office that the case should move forward. The Texas Civil Rights Review, edited by Greg Moses, spoke of the West Orange-Cove brief as "an Inaugural Day Betrayal," when the property-rich districts who gave "lip service" to maintaining Robin Hood finally tossed aside their property-poor cousins.
"I'm surprised altogether by the State and the West Orange-Cove Plaintiffs efforts to circumvent the laws we have in place," says MALDEF attorney David Hinojosa, according to a posting at the Texas Civil Rights Review website, http://texascivilrightsreview.org. Later in the posting, Hinojosa is quoted saying,
"The issue of equitable access to revenues for maintenance and operations funding has yet to be fully rendered by the trial court, yet the property-rich districts think certain issues should be yanked up by the Supreme Court?"
The Texas school finance case actually is three separate groups of plaintiffs with discrete claims, although those claims tended to overlap at trial. The West Orange-Cove plaintiffs, for instance, represented the property-wealthy districts that claimed they no longer had discretion once they reached the state-imposed $1.50 tax cap.
The Alvarado plaintiffs, which represented many of the member districts of the Equity Center, argued some equity questions but also a whole lot on the cost of an adequate education. And the Edgewood interveners, represented by the Mexican-American Legal Defense and Education Fund, argued the gap between wealthy and poor districts had opened to the point that equity was, once more, an issue in Texas schools.
It’s to the credit of the plaintiff attorneys that such disparate claims were brought under a single tent for the trial in District Judge John Dietz’s last summer. The attorneys, for their part, made a point of never saying Robin Hood was the enemy given MALDEF’s substantial concerns that the end of Robin Hood would mean the end of real equity.
But that common good has taken a hit over the last couple of months as the plaintiff groups have filed their appeals with Dietz’s court. MALDEF’s filings clearly indicate the Edgewood interveners want to send the case back to Dietz so he will recommend that the current school funding needs further equalization. The logic is that no new school finance system should be laid over an inequitable system. That just memorializes the current inequities of the system, which continues to widen the funding gaps.
For its part, the Equity Center also has continued the push for 98 percent equity in Tier I funding for the school districts in the state. In a dose of reality, the center’s December newsletter pointed out it would take billions to correct long-neglected areas such as updating formulas for transportation, small-sized school districts and bilingual education. And the main point of the Texas Federation of Teacher’s school finance plan was that the inequities of the current system must be corrected before new money is counted.
The Alvarado plaintiffs asked Dietz to consider the inclusion of additional evidence in the case, but they plaintiffs did not ask for further reconsideration of the equity issue. Dietz’s court has jurisdiction over the Texas school finance case until Feb. 14.
The West-Orange Cove plaintiffs have less to gain by delaying the case. Any school finance formula passed by the Legislature is likely to moot the statewide property tax claim, if it’s done correctly. Privately, those familiar with the case say that equalizing school facility funding should cut the gap between property-poor and property wealthy school districts in half, putting the gap within an "acceptable range" of inequity that could be corrected by other remedies that have popular acceptance, such as updating the cost-of-education index, or CEI, which has not been updated since 1990.
For its part, MALDEF always has the option to pursue its claim through the appeals court process, even if the rest of the case moves to the Texas Supreme Court. – Kimberly Reeves
January 23, 2005 http://www.quorumreport.com/
Saturday, January 22, 2005
Interesting TAKS Testing Recommendation in School Start Date Task Force Report
Note: Check out this report out of the Tx State Comptroller's Office, January 2005
Drawing the most emotive response (in the minority reports) was the following, very interesting recommendation provided by the Alternative Calendars sub-committee:
Date of Standardized Tests. The standardized tests that are offered in the spring of a student's third, fifth, eighth, and eleventh years should be moved to the third or fourth weeks of September in years four, six, nine, and twelve. This will permit the state to have a better measure of student's long-term knowledge. It will reduce the tendency of teachers to focus their attention on teaching material only for the examinations and it could serve as a diagnostic/prescriptive assessment to improve long-term learning. The current standard should remain in place for three to five years before it is changed in order to give teachers the opportunity to realize the progress. The entire assessment program for Texas will need to be examined to consider campus accountability ratings and other standards in the No Child Left Behind Federal Law.
I was a member of this task force and a good number of concerns were raised about the amount of time that testing and test prep consumes. -Angela
For entire report, go to: http://www.window.state.tx.us/schoolstart2004/taskforce/report/
Drawing the most emotive response (in the minority reports) was the following, very interesting recommendation provided by the Alternative Calendars sub-committee:
Date of Standardized Tests. The standardized tests that are offered in the spring of a student's third, fifth, eighth, and eleventh years should be moved to the third or fourth weeks of September in years four, six, nine, and twelve. This will permit the state to have a better measure of student's long-term knowledge. It will reduce the tendency of teachers to focus their attention on teaching material only for the examinations and it could serve as a diagnostic/prescriptive assessment to improve long-term learning. The current standard should remain in place for three to five years before it is changed in order to give teachers the opportunity to realize the progress. The entire assessment program for Texas will need to be examined to consider campus accountability ratings and other standards in the No Child Left Behind Federal Law.
I was a member of this task force and a good number of concerns were raised about the amount of time that testing and test prep consumes. -Angela
For entire report, go to: http://www.window.state.tx.us/schoolstart2004/taskforce/report/
The Relationship of High School Graduation Exams to Graduation Rates and SAT Scores
by Marchant, G. J. & Paulson, S. E. (2005, January 21). Education Policy Analysis Archives, 13(6).
Abstract
The current study examined the effect of high school graduation exams on
states’ graduation rates, states’ aggregated SAT scores, and individual
students’ SAT scores. Three data sources were used: One source
identified states requiring a standardized test for graduation; the NCES
provided state aggregated data on graduation rates for the class of
2002; and the College Board provided its 2001 SAT database for all
test-takers. After controlling for students’ demographic characteristics
(e.g., race, family education and income, GPA and class rank),
regression analyses revealed that states requiring graduation exams had
lower graduation rates and lower SAT scores. Individually, students from
states requiring a graduation exam performed more poorly on the SAT than
did students from states not requiring an exam. The impact of high
stakes tests’ on students’ motivation to stay in school and on the
teaching of critical thinking skills (tested by the SAT) are discussed.
For a full PDF report, see http://epaa.asu.edu/epaa/v13n6/.
Abstract
The current study examined the effect of high school graduation exams on
states’ graduation rates, states’ aggregated SAT scores, and individual
students’ SAT scores. Three data sources were used: One source
identified states requiring a standardized test for graduation; the NCES
provided state aggregated data on graduation rates for the class of
2002; and the College Board provided its 2001 SAT database for all
test-takers. After controlling for students’ demographic characteristics
(e.g., race, family education and income, GPA and class rank),
regression analyses revealed that states requiring graduation exams had
lower graduation rates and lower SAT scores. Individually, students from
states requiring a graduation exam performed more poorly on the SAT than
did students from states not requiring an exam. The impact of high
stakes tests’ on students’ motivation to stay in school and on the
teaching of critical thinking skills (tested by the SAT) are discussed.
For a full PDF report, see http://epaa.asu.edu/epaa/v13n6/.
Undoing the School-to-Prison Pipeline Is Right and Saves Tax Money
by State Rep. Dora Olivo,
Texas House of Representatives
and
James C. Harrington,
Director, Texas Civil Rights Project
Texas schools face a host of crises, not the least of which is discipline. School discipline affects the future of Texas, and especially the state’s minority and disability communities. The Legislature and local school boards must come to grips with this issue.
Educators and political leaders are increasingly concerned about the "school-to-prison pipeline" that happens when kids with discipline problems are moved out of the regular school setting, and not given effective educational support. Far too often, these students are "warehoused," sent to inferior disciplinary alternative education programs (DAEP) and juvenile justice alternative education programs (JJAEP) that, in reality, encourage them to drop out, or be expelled. These kids are the most likely to end up in prison.
In 2003, The Civil Rights Project at Harvard and Northeastern University’s Institute on Race and Justice summarized the national data, which reflect Texas’:
Since the early 1990’s, many schools have replaced graduated sanctions with "zero tolerance." This has nearly doubled students suspended annually since 1974 (from 1.7 million to 3.1 million, nationally), increased police presence in schools, and led to new laws, referring children to police for school code violations.
Minority students are heavily over-represented among those most harshly sanctioned. In 2000, African Americans comprised 17% of students nationally, but 34% of those suspended; blacks were 2.6 times as likely to be suspended as white students. Among students with disabilities, African Americans are three times as likely to be suspended, and four times as likely to be educated in correctional facilities, as whites.
In patterns startlingly similar to discipline data, in 1998, black and Latino youth represented 1/3 of the country’s adolescent population, but 2/3 of youths confined to correctional placements. Four out of five new juveniles detained were minority youths. Black youths with no prior criminal record are six times, and Latino youths three times, more likely to be incarcerated than whites for the same offense.
Criminal justice data reflect the school-to-prison-pipeline. Approximately 68% of state inmates in 1997 had not completed high school. Seventy-five percent of youths under age 18 in prison have not completed 10th grade. Within the juvenile justice population, 70% have learning disabilities, and 33% read below 4th grade level.
The "single largest predictor" of subsequent arrest among adolescent females is having been suspended, expelled, or held back during the middle school years; 70% of women state prisoners have not completed high school.
Discipline in schools is very important, to be sure. But discipline must be creative and effective -- effective, in that it teaches students to control their behavior, while continuing to educate them. Discipline cannot become a vehicle by which poor, minority, and disabled students are driven from school, but must be a tool to support teachers and help the educational process.
Part of the problem is how education money is spent. It takes good, early intervention to change bad behavior and deal with "acting out" by students, and educate them at the same time. Not investing money up front leads to a much greater drain on taxpayers when these children enter the criminal justice system.
Nor is it fair to lay all the blame on local districts for the "school-to-prison pipeline." In 1995, the Legislature established significantly lower standards for DAEPs. Then, in 2003, the Legislature cut funding for disciplinary alternative education from $18 million to $5 million. Both steps have to be reversed, and even more done so that teachers and administrators have the tools they need to educate.
Better use of funds and early intervention would help schools establish more effective, education alternatives. There are good models: Garza High School in Austin and the Lamar Consolidated School District are but two.
It is in everyone’s interest for today’s students to become as educated as possible, to graduate, and be productive. Sometimes, we can be short-sighted in focusing on immediate problems, and not seeing the long-range consequences of our short-term solutions.
There will be a summit at the State Capitol Legislative Conference Center on January 28 on these issues. It’s important not just to understand the situation better, but to organize local communities and political leaders to make a greater commitment to this problem. We all pay the price in the long run, if we delay. It may not be popular, but it is wise and prudent.
This issue unites all political stripes, from conservatives to liberal. It’s better to invest financial support in schools early on, rather than spending $25,000/year to keep someone in prison. It’s a matter of justice and fairness – to both students and taxpayers.
---------------------------------
For more information on the "Texas Summit: Laying the Groundwork: Creating a Positive School Environment for Student Success," January 28, 2005, 9:00am-3:00pm, please contact cassius.johnson@house.state.tx.us or by calling 512.463.0494
Texas House of Representatives
and
James C. Harrington,
Director, Texas Civil Rights Project
Texas schools face a host of crises, not the least of which is discipline. School discipline affects the future of Texas, and especially the state’s minority and disability communities. The Legislature and local school boards must come to grips with this issue.
Educators and political leaders are increasingly concerned about the "school-to-prison pipeline" that happens when kids with discipline problems are moved out of the regular school setting, and not given effective educational support. Far too often, these students are "warehoused," sent to inferior disciplinary alternative education programs (DAEP) and juvenile justice alternative education programs (JJAEP) that, in reality, encourage them to drop out, or be expelled. These kids are the most likely to end up in prison.
In 2003, The Civil Rights Project at Harvard and Northeastern University’s Institute on Race and Justice summarized the national data, which reflect Texas’:
Since the early 1990’s, many schools have replaced graduated sanctions with "zero tolerance." This has nearly doubled students suspended annually since 1974 (from 1.7 million to 3.1 million, nationally), increased police presence in schools, and led to new laws, referring children to police for school code violations.
Minority students are heavily over-represented among those most harshly sanctioned. In 2000, African Americans comprised 17% of students nationally, but 34% of those suspended; blacks were 2.6 times as likely to be suspended as white students. Among students with disabilities, African Americans are three times as likely to be suspended, and four times as likely to be educated in correctional facilities, as whites.
In patterns startlingly similar to discipline data, in 1998, black and Latino youth represented 1/3 of the country’s adolescent population, but 2/3 of youths confined to correctional placements. Four out of five new juveniles detained were minority youths. Black youths with no prior criminal record are six times, and Latino youths three times, more likely to be incarcerated than whites for the same offense.
Criminal justice data reflect the school-to-prison-pipeline. Approximately 68% of state inmates in 1997 had not completed high school. Seventy-five percent of youths under age 18 in prison have not completed 10th grade. Within the juvenile justice population, 70% have learning disabilities, and 33% read below 4th grade level.
The "single largest predictor" of subsequent arrest among adolescent females is having been suspended, expelled, or held back during the middle school years; 70% of women state prisoners have not completed high school.
Discipline in schools is very important, to be sure. But discipline must be creative and effective -- effective, in that it teaches students to control their behavior, while continuing to educate them. Discipline cannot become a vehicle by which poor, minority, and disabled students are driven from school, but must be a tool to support teachers and help the educational process.
Part of the problem is how education money is spent. It takes good, early intervention to change bad behavior and deal with "acting out" by students, and educate them at the same time. Not investing money up front leads to a much greater drain on taxpayers when these children enter the criminal justice system.
Nor is it fair to lay all the blame on local districts for the "school-to-prison pipeline." In 1995, the Legislature established significantly lower standards for DAEPs. Then, in 2003, the Legislature cut funding for disciplinary alternative education from $18 million to $5 million. Both steps have to be reversed, and even more done so that teachers and administrators have the tools they need to educate.
Better use of funds and early intervention would help schools establish more effective, education alternatives. There are good models: Garza High School in Austin and the Lamar Consolidated School District are but two.
It is in everyone’s interest for today’s students to become as educated as possible, to graduate, and be productive. Sometimes, we can be short-sighted in focusing on immediate problems, and not seeing the long-range consequences of our short-term solutions.
There will be a summit at the State Capitol Legislative Conference Center on January 28 on these issues. It’s important not just to understand the situation better, but to organize local communities and political leaders to make a greater commitment to this problem. We all pay the price in the long run, if we delay. It may not be popular, but it is wise and prudent.
This issue unites all political stripes, from conservatives to liberal. It’s better to invest financial support in schools early on, rather than spending $25,000/year to keep someone in prison. It’s a matter of justice and fairness – to both students and taxpayers.
---------------------------------
For more information on the "Texas Summit: Laying the Groundwork: Creating a Positive School Environment for Student Success," January 28, 2005, 9:00am-3:00pm, please contact cassius.johnson@house.state.tx.us or by calling 512.463.0494
Friday, January 21, 2005
CHARTER SCHOOLS—Rules Call for Greater Scrutiny of Scores, Spending
79th LEGISLATURE
Rules call for greater scrutiny of scores, spending
State agency's plan would make it easier to close troubled schools
By Jason Embry
AMERICAN-STATESMAN STAFF
Friday, January 21, 2005
Efforts to close struggling charter schools are gaining momentum at the Texas Education Agency and in the Capitol.
Education Commissioner Shirley Neeley will consider rule changes over the next six weeks that would toughen the criteria that charter schools must meet to stay open. And all 31 members of the Texas Senate endorsed goals for education reform last week that included a similar proposal.
Critics have said for years that the state allows its 274 state-funded charter schools to languish, academically or financially, for too long before enforcing serious penalties. The proposed regulations indicate that state officials share those concerns.
The rules under consideration at the education agency would allow the commissioner to close a charter school if it has low academic ratings for two or three consecutive years. The rules, which do not require legislative approval, also flesh out the financial standards that charter schools must meet.
The commissioner now has the authority to close a poor-performing or dangerous charter school, but the proposed changes provide more specific grounds for doing so, agency spokeswoman Suzanne Marchman said.
Marchman said lawyers for the state and for charter schools proposed the changes as part of an ongoing evaluation of agency rules. They also took note when the staff of the Sunset Advisory Commission, a key legislative panel, reported late last year that the state could not hold the schools fully accountable for their academic and financial track records.
Open-enrollment charter schools, which use state money but are independent of local school districts, have struggled in the state ratings system.
Last year, 21 percent of the charter schools that received state ratings were deemed "academically unacceptable." Statewide, 1.4 percent of all public schools that were graded received the low rating.
Stories of severe financial mismanagement also have hobbled the charter system. At Austin's Texas Academy of Excellence charter school, which closed in May, about $57,000 in taxpayer money was used to buy a Lincoln Navigator that was parked at former Superintendent Dolores Hillyer's home two months after the school closed, according to the school's former accountant, and a school bank card paid for hotel rooms overseas.
Patsy O'Neill, executive director of the San Antonio-based Resource Center for Charter Schools, a group that provides services to charter schools, applauded the proposed rules.
"It strengthens the entire movement for charters that are fraudulent or consistently low-performing, and therefore not meeting the needs of their students, to be closed," O'Neill said.
The Governor's Business Council, a panel of advisers to Gov. Rick Perry, recommended last year that the state expand the number of charter schools in the state while expediting the closing of charters that perform poorly. Dan Quinn of the Texas Freedom Network, a group that monitors social conservatism in government and has criticized the charter system, said state leaders should focus on putting the new rules in place.
"Let's see if these rules help clean up the mess in the charter system before we expand that system any more," Quinn said.
http://www.statesman.com/news/content/shared/tx/legislature/stories/01/21charter.html
Rules call for greater scrutiny of scores, spending
State agency's plan would make it easier to close troubled schools
By Jason Embry
AMERICAN-STATESMAN STAFF
Friday, January 21, 2005
Efforts to close struggling charter schools are gaining momentum at the Texas Education Agency and in the Capitol.
Education Commissioner Shirley Neeley will consider rule changes over the next six weeks that would toughen the criteria that charter schools must meet to stay open. And all 31 members of the Texas Senate endorsed goals for education reform last week that included a similar proposal.
Critics have said for years that the state allows its 274 state-funded charter schools to languish, academically or financially, for too long before enforcing serious penalties. The proposed regulations indicate that state officials share those concerns.
The rules under consideration at the education agency would allow the commissioner to close a charter school if it has low academic ratings for two or three consecutive years. The rules, which do not require legislative approval, also flesh out the financial standards that charter schools must meet.
The commissioner now has the authority to close a poor-performing or dangerous charter school, but the proposed changes provide more specific grounds for doing so, agency spokeswoman Suzanne Marchman said.
Marchman said lawyers for the state and for charter schools proposed the changes as part of an ongoing evaluation of agency rules. They also took note when the staff of the Sunset Advisory Commission, a key legislative panel, reported late last year that the state could not hold the schools fully accountable for their academic and financial track records.
Open-enrollment charter schools, which use state money but are independent of local school districts, have struggled in the state ratings system.
Last year, 21 percent of the charter schools that received state ratings were deemed "academically unacceptable." Statewide, 1.4 percent of all public schools that were graded received the low rating.
Stories of severe financial mismanagement also have hobbled the charter system. At Austin's Texas Academy of Excellence charter school, which closed in May, about $57,000 in taxpayer money was used to buy a Lincoln Navigator that was parked at former Superintendent Dolores Hillyer's home two months after the school closed, according to the school's former accountant, and a school bank card paid for hotel rooms overseas.
Patsy O'Neill, executive director of the San Antonio-based Resource Center for Charter Schools, a group that provides services to charter schools, applauded the proposed rules.
"It strengthens the entire movement for charters that are fraudulent or consistently low-performing, and therefore not meeting the needs of their students, to be closed," O'Neill said.
The Governor's Business Council, a panel of advisers to Gov. Rick Perry, recommended last year that the state expand the number of charter schools in the state while expediting the closing of charters that perform poorly. Dan Quinn of the Texas Freedom Network, a group that monitors social conservatism in government and has criticized the charter system, said state leaders should focus on putting the new rules in place.
"Let's see if these rules help clean up the mess in the charter system before we expand that system any more," Quinn said.
http://www.statesman.com/news/content/shared/tx/legislature/stories/01/21charter.html
Thursday, January 20, 2005
The Rise of Open-Source Politics
The Rise of Open-Source Politics
By Micah L. Sifry, The Nation
Posted on January 20, 2005, Printed on November 9, 2005
http://www.alternet.org/story/21032/
Whether you're a Democrat in mourning or a Republican in glee, the results from election day should not obscure an important shift in America's civic life. New tools and practices born on the internet have reached critical mass, enabling ordinary people to participate in processes that used to be closed to them. It may seem like cold comfort for Kerry supporters now, but the truth is that voters don't have to rely on elected or self-appointed leaders to chart the way forward anymore. The era of top-down politics – where campaigns, institutions and journalism were cloistered communities powered by hard-to-amass capital – is over. Something wilder, more engaging and infinitely more satisfying to individual participants is arising alongside the old order.
One moment when this new power began to be collectively understood by grassroots activists was on April 23, 2003. It was 4:31 p.m. (EST) in cyberspace when Mathew Gross, then toiling in obscurity on Howard Dean's presidential campaign, posted the following missive on the message board of SmirkingChimp.com, a little-known but heavily trafficked forum for anti-Bush sentiment:
So I wander back to my desk and there really IS a note on my chair from Joe Trippi, the Campaign Manager for Howard Dean. The note says:
Matt,
Start an "Ask the Dean Campaign" thread over at the Smirking Chimp.
– Joe
Surely a seminal moment in Presidential politics, no?
So, here's the deal. Use this space to throw questions and comments our way. I'll be checking this thread, Joe will be checking this thread. We're understandably very busy so don't give up if we disappear for a day or two. Talk amongst yourselves while we're out of the room, as it were. But we will check in and try to answer questions. We want to hear from you. We want to know what you think.
So, go to it. And thanks for supporting Howard Dean.
About an hour later, after 30 responses appeared, Zephyr Teachout, Gross's colleague, chimed in with some answers. A little later, a participant on the site wrote: "This is too cool, an actual direct line to the Dean campaign committee! Pinch me – I must be dreaming!" Ultimately, more than 400 people posted comments on Gross' thread. Richard Hoefer, a frequent visitor, later wrote me: "That was an amazing day to see that rise out of nowhere. People were floored that the thread title was 'Ask the Dean Campaign' – and Trippi and Matt were actually asking questions and interacting. Never before had anyone seen that."
Never before had the top-down world of presidential campaigning been opened to a bottom-up, laterally networked community of ordinary voters. The Smirking Chimp is a web site with 25,000-plus registered members, founded after the 2000 election as a gathering place for liberals, progressives and leftists who felt the newly selected president reminded them most of, well, a smirking chimp. Each day they devour and critique the handful of critical articles selected by its webmaster, Jeff Tiedrich, a New York-based programmer who started the site on a lark and is amazed by its growth. "The community of the Chimp is the angry, angry, engaged left," Tiedrich says. When it was offered a direct connection to Dean, who was then the only candidate attacking Bush and the war in stark terms, lightning struck.
"The reason these community sites have formed," says Gross, rattling off the names DailyKos, MyDD, Eschaton, Democratic Underground and Buzzflash, along with the Smirking Chimp, "is the Democratic Party is too based on insiders." (Some Republicans apparently feel the same way, and have started similar sites, like RedState.org.) Indeed, at most political organizations, "membership" and "participation" mean little more than writing a check in response to a direct-mail appeal, as Harvard professor Theda Skocpol argues in her 2003 book Diminished Democracy. This wasn't always the case, Skocpol notes – through the first half of the 1900s tens of millions of Americans were engaged in cross-class fellowship and civic activism through federated mass membership organizations like the Free Masons, the Knights of Pythias and the American Legion. But, undermined by the Vietnam War, the "rights revolutions" and especially the new mass-media system, mass membership groups atrophied. They were replaced by a proliferating array of professionally run, top-down advocacy organizations, like the AARP and Natural Resources Defense Council. "America is now full of civic entrepreneurs who are constantly looking upward for potential angels, shmoozing with the wealthy," Skocpol writes, rather than talking to people of modest means.
But it is also true that insiderism and elitism have recently come under heavy attack, as everyone from Trent Lott to Dan Rather can attest. And it's not just Congress and big media whose hierarchies are being challenged; nonprofits and interest groups are feeling the ground shift too. "Members Unite! You have nothing to lose but your newsletters and crappy coffee-cup premiums," read the title of a recent post on WorldChanging.com, a blog devoted to fostering this movement. New web-based tools are facilitating a different way of doing politics, one in which we may all actually, not hypothetically, be equals; where transparency and accountability are more than slogans; and where anyone with few resources but a compelling message can be a community organizer, an ad-maker, a reporter, a publisher, a theorist, a money-raiser or a leader.
Consider these harbingers:
About two-thirds of American adults use the internet, and more than 55 percent have access to a high-speed internet connection at either home or work.
More than 53 million people have contributed material online, according to a spring 2003 survey by the Pew Internet & American Life Project.
More than 15 million have their own web site.
A new blog, or online journal, is created every 5.3 seconds, according to Technorati.com, a site that tracks the known universe of these easily updated web sites. As of Nov. 1, there were almost 4.3 million blogs, a million more than three months before. More than half of them are regularly updated by their creators, producing more than 400,000 fresh postings every day. (Full disclosure: My brother David is the founder of Technorati.)
A well-written blog, Joshua Micah Marshall's Talking Points Memo, gets more than 500,000 monthly visitors – as many as the entire web site of The American Prospect, the magazine where Marshall used to work, at a fraction of the cost.
Of the approximately 400,000-500,000 people who attended a political meeting through the social-networking site Meetup.com this election season, half had never gone to a political meeting before. 60 percent were under 40.
Attendees of Meetups for Democratic Party presidential candidates reported making an average of $312 in political contributions last year.
A two-minute political cartoon lampooning both Kerry and Bush, put out by JibJab.com this past summer, had 10 million viewings in the month of July – three times the number of hits on both presidential campaign web sites combined – and has since been viewed another 55 million times.
But it isn't the quantity of interactions taking place that suggests the change under way; it is the quality of those conversations. If, as a New Yorker cartoon put it, "On the internet, no one knows if you're a dog," on the internet, no one likes it if you don't speak in a genuine human voice. Says Christopher Locke, one of the co-authors of The Cluetrain Manifesto, a bible of sorts for business people trying to understand how the internet is changing commerce:
"Compared to this kind of personal, intimate, knowledgeable and highly engaged voice ... top-down corporate communications come across as stale and stentorian – the boring, authoritarian voice of command and control. The glaring difference between these styles is the strange attractor that has brought tens of millions flocking to the internet. There's new life passing along the wires. And it hasn't been coming from corporations." Nor has it been coming from politicians, not until recently.
It's the Network, Stupid
The differences between MoveOn.org, the big, liberal e-mail activist group, and DailyKos.com, the biggest of the new blog-centered sites, are illustrative. MoveOn and its associated PAC give its 2.8 million subscribers lots of easy, timely and mostly well-chosen options to get involved in national affairs. Most people are too busy to get deeply involved in many issues, and thus many respond positively to a request for help if action is one click away. MoveOn's sheer size makes small actions feel larger – maybe you'll do a bake sale for democracy if you know 10,000 other people are doing it too. It has raised millions of dollars for political candidates and advertising, and involved its subscribers in many innovative experiments, like its June 2003 online presidential primary and its "Bush in 30 Seconds" ad contest.
But MoveOn is still very much a top-down organization. Technologist and organizational strategist Tom Mandel says, "MoveOn is to liberal politics as Wal-Mart is to retail." Wes Boyd, Joan Blades, Eli Pariser and the other members of its leadership team may sign all their mass e-mails with their first names, but they set policy for the organization in much the same way as every other nonprofit, by talking among themselves, fielding proposals from various suitors, polling their audience and talking among themselves some more. Periodically they will ask subscribers to offer their ideas about priorities using an "ActionForum" program that enables visitors to suggest an issue, read what others have said and vote on their preferences. But that tool gives MoveOn members little ability to talk to each other directly or to aggregate their ideas independently of the choices its leaders make for them.
By comparison, DailyKos is a multilayered community engineered to reward ideas that bubble up from below. Like many bloggers, Markos Moulitsas, the Gulf War veteran who runs it, requires visitors to register (for free) if they want to post a comment. He also encourages users to set up their own "diaries," or blogs within his blog, where they can post their own entries. Unlike most blogs, the DailyKos is built on a tool called Scoop, which includes peer moderation, where members rank each other's entries and comments. Smart diary postings thus often rise to Moulitsas's attention, and if he reprints them on his main page they gain an even larger audience.
In addition, people with high rankings become "trusted users" who have the ability to recommend that visitors who try to disrupt conversations or simply post right-wing taunts be banned from the site. Only Moulitsas has the power to make that decision, and he weeds his garden carefully. "If somebody posts and I haven't seen them in a while," he told me, "I'll say, 'Where've you been?'" Amazingly, he insists that he has developed personal relationships with hundreds of people. "That's what happens after two years of reading the same names over and over again," he says.
As a result, the Kos community has become a very efficient collaboration engine – not only for pooling money for candidates (at least $600,000 has been given through the site) but also for rapid fact-checking of political statements and news stories, quick dissemination of news of voting irregularities and brainstorming of campaign themes. During the presidential debates, Kos' daily traffic surged to more than a half million visits. The DailyKos, to be sure, is still an egocentric organization dominated by one person who is not without blemishes, like refusing to disclose who his paying political clients are. But his success shows the power of an open network approach to organizing.
Beyond Kos, blog-based political networking has had all kinds of concrete political effects. Best known is the way prominent bloggers like Joshua Micah Marshall, along with some conservatives like Glenn Reynolds, fired up the Trent Lott-Strom Thurmond story, which led to Lott's fall from grace. More recently, bloggers have spurred the resignation of a homophobic congressman (Ed Schrock), undermined the credibility of key evidence in Dan Rather's story on Bush's National Guard service, distributed Jon Stewart's blistering Oct.15 appearance on CNN's Crossfire, beat back Sinclair Broadcasting's plan to force its stations to air an anti-Kerry documentary, and formed a back channel for unhappy soldiers in Iraq and their families back home.
The new political technology works because it gives individuals a way to pool their time, attention and resources around causes they may hold in common – and to do it without needing to become a professional activist or wait for approval from any authority figure. "It's not about the technology or the blog," says Mathew Gross now. "It's about having a conversation and treating people with respect."
The New Gold Rush
If conventional politicos had doubts about that proposition after Dean's late-January collapse in the Democratic primaries, their questions were muted a few weeks later, when a $2,000 investment in advertising on a few political blogs generated more than $80,000 two weeks later in small contributions to Democratic congressional candidate Ben Chandler. Chandler went on to win the special election for the 6th District in Kentucky. Suddenly politicians were adding community-building tools to their web sites and buying ads on popular blogs. For firms that specialize in selling internet plumbing and the expertise needed to run it, like GetActive, Issue Dynamics, CTSG, Groundspring, IStandFor, Right Click Strategies, Kintera and Convio, these are flush times.
In late March an audience of several hundred technologists, venture capitalists and journalists gathered at Esther Dyson's annual PC Forum in Scottsdale, Ariz., a top venue for the computer industry. This year the hot topic was social software. The crowd listened intently as Bob Epstein, a member of GetActive's board of directors, told them that the company's clients – groups like Oxfam America, Earthjustice, Riverkeeper, PBS and the AFL-CIO – were seeing huge jumps in online fundraising. Noting that $70 billion is spent every year on direct mail and "some of that will move online," he reassured the crowd that "our goal isn't to change the political system, it's to get a good return on the dollar."
That seemed to be the main focus, too, at the "Politics Online" conference at George Washington University in April. To most of the audience, which was thick with consultants from both parties, the internet is just a new place for a more sophisticated kind of direct mail, the kind where each solicitation message can be tailored precisely to a voter's concerns and foibles, and where a dribble of quasi participation ("Become an E-Captain!" "Click Here to E-Mail This Pre-Written Message to Your Member of Congress") can produce a torrent of donations.
It fell to David Weinberger, a co-author of the Cluetrain Manifesto and an internet adviser to the Dean campaign, to try to pierce the marketing talk at the conference with a harder truth. "I am not a 'customer' and I am not a 'consumer,'" he fumed during a panel with representatives of MoveOn.org and RightMarch.com over the issue of how best to manage online campaigns. "I am a citizen and a voter. I flee from 'message.' It is advertising. I want to avoid advertising," he roared. Recalling the hullabaloo over Kerry's comment that the Bush campaigners "are the most crooked, lying group I've ever seen," caught when he thought a mike he was wearing was off, Weinberger insisted that this was the best thing that had happened to Kerry. "That was the first time he had been allowed to speak as a human being." Speaking off-mike, he argued, was like blogging – in both cases people's real voices could be heard, which is what we hunger for. "Control kills scale. Control kills passion. Control kills the human voice," Weinberger insisted.
Loss of Control Freaks
That message has been very slow in reaching the Democratic establishment. On his blog, Weinberger tells of meeting DNC chair Terry McAuliffe at a cocktail party. "I tried to say that the 'net can do things for campaigns other than raise money ... for example, bring in a portion of the population that is feeling a tad alienated in part because of the relentless money 'n' marketing focus of the campaign. McAuliffe agreed, and then went on to re-express my point in terms of using the 'net to raise money." Nor did this message penetrate the Kerry campaign. "They don't take part in the conversation on the Kerry blog," complained Mathew Gross this past summer. "They're still sort of issuing press releases, albeit in a more human voice."
That's because top-down politics is all about maintaining control. "Think of an established brand with a lot invested in control of its image," says Jonah Seiger, founding partner of Connections Media and a veteran of internet politicking since the late 1980s. "The idea of opening that up is scary."
"Anybody who does politics the old way will fight doing things the new way because it's harder to get paid for it," says Mark Walsh, CEO of Progress Media, the parent of Air America and a veteran of such companies as VerticalNet and America Online. "Look at every other industry and how the internet has altered it. Take E-Trade and the selling of stocks. Or Orbitz and the travel industry. In every case, the internet enables getting rid of the middlemen." For about a year, starting in late 2001, Walsh was McAuliffe's chief technology officer, earning $1 a year to help the Democratic Party upgrade its tech systems. "Terry did want to do the right thing," Walsh says, "but I found the same buzz saw – legacy behavior and consultants who are compensated highly for non-cyber-centric behavior. TV, telemarketing, direct mail – that's where the margins are."
Another veteran of early efforts to convince top Democrats to embrace the new technology, who asked not to be named, said "At the DSCC [Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee] the executive director, Jim Jordan, flatly didn't care. He said it was in the hands of then-political director Andy Grossman, who said, 'The day someone can show me that the internet will make a difference in raising money or casting votes, that's the day I will care.'" He said this in 2001 – after MoveOn's anti-impeachment campaign, after Jesse Ventura's breakthrough use of the internet in 1998, after John McCain and Bill Bradley raised millions online in the 2000 primaries.
"The disconnect is now gone," says my source, noting that top Democratic Party staff are all embracing new web-based tools, "but the willingness to acknowledge that change must happen to accompany that is not. The internet has to become the center of the organization. But the notion of the party's committees having well-defined departments with a top-down hierarchical structure hasn't changed." Walsh adds, "We have to go through a generational purge. People have been fed crap – the McPolitics diet – for so long, the body politic will respond slowly to new tools that will make them smarter and more powerful." Thus one big question for the coming year will be the extent to which grassroots activists, small donors and bloggers decide to raise hard questions about the functioning of the party organs and interest groups that until now have been able to act on their behalf without having to pay a price for their mistakes. The Kerry debacle is a good place to start.
Open-source politics is still a long way off. The term "open source" specifically refers to allowing any software developer to see the underlying source code of a program, so that anyone can analyze it and improve it; better code trumps bad code, and programmers who have proven their smarts have greater credibility and status. Applied to political organizing, open source would mean opening up participation in planning and implementation to the community, letting competing actors evaluate the value of your plans and actions, being able to shift resources away from bad plans and bad planners and toward better ones, and expecting more of participants in return. It would mean moving away from egocentric organizations and toward network-centric organizing.
The Emerging Internet Majority
To the visionary technologists building the new civic software, we are living in nothing short of a paradigm shift. Scott Heiferman, the scrawny, youthful CEO of Meetup.com, enjoys citing Alexis de Tocqueville along with Robert Putnam, and argues, "In the same way that TV took politics away from the grassroots, the internet will give it back." He predicts a return to the 1800s/early-1900s era of joiners and organizers, when a double-digit level of civic participation in community affairs was common. Steven Johnson, the author of Emergence, recently wrote:
Using open-source coding as a model, it's not a stretch to believe the same process could make politics more representative and fair. Imagine, for example, how a grassroots network could take over some of the duties normally performed by high-priced consultants who try to shape a campaign message that's appealing. If the people receiving the message create it, chances are it's much more likely to stir up passions.
Joi Ito, a Japanese venture capitalist and social entrepreneur, predicts that the web will become more self-organizing and that a new form of "emergent democracy" will evolve that will be more supple and transparent than traditional forms of representative democracy.
There's no question that public discourse is being radically changed. As Dan Gillmor, until recently a technology columnist for the San Jose Mercury News, writes in his terrific new book, We the Media, "If someone knows something in one place, everyone who cares about that something will know it soon enough." But it's also possible that new internet-based tools will merely give already advantaged groups greater voice, reinforcing existing inequalities. "I think there are still a lot of Americans who think that no one is listening to them," says Theda Skocpol. She argues that web-enabled politicking may just be "really well suited to the liberal side of the spectrum, where you have a lot of college-educated people who are not connecting to politics through church networks or their workplaces or professional associations, where open partisanship is frowned upon, and where the Democratic Party has fallen into dealing with people as disaggregated individuals, followers or clients, rather than participants."
Indeed, a Bentley College survey of attendees at Meetups for the Democratic presidential candidates and party found they were mostly white middle- and upper-income professionals. According to the Pew Internet and American Life Project's most recent survey, Hispanics have closed the gap with whites, with two-thirds of both groups going online, but internet usage among blacks lags by about 18 percent. Age is the other obvious predictor of online behavior, with just under one-quarter of people over 65 venturing online. Yet another factor also affects internet participation: time. "Who is it that spends time online?" asks Mathew Gross. "It's people at home or at desk jobs where they can surf the web. You don't have that kind of time or freedom if you're a dental hygienist or migrant worker," he notes.
Skocpol argues that the internet is not changing the class structure of mobilization, because it is all driven by "intentional politics." You have to know in advance that you're looking for political information or to join a conversation or make a donation before you search on the web, she says. In the past, when federated, mass-membership organizations enlivened civic life, "People didn't have to know in advance that they wanted to be involved," she notes. She has a point: While the web may make it easier for a compelling message to circulate through existing social networks, it doesn't alter our tendency to cluster by social group. At the same time, people who rely on the net for political information are actually more likely than non-net users to seek out views different from their own, according to a new Pew Internet study.
These are likely to be momentary bumps in a much larger wave. That's because the next generation is growing up online, rather than adapting to it in their mid-adult years. More than 2 million children aged 6-17 have their own website, according to a December 2003 survey by Grunwald Associates. Twenty-nine percent of kids in grades K-3 have their own e-mail address. Social networking sites like Friendster and Flickr (a photo-sharing site) are drawing millions of participants and fostering new kinds of social conversations, some of which are already political.
Josh Koenig, one of the 20-somethings who cut their teeth at the Dean campaign and a co-founder of Music for America, says, "We're only seeing the first drips of what is going to be a downpour." When he told me that in most high schools in America, students are using the web to rank their teachers, I thought that was a bit of hyperbole. But then I discovered RateMyTeachers.com, where more than 6 million ratings have been posted by students on more than 900,000 teachers at more than 40,000 American and Canadian middle and high schools. That's triple the number from one year ago, covering about 85 percent of all the schools in both countries.
Just imagine when they take that habit into their adult lives, and start rating other authority figures, like politicians and bosses. The future is in their hands, though the rest of us will be taken along for the ride.
Micah L. Sifry, senior analyst with Public Campaign, is the author, with Nancy Watzman, of Is That a Politician in Your Pocket? (John Wiley & Sons) and the executive editor of www.personaldemocracy.com.
© 2005 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/21032/
By Micah L. Sifry, The Nation
Posted on January 20, 2005, Printed on November 9, 2005
http://www.alternet.org/story/21032/
Whether you're a Democrat in mourning or a Republican in glee, the results from election day should not obscure an important shift in America's civic life. New tools and practices born on the internet have reached critical mass, enabling ordinary people to participate in processes that used to be closed to them. It may seem like cold comfort for Kerry supporters now, but the truth is that voters don't have to rely on elected or self-appointed leaders to chart the way forward anymore. The era of top-down politics – where campaigns, institutions and journalism were cloistered communities powered by hard-to-amass capital – is over. Something wilder, more engaging and infinitely more satisfying to individual participants is arising alongside the old order.
One moment when this new power began to be collectively understood by grassroots activists was on April 23, 2003. It was 4:31 p.m. (EST) in cyberspace when Mathew Gross, then toiling in obscurity on Howard Dean's presidential campaign, posted the following missive on the message board of SmirkingChimp.com, a little-known but heavily trafficked forum for anti-Bush sentiment:
So I wander back to my desk and there really IS a note on my chair from Joe Trippi, the Campaign Manager for Howard Dean. The note says:
Matt,
Start an "Ask the Dean Campaign" thread over at the Smirking Chimp.
– Joe
Surely a seminal moment in Presidential politics, no?
So, here's the deal. Use this space to throw questions and comments our way. I'll be checking this thread, Joe will be checking this thread. We're understandably very busy so don't give up if we disappear for a day or two. Talk amongst yourselves while we're out of the room, as it were. But we will check in and try to answer questions. We want to hear from you. We want to know what you think.
So, go to it. And thanks for supporting Howard Dean.
About an hour later, after 30 responses appeared, Zephyr Teachout, Gross's colleague, chimed in with some answers. A little later, a participant on the site wrote: "This is too cool, an actual direct line to the Dean campaign committee! Pinch me – I must be dreaming!" Ultimately, more than 400 people posted comments on Gross' thread. Richard Hoefer, a frequent visitor, later wrote me: "That was an amazing day to see that rise out of nowhere. People were floored that the thread title was 'Ask the Dean Campaign' – and Trippi and Matt were actually asking questions and interacting. Never before had anyone seen that."
Never before had the top-down world of presidential campaigning been opened to a bottom-up, laterally networked community of ordinary voters. The Smirking Chimp is a web site with 25,000-plus registered members, founded after the 2000 election as a gathering place for liberals, progressives and leftists who felt the newly selected president reminded them most of, well, a smirking chimp. Each day they devour and critique the handful of critical articles selected by its webmaster, Jeff Tiedrich, a New York-based programmer who started the site on a lark and is amazed by its growth. "The community of the Chimp is the angry, angry, engaged left," Tiedrich says. When it was offered a direct connection to Dean, who was then the only candidate attacking Bush and the war in stark terms, lightning struck.
"The reason these community sites have formed," says Gross, rattling off the names DailyKos, MyDD, Eschaton, Democratic Underground and Buzzflash, along with the Smirking Chimp, "is the Democratic Party is too based on insiders." (Some Republicans apparently feel the same way, and have started similar sites, like RedState.org.) Indeed, at most political organizations, "membership" and "participation" mean little more than writing a check in response to a direct-mail appeal, as Harvard professor Theda Skocpol argues in her 2003 book Diminished Democracy. This wasn't always the case, Skocpol notes – through the first half of the 1900s tens of millions of Americans were engaged in cross-class fellowship and civic activism through federated mass membership organizations like the Free Masons, the Knights of Pythias and the American Legion. But, undermined by the Vietnam War, the "rights revolutions" and especially the new mass-media system, mass membership groups atrophied. They were replaced by a proliferating array of professionally run, top-down advocacy organizations, like the AARP and Natural Resources Defense Council. "America is now full of civic entrepreneurs who are constantly looking upward for potential angels, shmoozing with the wealthy," Skocpol writes, rather than talking to people of modest means.
But it is also true that insiderism and elitism have recently come under heavy attack, as everyone from Trent Lott to Dan Rather can attest. And it's not just Congress and big media whose hierarchies are being challenged; nonprofits and interest groups are feeling the ground shift too. "Members Unite! You have nothing to lose but your newsletters and crappy coffee-cup premiums," read the title of a recent post on WorldChanging.com, a blog devoted to fostering this movement. New web-based tools are facilitating a different way of doing politics, one in which we may all actually, not hypothetically, be equals; where transparency and accountability are more than slogans; and where anyone with few resources but a compelling message can be a community organizer, an ad-maker, a reporter, a publisher, a theorist, a money-raiser or a leader.
Consider these harbingers:
About two-thirds of American adults use the internet, and more than 55 percent have access to a high-speed internet connection at either home or work.
More than 53 million people have contributed material online, according to a spring 2003 survey by the Pew Internet & American Life Project.
More than 15 million have their own web site.
A new blog, or online journal, is created every 5.3 seconds, according to Technorati.com, a site that tracks the known universe of these easily updated web sites. As of Nov. 1, there were almost 4.3 million blogs, a million more than three months before. More than half of them are regularly updated by their creators, producing more than 400,000 fresh postings every day. (Full disclosure: My brother David is the founder of Technorati.)
A well-written blog, Joshua Micah Marshall's Talking Points Memo, gets more than 500,000 monthly visitors – as many as the entire web site of The American Prospect, the magazine where Marshall used to work, at a fraction of the cost.
Of the approximately 400,000-500,000 people who attended a political meeting through the social-networking site Meetup.com this election season, half had never gone to a political meeting before. 60 percent were under 40.
Attendees of Meetups for Democratic Party presidential candidates reported making an average of $312 in political contributions last year.
A two-minute political cartoon lampooning both Kerry and Bush, put out by JibJab.com this past summer, had 10 million viewings in the month of July – three times the number of hits on both presidential campaign web sites combined – and has since been viewed another 55 million times.
But it isn't the quantity of interactions taking place that suggests the change under way; it is the quality of those conversations. If, as a New Yorker cartoon put it, "On the internet, no one knows if you're a dog," on the internet, no one likes it if you don't speak in a genuine human voice. Says Christopher Locke, one of the co-authors of The Cluetrain Manifesto, a bible of sorts for business people trying to understand how the internet is changing commerce:
"Compared to this kind of personal, intimate, knowledgeable and highly engaged voice ... top-down corporate communications come across as stale and stentorian – the boring, authoritarian voice of command and control. The glaring difference between these styles is the strange attractor that has brought tens of millions flocking to the internet. There's new life passing along the wires. And it hasn't been coming from corporations." Nor has it been coming from politicians, not until recently.
It's the Network, Stupid
The differences between MoveOn.org, the big, liberal e-mail activist group, and DailyKos.com, the biggest of the new blog-centered sites, are illustrative. MoveOn and its associated PAC give its 2.8 million subscribers lots of easy, timely and mostly well-chosen options to get involved in national affairs. Most people are too busy to get deeply involved in many issues, and thus many respond positively to a request for help if action is one click away. MoveOn's sheer size makes small actions feel larger – maybe you'll do a bake sale for democracy if you know 10,000 other people are doing it too. It has raised millions of dollars for political candidates and advertising, and involved its subscribers in many innovative experiments, like its June 2003 online presidential primary and its "Bush in 30 Seconds" ad contest.
But MoveOn is still very much a top-down organization. Technologist and organizational strategist Tom Mandel says, "MoveOn is to liberal politics as Wal-Mart is to retail." Wes Boyd, Joan Blades, Eli Pariser and the other members of its leadership team may sign all their mass e-mails with their first names, but they set policy for the organization in much the same way as every other nonprofit, by talking among themselves, fielding proposals from various suitors, polling their audience and talking among themselves some more. Periodically they will ask subscribers to offer their ideas about priorities using an "ActionForum" program that enables visitors to suggest an issue, read what others have said and vote on their preferences. But that tool gives MoveOn members little ability to talk to each other directly or to aggregate their ideas independently of the choices its leaders make for them.
By comparison, DailyKos is a multilayered community engineered to reward ideas that bubble up from below. Like many bloggers, Markos Moulitsas, the Gulf War veteran who runs it, requires visitors to register (for free) if they want to post a comment. He also encourages users to set up their own "diaries," or blogs within his blog, where they can post their own entries. Unlike most blogs, the DailyKos is built on a tool called Scoop, which includes peer moderation, where members rank each other's entries and comments. Smart diary postings thus often rise to Moulitsas's attention, and if he reprints them on his main page they gain an even larger audience.
In addition, people with high rankings become "trusted users" who have the ability to recommend that visitors who try to disrupt conversations or simply post right-wing taunts be banned from the site. Only Moulitsas has the power to make that decision, and he weeds his garden carefully. "If somebody posts and I haven't seen them in a while," he told me, "I'll say, 'Where've you been?'" Amazingly, he insists that he has developed personal relationships with hundreds of people. "That's what happens after two years of reading the same names over and over again," he says.
As a result, the Kos community has become a very efficient collaboration engine – not only for pooling money for candidates (at least $600,000 has been given through the site) but also for rapid fact-checking of political statements and news stories, quick dissemination of news of voting irregularities and brainstorming of campaign themes. During the presidential debates, Kos' daily traffic surged to more than a half million visits. The DailyKos, to be sure, is still an egocentric organization dominated by one person who is not without blemishes, like refusing to disclose who his paying political clients are. But his success shows the power of an open network approach to organizing.
Beyond Kos, blog-based political networking has had all kinds of concrete political effects. Best known is the way prominent bloggers like Joshua Micah Marshall, along with some conservatives like Glenn Reynolds, fired up the Trent Lott-Strom Thurmond story, which led to Lott's fall from grace. More recently, bloggers have spurred the resignation of a homophobic congressman (Ed Schrock), undermined the credibility of key evidence in Dan Rather's story on Bush's National Guard service, distributed Jon Stewart's blistering Oct.15 appearance on CNN's Crossfire, beat back Sinclair Broadcasting's plan to force its stations to air an anti-Kerry documentary, and formed a back channel for unhappy soldiers in Iraq and their families back home.
The new political technology works because it gives individuals a way to pool their time, attention and resources around causes they may hold in common – and to do it without needing to become a professional activist or wait for approval from any authority figure. "It's not about the technology or the blog," says Mathew Gross now. "It's about having a conversation and treating people with respect."
The New Gold Rush
If conventional politicos had doubts about that proposition after Dean's late-January collapse in the Democratic primaries, their questions were muted a few weeks later, when a $2,000 investment in advertising on a few political blogs generated more than $80,000 two weeks later in small contributions to Democratic congressional candidate Ben Chandler. Chandler went on to win the special election for the 6th District in Kentucky. Suddenly politicians were adding community-building tools to their web sites and buying ads on popular blogs. For firms that specialize in selling internet plumbing and the expertise needed to run it, like GetActive, Issue Dynamics, CTSG, Groundspring, IStandFor, Right Click Strategies, Kintera and Convio, these are flush times.
In late March an audience of several hundred technologists, venture capitalists and journalists gathered at Esther Dyson's annual PC Forum in Scottsdale, Ariz., a top venue for the computer industry. This year the hot topic was social software. The crowd listened intently as Bob Epstein, a member of GetActive's board of directors, told them that the company's clients – groups like Oxfam America, Earthjustice, Riverkeeper, PBS and the AFL-CIO – were seeing huge jumps in online fundraising. Noting that $70 billion is spent every year on direct mail and "some of that will move online," he reassured the crowd that "our goal isn't to change the political system, it's to get a good return on the dollar."
That seemed to be the main focus, too, at the "Politics Online" conference at George Washington University in April. To most of the audience, which was thick with consultants from both parties, the internet is just a new place for a more sophisticated kind of direct mail, the kind where each solicitation message can be tailored precisely to a voter's concerns and foibles, and where a dribble of quasi participation ("Become an E-Captain!" "Click Here to E-Mail This Pre-Written Message to Your Member of Congress") can produce a torrent of donations.
It fell to David Weinberger, a co-author of the Cluetrain Manifesto and an internet adviser to the Dean campaign, to try to pierce the marketing talk at the conference with a harder truth. "I am not a 'customer' and I am not a 'consumer,'" he fumed during a panel with representatives of MoveOn.org and RightMarch.com over the issue of how best to manage online campaigns. "I am a citizen and a voter. I flee from 'message.' It is advertising. I want to avoid advertising," he roared. Recalling the hullabaloo over Kerry's comment that the Bush campaigners "are the most crooked, lying group I've ever seen," caught when he thought a mike he was wearing was off, Weinberger insisted that this was the best thing that had happened to Kerry. "That was the first time he had been allowed to speak as a human being." Speaking off-mike, he argued, was like blogging – in both cases people's real voices could be heard, which is what we hunger for. "Control kills scale. Control kills passion. Control kills the human voice," Weinberger insisted.
Loss of Control Freaks
That message has been very slow in reaching the Democratic establishment. On his blog, Weinberger tells of meeting DNC chair Terry McAuliffe at a cocktail party. "I tried to say that the 'net can do things for campaigns other than raise money ... for example, bring in a portion of the population that is feeling a tad alienated in part because of the relentless money 'n' marketing focus of the campaign. McAuliffe agreed, and then went on to re-express my point in terms of using the 'net to raise money." Nor did this message penetrate the Kerry campaign. "They don't take part in the conversation on the Kerry blog," complained Mathew Gross this past summer. "They're still sort of issuing press releases, albeit in a more human voice."
That's because top-down politics is all about maintaining control. "Think of an established brand with a lot invested in control of its image," says Jonah Seiger, founding partner of Connections Media and a veteran of internet politicking since the late 1980s. "The idea of opening that up is scary."
"Anybody who does politics the old way will fight doing things the new way because it's harder to get paid for it," says Mark Walsh, CEO of Progress Media, the parent of Air America and a veteran of such companies as VerticalNet and America Online. "Look at every other industry and how the internet has altered it. Take E-Trade and the selling of stocks. Or Orbitz and the travel industry. In every case, the internet enables getting rid of the middlemen." For about a year, starting in late 2001, Walsh was McAuliffe's chief technology officer, earning $1 a year to help the Democratic Party upgrade its tech systems. "Terry did want to do the right thing," Walsh says, "but I found the same buzz saw – legacy behavior and consultants who are compensated highly for non-cyber-centric behavior. TV, telemarketing, direct mail – that's where the margins are."
Another veteran of early efforts to convince top Democrats to embrace the new technology, who asked not to be named, said "At the DSCC [Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee] the executive director, Jim Jordan, flatly didn't care. He said it was in the hands of then-political director Andy Grossman, who said, 'The day someone can show me that the internet will make a difference in raising money or casting votes, that's the day I will care.'" He said this in 2001 – after MoveOn's anti-impeachment campaign, after Jesse Ventura's breakthrough use of the internet in 1998, after John McCain and Bill Bradley raised millions online in the 2000 primaries.
"The disconnect is now gone," says my source, noting that top Democratic Party staff are all embracing new web-based tools, "but the willingness to acknowledge that change must happen to accompany that is not. The internet has to become the center of the organization. But the notion of the party's committees having well-defined departments with a top-down hierarchical structure hasn't changed." Walsh adds, "We have to go through a generational purge. People have been fed crap – the McPolitics diet – for so long, the body politic will respond slowly to new tools that will make them smarter and more powerful." Thus one big question for the coming year will be the extent to which grassroots activists, small donors and bloggers decide to raise hard questions about the functioning of the party organs and interest groups that until now have been able to act on their behalf without having to pay a price for their mistakes. The Kerry debacle is a good place to start.
Open-source politics is still a long way off. The term "open source" specifically refers to allowing any software developer to see the underlying source code of a program, so that anyone can analyze it and improve it; better code trumps bad code, and programmers who have proven their smarts have greater credibility and status. Applied to political organizing, open source would mean opening up participation in planning and implementation to the community, letting competing actors evaluate the value of your plans and actions, being able to shift resources away from bad plans and bad planners and toward better ones, and expecting more of participants in return. It would mean moving away from egocentric organizations and toward network-centric organizing.
The Emerging Internet Majority
To the visionary technologists building the new civic software, we are living in nothing short of a paradigm shift. Scott Heiferman, the scrawny, youthful CEO of Meetup.com, enjoys citing Alexis de Tocqueville along with Robert Putnam, and argues, "In the same way that TV took politics away from the grassroots, the internet will give it back." He predicts a return to the 1800s/early-1900s era of joiners and organizers, when a double-digit level of civic participation in community affairs was common. Steven Johnson, the author of Emergence, recently wrote:
Using open-source coding as a model, it's not a stretch to believe the same process could make politics more representative and fair. Imagine, for example, how a grassroots network could take over some of the duties normally performed by high-priced consultants who try to shape a campaign message that's appealing. If the people receiving the message create it, chances are it's much more likely to stir up passions.
Joi Ito, a Japanese venture capitalist and social entrepreneur, predicts that the web will become more self-organizing and that a new form of "emergent democracy" will evolve that will be more supple and transparent than traditional forms of representative democracy.
There's no question that public discourse is being radically changed. As Dan Gillmor, until recently a technology columnist for the San Jose Mercury News, writes in his terrific new book, We the Media, "If someone knows something in one place, everyone who cares about that something will know it soon enough." But it's also possible that new internet-based tools will merely give already advantaged groups greater voice, reinforcing existing inequalities. "I think there are still a lot of Americans who think that no one is listening to them," says Theda Skocpol. She argues that web-enabled politicking may just be "really well suited to the liberal side of the spectrum, where you have a lot of college-educated people who are not connecting to politics through church networks or their workplaces or professional associations, where open partisanship is frowned upon, and where the Democratic Party has fallen into dealing with people as disaggregated individuals, followers or clients, rather than participants."
Indeed, a Bentley College survey of attendees at Meetups for the Democratic presidential candidates and party found they were mostly white middle- and upper-income professionals. According to the Pew Internet and American Life Project's most recent survey, Hispanics have closed the gap with whites, with two-thirds of both groups going online, but internet usage among blacks lags by about 18 percent. Age is the other obvious predictor of online behavior, with just under one-quarter of people over 65 venturing online. Yet another factor also affects internet participation: time. "Who is it that spends time online?" asks Mathew Gross. "It's people at home or at desk jobs where they can surf the web. You don't have that kind of time or freedom if you're a dental hygienist or migrant worker," he notes.
Skocpol argues that the internet is not changing the class structure of mobilization, because it is all driven by "intentional politics." You have to know in advance that you're looking for political information or to join a conversation or make a donation before you search on the web, she says. In the past, when federated, mass-membership organizations enlivened civic life, "People didn't have to know in advance that they wanted to be involved," she notes. She has a point: While the web may make it easier for a compelling message to circulate through existing social networks, it doesn't alter our tendency to cluster by social group. At the same time, people who rely on the net for political information are actually more likely than non-net users to seek out views different from their own, according to a new Pew Internet study.
These are likely to be momentary bumps in a much larger wave. That's because the next generation is growing up online, rather than adapting to it in their mid-adult years. More than 2 million children aged 6-17 have their own website, according to a December 2003 survey by Grunwald Associates. Twenty-nine percent of kids in grades K-3 have their own e-mail address. Social networking sites like Friendster and Flickr (a photo-sharing site) are drawing millions of participants and fostering new kinds of social conversations, some of which are already political.
Josh Koenig, one of the 20-somethings who cut their teeth at the Dean campaign and a co-founder of Music for America, says, "We're only seeing the first drips of what is going to be a downpour." When he told me that in most high schools in America, students are using the web to rank their teachers, I thought that was a bit of hyperbole. But then I discovered RateMyTeachers.com, where more than 6 million ratings have been posted by students on more than 900,000 teachers at more than 40,000 American and Canadian middle and high schools. That's triple the number from one year ago, covering about 85 percent of all the schools in both countries.
Just imagine when they take that habit into their adult lives, and start rating other authority figures, like politicians and bosses. The future is in their hands, though the rest of us will be taken along for the ride.
Micah L. Sifry, senior analyst with Public Campaign, is the author, with Nancy Watzman, of Is That a Politician in Your Pocket? (John Wiley & Sons) and the executive editor of www.personaldemocracy.com.
© 2005 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/21032/
Wednesday, January 19, 2005
Beyond NCLB: Policy Options for 2007
January 12, 2005
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The Forum invites your participation--
Beyond NCLB: Policy Options for 2007
Federal Policy Options for Genuine School Improvement
A project of
Sponsored by The Forum for Education and Democracy
Beyond NCLB: Policy Options for 2007 is a project of the Forum for Education and Democracy designed to develop policy options that can inform the reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, recently named the No Child Left Behind Act. As a result of this work, we expect to:
• Publish and disseminate to legislators and public policy organizations a set of policy recommendations that will inform the reauthorization of NCLB in 2007 from a progressive, school-based point of view.
• Produce opinion pieces and paid media that promotes these policy options.
• Hold briefings and meetings with legislators, labor and business organizations, community groups, civil rights groups, and educators to educate them on these policy options.
Beyond NCLB is a twenty-four month long endeavor commencing in March, 2005 to be completed in March, 2007. It will involve policy research and writing, forums and educational meetings, and policy briefings in Washington, D.C. among other activities. Our goal is to educate legislators, the policy community, and the general public as to ways in which federal legislation can help nurture strong public schools for a strong democratic society.
The Forum invites your participation in this program. We are soliciting model legislative proposals, currently successful policies from states and communities, research reports on NCLB and alternatives, and commentary from those who have dealt with the effects of NCLB. You may attend one of our hearing on NCLB or submit materials directly to us via our web site at www.forumforeducation.org or by mail to Box 216, Amesville, Ohio, 45711.
© 2004 - The Forum for Education and Democracy
P.O. Box 216 - Amesville, Ohio 45711
Email info@forumforeducation.org - Phone 740.448.3402
http://www.forumforeducation.org/policy/index.php?id=47
------------------------------------------------------------------------
The Forum invites your participation--
Beyond NCLB: Policy Options for 2007
Federal Policy Options for Genuine School Improvement
A project of
Sponsored by The Forum for Education and Democracy
Beyond NCLB: Policy Options for 2007 is a project of the Forum for Education and Democracy designed to develop policy options that can inform the reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, recently named the No Child Left Behind Act. As a result of this work, we expect to:
• Publish and disseminate to legislators and public policy organizations a set of policy recommendations that will inform the reauthorization of NCLB in 2007 from a progressive, school-based point of view.
• Produce opinion pieces and paid media that promotes these policy options.
• Hold briefings and meetings with legislators, labor and business organizations, community groups, civil rights groups, and educators to educate them on these policy options.
Beyond NCLB is a twenty-four month long endeavor commencing in March, 2005 to be completed in March, 2007. It will involve policy research and writing, forums and educational meetings, and policy briefings in Washington, D.C. among other activities. Our goal is to educate legislators, the policy community, and the general public as to ways in which federal legislation can help nurture strong public schools for a strong democratic society.
The Forum invites your participation in this program. We are soliciting model legislative proposals, currently successful policies from states and communities, research reports on NCLB and alternatives, and commentary from those who have dealt with the effects of NCLB. You may attend one of our hearing on NCLB or submit materials directly to us via our web site at www.forumforeducation.org or by mail to Box 216, Amesville, Ohio, 45711.
© 2004 - The Forum for Education and Democracy
P.O. Box 216 - Amesville, Ohio 45711
Email info@forumforeducation.org - Phone 740.448.3402
http://www.forumforeducation.org/policy/index.php?id=47
DRAFT Principles for Authentic Accountability
FairTest
The National Center for Fair & Open Testing
-- Spring 2004
These draft Principles were developed by an informal alliance of education and civil rights organizations, together with individual activists, educators and researchers, for public discussion purposes.
"Accountability" has become perhaps the fundamental tool for instituting changes in public schools. In practice in most states and districts and through the federal No Child Left Behind Act, accountability has taken the form of using results from standardized tests to trigger labels, sanctions, rewards or interventions for districts, schools, educators or students.
We believe this approach has been both insufficient and has had undesirable side effects. We do not therefore reject accountability, but rather propose a different approach to accountability: authentic accountability. We offer this set of principles for guiding the reconstruction of accountability systems to better meet the needs of education and to avoid the dangers often associated with current accountability systems.
To be accountable or to give an accounting poses the questions: - accountable to what ends?
- accountable for what?
- accountable to whom? and
- accountable by what means?
These principles address each question in turn.
A. Accountable to What Ends?
The key purposes of accountability are to inform the public B to give an accounting B of the status of the school or system; to provide information that can be used to improve education; to ensure equity within the system; to foster democracy; and to ensure that participants in the system carry out their responsibilities well.
As it is widely recognized that much about schools, particularly those serving low-income and minority-group children, must be improved, we place improvement and equity as fundamental purposes of accountability. The education of our children is also widely understood as foundational to democracy. Accountability procedures should strengthen, not undermine participatory democracy. The public should be informed about these and other significant aspects of schooling. All the principles should be used to help guide participants in the system to doing their work responsibly and well.
We thus conclude these principles for the purposes of accountability:
1. Improvement. Schools and districts must be accountable for implementing procedures for using information to guide decision-making by educators, students, parents and the community to improve the quality of schools and learning. The most fundamental characteristic of good schools is good teaching. If accountability is to induce improvement, then professional development B particularly time for teachers to collaborate B must be a regular part of teachers= paid work and must be aimed toward improving practice and creating a community of learners.
2. Equity. Education systems must contribute to closing the race and class achievement gaps and to helping overcome the consequences of poverty and racism. The gaps must be closed on the significant academic, personal and social outcomes that society wants for its children B not only on standardized tests B and on the social and school indicators that prefigure and shape school achievement. Children who need more should be provided with more: equity does not mean the same for all, it means that all children receive what they need to fully develop.
3. Democracy. Participatory democracy serves as a vehicle for school accountability and improvement, and for strengthening the community. Accountability systems therefore must include structures that promote the informed involvement of key actors in the education system: parents, students, educators, and members of the local community first of all. To further strengthen democracy, government and education systems should be accountable for promoting, expanding and strengthening schooling that is integrated by race and class.
4. Informing the public. The public deserves substantive and accurate information about the functioning, successes and problems of public education, focusing on the various aspects of schooling that are of major concern to the public.
5. Responsible practice. As education involves complex systems, participants in public education are varied in their interests and roles. Each major sector of the system should be provided the means to perform well, evidence should be gathered on how well they are performing, and the evidence should be used to help participants carry out and improve their work.
B. Accountable for What?
Accountability must be based on a shared vision and goals for education and schools, on agreement about what schools should be and do. The larger community must participate in setting the basic goals and purposes of the educational system and evaluating how well they have been met. Because a shared vision may not be present, processes must be established to enable communities to agree on common ground or to allow differences to co-exist. To meet this purpose, we propose the following five principles:
1. Priorities. The shared vision should prioritize what is most important in academic and other formal learning, the physical and emotional well-being of students, the social environment of the school, and how well schools prepare students to be active participants in a democracy, lifelong learners, and able to continue their education and make a good living. Assessment information used in accountability must focus on those areas deemed most important, not those areas that are easiest to measure with inexpensive tools, such as standardized tests, though such tools may be useful in the accountability process.
2. Resources. Government must be held accountable for providing education systems, including schools and pre-schools, with adequate resources to meet agreed-upon priorities. This includes the money to hire good teachers and ensure continuing professional development, provide small classes, books, technology and supplies, in a comfortable, clean and hospitable environment, in order to ensure that all children receive an adequate and equitable opportunity to learn. Resources for other policies and programs known to positively contribute to important outcomes, such as pre-school or health care, must also be provided. Schools and districts should be accountable for using their resources fairly and effectively.
3. Student learning. Education systems should be accountable for ensuring all students learn those things society agrees all should learn (which could be expressed as formal standards), and for enabling all students to pursue areas of individual interest and talent. Assessments of academic, vocational or other formal learning must promote, measure and provide useful feedback and reporting on deep, strong learning rather than primarily procedural, factual or surface learning. They must include all important content areas of learning and be congruent with current knowledge about how students learn.
4. Student well-being. Students are happier and achieve more in environments that are hospitable and welcoming and where students feel empowered, challenged, motivated and supported.
Holding schools accountable for establishing supportive and caring learning environments for all children and for ensuring students= physical and emotional well-being must rely on evidence that illuminates the most important aspects.
5. Inclusion. The progress and well being of all students must be accounted for. Accountability data of all sorts should be broken out by major demographic categories. Inclusion also implies respect for the diverse experiences and cultural backgrounds of students and communities.
C. Accountable to Whom
Accountability must be mutual and reciprocal. Accountability systems require appropriate roles for the key participant sectors and structures within which to carry out the appropriate responsibilities.
1. Higher levels of government authority are responsible for ensuring adequate provision and fair use of resources so as to provide equity of opportunities; safeguarding civil and human rights to ensure fair treatment; monitoring local systems; analyzing research and practice to better determine what works best in what circumstances; disseminating knowledge; providing additional support as needed; and for intervening in localities when necessary.
States can define, with wide participation, core areas for learning (though specific standards as well as curriculum and instruction can be left to districts and schools); and intervene when localities are unable to provide a high-quality education even when they have reasonable resources. Governments are accountable for conducting business with transparency and substantial educator, parent and community input.
2. Local schools and districts and their communities must be the primary authorities in the accountability process. Schools are first of all accountable to their students, the parents and the local community. Local accountability involves active participation and shared power among key actors. Schools and districts also are responsible to the general public and the state.
D. Accountable by what means
The means used to implement accountability can support or undermine the underlying accountability goals and overall school quality. The general trend has been to combine narrow measures with high stakes, thereby damaging schools= capacity to meet the larger goals sought by the public and often undermining the quality of education.
To ensure that accountability methods support full accountability goals, we propose the following principles:
1. Use multiple forms of evidence. Accountability requires the use of multiple forms of qualitative and quantitative evidence from both academic and non-academic areas to arrive at judgments as to where a student, school, district or the state is doing well and where not, and to provide a basis for making improvements. All students must be assessed and evaluated with a range of appropriate tools and methods, with no student evaluated by means that are inappropriate to that student. No important academic decision about a student, a teacher, an administrator, a school or a district should be made solely on one type of evidence, such as standardized test scores. (Scores from several standardized tests do not constitute multiple forms of evidence.)
2. Use predictive and formative school and system indicators. Education systems must assess the key factors that contribute to the attainment of rich outcomes. These factors include whether schools and districts are using policies and programs that support strong outcomes; whether they are using information in a reasonable way to improve teaching, learning and school quality; and whether the state and federal governments are providing positive support in these areas. Out-of-school indicators such as health care, housing, nutrition, and availability of high-quality pre-school, also should be assessed and evaluated. Systems also should identify and analyze in-school factors that inhibit high achievement or harm school quality; these could include tracking and grouping practices, retention and promotion policies, and social and cultural practices and expectations.
3. Use formative student assessment. Research has strongly demonstrated that skilled use of giving feedback to students (Aformative assessment@) is among the most powerful means teachers have for improving learning outcomes. For assessment to be most helpful to students, it must be comprehensive and regular enough to provide fine-grained useful information about each student to guide further instruction, must be understood and used by the student, and the student should be actively involved in the assessment and evaluation process. Most assessment therefore must be classroom-based and used by well-prepared teachers. Schools and districts must ensure that all teachers are skilled users of formative assessments. Standardized exams should supplement, not supplant or overpower, classroom assessment. Because teachers must use information to improve instruction, it would be more efficient to ensure high-quality assessment practices by teachers than to focus on improving standardized testing to be used by under-prepared teachers.
4) Use interventions sparingly and carefully. Interventions from higher levels of government must focus on providing useful assistance and only as a last resort include harsher measures. Intervention should focus on factors that can produce powerful improvement, such as rich professional development, strong parent involvement, and high quality classroom assessment.
If a school or district has taken steps that plausibly will lead to desired improvement, it must be allowed time for those changes to take effect. During that time, improvement efforts must be monitored using a range of evidence to determine if implementation of reasonable changes is proceeding well and schools are able to use information to effectively adjust their improvement efforts.
The little research that exists suggests that there is no significant evidence of effectiveness for sanctions such as removing the principal and key staff, privatizing school or system management, making the school a charter school, or the having the state run the school or district. This indicates that firing teachers or changing governance are not proven paths to meaningful improvement. Such sanctions therefore should be taken as a last resort, with sufficient support and resources to increase the likelihood of success, and with careful monitoring of progress. Such strong interventions should be consistent with these principles.
http://www.fairtest.org/nattest/Authentic%20Accountability/Draft%20Principles.html
The National Center for Fair & Open Testing
-- Spring 2004
These draft Principles were developed by an informal alliance of education and civil rights organizations, together with individual activists, educators and researchers, for public discussion purposes.
"Accountability" has become perhaps the fundamental tool for instituting changes in public schools. In practice in most states and districts and through the federal No Child Left Behind Act, accountability has taken the form of using results from standardized tests to trigger labels, sanctions, rewards or interventions for districts, schools, educators or students.
We believe this approach has been both insufficient and has had undesirable side effects. We do not therefore reject accountability, but rather propose a different approach to accountability: authentic accountability. We offer this set of principles for guiding the reconstruction of accountability systems to better meet the needs of education and to avoid the dangers often associated with current accountability systems.
To be accountable or to give an accounting poses the questions: - accountable to what ends?
- accountable for what?
- accountable to whom? and
- accountable by what means?
These principles address each question in turn.
A. Accountable to What Ends?
The key purposes of accountability are to inform the public B to give an accounting B of the status of the school or system; to provide information that can be used to improve education; to ensure equity within the system; to foster democracy; and to ensure that participants in the system carry out their responsibilities well.
As it is widely recognized that much about schools, particularly those serving low-income and minority-group children, must be improved, we place improvement and equity as fundamental purposes of accountability. The education of our children is also widely understood as foundational to democracy. Accountability procedures should strengthen, not undermine participatory democracy. The public should be informed about these and other significant aspects of schooling. All the principles should be used to help guide participants in the system to doing their work responsibly and well.
We thus conclude these principles for the purposes of accountability:
1. Improvement. Schools and districts must be accountable for implementing procedures for using information to guide decision-making by educators, students, parents and the community to improve the quality of schools and learning. The most fundamental characteristic of good schools is good teaching. If accountability is to induce improvement, then professional development B particularly time for teachers to collaborate B must be a regular part of teachers= paid work and must be aimed toward improving practice and creating a community of learners.
2. Equity. Education systems must contribute to closing the race and class achievement gaps and to helping overcome the consequences of poverty and racism. The gaps must be closed on the significant academic, personal and social outcomes that society wants for its children B not only on standardized tests B and on the social and school indicators that prefigure and shape school achievement. Children who need more should be provided with more: equity does not mean the same for all, it means that all children receive what they need to fully develop.
3. Democracy. Participatory democracy serves as a vehicle for school accountability and improvement, and for strengthening the community. Accountability systems therefore must include structures that promote the informed involvement of key actors in the education system: parents, students, educators, and members of the local community first of all. To further strengthen democracy, government and education systems should be accountable for promoting, expanding and strengthening schooling that is integrated by race and class.
4. Informing the public. The public deserves substantive and accurate information about the functioning, successes and problems of public education, focusing on the various aspects of schooling that are of major concern to the public.
5. Responsible practice. As education involves complex systems, participants in public education are varied in their interests and roles. Each major sector of the system should be provided the means to perform well, evidence should be gathered on how well they are performing, and the evidence should be used to help participants carry out and improve their work.
B. Accountable for What?
Accountability must be based on a shared vision and goals for education and schools, on agreement about what schools should be and do. The larger community must participate in setting the basic goals and purposes of the educational system and evaluating how well they have been met. Because a shared vision may not be present, processes must be established to enable communities to agree on common ground or to allow differences to co-exist. To meet this purpose, we propose the following five principles:
1. Priorities. The shared vision should prioritize what is most important in academic and other formal learning, the physical and emotional well-being of students, the social environment of the school, and how well schools prepare students to be active participants in a democracy, lifelong learners, and able to continue their education and make a good living. Assessment information used in accountability must focus on those areas deemed most important, not those areas that are easiest to measure with inexpensive tools, such as standardized tests, though such tools may be useful in the accountability process.
2. Resources. Government must be held accountable for providing education systems, including schools and pre-schools, with adequate resources to meet agreed-upon priorities. This includes the money to hire good teachers and ensure continuing professional development, provide small classes, books, technology and supplies, in a comfortable, clean and hospitable environment, in order to ensure that all children receive an adequate and equitable opportunity to learn. Resources for other policies and programs known to positively contribute to important outcomes, such as pre-school or health care, must also be provided. Schools and districts should be accountable for using their resources fairly and effectively.
3. Student learning. Education systems should be accountable for ensuring all students learn those things society agrees all should learn (which could be expressed as formal standards), and for enabling all students to pursue areas of individual interest and talent. Assessments of academic, vocational or other formal learning must promote, measure and provide useful feedback and reporting on deep, strong learning rather than primarily procedural, factual or surface learning. They must include all important content areas of learning and be congruent with current knowledge about how students learn.
4. Student well-being. Students are happier and achieve more in environments that are hospitable and welcoming and where students feel empowered, challenged, motivated and supported.
Holding schools accountable for establishing supportive and caring learning environments for all children and for ensuring students= physical and emotional well-being must rely on evidence that illuminates the most important aspects.
5. Inclusion. The progress and well being of all students must be accounted for. Accountability data of all sorts should be broken out by major demographic categories. Inclusion also implies respect for the diverse experiences and cultural backgrounds of students and communities.
C. Accountable to Whom
Accountability must be mutual and reciprocal. Accountability systems require appropriate roles for the key participant sectors and structures within which to carry out the appropriate responsibilities.
1. Higher levels of government authority are responsible for ensuring adequate provision and fair use of resources so as to provide equity of opportunities; safeguarding civil and human rights to ensure fair treatment; monitoring local systems; analyzing research and practice to better determine what works best in what circumstances; disseminating knowledge; providing additional support as needed; and for intervening in localities when necessary.
States can define, with wide participation, core areas for learning (though specific standards as well as curriculum and instruction can be left to districts and schools); and intervene when localities are unable to provide a high-quality education even when they have reasonable resources. Governments are accountable for conducting business with transparency and substantial educator, parent and community input.
2. Local schools and districts and their communities must be the primary authorities in the accountability process. Schools are first of all accountable to their students, the parents and the local community. Local accountability involves active participation and shared power among key actors. Schools and districts also are responsible to the general public and the state.
D. Accountable by what means
The means used to implement accountability can support or undermine the underlying accountability goals and overall school quality. The general trend has been to combine narrow measures with high stakes, thereby damaging schools= capacity to meet the larger goals sought by the public and often undermining the quality of education.
To ensure that accountability methods support full accountability goals, we propose the following principles:
1. Use multiple forms of evidence. Accountability requires the use of multiple forms of qualitative and quantitative evidence from both academic and non-academic areas to arrive at judgments as to where a student, school, district or the state is doing well and where not, and to provide a basis for making improvements. All students must be assessed and evaluated with a range of appropriate tools and methods, with no student evaluated by means that are inappropriate to that student. No important academic decision about a student, a teacher, an administrator, a school or a district should be made solely on one type of evidence, such as standardized test scores. (Scores from several standardized tests do not constitute multiple forms of evidence.)
2. Use predictive and formative school and system indicators. Education systems must assess the key factors that contribute to the attainment of rich outcomes. These factors include whether schools and districts are using policies and programs that support strong outcomes; whether they are using information in a reasonable way to improve teaching, learning and school quality; and whether the state and federal governments are providing positive support in these areas. Out-of-school indicators such as health care, housing, nutrition, and availability of high-quality pre-school, also should be assessed and evaluated. Systems also should identify and analyze in-school factors that inhibit high achievement or harm school quality; these could include tracking and grouping practices, retention and promotion policies, and social and cultural practices and expectations.
3. Use formative student assessment. Research has strongly demonstrated that skilled use of giving feedback to students (Aformative assessment@) is among the most powerful means teachers have for improving learning outcomes. For assessment to be most helpful to students, it must be comprehensive and regular enough to provide fine-grained useful information about each student to guide further instruction, must be understood and used by the student, and the student should be actively involved in the assessment and evaluation process. Most assessment therefore must be classroom-based and used by well-prepared teachers. Schools and districts must ensure that all teachers are skilled users of formative assessments. Standardized exams should supplement, not supplant or overpower, classroom assessment. Because teachers must use information to improve instruction, it would be more efficient to ensure high-quality assessment practices by teachers than to focus on improving standardized testing to be used by under-prepared teachers.
4) Use interventions sparingly and carefully. Interventions from higher levels of government must focus on providing useful assistance and only as a last resort include harsher measures. Intervention should focus on factors that can produce powerful improvement, such as rich professional development, strong parent involvement, and high quality classroom assessment.
If a school or district has taken steps that plausibly will lead to desired improvement, it must be allowed time for those changes to take effect. During that time, improvement efforts must be monitored using a range of evidence to determine if implementation of reasonable changes is proceeding well and schools are able to use information to effectively adjust their improvement efforts.
The little research that exists suggests that there is no significant evidence of effectiveness for sanctions such as removing the principal and key staff, privatizing school or system management, making the school a charter school, or the having the state run the school or district. This indicates that firing teachers or changing governance are not proven paths to meaningful improvement. Such sanctions therefore should be taken as a last resort, with sufficient support and resources to increase the likelihood of success, and with careful monitoring of progress. Such strong interventions should be consistent with these principles.
http://www.fairtest.org/nattest/Authentic%20Accountability/Draft%20Principles.html
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