Three years ago the venerable
Phi Delta Kappan commissioned a series of Fast Backs for the millennium. They were designed to review the immediate past and stimulate cogitation about the future.
55 – The Season of Our Discontents
New Federalism is back in play, thanks to a faltering economy and federal tax and spending policies. But this time it’s back not because a president has called for it – as Nixon and later Reagan did – but because the states would like to see Uncle Sam pick up some of the staggering financial burdens they now face.
Guest Cyber-Chair: The Medical Model in Education Research
Recently, while we were having breakfast and discussing education research with the editor of this newsletter, Denis Doyle, he suggested that we read the book Complications by Atul Gawande. His suggestion was all the more relevant given the recent reauthorization of OERI, now the Institute of Education Sciences.
53 - Charter Schools Revisited
I last wrote about charter schools in February 2001 – much has happened since then, both good and bad. Indeed, in one respect, the bad news is the good news – so popular are charter schools that they are beginning to produce a backlash among the less enlightened supporters of public schools.
52 - Evidence Based Education
No Child Left Behind (NCLB) bristles with references to evidence-based or research-based education solutions. By one count the 1,000 plus page bill contains more than 130 references to it.
51 – Lowering the Bar
As a device to give the impression of prowess, lowering the bar is among the oldest ploys in recorded history. Accordingly, it came as no surprise to see The New York Times reproachfully report that various states were doing precisely that, lowering the several bars set by NCLB so they could claim that they were in compliance.
50 – NCLB: Beyond Brown
With this the 50th Cyber Chair I have searched high and low for a 50th anniversary to comment on and it was not difficult to find. Brown -- arguably the most important Supreme Court decision of the 20th century -- was handed down nearly fifty years ago.
49 – Family Movies
The premiere art form of the 20th century is cinema, moving pictures as they were once called. Indeed, in many respects cinema not only captures the 20th century, it defines it, first appearing at the turn of the century as scratchy black and white silent films, lasting only a matter of minutes and culminating at the end of the century in a blizzard of full-color, wide-screen, surround sound special effects that are simply dazzling.
48 - Knowledge-based Decision-making: A Medical Model
As the 21st century begins to unfold, two intertwined terms are becoming, if not household words, school house words: data-driven decision-making and scientifically-based-research. They are becoming a part of the culture of education.
47 – 9/11 Remembered
It was a perfect early fall day – clear, cool, beautiful – which somehow made the disaster all the more incomprehensible. As a Washingtonian of more than 30 years, I shared a bad habit with many of my colleagues: an insatiable hunger for news, on time, and in this the modern era, on-line.
46 – Back-to-School
The back-to-school ritual is so much a part of American life that it is hard to remember that it is an archaic carryover from the pre-industrial era. That we take it for granted is a commentary of the power of custom and habit.
45 – The PDK/GALLUP POLL
The 34th Annual Phi Delta Kappa/Gallup Poll of the Public’s Attitudes Toward the Public Schools will be published in hard copy in the September PDK magazine; for those of you who – like me – are impatient, however, you can find it at the PDK WEB site.
44 – Standards: A Short History
The most remarkable thing about the education standards movement is that it is remarkable at all. One is perforce reminded of the famous (and now politically incorrect) comment of Dr. Johnson’s – what is remarkable about women preachers and dogs that walk on their hind legs is not that they do it well but that they do it at all.
43 - Truancy as a Rational Choice
Writing Wining the Brain Race with David T. Kearns in the late 1980’s (when he was still Chairman and CEO of Xerox) we advanced a novel argument about a corporation’s most important customer. It was not the customer who returned year after year without complaint; not the customer who complained and still returned (he or she, after all, offered constructive criticism); the most important customer was the one who abandoned you and never told you why.
42 – The Tidal Wave Builds
One of the strangest facets of No Child Left Behind (NCLB) is its slow penetration of the heartland. A reform – if that is the word – without precedent in the annals of the federal government, yet word about its pending impact is only slowly filtering out to school districts and the states.
Data: Would That it Were as Dull as it Sounds
The recent round of corporate scandals and accounting legerdemain is enough to give data users a bad name. That, after all, was the problem with WorldCom (the biggest bankruptcy in American history) Enron and Andersen.
Long Live Vouchers, Vouchers are Dead
Among the most vexing problems in political life is the question of succession. President Bush brought this into high relief last week when he exercised the 25th amendment to name Vice President Cheney acting president for the few minutes when he would be under anesthesia (undergoing a routine colonoscopy).
Technology, Equity and Choice
Now that the Supreme Court has ruled on education tuition vouchers - taking the "ouch out of vouchers" as Steve Weiner described the OEO sponsored education voucher demonstration project 30 years ago - it is time to think about the implications of the ruling.
The Court and Education Reform
Time to stand and be counted. Or more precisely, time to stand and predict. Predict what? How the US Supreme Court will rule on vouchers. No issue elicits more oohs and aahs among educators than vouchers, a “modern” phenomenon now nearly half a century old.
AYP, Once More Once
In the immortal words of Louis Armstrong, when he was recording Mack the Knife and he and his band couldn’t get enough of their Bertold Brecht improvisation, "once more once!" And so I return to AYP.
AYP revealed. Now what?
Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP), or lack thereof, is not only the catch phrase of 2002, it promises to define the education debate for the foreseeable future. How it is interpreted will have far-reaching consequences for both schools and the federal role in education.
No School Left Behind
Last week, The Doyle Report, with the sponsorship of Deloitte & Touche and SchoolNet, Inc. jointly sponsored – with Leander ISD (TX) – the first in a series of symposia on data-driven decision-making and NCLB.
High Tech Low Tech
Although I am a devotee of technology, I am still of two minds about it. As my friends know, I can't live without my cell phone and my laptop, but I still drive a stick-shift car, use wooden matches to light my winter fires and write (when I'm not at my laptop) with an old fashioned fountain pen.
The New Politics of Education
When President Lyndon Baines Johnson said there are only three things worth being - a preacher, a teacher or a politician -- he must have had former NC Governor Jim Hunt in mind. He is all three. After an unprecedented four terms as NC governor - an education reform governor par excellence - the flame still burns bright.
Forward Mapping and Invitational Seminars
When I work as a school district standards consultant, one of the key techniques I recommend is "backwards mapping." Backwards from what? From the district vision of what a graduate "should know and be able to do to earn a diploma.
Embedding Technology in the School
NCLB (the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001) the still awkward sounding acronym for the reauthorization of
ESEA (the Elementary and Secondary Education Act), calls for significant increases in the use of technology in the schools, not as an end in itself, but as a means to several ends.
Testing, Testing, Testing...
To the surprise of most non-educators, no contemporary subject raises the hackles of educators more than testing. Why? The ostensible reasons are many and varied: testing is time consuming, it is expensive, it measures, if it measures at all, the wrong thing, it induces – nay incites – bad behavior, namely, teaching to the test, or worse yet, cheating.
From IEP to ILP - The Legacy of Special Ed
PL 94-142 was one of the most important pieces of federal domestic legislation in history, changing forever the way Uncle Sam does business. It not only created a dramatically new federal role in education, it placed special education itself in a whole new light.
Report Cards Revisited
In early November 2001, when ESEA reauthorization began to look as it might be running out of steam, I wrote a short piece about state and school district report cards. Upon reflection, I realize it was a bit wistful – I like the idea of report cards and was afraid that without some strong prompting from Uncle Sam they would remain the purview of a handful of states (13 states as of this writing).
The New, New Federalism
Once upon a time a president named Nixon called for a radical program to redistribute federal money and federal power: New Federalism he called it. In exchange for doing things they were better at – building roads, running schools and the like – states would be given more power and more money.
Taking the Ouch out of Vouchers
In anticipation of this week’s Supreme Court hearing on education vouchers, in early November I wrote an historical piece on the subject. As I pointed out, in the West vouchers have a long history, dating back to Adam Smith in The Wealth of Nations in the late 18th century to John Stuart Mill in the mid-19th century to Milton and Rose Friedman in the mid-20th.
What is Good for the Country…
Secretary Paige, in implementing the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001, requested comments from interested parties. As an interested party, I submitted the below letter. Is it self-serving? Yes and no.
Leadership Personified – The Harold McGraw Awards
Leadership is a topic with endless permutations and possibilities – something there is in us that longs to know more about it. Who are leaders? Where do they come from? How to we know them when we see them? For many years I had a running discussion about a similar subject with a special friend, now, sadly dead, but I remember the debate as only yesterday.
Leadership Revisited
Too often leadership is discussed in limited and narrow terms – there is a leader (occasionally leaders) and followers (typically lots of them). The analogy is usually military or industrial (part of the military- industrial complex Eisenhower warned us about in his last state of the union speech?).
Leadership
As Edmund Burke believed, the duty of leaders is to lead. In times of war and domestic distress this is abundantly clear – think of Churchill. Even his uncharacteristically modest assertion that he was not the British lion, but only “privileged to utter the lion’s roar” does not obscure the fact that he was one of the great leaders of the 20th century.
E-Learning, the Promise and The Reality
About one thing most techies agree - e-Leaning is the wave of the future. The logic is persuasive and overwhelming: e-Leaning fits perfectly with the mood and pace of modern America. Any time, anywhere learning, just what the busy person needs.
Technology: Too Important to be left to technologists
Georges Clemenceau is famously famous for his epigrammatic utterance: “war is too important to be left to generals.” Right he was, and about other endeavors as well, education technology in particular.
Vouchers are dead, long live vouchers
Education vouchers – a scheme in which education is underwritten with government transfer payments to families instead of direct payments to schools – are an old idea. Adam Smith was their first modern exponent in the late 18th century and John Stuart Mill wrote about them approvingly in the mid-19th century.
School Finance Reform Rears Its Head Again
The Ohio high court’s recent school finance reform ruling should remind us that there is nothing new under the sun. Indeed, “school finance reform” is by now such an old staple that the modifier “reform” seems redundant.
Education and the Economy
As the dust begins to settle and the shock dissipates (even though it will never go away) we return to work, both for practical reasons – bread on the table – and a no less important reason: work is therapeutic.
The Sounds of Silence
On the one-week anniversary of the terrorist attack on America “sounds of silence” describe Washington. It is a ghost town. A therapeutic trip to the Hirschhorn for the last day of the Clyfford Still show was startling – only a tiny handful of visitors were in a museum that would otherwise be overflowing.
The Ultimate Teachable Moment
Desperate to make some sense of the disaster that has befallen us, TDR has posted the beginnings of an exchange among readers (Click here to contribute to the FORUM).
Intellectual Property in the Digital Era, or "If You're So Smart, How Come You're Not Rich?"
There are two basic ways to think about IP (intellectual property) in the digital era. The first and most obvious is the lawyerly way: what does the law say about IP? A good deal, but it is a thorny thicket for the uninitiated.
Whither the Education Wars?
Until campaign 2000, the federal role in elementary and secondary education belonged to the Democrats. And if academic history didn't support the claim—Abraham Lincoln began the federal role when he created an office to gather education statistics—popular thinking certainly bolstered it.
Public Attitudes Toward Public Education
For a third of a Century now, the Phi Delta Kappan – with the assistance of the Gallup organization -- has been plumbing the public’s attitudes toward the public schools (and private schools, for that matter.
Déjà vu All Over Again
With the recent release of NAEP scores, backwards reels the mind. It was not long ago – two and one half decades – that there was a debate about NAEP itself. Should Uncle Sam collect and then present student performance data at all? Wasn’t that too intrusive, too much of a federal role? Didn’t data collection and reporting smack of a national school board? The debate was serious and entered into in earnest; its first victim was the name itself.
Dumbing schooling down: Technology and Testing
The technology/education questions everyone asks - or that everyone ought to ask - is what impact does technology have on academic outcomes? How is the impact measured? What is its magnitude? And most important, what is its direction, up or down?
In this cyber chair I turn to technologies that are largely pernicious, technologies that actually dumb schooling down.
SCHOOL REPORT CARDS
School report cards are in the news - with good reason. The reauthorization of ESEA will focus the nation's attention on school performance, both on individual students and, for the first time in recent memory, on school buildings themselves.
The Big News in Federal Education
Newspaper headlines trumpeted the passage of SB 1 by a margin of 91-8, the US Senate's reauthorization of the ESEA (the elementary and secondary education act). The big news is the amount; at $33 billion, it is $14 billion more than the total requested by the White House ($19.
THE EDITOR'S CYBER CHAIR: BUYING AND SELLING IT
According to Aristotle, three kinds of people go to the Olympic games: those who go to compete, those who go to buy and sell, and those who go to watch. Not surprisingly, in Aristotle's hierarchy of values, those who go to watch are highest on the totem pole (to mix new and old world metaphors).
THE CYBER CHAIR: STANDARDS
It is clear that de jure national standards – that is to say, federal government standards – are not in the cards. But even if standards won’t be “federalized” in the near future, they are quietly going national.
THE CYBERCHAIR: Teacher’s Pay
In 1926 William Faulkner published Soldier’s Pay, a novel little noted and largely forgotten today (though still read by Faulkner aficionados, as it should be). His artful title (using the possessive) suggests not a soldier’s compensation but payback, the price not the reward of soldiering.
As American as Apple Pie: Think Tanks
As American as apple pie, think tanks are not only an American invention they are nearly an American exclusive. Insofar as they are to be found in other parts of the world - where they are few and far between -- they are typically affiliated with political parties; in Germany, the Konrad Adenaur Stiftung is the Christian Democrats "think tank," in the United Kingdom the Institute for Economic Affairs is not only physically close to 10 Downing Street, when the Tories are in power it is their intellectual home-away-from-home.
THE EDITOR’S CYBER CHAIR – The Unions & Reform
The truism is worth repeating: there will be no education reform unless teachers buy-in, and buy-in depends on their understanding of the issues. Which is to say, ideas make a difference.
THE EDITOR’S CYBER CHAIR – EDUCATION ON THE WEB
WEB analysts are fond of a novel statistic: the rate at which technology is deployed and adopted. A commonly used market penetration figure is the time it takes a technology to reach fifty million users.
FROM THE EDITOR'S CYBER CHAIR -- USING DATA STRATEGICALLY
Mark Twain famously opined that "Wagner's music is not as bad as it sounds." In that spirit, I assure you that "using data strategically" is not as dull as it sounds. After all, as I have said before, data is the plural of anecdote, and everyone loves a story.
FROM THE EDITOR'S CYBER CHAIR: CHARTER SCHOOLS
As one looks around the education landscape, one conclusion is inescapable. Charter schools are all the rage, as indeed they should be. They are the rarest of species in the American education eco-system -- a successful innovation that that is growing from within and shows every sign of continuing to prosper.
The Editor’s Cyber Chair: Happy Families
In this, the maiden issue of The Doyle Report, I owe readers an explanation: why did I choose the term cyber chair as the title for the weekly lead essay? It is the sincerest form of flattery, imitation.
If there is no solution there is no problem …
With this issue, the Doyle Report begins its maiden voyage. For the author it marks both an end and a beginning. It is the end of more than thirty years of education research and policy analysis and the beginning of a new career as an education entrepreneur.
