Vassallo's MORE THAN GRADES Cited by Cato Institute Report

Philip Vassallo's 2000 study for the Cato Institute, More Than Grades: How School Choice Boosts Parental Involvement and Benefits Children, was cited in another Cato study demonstrating that school choice for private schools has been the modus operandi in rural Maine for more than a century. The report, Lessons from Maine: Education Vouchers for Students since 1873 by Frank Heller, referenced Vassallo’s report as follows:

Most reports find that parents in choice programs define educational excellence in terms of a combination of factors; the most important are safety, discipline, and instructional quality.

Here are the links to both reports:

• More Than Grades: How Choice Boosts Parental Involvement and Benefits Children by Philip Vassallo: www.cato.org/pubs/pas/pa383.pdf
• Lessons from Maine: Education Vouchers for Students since 1873 by Frank Heller: ww.cato.org/pubs/briefs/bp66.pdf

Arizona a Closely Watched State for School Choice

American education is looking to Arizona for a crucial next step in the country's school choice saga. A universal voucher bill, which would allow every child regardless of income financial support to attend nonpublic schools, has already passed Arizona's Senate and awaits a decisive vote in the House of Representatives.

Publicly-funded school choice programs have become a standard practice for several states, such as Florida, Maine, Ohio, Vermont, and Wisconsin. However, they are limited to a small percentage of the population, or reserved for low-income students, or granted to rural children living at a great distance from a public school.

Arizona's program is different. It would provide vouchers of $3,500 a year for elementary schoolers and $4,500 for high schoolers. Passing this bill would go a long way toward eliminating the bias against low- and moderate-income families that cannot afford to send their children to the school of their choice.

The House vote, perhaps next week, expects to be close. A major precedent for education freedom lies at stake.

Book Review: On Which Side Are You?

By Philip Vassallo, Ed.D.

Hard America, Soft America: Competition vs. Coddling and the Battle for Our Nation’s Future by Michael Barone. New York: Crown Forum, 2004. 188 pp. $12.00. Paper.

In the introductory chapter of his highly readable, remarkably eclectic book Hard America, Soft America: Competition vs. Coddling and the Battle for Our Nation’s Future, author Michael Barone reveals a problem with seeing the world in terms of polar opposites when he writes: “For many years I have thought it one of the peculiar features of our country that we seem to produce incompetent eighteen-year-olds but remarkably competent thirty-year-olds.”

The incompetents Barone refers to are schoolchildren who are victimized by the inadequate education available to them, and the competents are the professionals in offices, laboratories, hospitals, courtrooms, and universities whose wisdom, creativity, diligence, and entrepreneurialism contribute significantly to the American and world economies. What Barone never mentions in his book, however, are that many of the incompetents he refers to become those very competent adults later in life, and that many of the competents are not products of the American education system at all. This faulty premise serves as a theme of Hard America, Soft America, yet serious though the flaw may be, Barone’s narrative frames an interesting perspective of recent history.

Essentially, Barone sees two Americas: a Soft America, one in which competition and accountability are lessened, and a Hard America, one which favors them. While he ultimately sees the need for a consistently Harder America, he does not exude the ruthlessness Al Dunlap or the egomania of Donald Trump, because of evenhanded observations such as

It would be a cruel country that had no Soft niches. But it would be a weak and unproductive country that did not have enough Hardness.

How Did We Go Soft?

Throughout the book, Barone provides a veritable historical survey of America’s political, economic, military, and educational movements in the twentieth century. He does so creatively with allusions to literary classics, such as John Updike’s Rabbit is Rich, Sloan Wilson's The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit, and Charles Reich’s The Greening of America, searching for metaphors that conform to his idea of Hardness and Softness. He equates Soft America with Progressivism, the New Deal, Social Security, welfare, racial quotas and preferences on the political side; unionization and the Big Three automakers’ planned obsolescence of their cars on the economic side; and grade inflation, social promotion on the education side. Standing in for Hard America, their polar opposites, are the financial or educational requirements on recipients of programs of the Federal Housing Administration (pay your mortgage to get a federal break) and Veterans Affairs (go to college to receive aid); the aggressive American response, led by President John F. Kennedy, to the Russian early lead in the space program; the enforcement of quality of life standards established by former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani; the innovation or reorganization of Bill Gates’s Microsoft, Jack Welch’s General Electric, and Fred Smith’s Federal Express; and the creation and continuance of the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program for public school students.

Barone maintains that Soft America, regardless its good intentions, creates contradictory and deleterious effects for the constituents it purports to help. He deduces that although Blacks lived in hard conditions, they were victims of Soft America, with limited entrepreneurial activity and little accountability. In such a scenario, victimization extends even to society’s more privileged members, who were deluged by images of the segregated South in the early 1960s, when Birmingham police commissioner Bull Connor unleashed water hoses and police dogs on peaceful Black demonstrators: :

White Americans came to think worse of themselves even as they made the country—and themselves—better. If you had asked white Americans in 1961 whether blacks were treated unfairly in the United States, a very large number would have said no. If you had asked white Americans in 1969 the same question, a majority would have said yes—even though blacks at that point were treated much less unfairly than they had been eight years earlier.

Hard America, Soft America asserts that Progressivism in education, with John Dewey in the vanguard, led the fight against rote memorization, traditional curricula, and teacher-centered classrooms, all of which ultimately created a Soft American school system. Add to these initiatives the phenomena of grade inflation, social promotion, the right of teacher unions to strike and to veto attempts to legitimize teacher accountability, and we have a school culture that has run amok and institutionalized mediocrity in the classroom.

How Should We Become Hard?

A common practice of many innovators when seemingly every attempt at improving one’s field has failed is to look to other fields. No reform was successful in stemming the plummeting of the national average SAT scores (from a high of 478 in verbal and 502 in math in 1963 to 420 in verbal and 466 in math nearly in the late 1970s and early 1980s), which in part prompted the 1982 publication of the watershed A Nation at Risk, which called for extreme measures to reverse America’s educational slump.

Where should we turn for exemplars of turning the tide of diminished achievement? Barone points to several examples, including imprisonment and warfare, which are more Straw Men for his argument than indicators of success. The first example concerns the decrease in violent crimes in proportion with the increase of incarcerations. In a longitudinal analysis of crime, punishment, and their connection, Barone insists that crime increased as we Softened sentencing laws and decreased since we Hardened them.

So, increase the prison population to reduce crime—is it really that simple? Then what accounts for wild increases in violent and property crimes between 1960 and 1980, which do not entirely correlate with the prison population changes, as incarceration numbers also increased during that period? In addition, what explains the incongruous aggregates: the prison-to-general-population ratio skyrocketed from 1:842 in 1960 to 1:211 in 2000, but the crime rate also skyrocketed 118.6 percent during the same period?

The second example discusses American troop casualties in various military campaigns. Barone suggests that the large numbers of American dead in the Korea War (36,574) and Vietnam War (58,209) resulted in part from a Soft stance regarding clear military objectives and a lack of political resolve, while the 1990-1991 Persian Gulf War (382 dead), Operation Enduring Freedom in Afghanistan (158 dead since 2001), and the Operation Iraqi Freedom (over 1,500 dead since 2003) are prototypes for Hard action. Needless to say, when Barone wrote this book, Iraq might have seemed a rosier picture than it currently is. Yet one would have to wonder how he would compare these campaigns to those of 30 and 50 years earlier, whose scopes were vastly different. Also noteworthy for its omission are World War II casualties (405,399 dead), presumably because the causality rates for this Hard military engagement are consistent with his theory.

So What About Schools?

Where do these faulty premises take the reader when transitioning to America’s K-12 schools? In one misstep, Barone never adequately addresses connection between the reality of failing children and the successes, overrated though they often are, of American adults. Indeed, he spills quite a bit of ink in rehashing spectacular adult failures, such as the losing battle of the Big Three automakers against foreign competition and the impotence of government and law enforcement against Detroit rioters in 1967. Soft or Hard, adults have failed as much as children, if not more. In another error of omission, he excludes the contribution of immigrant adults working in technical and scientific fields who used their foreign education to benefit the United States.

For two reasons, however, I found it easy to finish this book. First, Barone captures the imagination with references to fine literature, even when they are not always apt, to wit his inclusion of If I Die in a Combat Zone by Tim O’Brien. Second, he often occasionally offers helpful summations which acknowledge the complexity of the issues he raises:

Hardening public-sector institutions is more difficult than Hardening private-sector institutions; a corporation cannot ignore a failure to make profits, while a public-sector institution can ignore a failure to achieve results for a very long time indeed as long as revenues keep flowing in.

Thus, read Hard America, Soft America not necessarily for insights on education policy, but for its sweep and swing.

Philip Vassallo, Ed.D., writes on education issues and specializes in writing instruction, family participation, and school choice. He accepts messages at Vassallo@aol.com.

Great Links on School Choice

If you are new to school choice and need a quick primer on the critical issues affecting this significant movement in education history, then you need to visit the websites listed below. They offer comprehensive histories of the issue, in-depth reports on school choice initiatives throughout the United States, and current news of interest in the field. Here they are:

• Alliance for School Choice: www.allianceforschoolchoice.org
• Center for Education Reform: www.edreform.com
• Children First America: www.childrenfirstamerica.org
• Council for American Private Education: www.capenet.org
• Education Industry Association: www.educationindustry.org
• Education Policy Institute: www.educationpolicy.org
• Homeschool.com: www.homeschool.com
• Milton & Rose D. Friedman Foundation: www.friedmanfoundation.org
• Program on Education Policy and Governance - Harvard: http://data.fas.harvard.edu/pepg
• School Choice Info: www.schoolchoiceinfo.org
• Thomas B. Fordham Foundation: www.edexcellence.net
• US Charter Schools: www.uscharterschools.org

Other great websites covering school choice are noted on this website's entry "Important Think Thanks" (January 13, 2005), which you can find by clicking the January 2005 in the archives link.

New LEARNING CLASS Article Posted on EDUCATION NEWS.ORG

The latest installment of THE LEARNING CLASS by Philip Vassallo has been posted on EducationNews.org, "the Internet’s leading source of education news." The article, "On Which Side Are You?" reviews the book Hard America, Soft America: Competition vs. Coddling and the Battle for Our Nation’s Future by Michael Barone. Here is the link:

www.educationnews.org/on-which-side-are-you.htm

For Vassallo, this is his ninety-third LEARNING CLASS article since starting the freelance column in 1990. It is also his ninth book review and twenty-third article overall for EducationNews.org, with which he formed an association in 2000.

MORE THAN GRADES Cited in Another Education Report

Philip Vassallo's 2000 study for the Cato Institute, More Than Grades: How School Choice Boosts Parental Involvement and Benefits Children, continues to serve as a key source in the school choice debate. It has been widely cited in publications arguing that meaningful parental involvement, which is an indispensable component to a successful public education program, is more likely to occur in schools which parents choose for their children.

Most recently, More Than Grades was cited in A School Voucher Program for Baltimore City, a 2005 report by Dan Lips, a Senior Fellow of Education Policy Studies with the Maryland Public Policy Institute and the Goldwater Institute. The Lips report, jointly published by Milton and Rose D. Friedman Foundation and the Maryland Public Policy Institute, agrees with the Vassallo study in noting "parents able to choose their child’sschool were happier than those parents who were unable to choose their child’s school."

Here are the links to both reports:

More Than Grades: How Choice Boosts Parental Involvement and Benefits Children by Philip Vassallo: http://www.cato.org/pubs/pas/pa383.pdf

A School Voucher Program for Baltimore City by Dan Lips: mdpolicy.org/research/education/BaltimoreVoucherStudy.pdf

Book Review: Misstating the Obvious

From THE LEARNING CLASS: Essays on Education by Philip Vassallo, Ed.D. at EducationNews.org

All Else Equal: Are Public and Private Schools Different? by Luis Benveniste, Martin Carnoy, and Richard Rothstein. New York: RoutledgeFalmer, 2003. 206, xv pp. $19.95. Paper.

Anyone who has studied education half seriously knows that public and private schools have in common many imposing tasks: structuring and managing administrative offices and classrooms, supervising physical plant problems, effecting curricular decisions, acquiring useful print and electronic instructional materials, resolving professional and nonprofessional personnel issues, coordinating teacher development opportunities, implementing efficacious teacher evaluation instruments, encouraging teacher innovations, engendering parental involvement, monitoring volunteers such as PTA members and student teachers, confronting constituent pressures within and outside the education community, and a host of other challenges. (Have I mentioned educating and disciplining the students themselves?)

All Else Equal chooses to ignore these obvious similarities in claiming that none of the school-choice innovations launched over the past generation has made a difference in improving the affected education systems. The book fashions a revisionist historical tour of libertarian initiatives such as vouchers, private scholarship programs, charter schools, and private management of public schools. Along the way, it attempts to discredit Nobel Prize-winning economist Milton Friedman’s enduring market-side view of education and John E. Chubb and Terry M. Moe’s 1990 landmark book, Politics, Markets, and America’s Schools, which held that parochial school students outperform their public school counterparts. Authors Benveniste, Carnoy, and Rothstein begin their examination of voucher programs in the early 1970s with the Alum Rock school district in San Jose, California, and continue to the present day with a look at the controversial Milwaukee Parental Choice Program and Cleveland Scholarship Program. They also briefly discuss private scholarship programs for public school students in New York, Dayton, Washington, D.C., and Charlotte, as well as public school projects run by for-profit education management organizations like the Edison Schools. Their conclusion: Any positive reports of these efforts are grossly exaggerated because they are plagued by validity problems, including consistently low follow-up test participation rates and limited progress among students. They submit that achievement “differences are at best small,” which “leaves us back at square one” in righting public education wrongs.

Friedman, the authors assert, failed to consider the simple fact that schools in a greater choice environment would reject certain students (just as the authors themselves failed to state that schools in a greater choice environment would likely seize the market niche opportunity to develop programs for addressing those rejected students). In fact, Friedman focused more on economic and political theory because he knew that school management issues would be better left to educators, entrepreneurs, and government overseers in a society where every student is guaranteed an education. In trashing Chubb and Moe’s study, the writers register the tired, shallow complaint that Politics, Markets, and America’s Schools made unequal comparisons between parochial schools, which were presumably more privileged in their student selection process, and public schools, which were strapped with lower-performing students whom they were required to keep. Nowhere in this section of the book do the writers conjecture that parental choice (they are as free to pull their children out of a private school as they are to place them in one) and the motivation that springs from parental sacrifice (private schools do not come free) might have contributed in an least some measure to student achievement.

All of these attacks serve a prelude to their own study, which they acknowledge provides limited quantitative data and heaps of unreliable qualitative data. For example, no high schools were in the study and the sample included only 16 California metropolitan-area primary and middle schools. Yet, from their findings, the authors insist that public schools would not improve by adopting greater accountability to parents and flexibility in hiring and firing teachers. They add that private schools do not do a better job at responding to parents and at organizing themselves around academic achievement. One of their parting shots: “Privatization and market accountability are not necessarily the solution to improving the public education system,” clearly does not emerge from the data they present.

While the authors go to considerable lengths to find holes in pro-choice arguments, they say virtually nothing about mediocre or dangerously negligent public schools. Unfortunately, they also steer clear of the central question underpinning the school choice movement: Should all American taxpayers be free to choose their children’s school—be it one run by the public or the private sector—simply in the name of democracy?


Philip Vassallo, Ed.D., writes on education issues and specializes in writing instruction, family participation, and school choice. His books include The Art of On-the-Job Writing and The Inwardness of the Outward Gaze: Learning and Teaching through Philosophy. He accepts messages at Vassallo@aol.com.

Weighing In on Summers's Statements

A lot has been said about comments made by Lawrence H. Summers, President of Harvard University, concerning the state and prospects of women in the sciences. In-depth articles appearing in The Wall Street Journal, New York Times, Time, and other newspapers and magazines have covered the issue with their own special slant, depending on their political persuasion.

Regardless the position one takes on women's or men's "intrinsic aptitude," I find it amazing that few have discussed the matter of free speech and intellectual inquiry. Even if one thinks Summers's comments fall on the lowest end of thinking, imagine, then, what one must believe about those people who call for his ouster? How ironic that free speech seems constantly under assault in the very place that champions independent thought and expression free from political repercussions.

EDUCATIONNEWS.ORG: An Essential Link

Without EducationNews.org, I would not have immediate access to education issues of a national and international scope. The website, which is edited and maintained with amazing efficiency and consistency by its founder, Jimmy Kilpatrick, says about itself in its mission statement that it "is a fresh approach to the age-old problem of increasing coverage of education news. Unfortunately, education is not a topic that news organizations are able to provide premium coverage to all the time, thus ironically, all education experts face the same problem - the difficulty of educating the public."

If you have not been visited the site, you should go there now and bookmark it. Within days, you will be on top of the education scene. The link is www.EducationNews.org.

ERIC: An Indispensable Resource

Educational researchers cannot do without the Education Resources Information Center (ERIC) when surveying educational trends, reviewing academic issues, and writing research reports. Many complete articles on a vast range of topics are available free of charge; others are annotated and available at a cost. ERIC, which is sponsored by the Institute of Education Sciences of the U.S. Department of Education, bills itself as follows:

(ERIC) produces the world’s premier database of journal and non-journal education literature. The new ERIC online system, released September 2004, provides the public with a centralized ERIC Web site for searching the ERIC bibliographic database of more than 1.1 million citations going back to 1966. Effective October 1, more than 107,000 full-text non-journal documents (issued 1993-2004), previously available through fee-based services only, will be available for free.

ERIC's website is definitely worth bookmarking. Here is the link: www.eric.ed.gov

Family Is Forever

In response to an inquiry from the AVID Center concerning the most important and controversial K-12 educational issues in the next five years, I responded as follows:

Among the compelling issues in American education today--educational measurements, teacher qualifications, and the like--the most critical and overarching is parental empowerment through school choice. Look at your own education: I 'm sure you'd agree that the home more than the school has had a far greater impact on your life. I would say this is true even if you had no traditional home. The impact of that situation has shaped you more than anything else. More parental participation in schools--without the numerous restrictions imposed on parents by schools boards and teacher unions--would go a long way toward improving the educational system. Not educational scholars like me, not university academics in graduate schools of education, and certainly not politicians and media pundits--just parents advocating for their children in the schools and involving themselves in school activities. And I do not mean bake sales; I mean questioning flawed curricula, truncated instructional time, and unconcerned tenured teachers.

To learn more about the AVID Center, which describes itself as an international non-profit educational reform organization, visit www.avidonline.org.

Book Review: An Insider’s Story

From THE LEARNING CLASS: Essays on Education by Philip Vassallo, Ed.D. at EducationNews.org

Voucher Wars: Waging the Legal Battle over School Choice by Clint Bolick. Washington, D.C.: Cato Institute, 2003. 277, xvi pp. $20.00. Paper.

Readers looking for an insider’s treatment of the school choice movement—albeit one from an unabashedly impassioned and highly persuasive proponent of school choice—need look no further than Voucher Wars: Waging the Battle over School Choice. Author Clint Bolick has written a recent history of American education that does not read like one. He steers clear of the academic researcher’s mind-numbing statistical tables and ambiguous longitudinal analyses to submit a trenchant narrative in which he plays the main character, championing the many voucher, tax credit, and private scholarship programs that have sprouted like wildflowers throughout the nation in the past fifteen years. In doing so, Bolick relates his experiences as a courtroom advocate of a grassroots movement that has drawn friends and enemies from unlikely circles into a cause that appears destined to transform American education.

Voucher Wars reads like a novel. In allowing his gift of storytelling to take center stage, Bolick, Co-founder and Vice-president of Institute for Justice, vividly portrays his friends as heroic and enemies as sinister, and he places them in contexts that are occasionally ironic (the Clintons were the only parents living in Washington, D.C. public housing allowed to exercise school choice for their daughter at taxpayer expense), frequently poignant (a second-grade boy emerges from his coloring book to encourage Bolick to fight the good fight after losing a case in Appeals court), and consistently compelling. But if his anecdotes seem too creative or his interpretations of court rulings too strident, he does so at the service of the parents whose circumstances do not give them the same freedom as their more fortunate fellow citizens to choose their children’s school. On this point, Bolick defers to no pundit and yields to no alternative. After all, this is a lawyer’s story.

Bolick opens his exposé by describing his evolution from a working class New Jersey public school student to a beleaguered education major at local Drew University and St. Elizabeth College, to a law student at University of California Davis, where the house organ seemed to be the Communist Manifesto, to his first job as a litigant for the Mountain State Legal Foundation in Denver, where he began advocating for children’s rights. Before long, the young attorney found himself chasing Wisconsin state legislator Polly Williams, who spearheaded the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program, now in its second decade. Remarkably, he convinced Representative Williams to appoint him as the Program’s legal advisor and litigator. He offered sound counseling, encouraging Williams to place students in choice schools immediately, before legal challengers had their day in court, because he knew that judges would be averse to removing children from good schools. In mercurial fashion, school choice initiatives seemed ubiquitous, and Bolick seemed omnipresent—in Ohio, Maine, Vermont, Pennsylvania, and Puerto Rico, and other environs, all with their own legal precedents, protocols, and loopholes.

When statistics do appear in Voucher Wars, Bolick uses them from a human perspective that is virtually impossible to ignore:

The numbers 1 in 14 will forever haunt my memory: a student in the Cleveland city public schools had a slightly less than 1 in 14 chance of graduating on time with senior-level proficiency; the same student had a slightly greater than 1 in 14 chance of being a victim of crime, inside the schools, each year. It blew me away that in light of such a debacle, anyone would depict any proposed reform as too radical, rather than not radical enough.

It was Cleveland, of course, that became the battleground of the landmark Supreme Court decision, Zelman v. Simmons-Harris, which on June 27, 2002, ruled by a 5-4 margin in favor of the Cleveland Scholarship Program. The Hollywood-type climax of Voucher Wars centers on this decision, the greatest legal victory yet for school choice. Here we have a tale of David, empowered by the voices of disenfranchised parents, slaying Goliath, bloated with the awesome bureaucracy and unlimited funds that big government has at its disposal to squash whatever it does not like.

Bolick is not so quixotic, however, to end his story there. He admonishes supporters about the administrative stonewalling, legislative roadblocks, and legal battles that lie ahead. In discussing the dearth of options available to public school students in major American cities, he concludes:

School choice is not even on the horizon in Baltimore, Chicago, or Los Angeles because of the vise-grip control the unions exercise over the school districts and state legislatures. It is nothing less than criminal to fail to consider private options in a rescue mission for those children’s futures.

For Bolick, the best defense is a good offense. He calls for choice programs large enough to pressure government schools into changing their culture of failure as wells as a diverse approach which includes vouchers in some cases and tax credits in others. Ultimately, he urges endurance and shrewdness, for he is uncompromising in his belief that government-controlled schools should not be the sole option available to most Americans. Those agreeing with Bolick’s viewpoint will get plenty of talking points from Voucher Wars; those who do not will know the full force of what they’re up against.

Philip Vassallo, Ed.D., writes on education issues and specializes in writing instruction, family participation, and school choice. His books include The Art of On-the-Job Writing and The Inwardness of the Outward Gaze: Learning and Teaching through Philosophy. He accepts messages at Vassallo@aol.com.

Vassallo Study "More Than Grades" Available on The Web

The article More Than Grades: How Choice Boosts Parental Involvement and Benefits Children, published by The Cato Institute and authored by Philip Vassallo, education consultant and author of THE LEARNING CLASS, "shows that parental involvement in a child's education is a strong predictor of student achievement ... (and) that school choice can be a powerful engine for parental involvement." The study has been cited worldwide in numerous government and foundation reports. The full 16-page monograph is available for free at www.cato.org/pubs/pas/pa383.pdf.

Important Think Tanks

Think tanks are vital sources for keeping abreast of the education policy scene. Most of them cover a broad range of domestic and international issues as well. Below is a selected list in alphabetical order. All are worth more than a look.

Academy for Educational Development: aed.org
Alexis de Tocqueville Institution: adti.net
American Enterprise Institute: aei.org
Aspen Institute: aspeninstitute.org
Brookings Institution: brookings.edu
Cato Institute: cato.org
Center for Education Reform: edreform.com
Discovery Institute: discovery.org
Education Policy Institute: educationpolicy.org
Goldwater Institute: goldwaterinstitute.org
Heartland Institute: heartland.org
Heritage Foundation: heritage.org
Hoover Institution: hoover.org
Hudson Institute: www.hudson.org
Institute for Justice: ij.org
International Society for Individual Liberty: isil.org
Mackinac Center for Public Policy: mackinac.org
Manhattan Institute: manhattan-institute.org
Milton and Rose D. Friedman Foundation: www.friedmanfoundation.org
National Center for Policy Analysis: ncpa.org
New America Foundation: newamerica.net
Pacific Research Institute: www.pacificresearch.org
Program on Education and Policy Governance: www.ksg.harvard.edu/pepg/
Public Agenda: publicagenda.org
Rand Corporation: rand.org
Reason Foundation: rppi.org
Thomas B. Fordham Foundation: edexcellence.net
Urban Institute: urban.org

Are Educators Training or Trainers Educating? at EducationNews.org

My article "Are Educators Training or Trainers Educating?", which distinguishes between the terms education and training, appears in EducationNews.org at the following link:

http://www.educationnews.org/areeducators-training-or-traine.htm

Is the difference in the two words merely a difference in semantics or does the distinction have an impact on the way we view education and legislate education policy? I argue that despite the overlap in their meanings, "A world of difference hangs in the balance here." Read the entire article at EducationNews.org, an excellent source for education across the globe.

National Report Cites Need for Writing Skills in Business

Writing: A Ticket to Work … Or a Ticket Out, A Survey of Business Leaders: A Report of the National Commission on Writing for America’s Families, Schools, and Colleges (College Board, September 2004)

A high-profile survey of 120 major American corporations employing nearly 8 million people concludes that in today’s workplace writing is a “threshold skill” for hiring and promotion among professional employees. Survey results indicate that writing is a ticket to professional opportunity, while poorly written job applications are a figurative kiss of death. Estimates based on the survey returns reveal that employers spend billions annually correcting writing deficiencies.

Among the survey findings:

• Half the responding companies report that they consider writing skills when hiring and promoting professional employees.
• Two-thirds of salaried employees in large American companies have some writing responsibility.
• Eighty percent or more of the companies in service sectors, the corporations with the greatest employment-growth potential, assess writing during hiring.
• Half of all companies take writing into account when making promotion decisions.
• More than half of all responding companies report that they “frequently” or “almost always” produce technical reports, formal reports, and memos and correspondence. Communication through e-mail and PowerPoint presentations is almost universal.
• More than 40 percent of responding firms offer or require training for salaried employees with writing deficiencies.
• Remedying deficiencies in writing may cost American firms as much as $3.1 billion annually.

Your executive, professional, technical, and support staff can learn to:

• write purposefully in time-sensitive situations
• enhance client focus by writing consultatively
• organize complex material effectively
• edit documents for completeness, clarity, concisesness, and correctness

The writing courses offered by Philip Vassallo, Ed.D. address the reality that writing is a “threshold skill” for both employment and promotion. Dr. Vassallo designs each writing course to cultivate professional writing skills regardless the proficiency level and writing responsibilities of the employee. Contact Dr. Vassallo at vassallo@aol.com for more information.

Book Review: School Choice Down Under

By Philip Vassallo, Ed.D.

Families, Freedom and Education: Why School Choice Makes Sense by Jennifer Buckingham. St Leonards, New South Wales: Centre for Independent Studies Policy Monograph 52, 2001 (http://www.cis.org.au/). 100 pp, xi.

Now that the U.S. Supreme Court agreed last month to hear a case on a modified voucher program in Cleveland, the idea of school choice has finally reached the judicial platform it deserves. As reported in the media, at issue is whether American citizens can choose for their children any education without paying the penalty of tuition compounded onto their school taxes. A far greater issue, however, will also gain national attention (though I doubt the Supreme Court will go so far as to resolve it), namely, whether we should continue to restrict the definition of public education to one administered by government schools?

This issue is not the exclusive province of the United States, as Jennifer Buckingham so skillfully reveals in Families, Freedom and Education: Why School Choice Makes Sense, published by the Centre for Independent Studies, an Australian think tank. Early on in this slim but comprehensive volume, Ms. Buckingham quickly establishes clear distinctions between the way Australia and America fund education. Perhaps because of Australia’s smaller population (one-fourteenth of the USA’s), relative cultural homogeneity, and less contentious legal and social history, its politics has not been obsessed to the same extent as the USA’s over matters such as public funding of private schooling and separation of church and state. (Australia does provide substantial, albeit limited, funds to private schools, and the proportion of children in Australian non-government schools is nearly three times greater than in American schools-31% to 12%.) Despite their differences, what the countries have in common is their unqualified support of public schools. Withdrawing funding from floundering public school is unthinkable, while private schools that fail to educate their students will soon go out of business. This fact, among others, serves as a springboard for Buckingham’s argument that “school choice offers a way … to enhance the education opportunities and quality available to children.”

The book briefly reviews the history of Australian education to illustrate how legislation contributes, indirectly or not, to marketplace pressures on the education industry. Buckingham cites indisputable statistics in observing that an increasing number of parents are sending their children to non-government schools, eroding the government school share of the market. Contrary to the popular belief that only the wealthy send their children to private schools, these parents represent the entire Australian socioeconomic spectrum, choosing non-government education at a great financial burden to themselves-and a huge economic relief to the government. (The state and federal share of education costs to government schools total $6,425 Australian compared to $3,790 Australian for non-government schools.)

Buckingham dedicates most of her study to discussing the ten main school choice issues, ranging from cost considerations to possibilities for integration, and she concludes with an examination of what she believes stands as a reasonable option for realizing universal choice: the tuition tax credit. She does not gloss over difficulties associated with administering a universal tuition tax credit; however, she cogently suggests that tax credits provide all schools an opportunity to reap the benefits of a market model of education, all families an equal chance to obtain the best education for their children, and all citizens the best return for their tax dollar. This contribution from half a world away to the emergent American literature on the subject (most notably from the Cato Institute, Sutherland Institute, and Mackinac Center for Public Policy) should strengthen the position that all education should be-and can be-public.

Philip Vassallo, Ed.D., is an educational consultant and columnist focusing on the education industry.

Book Review: The Price of School Reform

By Philip Vassallo, Ed.D.

No Child Left Behind?: The Politics and Practice of School Accountability by Paul E. Peterson and Martin R. West, editors. Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution Press, 2003. ix, 340 pp. $22.95. Paper.

Few federal government initiatives since the Civil Rights Act of 1964 have been subjected to as much scrutiny as the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) signed into law by President George W. Bush in 2002. And with good reason. The very survival of our nation depends on a well educated population, yet the school choice movement continues to force Americans to decide on what exactly it means today to be educated.

The President’s political opponents claim the NCLB is too intrusive into the management of local public schools—especially since on average only 7 percent of their budget comes from federal aid. Even many of the President’s supporters have found fault in NCLB because they believe that it does not sufficiently hold students accountable for their performance.

NCLB requires each state to evaluate the performance of all students in grades three through eight in math and reading each year and again once between grades ten to twelve, assesses schools in need of improvement, and offers parents the choice of placing their child in another public school within their district.

No Child Left Behind?: The Politics and Practice of School Accountability, a collection of 13 essays written by the book’s editors Paul E. Peterson and Martin R. West and other notable education analysts such as Terry M. Moe of Stanford, Tom Loveless of the Brookings Institution, and Ludger Wößmann of Germany’s Institute for Economic Research, provides an instructive first look at the law as many American school districts still wrestle with its implications. The book addresses the universe of NCLB from the national perspective of the law’s rationale to the political struggles in launching it, and from recent applications on the state (California) and local (Chicago) levels to an international viewpoint with a focus on student achievement.

Four introductory essays offer a primer of the law itself, the politics of passing it through Congress, and the problems of its implementation. One emerges from these chapters with a clear lesson in educational politics and an excellent idea of why federal bills become watered down once they reach the grassroots level. Race and class concerns, teacher union opposition, party politics, high-performance community resistance, and general concerns about marginalizing the purposes of education all contribute to compromising the impact of the law, resulting in lowered passing requirements and reduced consequences of failing.

In any field, accountability is always much easier planned than effected. No Child Left Behind? does not necessarily prescribe an ultimate best practice for NCLB; in fact, the essays in the second half of the book make plain the uneven and, in places, conflicting early evidence on putting NCLB’s theory into practice. Contentious issues such as performance test validity, teacher credentialing, and decertifying schools cannot be resolved without a radical shift in political priorities and educational philosophies. In presenting the quagmires and chasms laden in the uncharted terrain of NCLB, this book succeeds.

Philip Vassallo, Ed.D., writes on education issues and specializes in writing instruction, family participation, and school choice. His books include The Art of On-the-Job Writing and The Inwardness of the Outward Gaze: Learning and Teaching through Philosophy. He accepts messages at Vassallo@aol.com.

THE LEARNING CLASS on Jenny D. Blog

A recent LEARNING CLASS article was spotlighted on the blog "Jenny D.: Education, public policy and politics, middle-aged moms, life in the Midwest, life in the academy." (http://drcookie.blogspot.com) The excerpt appears below:

Today, another writer has come out with a piece on the goal and definition of education. Philip Vassallo, Ed.D. has written "ARE EDUCATORS TRAINING OR TRAINERS EDUCATING?", published via Education News.org.

Vassallo argues that education and training are different, that one has a lofty goal of increasing knowledge, and the other has a practical goal of making sure people can exist and thrive using skills. Rather than take a stand and scoff at one of these, Vassallo argues that both are necessary:

"Using simple examples, a reasonable person would conclude that we cannot have education without training, and vice-versa. If we see education as a know word and training as a do word, then they are inextricable. For instance, why teach a child addition and subtraction if she cannot make change from a cash transaction? Or why teach a high school student advanced composition theory without expecting her to be capable of writing a letter of complaint about a poor service she received? Similarly, what good is training a soldier on how to use a weapon if he is not first educated on the logistical limitations of the weapon and on deciding when to use the weapon? The fact is that all education must train us for something, and all training is useless unless it first educates."

Yes. Very good. I think of this when I visit schools with poor students, kids who really deserve the chance to not be poor as adults. They need training in skills. And they need in education in how to apply and think about these skills, and the situations in which they might use skills.

You can read my article "Are Educators Training or Trainers Educating?" by clicking here: www.educationnews.org/areeducators-training-or-traine.htm

Welcome

Welcome to THE LEARNING CLASS: Essays on Education by Philip Vassallo, Ed.D. Dr. Vassallo focuses on education issues concerning parental empowerment and school choice to encourage dialogue among families, educators, businesspeople, legislators, and other taxpayers. You may find previous LEARNING CLASS articles at the following website: http://www.educationnews.org/philip-vassallo.htm