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