• Popular perception on performance.

• Public Schools Beat Private Schools.

• Study of Test Scores Finds Charter Schools Lagging.

• Child Care Linked to Bad Behavior

Reason #1 "False Data"
      Prior to the 1960's, standardized testing in high schools was not wide spread. The test data that was available was largely data for the old Ivy League area prep schools of the New England area. It is agreed that there was a likely overall spike in performance during the 1950's. However, this was a time when the nation made huge outlays for educational expense at the college level for the vast amount of returning soldiers after WWII through the GI bill. In addition, the growing prosperity of the nation during the 1950's allowed for greater outlays to public education that was just not possible during the rural, agricultural hard times of the post depression era and WWII. Better educated parents who understood the value of education carefully cultivated a hard work effort in their students.
      The US Department of Energy conducted their famous "Sandia Report" investigation on the subject of true and valid public school test scores over the years and came to the conclusion that scores are essentially naturally static or unchanging. They found that the standardized testing which did exist in the 1950's, could in no way be compared with later data because fundamental testing standards had changed and thus one would be forced to compare apples and oranges when looking at data. The "Sandia Report" was buried by the Regan administration because it did not say what they wanted it to say. In short, the alleged claims of a greater yesteryear have no basis in data. They probably have much to do with each succeeding generation's desire to assert that they somehow had "higher standards" when they were kids. I call it "The Snobbish Approach" and I think it recklessly belittles the achievements of our kids who need encouragement, instead of being sent on some mind trip of misperception by the older generation. The "glory days" is a myth.

Reason #2 "Distortion of Our Place on the World Stage"
      Most adults have heard the often touted claim that we come in at last place among the top 16 developed nations in the world. There is some truth to this. However the numbers are not what they appear. To begin with, if you were to rank all nations' performance and compare them by percentile, you would find that all 16 of these nations would be in the 98th percentile or above. Second, if just the worst five percent performing school districts were removed from the calculation, The USA would rank alongside Denmark, not first, but near the top of the pack. This 5 percent bunch, represent the poorest inner city districts and have disproportionate numbers of immigrants and non-English speakers (these two facts kind of put things in perspective). It is true that many parents of kids from nice schools in Mexico City have told me that after their student assimilated into American culture, they noticed a drop in work ethic and that their kids were not challenged as much. Which one leads to which, is a good question. Perhaps the overall laziness of our society compared to others is real. However, if it is true, should public schools be singled out as somehow being the instigators of this laziness or do schools simply reflect the society in which they operate? If you live in a nice suburb and your kid goes to a school that's less than 25 years old, there are a lot of other things in life you could complain about. You're likely in the top percentile worldwide already!

Reason #3 "Changing Demographics"
      One factor that almost always gets ignored when looking at data is that our nation practiced the unjust habit of segregating our students on the basis of race in much of the country during this time. This led to unseen and under funded inequities in the quality of education that rarely got included in the thin educational data of the day. During the 1950's, there was the huge influx of migrants into the country that we are familiar with today. Every new face that shows up in classrooms must be educated. However, the reality is that many of these new comers can't contribute much to the local property tax base where half of all educational funding comes from. The class roster continues to swell regardless of how we might feel about this.
      Another factor that obscures this period in time was the migration of people to the cities and suburbs from country farm life as the nation's growing prosperity allowed families to work in cities. Even in the midst of this swelling in metropolitan areas, the prosperity of the 50's and 60's allowed for schools to keep small class size as a priority. There was a general support for education and educators among the public.

Reason #4 "Drugs"
      As our troops returned from the political folly of Vietnam, many brought back substance abuse habits that were formed in order to attempt to retain sanity in the midst of hell. The decade of the sixties and seventies are when the scourge of drugs began to effect student motivation. Today my kids tell me that half of the kids in school smoke it occasionally when they can, and perhaps 15% daily. Ecstasy, and to a lesser extent methamphetamine, are more widely used than most parents realize. Kids do "X" at parties and concerts on the weekends and manage to make it to class on Monday, but by midweek, they have to recover and stay home (this creates an attendance pattern to look for with some kids today).

Reason #5 "Unsupervised Kids"
      During the 60's when I grew up homes were relatively cheap. My father worked and my mother was able to stay at home raising me and insuring that homework was done every afternoon. During the 1970's and 80's, inflationary pressures drove up the cost of family homes and two incomes began to be required to meet the mortgage payment. In the late 1970's as this change hit our family, I and many of my friends were unsupervised from 2:30 to 5:30. I was an average kid. However, for a teenager, when the cat's away……..well, lets just say the mice will play and like many, I got into my share of trouble as a teen.
      It is stunning how the world I have just described, is so unlike the world of today. Every teacher will tell you that the most important factor in their ability to have success is class size. Then, it was twenty. Today, unless you live in states like Iowa, the Dakotas and Nebraska (where class sizes are still twenty with high standardized test score results); you generally attend a class that has 35-40 students. It is shocking that the taxpayer and politicians choose to ignore every study that has ever been done on the educational success of smaller class size environments in the name of lower taxes. The Japanese and Europeans don't think about taxes when it comes to their kid's education. More kids means less individual supervision. How is this not obvious? In the so called "glory days" of the 50's and early 60's, your actions were supervised by mom after school. Today, in the suburbs, they call you a "latch key" kid because your parents are at work attempting to give their children a better life and a bigger house. For high school kids, there is a reasonable chance you are sexually active, smoking marijuana, and are either not engaged in homework, or refining your lies about not having homework. Supervision matters.

Reason #6 "Modern Politics"
      Once upon a time, both political parties backed teachers and political battle lines had not been drawn. It was not necessary to blame each other because we were all attempting to go along for the ride together. Today, its open warfare and teachers are too often the target. In '94 I was touring Thailand and I was impressed how students upon discovering that I was a teacher, would stop in the outdoor hallways, prayerfully clasp their hands together, and wait for me to pass before they continued walking. This show of respect on account of my occupation blew my mind. In my 18 years as a teacher, I have been spit on, shoved, had a knife pulled on me, and even threatened with bodily harm by a parent. The political wars at the national level have demonized educators for the purpose of rallying voters to a perceived common battle. This selfish advancement of politicians is rooted in the old approach of tearing down others in order to elevate one's self. If you blame teachers for what you have been led to believe is failure, then you must ask yourself if your attitude is justified through constant experience, or are you simply swallowing political spin from talking heads you've seen on TV. If we as a society, valued teachers, then the starting salaries for teachers in many states would not be around $20,000 when the median price of a home in the some states is $450,000. With the exception of a few failures from the business sector, most teachers go into their profession because they are altruistic givers who want to make a difference to their society. Most don't have a greedy bone in their body. How could such a band of caring people become the demons of society over the last 25 tears? Add this to the anger in the fundamentalist religious community over things like "prayer in schools" and curriculum in the areas of "natural selection" and "sexual reproduction" and you've got plenty of material to help with fanning the flames of discontent. I submit that most of the discontent I see today is perceived and is kind of political "think-speak" that must be engaged in as a good political soldier. To me, it is simply par for the course on the fairway of modern political reality.

1. Students need a good breakfast in the morning.
2. Students need to remain free of substance abuse.
3. Students need to be prepared with materials.
4. Students need to get adequate sleep.
5. Students need to follow teacher directives.
6. Students need to follow the rules of the class and school.
7. Students need to obey parents.

8. Parents need to enforce discipline at home upon hearing a bad student report.
9. Parents need to support the teacher's decisions so as to not undermine them.
10. Parents need to monitor student homework for completion.
11. Parents need to provide adequate supervision of their kids after school.
12. Parents need to provide a regular time and workplace at home to do homework.

13. Teachers need to provide communication with parents on student problems.
14. Teachers need clearly defined daily objectives.
15. Teachers need to promote students doing things more than hearing things.
16. Teachers need to promote small group and lab activities.
17. Teachers need to treat students with delicacy and be sensitive to emotional needs.
18. Teachers need to be consistent with behavioral expectations and discipline.
19. Teachers need to teach the standards agreed upon by state.

20. Administrators need to allow teachers to operate free of political/religious threat.
21. Administrators need to allow teacher freedom to teach creatively within units.

22. Boards need to provide new teacher mentoring support during their first year.
23. Boards need to pay teachers in a way that honors their value to society.
24. Boards need to provide the right equipment and materials to get the job done.

25. Universities need to require a semester of student teaching.

26. Taxpayers need to fund education to lower student/teacher ratio to 18:1.
27. Taxpayers need to fund education to allow safe & clean school facilities.

28. Politicians need to stop manipulating educational debate for political gain.

29. Society needs to develop a respect for teachers similar to what is seen in Asia.

WASHINGTON, Aug. 22 — Fourth graders in traditional public schools did significantly better in reading and math than comparable children attending charter schools, according to a report released on Tuesday by the Federal Education Department.

The report, based on 2003 test scores, thrust the Education Department into the center of the heated national debate over school choice. It also drew a barrage of criticism from supporters of charter schools, the fastest-growing sector in public education, who sent out press statements casting doubt on the report’s methodology and findings even before they were announced.

Even as the federal commissioner of education statistics, Mark S. Schneider, released the report, he said the agency should no longer put its official imprimatur on research comparing charter with public schools and leave such studies to independent researchers.

The study found that in 2003, fourth graders in traditional public schools scored an average of 4.2 points better in reading than comparable students in charter schools on the National Assessment of Educational Progress test, often called the nation’s report card. Students in traditional schools scored an average of 4.7 points better in math than comparable students in charter schools.

Students in charter schools that said they were affiliated with local school districts did better than those in schools largely independent from local systems, scoring on par with children in regular public schools in reading and math.

The study also compared traditional public schools with charter schools in central cities serving mostly minority students and found no significant difference in reading achievement at the different schools. However, math scores at such urban charter schools still lagged those at traditional schools, except when those charters were affiliated with local districts.

“We know they are not doing harm,” Mr. Schneider said of charter schools, “so they pass a fundamental test of policy analysis.”

But this was weak praise considering that proponents of charter schools have long argued that students at these institutions would show progress far greater than those at neighborhood schools.

The Bush administration is a strong proponent of charter schools. Education Secretary Margaret Spellings said in a statement Tuesday, “Charter schools are empowering low-income parents with new educational options and providing an important lifeline for families in areas where traditional public schools have fallen short of their responsibilities.”

The federal No Child Left Behind law aims to expand school choice by allowing schools whose students show insufficient progress for five years running to be shut down and reopened as charters.

Edward J. McElroy, president of the American Federation of Teachers, the public employees’ union that is critical of charter schools, said the study “provides further evidence against unchecked expansion of the charter school experiment.”

Jeanne Allen, president of the Center for Education Reform, a Washington group that advocates for charter schools, said the study used a flawed measure of poverty to find comparable students and failed to capture the variety of children attending charter schools and the many types of charters that exist.

“This research is no more valid than the government response to Katrina,” Ms. Allen said. “Why do we need to have the government give us data when the most important data is what we get locally, looking at the school and how it does in meeting the state standards to which they have to be held under No Child Left Behind?”

Charter schools, which are largely free from education regulations and are run by groups like nonprofit organizations and for-profit managers, are a fast-growing alternative to traditional public schools. Mr. Schneider showed discomfort on Tuesday at taking a stand on which kind of school performed better.

“This is one of the most contentious issues with regard to the charter school research debate,” Mr. Schneider said. He said the department should not put its stamp on research comparing public and charter schools but should leave individual researchers to use the data to compete in the “marketplace of ideas.”

How to judge the relative performance of public, charter and private schools has been a touchy issue for the department since 2004, when it initially avoided publicizing results from the 2003 assessment that were largely unfavorable to charters.

The teachers’ union ferreted those results out of the department’s Web site, showing that students in charters were largely trailing those in regular public schools. After the federation reported the scores, the department issued its own report confirming their accuracy.

But charter supporters objected to these findings, saying the raw scores did not convey the full picture of charter schools. They said children in charters were more disadvantaged than those in regular public schools and often turned to charters after having struck out in their neighborhood school.

Tuesday’s report, written by the Educational Testing Service, compared a nationally representative sample of 376,000 students at nearly 6,800 regular public schools with 6,500 students at 150 charter schools, controlling for race, socioeconomic status and other factors. The study did not look at students’ previous educational achievement.

Martin Carnoy, a professor of education at Stanford University who has written critically of charters, said he had found no evidence that lower-scoring students from regular public schools made up a disproportionate share of those moving to charters.

Supporters of charters argue that the findings represent only a snapshot of student performance in 2003, saying nothing about progress over time. Dr. Schneider said it had taken the National Center for Education Statistics that long to commission and review the study; the center’s main responsibility is the release of scores on the national assessment.

More recently, the 2005 national assessment showed no significant difference in reading scores between fourth graders in charters and those in regular public schools, although students at regular public schools did significantly better in math at fourth grade and in math and reading at eighth grade.

March 26, 2007 -The more time that children spent in child care, the more likely their sixth grade teachers were to report problem behavior.

Also, children who got quality child care before entering kindergarten had better vocabulary scores in the fifth grade than did youngsters who received lower quality care.

The findings come from the largest study of child care and development conducted in the United States. The 1,364 children in the analysis had been tracked since birth as part of a study by the National Institutes of Health.

In the study's latest installment, released Monday, researchers evaluated whether characteristics observed between kindergarten and third grade were still present in fifth grade or sixth grade. The researchers found that the vocabulary and behavior patterns did continue, though many other characteristics did dissipate.

The researchers said the increase in vocabulary and problem behaviors was small, and that parenting quality was a much more important predictor of child development.

In the study, child care was defined as care by anyone other than the child's mother who was regularly scheduled for at least 10 hours per week.

The researchers said the enduring effect of child care quality is consistent with other evidence showing that children's early experiences matter to their language development.

The long-term effect on behavior also may have a logical explanation, the researchers said.

"One possible reason why relations between center care and problem behavior may endure is that primary school teachers lack the training as well as the time to address behavior problems, given their primary focus on academics," the researchers said.

The study appears in the current issue of Child Development. The authors emphasized that the children's behavior was within a normal range and that it would be impossible to go into a classroom, and with no additional information, pick out those who had been in child care.

Still, the differences in behavior do merit more study, particularly on classroom and playground dynamics, the authors said.

"We regard (the behavior) as noteworthy and meaningful because of the large number of children in America who experience extensive and/or low quality child care prior to school entry," they said.