Former Education Secretary Rod Paige labeled the “65 percent solution” as “one of the worst ideas in education” in a commentary in The New York Times. That’s the conservative movement, pushed by Overstock.com founder Patrick Byrne, to mandate that 65 percent of school spending be spent in the classroom. Paige overstated Kansas’ embrace of the magic number; during last summer’s special session on school finance, the Legislature made 65 percent a target rather than a mandate. It makes sense for all districts to spend as much as possible on instruction rather than administration and other expenditures. But Paige predicted that rather than make schools better, such mandates would lead school officials to engage in creative accounting. Instead, Paige advocates “weighted student funding” — a needs-specific package of financing that would follow a child to the public school of his parents’ choice. “Liberals should like the extra investment in needy children; conservatives should appreciate its positive effects on deregulation and school choice,” he wrote.
Posted by Rhonda Holman
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9 Comments
What, only 65% goes to teachers and Classroom cost. That is ridiculous.
Maybe we need more administrators to fund cost studies from experienced, but pricey consultants to see if the 65% is a good alternative. If that fails the small school districts, they can always sue.
Before any of you go spouting off about this proposal, go read it carefully (firstclasseducation.org/faqs#specifics).
While there are some good things and ideas in the proposal, keep in mind that they consider athletics “in the classroom” and things like librarians, teacher training, and other student support personnel like nurses and counselors “outside the classroom”. I have emailed this organization to ask about this very thing and have NEVER received even an automated reply.
What we might do is to open education to market forces and let parents decide individually whether they like schools where a lot is spent in the classroom (however that may be defined) or on administration.
Instead of a one-size-fits-all government-mandated system, people could choose what they like and what works best for them.
This paige clown is just antoher one of shrub’s affirmative action incompetents.
Rod Paige PageBoth test scores and grades have been fabricated at Houston’s school district’s program for troubled kids run by CEP. Rod Paige looks the other way and believes that things have gone unbelievably well in these schools run by people with no educational experience (former Republican party chairmen and people who ran private jails).Paige ignored both the independent test scores (cited by his statisticians) AND common sense in HISD’s CEP program. He’s never explained why.A recent story in the Houston Press quoted a director of the TEA as confirming what the HISD statisticians told Paige:
According to the TEA’s Jacobs, it is up to HISD to ensure the scholastic credibility of CEP. The TEA’s involvement is to look at academics as they relate to TAAS scores. The TEA is also compiling data on why students in Texas are being removed from class and how long they are out, Jacobs says. Unfortunately, his findings support Jones’s worst fears.
“We’ve discovered so far that the longer students are removed from certain programs, we see academic regression,” Jacobs says.
Unlike what Paige claims, publicly available data shows that the Houston high school dropout rate after Paige’s 6 years in office is one of the highest in Texas and in the nation (92nd out of the 100 largest districts in the US). Higher dropouts make tests scores look better.Under Paige, the kids who will suffer the most are the kids who most need the help (such as the CEP students and other disadvantaged students who will depend on federal funding). Their scores will “appear” to go up, but their learning will probably decline.
In addition, Paige will undoubtedly push for privatization. Even though this has been a major failing, he’ll make sure that the numbers the public sees will look good, just as he did with the CEP students.
So of all the choices for education secretary, this is the best we can do???!!?
Bush said during his campaign that education is the #1 issue facing America today and intends to make it a priority for his administration.
This story about Rod Paige that appeared in the Dec 30 NY Times about education secretary nominee Rod Paige. Based on stuff on his website, Rod Paige seems to be a great choice. For example, this excerpt:
Paige named national Superintendent of the Year by the National Alliance of Black School EducatorsThe award is the latest in a series of honors recognizing the leadership of Dr. Paige, who has been superintendent of HISD since 1994. Dr. Paige, now one of the longest-serving superintendents in America, and the board of trustees have led the school district to strong improvement in test scores, a sharply reduced campus crime rate, falling dropout rates, greater parental involvement, and improvements in management that have saved taxpayers money.
In October, Dr. Paige won the McGraw Prize in Education, one of the nation’s top awards for leadership in education.
But all is not what it seems.
I talked to someone on that McGraw award committee. The scoop: Paige has a great PR dept (Terry Abbott, a professional PR guy, and the only full time PR person for any superintendent anywhere in the US, has done an excellent job of “packaging” Paige, sending out mailings regularly proclaiming each achievement) and had been seeking the award for a while and that when objections were raised due to all the controversial stuff going on in Houston, most committee members ignored it and gave him the award anyway (causing at least one committee member to quit). This McGraw Hill situation is well documented by several sources. As for Abbott, here is a reader comment published in the Houston Chronicle on a Houston Chronicle story:
I know too many people who work for this district who are extremely unhappy within the system. They are all in diverse jobs within HISD, yet all report an abundance of miscommunication, mismanagement, waste, and too many hard-working people getting paid an under whelming salary. Their jobs range from custodians to principals yet they all are in agreement of one thing….HISD is not a district where your hard work is appreciated. Rod Paige should be happy. (Terry Abbott also.) They are being paid an exorbitant amount of money for doing no more than promoting themselves on the backs of others blood, sweat, and tears. HISD does not deserve the accolades it has gotten according to the people who are on the inside, but their spin doctor (Abbott) is doing an excellent job of deceiving the public of the truth.
Here’s another interesting fact…
I know little about Rod Paige, but here is one revealing fact about Houston schools. If one takes the number of HS graduates in 1997-98 and divides by the average number of students enrolled in grades 7 to 9 in 1994-95, Houston (with a “graduation rate” rate of 46.77%) is the worst of large districts in Texas, and among the 10 worst of large districts nationally.
In other words, if he’s confirmed, Paige can do for the rest of the country what he’s done for Houston: keep the dropout rate high. That way, test scores appear to go up and Paige looks successful. Unfortunately, those dropouts frequently can’t find jobs and must resort to crime. It is much cheaper for society and better for the individuals to keep them in school so they graduate.
The big danger if Paige is confirmed that we institute high stakes testing everywhere (especially in poorer districts who are more dependent on federal funds), leading to higher dropouts (since teachers will want to raise average test scores to get more money), leading to higher crime, leading to higher costs to society.
There are several dangers of high-stakes testing:
Tests are only approximate measures of a students true ability, yet a bad test score may be sufficient to keep a child from progressing on to the next grade (especially when the school funding depends on test scores). This leads to frustrated students who drop out.Teachers who spend time teaching the test, as all teachers do in high stakes testing states, produce students who are excellent test takers on the question types they practice for, but those skills don’t translate into other national tests, i.e., no real learning has taken place.Time spent doing test preparation exercises means time not spent doing real learning and time not spent in other subjects which are not being tested, like science.The Times story began by talking about Paige enforcing a new state law in Texas.
Again, there may be a LOT more to this story than meets the eye that the NY Times reporter missed. This article about Paige that appeared in April in a Houston alternative weekly that didn’t get much notice since Paige wasn’t a hot item in April. It basically said Paige ignored independent test data presented by his own statistician showing students were actually getting worse over time (relative to other students), and instead give total and unquestioned credibility to CEP data that shows that CEP is wildly succeeding beyond belief with the most difficult students in Texas…http://www.skirsch.com/politics/rodpaige/rod_paige_page.htm
V.L.R.B!!!
What happened to Rod Paige? Why was he replaced by Margaret Spellings?
I wish the Eagle were a little quicker on things. Like, they left it to us bloggers to announce to their readership Ken Lay’s death yesterday afternoon (Open Thread July 5 1:04 PM). I wish that Rhonda had posted Rod Paige’s NYT commentary early enough so that WE Blog readers could read it for free, instead of having to pay an archive fee or subscribe to NYT Select.
Paige just rationally said that setting any given percentage for “classroom costs” isn’t going to work. He pointed out the problem of “creative accounting”, but even absent that, schools have to be flexible. He said that socioeconomically-disadvantaged kids need more spending, relative to non-disadvantaged kids. Kansans understand this. We’ve had computers in our household since 1984. We got our kids their own in 1986. If you want poor kids to have computers, their parents cannot afford them. If you say that they do not need computers, then you are dooming them to a third-world education.
In regards to Houston’s increasing dropout rate, gee, when a school system enrolls increasing numbers of Latinos and Latinas in whose homes English is not spoken, and who are informed that jobs to help their families are available if they drop out, and who are told that if they were born in Mexico, they can’t get college financial aid, what do you think is going to happen? “You can get a fulltime job cleaning houses at age 15, or you can go to school and get the same job at age 18?” Which would we WE Bloggers choose? This isn’t a rocket-science calculation.
Four Local students win Merit Scholarships but only one was from a public school. SAD! Even a home schooled student won one.
http://www.kansas.com/mld/kansas/15014848.htm
That factoid is actually meaningless RA.
That factoid is actually meaningless RA.
Posted by: Apophis | July 11, 2006 at 06:50 PMHow so?