The Bush Administration Goes The Distance By Making It Harder For Kids To Get To School»

A string of recent articles on an issue in the Northern California public schools caught our attention today. The Federal Transit Administration (FTA) is threatening to cut off public bus routes that service local school districts, claiming that federal dollars designated for city transit should not be “subsidizing” school buses, harming the ability of private bus companies to compete. The students effected are from predominantly poor neighborhoods, using the buses to transport themselves to better schools than what is available around them.

As one post explains:

In the East Bay [Oakland-area], about 30,000 schoolchildren use [public] AC Transit buses to get to and from school, paying $15 a month for discounted youth passes. While many of those trips are on regular routes used for nonschool commuters, some of them with route numbers between 600 and 699 are specially scheduled and routed to serve specific schools. Local officials fear that the change sought by the Federal Transit Administration (FTA) would ban those special routes.

The FTA, however, has proposed no method of replacing these public buses — and certainly nothing speedy enough to be enacted before the next school year. There is no guarantee that private contractors would be willing to service all areas currently covered by public routes, and there is no guarantee that the school districts would have the resources to pay the additional cost.

Congresswoman Barbara Lee (D-CA), whose district will be most affected, has voiced concern with the FTA’s mis-shapen priorities: “Instead of looking for ways to make it more difficult for kids to get to school, the FTA should be expanding transportation options for our students.”

Congresswoman Lee is right. The FTA, and the Bush Administration, need to put their money where their mouth is. At time when gas prices are through the roof, cutting access to public buses is counterproductive to ensuring students can get to school, particularly youth from less affluent neighborhoods who set to be the most hurt. (As a San Leandro High student explained, “Take this bus away, and I’ll end up in the streets and probably get into some kind of trouble.) It’s also completely contradictory to the Administration’s drive to encourage mass transit and reduction in energy use. If we’re supposed to be walking to work, carpooling in hybrids and riding the subway, then it would be interesting to hear how the removal of public buses for students furthers that goal.

Low Education = High Health Risks»

Our guest blogger is Robin Chait, a Senior Education Policy Analyst at the Center for American Progress Action Fund.

At an education meeting yesterday, Mike Smith — Education Program Director at the Hewlett Foundation — recounted a sad story from a recent meeting with Superintendents. One of the Superintendents said that he had been going to a lot of funerals of students in his district lately. The others asked why, was there an increase in gang violence? The Superintendent responded no. The deaths were from cavities. Children in America are dying from cavities.

An article in the Washington Post today reports on a study that finds “the difference in death rates between highly educated and poorly educated people in the United States is very wide and growing wider.” While the study can’t conclude that low educational attainment causes increases in mortality, clearly there is a relationship between the two. The failure to improve education for disadvantaged students has implications for the health of our population, and the failure to provide adequate health care for all has implications for educational achievement.

It’s not that educational achievement can’t be improved without addressing the health of students, or that we couldn’t improve health outcomes without first increasing educational attainment. It’s that the consequences of not addressing either exacerbate both. When only about 50% of poor and minority students are graduating high school nationally, there’s a critical need for a greater national investment in addressing this problem. What we’ve had over the past eight years is little new funding for improving low performing schools. And we know that people with health insurance are generally healthier and that income is associated with having health insurance. When 19.3% of children in poverty are uninsured, it’s clear we have a national crisis on our hands.

It’s also clear that the Bush administration hasn’t made the needs of low-income people a priority in any policy arena.

Sense And Nonsense On Education (UPDATED)»

Our guest blogger is Robert Gordon, a Senior Fellow at the Center for American Progress Action Fund.

New York has just approved a budget that reads in part as follows: A “teacher shall not be granted or denied tenure based on student performance data.” This blocks a New York City effort to consider students’ gains on tests as one factor in the teacher tenure decision.

Consider what this law means (keeping in mind that I am also an advisor to the City’s Department of Education). This means that in deciding whether to give a teacher a presumptive right to teach for 30+ years, a principal may not consider evidence of whether the teacher is helping students learn. The principal can consider whether the teacher maintains neat bulletin boards, whether the teacher attends meetings on how to pay for pencils, and whether the teacher is sufficiently deferential in the hallway. But the principal may not consider, based on achievement data, whether children are learning.

Test scores should not count for everything, but this law says they may count for nothing. The law broadly bars consideration of “student performance data” at all.

A prohibition on using relevant data is something out of the Bush Administration’s EPA. It is, to quote a progressive editorial page, “an absurd ban that does a disservice to the state’s millions of public school students.”

Contrast that nonsense with the common sense coming from, well, John McCain. To be sure, McCain has little education record to speak of. He is pressing a pointless detour into private school vouchers, at a time when supporting high-performing public charter schools could do enormous, bipartisan good. And he now favors massive tax cuts for billionaires over needed funding for pre-school.

All of that said, here’s what McCain is saying about education these days:

“Because we all know that if you are privileged and grow up in a certain area then you have access to a pretty good education…We also know that there is a dramatic difference between that level of education and say the inner cities in America. Look at the drop out rates, look at all of the test scores. So it’s a fundamental unfairness….

And here’s an excerpt of his take on teaching:

Teaching is among the most honorable professions any American can join. After our parents, few people influence our early life as profoundly as teachers. Theirs is an underpaid profession, dedicated to the service of others, which offers little in the way of the rewards that much of popular culture encourages us to crave — wealth and celebrity…. We should reward the best of them with merit pay, and encourage teachers who have lost their focus on the children they teach to find another line of work.

I would call it “performance pay” rather than “merit pay,” but if you ask me, this is basically good stuff.

McCain is a Johnny-Come-Lately to education, but for the moment, the contrast between his sensible speech and the absurd action in one of America’s bluest states is enough to make a progressive wince. The shame of New York is an opening for Senator McCain.

UPDATE: “Eduwonkette” asks why I worry that New York has forbidden the use of “student performance data” when other forms of evaluation “provide lots of information.” But to support the use of other forms of evaluation, the blogger cites a paper whose central conclusion is as follows:

We find that subjective principal assessments of teachers predict future student achievement significantly better than teacher experience, education or actual compensation, though not as well as value-added teacher quality measures.

If New York attempts to build a meaningful tenure review around the measures Eduwonkette is now touting, we will hear that subjective evaluations have problems too. We will probably see citations to the very same paper. The citations will be more logical then than now.

Prior to New York State’s action, nothing would have prevented critics from bombarding principals with reasons not to use the data. What we have instead is legislatively-enforced ignorance, a ban on using “student performance data” in any way in a decision of utmost importance to the students that schools are supposed to serve. The legislation is every bit as reactionary as it sounds.