Apropos of my blog post about charter schools in New Orleans from last week, Katherine Mangu-Ward has an article in Reason today about the Los Angeles Times publication of extensive information on nearly 6,000 Los Angeles public school teachers. This information is something of a hot button issue in Los Angeles right now, with the teacher unions calling for a boycott of the Los Angeles Times and school reformers hoping that any knowledge about which teachers perform well and which do not can lead to better academic outcomes.

Mangu-Ward, however, is skeptical that there will be any revolutionary changes in the school system without an expansion of parental choices to accompany the newly public information:

Even if parents know who the good teachers are—and they often do already—it often doesn’t matter, since kids are randomly assigned. They’re allocated to a district, a school, a schedule, and a classroom, all without any input from students or parents. The biggest decision public school parents get to make about their child’s primary education is where they choose to live. Short of staging a mini-sit in at the guidance counselor’s office (something my parents were known to do from time to time) there’s not much you can do once the die has been cast. And if you’re a parent who doesn’t have the luxury of taking a day off from work to spend fighting the school bureaucracy, your kid is stuck wherever he was randomly assigned, no matter what. Teacher data doesn’t do a lick of good if you don’t have input about which teacher you wind up with.

Instituting a small degree of teacher choice wouldn’t be overwhelmingly difficult. Schools at all levels could opt for the kind of first-come, first-served lottery that large colleges use. It’s not an ideal system, but it’s an improvement. Again, computers these days, they can do amazing stuff. Once a system is in place, this kind of limited choice would be neither time consuming nor expensive. But it would create one outcome that teachers unions will do almost anything to stop: It would quickly become obvious which teachers aren’t desirable. The teachers with the half-empty classrooms would be ripe for firing. And that’s the scenario that makes teachers unions (and to a lesser degree school boards and other education bureaucracies) fear a flood of data, especially if it’s accompanied by even a little choice.

Such a reform would even avoid the common complaint against charters, vouchers, and educational tax credits, that they take money away from the public schools. We can simply introduce competition within the schools themselves. I doubt this will turn a failing school system around, but it should improve the situation at the margin.

On Sunday, Jessica Bock of the Post-Dispatch reported that the superintendent of the Ferguson-Florissant school district was awarded health insurance for life as an incentive to get him to stay at the district for an extra year. This is incredibly rare, if not unprecedented. In my study of Missouri superintendent pay, I did not see any other Missouri school district award its superintendent perpetual health insurance.

According to his contract, the superintendent, Jeffery Spiegel, will begin to receive free health coverage for both himself and his dependents after June 30, 2011, until the end of Spiegel’s life. The superintendent and his dependents will not have to pay any premiums for this coverage after June 30.

This is pricey. According to Bock’s article, district officials estimates the cost of the lifelong health insurance to be more than $200,000.

A more typical health insurance benefit for superintendents at larger school districts is to provide health insurance to a superintendent and his or her family while the superintendent works at the district. (The Pleasant Hill superintendent’s contract is a good example).

If the Ferguson-Florrisant school board members were having a difficult time persuading Spiegel to stay at the district, they could have awarded him an increase in salary for that year, or an increased annuity payment — something that other school districts occasionally do. The health insurance that Spiegel was awarded is an unknown expense. It is impossible to know how long he and his dependents will use the benefit. Estimates, such as the $218,398 figure calculated by district officials, are only estimates.

Really, why would the Ferguson-Florissant school board, which oversees the district’s budget, prefer to award a benefit with an unknown cost to one that can easily be budgeted for? If board members thought Spiegel was worth an additional $218,398, the board members could have increased his salary by that amount. That approach would result in Spiegel’s salary increasing to $430,051. Of course, if the school board had taken that approach, the additional compensation would have been awarded in a much more transparent manner.

School districts report their superintendent’s salary each year to the Department of Elementary and Secondary Education. But districts do not report the non-salary benefits, such as annuity payments, car allowances, or, in this case, health insurance for life. So, Spiegel’s additional compensation cannot be found by looking at state data. Additionally, if an education reporter or interested district resident were to request Spiegel’s employment contract, which is where you can find information about non-salary benefits, they would only see that he was awarded health insurance for life — not the monetary value of that benefit. It took diligent reporting to suss out the $218,398 figure.

It is impossible to tell whether school board members thought that they could obscure the enormous sum of money awarded Spiegel by providing lifelong health insurance to its superintendent and his dependents. But, regardless of the intention, that is the end result. I’m glad the Post-Dispatch caught it.

Incidentally, the next Ferguson-Florissant school board meets next on Sept. 8.

Newsweek ran a good article on “New Orleans’ Charter-School Revolution” yesterday, and it shows the possibilities of a very open charter school system:

In most public school systems in America, students attend the school for which their neighborhood is zoned. But in the five years since Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans has created a school system unlike any other in the country. “We used Katrina as an opportunity to build—not rebuild, but build—a new school system,” says Paul Vallas, the outgoing superintendent of the Recovery School District, which, authorized by the state to turn around failing schools, took over most of New Orleans’s schools after the storm. Last year more than 60 percent of the city’s students attended charter schools; this year nine additional schools switched to a charter model, so that number will be higher. Vallas calls this new paradigm an “overwhelmingly publicly funded, predominantly privately run school system.”

In 2005 Orleans Parish was the second-worst-performing school district in the state, and in some schools 30 percent of seniors dropped out over the course of the year. In 2003 one high-school valedictorian failed the math portion of the state exit exam five times and could not graduate. Things were different at the charters: at New Orleans Charter Middle School, which in 1998 became the city’s first charter school, parents would put their head in their hands and cry if their child’s name didn’t come up in the admissions lottery.

In New Orleans today, students and educators have unprecedented leeway to mold educational experiences. Students can apply to and, if accepted, choose to attend any of the [...] 46 charter schools or 23 “traditional” schools. The vast majority of schools have open-enrollment policies that allow any student to attend, regardless of past academic success. (Schools with more applicants than spots hold lotteries.) The prevalence of charters means that in most of the city’s schools, educators can choose how their schools are run. Even in traditional schools, principals have unusual autonomy over the hiring—and firing—of teachers, since the city’s teachers’ union lost its collective-bargaining rights.

So far, the experiment appears to be working. Before Katrina, two thirds of students were attending schools deemed failing by state standards, notes Leslie Jacobs, a New Orleans education-reform advocate; in the 2010–11 academic year, she says, it will be less than one third. “The fact that we haven’t gotten everything right yet shouldn’t take away from the fact that we’re getting a whole lot more right,” she says. New Orleans schools are still performing below the state average on achievement tests, but according to Jacobs’s analysis of state data, the gap between New Orleans and the rest of the state has basically been cut in half.

Obviously, that’s far from perfect, but it’s more improvement than the city saw under the old regime. I also think that the teacher union’s loss of collective bargaining rights is a big reason that charters schools have the chance to succeed in New Orleans. Public school teacher unions typically act as a special interest groups hell-bent on stopping any kind of competition to the public school model, so they lobby for laws restricting options like vouchers, education tax credits, and charter schools. Missouri, for instance, has fairly strict rules on charters requiring them to have an academic sponsor and restricting their operations to the cities of Saint Louis and Kansas City.

Still, students in Missouri’s charter schools can be expected to outperform their public school counterparts over time, according to a study by Standford University’s Center for Research on Education, which my colleague Josh Smith blogged about last year. If Missouri offered an even more welcoming environment to charter schools — by, say, letting them operate anywhere in the state — we might be able to come closer to matching the impressive gains of the New Orleans’ schools. At the very least, the research shows that charter schools can replicate the academic accomplishments of public schools at a much lower cost, which is still a net benefit over the status quo.

Again, the evidence shows that schools are like most other institutions in that they perform best when their stakeholders have alternatives and choose which establishment to patronize.

I enthusiastically encourage you to read this op-ed in the Kansas City Star about school reform options and challenges in Missouri. It is written by our friend, Earl Simms, of the Children’s Education Council of Missouri. The op-ed focuses on the hotly contested issue of allowing and/or requiring children in unaccredited school districts to enroll in and attend public schools in neighboring, accredited districts. Enjoy and discuss, and thanks to Combest for the link.

As the president tries to ramp up education reform with the administration’s new Race to the Top funding structure, he is receiving blow-back from the NAACP and a number of other groups. Their major critique of this most recent outreach program is that a funding structure based on competitive incentives during a recession cannot help the massive education problems that exist in the nation’s low-income communities.

The statement that the civil rights and other activist groups produced at the end of July suggested as a solution more of the status quo — or, at least, more for the status quo. It seems that their position is to give current schools more money (with no qualifier) and trust them to fix the problems.

Unfortunately, the economic reality is that money doesn’t grow on trees. Whether or not this attempt at ensuring that the dollars devoted to education are spent effectively actually achieves all the program’s goals, competition for the grants will hopefully create change in a stagnant system.

One of the criteria in this system that the civil rights groups oppose is the use of charter schools. Today, an article in the Wall Street Journal pointed out that minority support for these institutions is on the rise, and the numbers suggest that nearly 50 percent of African Americans and Hispanics support the formation of charter schools, while only 14 percent of African Americans and 21 percent of Hispanics oppose them. It is time for these groups to stop playing politics in education. The current system doesn’t work.

The Show-Me Institute’s most recent policy study shows that superintendents in school districts across the state are receiving compensation based not on performance factors, but rather correlated with school district characteristics, such as population size.

The time to reform education is now; competition and a fundamental change in how schools are funded have a far better chance of helping the kids that need it most. Although Missouri is not on the short list to receive any of the grants, we should pay close attention to this new federal market-based funding structure and track its results.

On July 31, the Post-Dispatch ran the following letter I had written to the editor:

Society makes a promise to children that no matter their race, ethnicity, or socioeconomic status, every child should have the education necessary to realize his potential. For many children in Saint Louis, however, that promise has been broken.

Saint Louis Public Schools maintains a handful of excellent institutions, but for three years now, the state has deemed the district as a whole to be unworthy of accreditation. State law requires that if a school district fails to maintain accreditation, the students living in that district must be given the opportunity to escape their troubled schools and attend accredited public schools in nearby districts. Just as SLPS was about to lose accreditation in May 2007, however, the elected school board formally urged county school districts to deny admission to any students seeking transfer under this law — and the county districts complied. For three years, many students from Saint Louis have been denied the educational lifeline provided by state law, trapped in failing schools for years they won’t get back.

Thanks to the Missouri Supreme Court, that now seems likely to change. With a 4-3 decision in Turner v. School District of Clayton, the judges ruled that the school districts in Saint Louis County cannot turn away Saint Louis residents seeking admission to their schools.

It also ruled that SLPS must bear the expense of their students’ education and provide transportation.

The court said that when a Missouri school district has clearly failed its students, that district is required to provide access to alternatives.

Many in the county will worry about the potential challenges of integrating kids from Saint Louis into their classrooms. Elected leaders and school officials in the city will complain about the expense of sending students to other school districts. SLPS will argue that without the money those students represent, the district cannot be expected to make the changes necessary to regain accreditation, and that this decision represents the death of public education in Saint Louis.

These arguments overlook what the law and the Missouri Supreme Court did not: Public schools exist to serve the children, not the other way around. Children in Saint Louis have already had their educational progress delayed for too long. Access to better schools cannot wait until the adults straighten out the mess they created. The welcome impact of the Turner decision is that after years of hollow promises that someday all of the students in Saint Louis would enjoy access to high-quality educational opportunities, someday has finally arrived.

Today, another letter to the Post-Dispatch (predictably) responded that the real problem with SLPS is a lack of funding — which the writer attributes to Missouri school districts’ failed attempts to persuade the courts that taxpayers should be spending billions more in school funding. There are, of course, two massive failures of logic in this letter. The first is the notion that students’ academic performance is linked to the amount of money spent by their school district, a point debunked not only by the research of Dr. Michael Podgursky (who happens to be a Show-Me Institute board member), but also by the fact that SLPS maintains some of the very best schools in the state with the same per-student funding it provides to some of the very worst schools in the state.

The second failure is linked to the first. The letter complains about school funding at the state level, but the question at issue is the failing of Saint Louis city’s unaccredited school district. Last year, SLPS spent more than $15,600 per student — far, far above the state average, and on par with the best-performing districts in Saint Louis County. SLPS also maintains a student-to-classroom-teacher ratio of 18 to 1. This means that SLPS has roughly $281,000 to spend for every active classroom in the district. That’s $281,000 per classroom! Even if, say, 40 percent of that money (more than $110,000 per classroom) went to administrative costs, that would leave nearly $170,000 to pay a teacher’s salary (let’s say $60,000) and to properly equip and maintain just that one classroom.

SLPS suffers from a number of ills, but lack of funding is not one of them.

On Tuesday, Saint Louis city residents voted overwhelmingly to pass a $155 million bond for Saint Louis Public Schools (SLPS). According to the city’s Board of Election Commissioners, nearly 76 percent of the city residents who showed up at the polls voted for the bond.

One of the primary strategies with which proponents of a school bond promote such measures is to say that the bond will not result in an increase in taxes. This is misleading at best, and disingenuous at worst.

There are two main ways that school districts ask residents for more money. The first is by asking voters to approve a tax levy increase, which, if approved, results in a direct increase in the property tax rate. The second is by requesting that voters approve a bond. A bond is an issuance of debt. It does not directly raise your property tax rate, but the debt must be paid off in the future. And school districts pay off the bond issued today with property taxes tomorrow, plus interest.

According to St. Louis Public Schools’ 2009 Comprehensive Annual Financial Report (CAFR), district residents paid $3.8 per $100 of assessed property valuation. Of the school property tax rate, $0.6211 was used to pay off debt and debt-related costs. That means that more than 16 percent of the property taxes that district residents pay for SLPS are used to pay for the district’s debt. Tax dollars will be used to pay for the just-approved $155 million bond. Those millions will not appear out of thin air.

Reading the coverage leading up to the election, one statement stood out as particularly bad. As St. Louis Post-Dispatch reporter Elisa Crouch put it, “The bond measure would not result in a tax increase, [h]owever, taxpayers would pay the levy longer if the bond is approved. The district would retire its bonds in 2025, rather than 2018.”

Read that quotation again. It’s kind of ridiculous. Rationalizing school debt by saying that it won’t increase the tax rate, only the duration of payments, is akin to justifying taking on more credit card debt because it won’t increase your monthly payment — you’ll just have to spend a few more years making the minimum payment. If I applied this logic to my own finances, I’d have many wonderful impulse purchases (ooh!), but it would take me years of austerity to climb out of debt in the future.

I wonder when SLPS will get around to paying off all of this debt it has accumulated. Going back to the 2009 CAFR, you can see on page 105 that since 1999, SLPS has never managed to reduce the rate of taxes it charges residents for debt purposes. The rate has only increased, from $0.55 to $0.6211. In 2009, SLPS had accumulated a total of more than $245 million in bonds and notes payable, according to the CAFR. Furthermore, SLPS paid down $14.3 million of its debt last year, while paying an additional $8.95 million in interest charges. In fact, according to the CAFR, only $1 of every $2 that SLPS spent in 2009 on debt service went to paying down its debt. The rest was eaten up by interest, payments to an escrow agent, and bond issuance costs.

Debt is expensive. I’m sure SLPS — and Nicolas Cage — would agree.

Last night, I was privileged to attend an advance screening of Waiting for Superman with my colleagues Dave Roland and Bill Kay. The documentary takes on the problems of America’s educational system, and — given that it is directed by Davis Guggenheim of An Inconvenient Truth fame (and also a native son of Saint Louis) — you could be forgiven for thinking that the film would offer nothing but liberal platitudes about the need to support public schools with ever more money. You would, however, be wrong. Guggenheim strongly suggests that education has been hijacked by teacher unions, and the best ways to change the system would be to inject some degree of competition through charter schools, institute merit pay to attract and retain the best teachers, and eliminate — or, at least, strongly limit — tenure so that bad teachers can be fired, if necessary.

During the question and answer session afterward, a questioner who identified herself as a longtime teacher took issue with the merit pay suggestion. She argued that teachers do their jobs because they love their work and are passionate about it, and are not motivated by “greed” like people on Wall Street. There is some truth to this. Certainly, no one goes into teaching expecting to become fabulously wealthy. Still, I was reminded of what my cooperating teacher used to say when I was going through student teaching: “I’m doing it for the money … if they stopped paying me, I’d stop showing up.” Unless someone is independently wealthy, the money matters, and if school districts could pay more to the best teachers, they would likely attract and retain more highly skilled individuals to the profession.

In Superfreakonomics, Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner argued that one of the major factors for America’s falling educational achievement over the last half century is the movement of educated women into fields outside of teaching, such as law and medicine. That is not a reason to lament women entering the wider workforce, but if there were more upward mobility possible in teaching, far more qualified people — both men and women — would have opted for teaching. Teaching can be an inherently satisfying profession, but it would be foolish to pin the hopes of our educational system on pure altruism.

Saint Louis’s Paideia Academy, a charter school, is set to close its doors following a recent defeat in a court battle with Missouri’s Board of Education, which rejected the school’s charter application earlier this year. The Post-Dispatch reports that the Board of Education, in rejecting the application, and the Cole County Circuit Judge, in upholding its decision, cited poor management, the lack of a sponsor, and low test scores as reasons to revoke the charter. Although I am not in a position to speak about the quality of management, or about the lack of a sponsor (which certainly seems like a valid reason to revoke a charter), I do, however, object to the “low test score” argument on two grounds.

First, although it is true that Paideia’s test scores rank among the lowest in the state, absolute measures of test scores are not a very meaningful measure of school quality. The production of education is similar to the production of anything else in the economy: Poorer quality inputs, in the form of poorer students from historically disadvantaged ethnic backgrounds, translate to poorer quality outputs, in the form of test scores. It’s not only a mistake, then, to compare Paideia’s students to those of high-performing districts, but also to an arbitrary benchmark determined by the state. Taking a snapshot of test scores is not enough, because a reliance on mere glimpses into time discourages an understanding of the underlying trends at work. The more important measure is the longitudinal one: Are Paideia’s students learning more now than they were before the school existed? Perhaps the answer is no, but it doesn’t look like this question was considered by either the Board of Education or the Cole County Circuit Judge.

Second, I am willing to believe that we may overvalue test score measures of all kinds. One-size-fits-all models don’t work in schools, where abilities and interests vary greatly between student populations. Schools that produce less significant test score gains but more significant “creativity” gains may still be cultivating meaningful human capital.

A court ruling on Monday likely means that Paideia Academy — a charter elementary school in Saint Louis plagued with low test scores — will close permanently. Missouri law requires charter schools to have a sponsor, and Paideia has not been in compliance with the law since losing the sponsorship of the Missouri University of Science and Technology, so the ruling seems completely appropriate from that perspective. Paideia’s closing also illustrates an advantage of both charter and private schools: They can fail! Public schools are rarely punished for poor performance, and this leads to stagnation. As with any other endeavor, education is an evolving process that requires experimentation to discover which methods are successful and which are failures, but if schools are never allowed to fail, teachers and administrators have little incentive to sort the wheat from the chaff.

The major problem I have with the Paideia ruling from a policy perspective is that the closing is the result of a judge’s ruling, not from a lack of demand on the part of parents. Paideia certainly suffered from low test scores, but as charter school consultant Richard Hay argued in the hearing, improvement on the tests may be a far better metric of school success than absolute scores. Furthermore, perhaps the public schools into which the kids will be reassigned are even worse (and very unlikely to be closed for poor performance).

In the overwhelming majority of cases, parents and students have more incentive and better information to determine which school best meets their educational needs, and their decisions are far better guides for which schools should fail and which should flourish.

The Kansas City School District, in another effort to reform lagging schools, plans to move students into an ungraded primary system,  where students progress based on skill level, rather than age, once a subject has been mastered. From USA Today (emphasis added):

Now, in the latest effort to transform the bedraggled Kansas City, Mo. schools, the district is about to become what reform experts say is the largest one to try the approach. Starting this fall officials will begin switching 17,000 students to the new system to turnaround trailing schools and increase abysmal tests scores.

Richard Innes at the Bluegrass Institute in Kentucky points out that this was, in fact, tried in Kentucky during the 1990s, in a school district five times the size of Kansas City’s district. He reports that it was generally unsuccessful, with only 25 percent of Kentucky schools still in “ungraded primaries” — although it is still on the books:

Even KERA’s most enthusiastic cheer leader, the Prichard Committee for Academic Excellence, now admits that Primary just didn’t work out.

The fact that the education “reform experts” were unaware that this had been tried before, on a large scale, does not bode well. It didn’t work in Kentucky. Can it work in Missouri?

Lessons can be learned from these failed attempts. After all, the reform itself could have some merit when implemented on a small scale, and some states like Alaska and Colorado have had success with the program. Theoretically, it makes sense: A student may have advanced math skills, but need extra time to practice reading. If implemented appropriately, that student could devote more time to skills that need improvement.

Kentucky’s problems may have fallen upon the difficulty of implementation. Innes suggested, in a phone call yesterday, that the teachers would have needed “Solomonic wisdom” to successfully implement the program. Indeed, a skill progression is a difficult thing for a teacher to assess for a few dozen students in multiple subject areas. A 2002 study by CREDE found that the primary program had varied implementation, which might explain some of Kentucky’s problems:

“The study of the implementation and effects of the nongraded primary program in Kentucky revealed that when teachers fully implemented the program, they were also practicing the CREDE standards fully. Teachers across the state, however, implemented the program in a variety of ways, some of which were not philosophically aligned with the original intent.”

Perhaps the advent of more advanced technology will provide the piece that was missing in Kentucky. Some virtual school courses have a modular structure that allow students to progress at their own pace, which might create an easier way to assess a student’s skill progression and readiness to move on to the next subject.

Whatever the case may be, I hope that Kansas City looks at all the research — the successes and failures — before they attempt such a large transformation.

A recent article in the Columbia Missourian highlights some of the steps being taken in Missouri to combat childhood obesity. Among the initiatives mentioned are the Walking School Bus and Farm to School programs:

More than 400 students from 10 Columbia public elementary schools participate in this Walking School Bus program, sponsored by the PedNet Coalition. A trained adult walks a set route each morning, picking up kids along the way and guiding them to school.

In addition to cutting costs for buses facing rising fuel expenses, the Walking School Bus is designed to increase physical activity for children in order to combat the country’s growing childhood obesity epidemic.

The difference between the two programs is that the Walking School Bus is grounded in the volunteerism of adults willing to walk with children to school, with the end of incentivizing good habit formation, whereas Farm to School is a government program that encourages the use of local food in school lunches. There are a couple of problems with the latter. As Sarah Brodsky and Caitlin Hartsell have pointed out, it’s incorrect to conflate “local food” with “healthy food”; food produced locally may not always be healthy, and food that is healthy may be imported from outside a given region. Mandating that school food be locally procured is also costly, because price-based competition from a large portion of the potential market for food is left unconsidered, and the increased demand for local food contributes to a rise in its prices.

It can also be a costly mandate for local farmers, who must cope with changes in the types of crops that they grow. A Columbia school district official admitted:

“We’re essentially asking farmers to start to grow what we want them to grow. And that’s a big risk for them.”

It is indeed a risk for Missouri farmers, who must diversify their crops to meet a new form of demand. Modern farmers maintain a delicate balancing act of running up huge debts in acquiring machinery that is geared specifically for the crops they have elected to raise. Mandating that schools provide local food presents an opportunity for local farmers, but also places a burden on them to raise a diversity of crops year-round — for many, a costly and impractical endeavor. Missouri farmers will be taking more than a “big risk” here and now; this involves their whole financial life plans.

Tackling the difficult issue of childhood obesity requires daily diligence in habit formation, because parents ultimately control the health of their children. One or more healthy meals served at school every day can be negated by a pantry full of junk food at home. This is not to say that schools shouldn’t care about serving healthy food — indeed, school lunch programs that focused on meeting nutritional guidelines, whether or not the food is locally procured, would better balance costs with student health.

Similarly, a mandated exercise class during the school day doesn’t affect the inactivity of kids who stay indoors and play video games all day on the weekends and during the summer. Yet initiatives like the Walking School Bus program directly incentivize the most important players on this issue — the parents and children themselves. Children are habituated toward associating activity with involvement with their peers, and parents are given an easy, safe, and inexpensive way of getting their kids to school that may benefit the community (e.g., through reduced traffic congestion near schools) at the same time. Yet again, volunteerism creates a win-win for everyone.

The New York Times ran an excellent article on Friday critiquing the idea that all students should attend college. A college education can certainly lead to a better career and higher pay for those who prosper in that academic environment, but for millions of others, it is ultimately a very expensive distraction:

The idea that four years of higher education will translate into a better job, higher earnings and a happier life — a refrain sure to be repeated this month at graduation ceremonies across the country — has been pounded into the heads of schoolchildren, parents and educators. But there’s an underside to that conventional wisdom. Perhaps no more than half of those who began a four-year bachelor’s degree program in the fall of 2006 will get that degree within six years, according to the latest projections from the Department of Education. (The figures don’t include transfer students, who aren’t tracked.)

For college students who ranked among the bottom quarter of their high school classes, the numbers are even more stark: 80 percent will probably never get a bachelor’s degree or even a two-year associate’s degree…

College degrees are simply not necessary for many jobs. Of the 30 jobs projected to grow at the fastest rate over the next decade in the United States, only seven typically require a bachelor’s degree, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Among the top 10 growing job categories, two require college degrees: accounting (a bachelor’s) and postsecondary teachers (a doctorate). But this growth is expected to be dwarfed by the need for registered nurses, home health aides, customer service representatives and store clerks. None of those jobs require a bachelor’s degree.

Despite the steady drumbeat from politicians and educators over the last 50 years, college is not the one true way in education. Training in a skilled trade and on-the-job experience are just as valid educational paths as college, and can be just as lucrative — often, more so. Government policy, both at the federal level and in Missouri, encourages people to attend college instead of pursuing other routes. We could both save money and achieve better outcomes if the government were to cut back on spending for colleges and shift some of that funding to need-based scholarships for trade schools.

The near single-minded focus on college as the best educational path is just another example of government’s tendency to impose a monolithic solution for a host of varied and complicated problems. Such problems can best be solved by a greater role for the market, which offers numerous alternative strategies for achieving similar goals.

If you don’t have any other plans tonight, come out to the Plaza Frontenac Cinema to see The Cartel, a new documentary discussing the troubles facing public schools in New Jersey. The main showing will begin at 6:45 p.m., after which yours truly will open up the floor for a brief Q&A session about the ideas contained in the film and how they might make a difference for Missouri. Hope to see you there!

As our regular readers know, we blog a lot about the Parents as Teachers (PAT) program here. It tends to generate a substantial number of comments, which is awesome. Sarah Brodsky has done most of the posting on this subject, but I will take a stab at it here — and I post this as someone who has been a defender of the program and its benefits previously (in comments, not my own blog posts).

Today’s Post-Dispatch has an article about the latest round of budget cuts in Jeff City. This round of cuts will apparently hit the PAT program hard. The national director of the organization, which is based in Missouri, is taking the cuts personally and hitting back hard:

“I have passed beyond astonishment at the governor’s actions to anger at this disparate attack on Parents as Teachers,” Stepleton said from the organization’s national headquarters in Maryland Heights.

I might understand her anger, but I have to come to the defense of the governor and legislature here. PAT is a worthy program, and by that I mean that I feel it serves its mission more effectively than many other social programs. My family uses it, and we pay for it through our property taxes. If we were asked to pay for it via both property taxes and additional fees, I readily admit we would not use it. But there is no reason PAT should not feel the cutbacks to the same degree as other programs — or, in certain cases like the Highway Patrol, more than other programs. There is nothing so important about PAT, compared to may other programs, that should make it immune to cutbacks when they are required. And I again remind you that I say this as someone who likes, uses, and supports the PAT program overall.

The governor has difficult choices to make, and he deserves credit for facing up to the task and making the hard decisions. The General Assembly also deserves great credit for working with him on many (not all, but many) of these choices, and refusing to raise taxes in these tough budget times. Raising taxes is the easy way out, not the hard way.

Other proposed cuts are positively exciting, such as reducing, even just temporarily, aid to Missouri’s insipid ethanol industry:

The state will delay paying $3.2 million in subsidies owed to biodiesel plants. Next year, they’ll get about 75 percent of what they’re owed, with the rest being deferred to future years.

Here’s hoping that they make the biodiesel cuts permanent, then cut it even further.

The Missouri Senate has given initial approval for a proposal by Gov. Jay Nixon to consolidate the Department of Elementary and Secondary Education (DESE) and the Department of Higher Education. Approaching the issue purely as a matter of spending, this looks like an obvious move. With one department, some of the redundant agencies and services can be rolled into one capable of doing the same work for less money. However, the effect that such a change would have on educational outcomes is far more ambiguous.

Once they are a single department, the management styles of the old departments will influence each other. No doubt the influence will flow in both directions, but ultimately either higher education will end up looking more like elementary and secondary education, even if only on the margin, or vice versa. I hope it will be the latter, because higher education gives far more autonomy to individual schools, instructors, and ultimately students, which I believe is one of the reasons that — for all its problems — the American higher education system remains highly touted.

That said, I fear DESE’s influence will win out. It is the far larger department, with a 2010 appropriation of more than $5.4 billion compared to Higher Education’s $1.3 billion. This will probably mean far more micromanagement of college curricula and a greater emphasis on pedagogy compared to content. That’s simply how DESE officials think; they create a statewide standard to make classes nice and formulaic. If this plan is implemented, I fully expect that within a decade there will be state-mandated standards for common courses (e.g., western civilization, macroeconomics, chemistry, etc.) similar to the Class Level Expectations (CLEs) in high school classes. Missouri will have a “seamless” education system, as one legislator describes it, but at the expense of the independence of our public universities.

According to an AP article dated yesterday:

Education officials from across Missouri joined Gov. Jay Nixon’s call to rein in tax credits, asserting Wednesday that escalating incentives are diverting money from financially strapped schools and colleges. [...]

Nixon, a Democrat who last year backed an expansion of state tax credits for businesses, now says tax incentives have grown so greatly that they are threatening other essential government functions. About $585 million of tax credits were redeemed last year — up 86 percent over the past decade, he said.

I realize that education officials are self-interested, but I agree with their assertion here that Missouri’s tax credit programs are funded at the expense of other programs. When tax revenue is spent on subsidizing select businesses and industries, taxpayers cannot spend that money elsewhere, such as on education; they face an opportunity cost that at least equals the amount of the tax credit.

Additionally, the state shouldn’t carve out sections of its tax base to reduce tax burdens for a select few, because those who remain in the tax base have to pick up the difference. By having a broad tax base, Missouri can assess a tax rate that’s lower and more equal for all taxpayers. This low-tax environment would attract new businesses and individuals to Missouri better than any selective tax credit program could. This would result in a steady stream of more reliable tax revenues, so government in Missouri would not have to struggle to pay for itself.

From the Columbia Daily Tribune:

A recent demonstration by the Missouri State Highway Patrol SWAT team had students ducking for cover and later upset at least one parent.

On April 8, about 27 students — mostly high school juniors and seniors — were taking part in a Student Alliance Program course in the highway patrol hangar at the Jefferson City airport. As part of a demonstration by Troop F, a SWAT officer rolled a “flashbang” grenade under the seats of the students without their knowledge.

The grenade, a non-lethal weapon used to stun or divert the attention of criminals when tactical teams enter a building, went off, emitting a loud noise, a burst of light and smoke.

Thankfully, no one was seriously injured, but if police officers have become so desensitized to flashbangs that this can be considered normal behavior, the SWAT team is raiding far too many houses.

Via Radley Balko.

Last week, I wrote that we needed many more options in education than the traditional public school. In his latest column, Steve Chapman echoes that sentiment but cautions that no single alternative is likely to bring revolutionary change. For instance, Chapman looks at the lackluster results from the voucher program in Milwaukee:

In 1990, in one of the most innovative developments in modern American education, the Milwaukee public schools created a parental choice system. Some low-income parents got vouchers that could be used to send their children to private schools.

It was a richly promising idea. The new option would let disadvantaged kids escape wretched public schools. Competition would force public schools to improve or close. Students would learn more.

Twenty years have passed. Last week, researchers at the School Choice Demonstration Project at the University of Arkansas published their latest assessment of the results.

What did they find? Something unexpected: Kids in the program do no better than everyone else. “At this point,” said professor Patrick J. Wolf, “the voucher students are showing average rates of achievement gain similar to their public school peers.”

Although I agree with Chapman’s main point, I think he is too critical here.  Voucher students score basically the same as public school students, but the graduation rate for students receiving vouchers is 77% to 65% for students without the voucher, which is hardly insignificant. Even more striking, especially in such a lean fiscal year, voucher students attain the same level of education as their public school peers for less than half the cost — $6,400 a year for voucher students against $14,000 for public school students. In other words, the private schools are doing the same job with half the resources. Cutting costs without substantially improving educational outcomes is not worthy of a standing ovation, but it at least deserves mild applause. The same point can be made about charter schools.

That said, Chapman’s conclusion is incredibly wise:

What should we learn from these experiences? Not that nothing works, but that few if any remedies work consistently in different places with different populations. We shouldn’t expect that broad, one-size-fits-all changes imposed by the federal government—such as those offered by the Obama administration—will pay off in student performance.

From the local school district to the federal Department of Education, humility, caution, and open-mindedness are in order. Because right now, the main thing we know about improving schools is that we don’t know very much.

This is why changes in the educational system should come from the bottom up. Students, parents, and individual schools and districts should be encouraged to experiment and imitate those experiments that work. Grandiose nationwide (and even statewide) plans, on the other hand, have a tendency to ignore local and individual particulars. Ignoring those particulars all too often leads to general failure.

St. Louis Public Radio posted a piece yesterday about $54 million in stimulus funds that Missouri has received to spend on underperforming schools. One particular paragraph caught my eye (emphasis added):

The competitive bids will fund interventions into schools that are in the bottom 5 percent academically, or have graduation rates below 60 percent. But districts have to agree to one of four draconian options, including firing the principal and most of the staff, closing the school and reopening it as a charter school, closing the school and sending students elsewhere, or a model that focuses on teacher education and curriculum changes.

Last time I checked, “draconian” meant “rigorous; unusually severe or cruel.” I’m not sure I would consider “closing the school and reopening it as a charter school” or using “a model that focuses on teacher education and curriculum changes” as severe or cruel. In fact, they seem to be rather obvious solutions, especially considering these schools consistently underperform.

Show-Me Institute scholars have written extensively about charter schools, including a recent policy study highlighting the benefits of charter schools. Of the four options summarized above, charter schools provide the most promise for improvement. Although they’re not a cure-all, charter schools can inject some needed competition into the school system. Not every charter school will succeed, just as there will be public schools that do not succeed. Nevertheless, the ability to innovate — and to close failing schools — gives charter schools an advantage over traditional public schools. If a school is failing, as these are, it does not serve the children or the taxpayers to continue funding it. Schools that are not fulfilling their mission to educate their students need to be overhauled.

With this large potential influx of federal money, it would be imprudent not to require that some radical changes occur first. The four options given may seem extreme, but they are necessary to improve the schools. Keeping children in failing schools without expecting those schools to make changes that might better serve to educate them properly is the truly draconian option.

The Washington Post recently carried an article by Reason magazine senior editor Katherine Mangu-Ward on the benefits of online education and its even greater potential. It is worth quoting at some length:

Since the Internet hit the big time in the mid-1990s, Amazon and eBay have changed the way we shop, Google has revolutionized the way we find information, Facebook has superseded other ways to keep track of friends and iTunes has altered how we consume music. But kids remain stuck in analog schools. Part of the reason online education hasn’t taken off is that powerful forces such as teachers unions — which prefer to keep students in traditional classrooms under the supervision of their members — are aligned against it.

So children continue to learn from blackboards and books — the kind made of dead trees! no hyperlinks! — rather than getting lessons the way they consume virtually all other information: online. Putting reading materials and lecture notes on the Internet, like many teachers do today, is just the first step; it’s like when, in the early days of movies, filmmakers pointed a camera at a stage play. Kids are still stuck watching those old-style movies, when they could be enjoying the learning equivalent of “Avatar” in 3-D. Thousands of ninth-grade English teachers are cobbling together yet another lecture on the Globe Theatre in Shakespeare’s day, when YouTube is overflowing with accessible, multimedia presentations from experts on Elizabethan theater construction, not to mention a very nice illustrated series on the Kennedy Center’s ArtsEdge site. [...]

How do we know online education will work? Well, for one thing, it already does. Full-time virtual charter schools are operating in dozens of states. The Florida Virtual School, which offers for-credit online classes to any child enrolled in the state system, has 100,000 students. Teachers are available by phone or e-mail from 8 a.m. to 8 p.m. seven days a week. The state cuts a funding check to the school only when students demonstrate that they have mastered the material, whether it takes them two months or two years. The program is one of the largest in the country. Kids who enroll in Advanced Placement courses — 39 percent of whom are minority students — score an average of 3.05 out of 5, compared with a state average of 2.49 for public school students…

Moving lesson planning and delivery online can provide students with more supervision, not less, says Michael Horn, one of the co-authors of “Disrupting Class.” It would free teachers, Horn says, “to do hand-holding and mentoring, something which is pretty much impossible in the current model.” After all, where is it written that the babysitter, disciplinarian, lecturer and evaluator must all be the same person? Or even that they all have to be in the same building?

Some online learning models eliminate human interaction, but the vast majority do not. Instead, they connect students and teachers via polls, video, chat, text and good old-fashioned phone calls. The Virtual Virginia program focuses on offering Advanced Placement classes to every student in the state, bringing college-level courses to rural districts and inner-city Richmond, where high-level instruction is difficult to get. Rocketship Education, in San Jose, Calif., brings at-risk elementary students together in a safe, cheap, modular space along with a small staff and hands their studies over to online curriculum for part of each day.

Online education has already become a boon for kids with special needs, the students least served by the traditional system. Education entrepreneur Tom Vander Ark launched Internet Academy, the first online K-12 establishment, in 1995 in part to serve kids with unorthodox education requirements, from serious athletes to children with health problems or learning disabilities.

One of the most successful areas of online education so far is helping kids who have fallen off the educational grid. Companies such as AdvancePath Academics scoop up students classified as unrecoverable by traditional schools and help them complete their education. Some dropout-recovery programs can be found in shopping malls and gyms.

Online education is no silver bullet for Missouri’s educational problems because there is no such thing. Each student is different, and although the traditional models may work well for most (a point I think is debatable), others may experience far more success in a more structured online program that still allows students to move at their own pace. Others could benefit from more independent learning styles like Montessori schools. All these options have their places, and we will be most successful when we allow parents and students find the pedagogical methods that work best for them instead of trying to force hundreds of thousands of individuals into the same boxes.

Sarah Brodsky has written about online schooling several times, and Caitlin Hartsell has also blogged about the issue.

When I blogged about a North Carolina Parents as Teachers program that encouraged participants to join a research study, I hadn’t heard of any Parents as Teachers programs in Missouri asking participants to do something similar. It turns out that Parents as Teachers has enrolled Missourians in research; in this study conducted by professors at Washington University and Saint Louis University, the entire set of subjects comprised only Parents as Teachers participants. The study examined the relationship between parent behaviors and child nutrition.

In accounts of the activities and benefits of Parents as Teachers, supporters describe the program’s role in promulgating information that has previously been gleaned from academic research. If Parents as Teachers is also itself facilitating research with participants as subjects, that fact should be considered in debates over its funding.

The Columbia Daily Tribune asks school board candidates which improvements they would like to see in school lunches. One candidate mentions local food in his response:

Nutritional Services is working with vendors to provide food and educational opportunities from local food producers and farmers to reduce the impact CPS has on the environment and to educate students about where their food comes from.

The assertion that local food is superior for environmental reasons comes up often in local food debates. To understand why districts should not conflate local food with environmentally friendly food, I recommend reading Caitlin Hartsell’s excellent post about why growing food closer to consumers is not always better.

In addition to in his claim that local food is better for the environment, the candidate says that purchasing food locally will teach students where their food comes from. I don’t know how he expects the food to do that. From the students’ point of view, food from Missouri looks the same as food from Illinois or food from Indiana. Of course, teachers could point out to students where the food originated from, and they could conduct lessons on where the food was cultivated and harvested — but they could do that just as well if the food came from a different state. In fact, if the place where cafeteria food is grown is to become a subject of study, it might be better to buy food from a distance. That way, students can learn about a place with which they wouldn’t otherwise become familiar, instead of focusing their local area, which they already know something about from experience.

Intelligence Squared is a public charity dedicated to providing a public forum for intelligent discussion on a wide range of important and/or controversial issues. They host Oxford-style debates in which teams of three argue opposing sides of a motion. Before the debate begins, the live audience members register their opinions on the topic, and they do the same after the debate so that, in effect, observers can discern which side’s arguments the listeners found most persuasive.

On March 16, the topic up for debate was whether teacher unions should be blamed for failing public schools. Arguing that teacher unions should not be blamed were Randi Weingarten, the president of the American Federation of Teachers; Gary Smuts, a superintendent of a successful public school district in California; and Kate McLaughlin, an elementary school teacher in Lowell, Mass. Arguing that unions should be blamed were Dr. Terry Moe, a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University; Rod Paige, former U.S. Secretary of Education; and Larry Sand, a teacher from Los Angeles.

The debate itself is incredibly interesting and well worth watching for anyone interested in the topic of education reform. Although the details of the debate are too numerous to go into here, I will give you an idea of how it turns out.

Before the debate, 43 percent of the audience said that unions were to blame, 24 percent said they were not to blame, and 33 percent were undecided. After the debate, 68 percent said that unions were to blame, 25 percent said they were not to blame, and only 7 percent remained undecided. In short, only one percent of the audience’s undecideds were persuaded by the union advocates, while 25 percent were persuaded by the union’s detractors.

A decade ago, education expert Dr. Jay P. Greene published a study for the Mackinac Center for Public Policy in Michigan about the direct costs of developmental (or remedial) education for colleges and industry. His conservative estimate then was that developmental education cost Michigan an astounding $601 million each year, and cost the entire United States $16.6 billion.

His figure does not take into account intangibles like lost productivity, college classes that must be taught at a lower level of comprehension, loss of human capital and some mechanization costs that are necessary to circumvent the lack of skill within the workforce (like installing cash registers that automatically dispense change).

The numbers tell a troubling story about the state of public education. The Department of Elementary and Secondary Education in Missouri alone had an allocation of $5.4 billion in 2010; some school districts spend as much as $22,000 per student. Clearly, not all of this money translates into higher educational outcomes. (See below for a map of school district spending per student created by Audrey Spalding.)

Achieving the Dream, a research group focused on improving community college students’ educations, reported that 60 percent of community college students took a developmental course, but that the number of students in need of these courses was undoubtedly higher. Community colleges tend to absorb the majority of remedial class costs, because they often serve as a bridge from high school to a four-year institution.

Community colleges in Missouri received $148,377,417 in appropriations for 2010. How much of this is devoted to remedial education? Michigan colleges devoted an estimate of between 6 to 33 percent of their budgets on remedial courses; if Missouri colleges are at all similar to that, this entails a substantial amount of money being devoted to teaching skills like reading, algebra, and trigonometry that should have been learned in high school.

In February of this year, the agenda for the Coordinating Board of Higher Education created a new Developmental Education Data and Policy Task Force (DEDPT) to quantify this problem in Missouri. Its stated purpose:

Too many freshmen (both traditional and nontraditional) are not adequately prepared for collegiate work.  As a result, substantial numbers of entering students are forced to take remedial coursework to address shortcomings in their preparation and to achieve mastery of the knowledge and skills needed to be successful college students. [...]

The DEDPT was established to work with MDHE staff to understand better the variation in definitions used by different institutions and sectors and to make recommendations for uniform data definitions about developmental students and coursework. This work will better position Missouri to implement strategies to reduce the need for remediation and shorten time-to-degree.

The task force will bring clarity to the true scope of the inadequate preparation being imparted by the public schools in Missouri. This is a good first step, but beyond just mapping the problems, immediate steps can be taken to address these concerns and improve education before the college level. For example, a Show-Me Institute study showed that charter schools have been shown to increase competition and improve educational outcomes. At any rate, Missouri and states across the country are spending far too much money on education for such a large group of students to graduate without acquiring basic skills.

(Jay Greene spoke last month in Kansas City at a Show-Me Institute event about education reform. The audio of his speech is now available on the Show-Me Institute website.)

Now that the Missouri Virtual Instruction Program has lost state funding and is charging tuition, it’s an opportune time for the St. Louis Public School District to expand its Virtual School.

Enrollment in the SLPS Virtual School is constrained by the district’s rule that online students spend one or more days a week in a classroom, working with Virtual School teachers in person. This policy is unusual for an online school; most such schools allow children to talk to teachers through video conferencing or by telephone, and require less frequent meetings. If SLPS made weekly in-person meetings optional, it could open enrollment to students who live far from St. Louis.

Another factor that has limited the Virtual School’s growth is its policy that elementary students must be enrolled full-time. Permitting young students to enroll in individual classes would give more children the ability to participate.

A Hebrew-language charter school is set to open this fall in New Jersey. Unlike the California “Hebrew-language” charter I recently wrote about, the New Jersey school will focus on … Hebrew. That’s right, the school has permission to specialize in one language. Here, its website lists some reasons to study Hebrew, such as gaining an advantage in international business and diplomacy. None of the reasons have anything to do with religion.

I hope the charter school approval process in Missouri will remain friendly to single-language charter schools, so that a school like the New Jersey charter would be welcome here. There are many languages besides Hebrew that could possibly be studied for their religious significance. Religious texts have been composed in Greek, Latin, and Arabic, to name a few — yet all of those languages are taught in public schools. It’s unfair to single out Hebrew or any of those languages as unsuitable for specialization, when students’ reasons for studying them are as varied as the words in a dictionary.

Currently, home-schooled students cannot participate in high school athletics, but a bill before the Missouri Senate would allow them to play sports at their local school. The Columbia Missourian covered a hearing on the bill yesterday:

During the roughly hour-long hearing, Senate Education Committee members heard from Sam Williams, 14, an eighth-grade home school student from Neosho. Williams said he wanted to continue his wrestling career past the club team he had been on for eight years and play for the team that went undefeated to a Class 4 state title but didn’t want to give up his home-school education.

“I’d rather not have to choose between two things that are good for me,” Williams said.

I would prefer to completely decouple athletics from schools entirely, and turn them over to sports clubs, which would allow schools to focus on education and sports teams to focus on competition, but this bill would certainly be an improvement over the status quo. If a student is allowed to attend a public school and use all the resources that come with it, why shouldn’t he be allowed to use just some of those resources while pursuing his education through an alternative method? Education works best when it is tailored to meet the needs of every individual, so we should be encouraging numerous alternatives to the standard public school model. As long as extra-curricular activities are nearly monopolized by schools, locking out home-schooled and other alternative students only limits the educational options for Missourians.

The Parents as Teachers website includes a list of tips on involving fathers in their children’s lives, and it also gives several reasons why fathers should be involved. Most of them look fine to me, but I take issue with this one:

Dads often have a special interest in analytical skills such as math and problem-solving, which can support a child’s intellectual development and promote school readiness.

The page also states that fathers “are usually more rough-and-tumble in their play with children than moms.”

Mothers can also focus on problem solving and their children’s cognitive growth, and I see no reason to highlight those characteristics as the special domain of men. There are plenty of couples that don’t fit these generalizations; it’s unfair to them to imply that an analytical father paired with a docile mother is the norm, or that this is what men and women are “usually” like.

Now, the wording on this one page should not be a deciding factor in funding Parents as Teachers. I’ve set out my arguments for limiting Parents as Teachers in previous posts, and my reasoning doesn’t depend on what a small section of the program’s website says. However, because Parents as Teachers receives state funds, taxpayers should be aware of what it tells participants. Public programs that give parenting advice can acquaint parents with information, but they can also provide a platform for the promulgation of opinions, biases, and stereotypes.

Last week, I blogged about some advice a Parents as Teachers participant received from a program representative. She says she was told that she “needed” to read to her unborn child every day, and that it was important to read the exact same book each time. I criticized this advice as lacking a scientific basis; in addition, it’s liable to provoke anxiety or unrealistic expectations in parents.

This incident brings to mind a program that was introduced in Georgia back in 1998. The state distributed free classical music tapes and CDs to the parents of newborns, in hopes that listening to the music would stimulate babies’ cognitive development.

In both cases, public programs inappropriately extrapolated from scientific research to prescribe parenting behaviors. Babies can enjoy music — and psychologists have debated the existence of a “Mozart effect” — but that does not mean all babies need to listen to CDs for healthy development. Likewise, research shows that fetuses can detect sounds and that young brains learn from repetition, but that does not imply that reading one book every day will be beneficial. It’s worth noting that despite the research on repetition, repetitive exposure to Baby Einstein language videos has been shown not to help babies’ linguistic abilities. The manner of repetition makes a difference. It’s not sufficient for Parents as Teachers to point to studies about repetition in general; the program would have to show that this specific repetitive activity has a positive effect.

It’s been brought up in our comments section that Parents as Teachers might endorse other ways of interacting with fetuses. This could be true. Similarly, if pressed, Georgia’s governor might have been forced to admit that country music has as much chance of promoting development as classical music. But what matters is the advice that was actually conveyed by the program. When participants honestly come away from a class under the impression that they need to do one particular thing — and I have no reason to believe the blogger I linked to was trying to misrepresent Parents as Teachers or make it look bad — we should evaluate whether that activity is as important as the program claimed. If Parents as Teachers never intended to promote one activity over others, then the program needs to do a better job of communicating with parents so they don’t form erroneous conclusions.