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AFT's Closer Look - June 7, 2004

IN THIS ISSUE
June 7, 2004

School's Out for Summer--And That's Not Good for Disadvantaged Students
Although the achievement gap between advantaged and disadvantaged students increases as students become older, a new study from Johns Hopkins says the growth in that gap is caused solely by what goes on during summer vacations. Policymakers haven't caught up with this research, and public school bashers ignore it and ramp up their rhetoric. More . . .

Kindergarten-Plus Results Due Out This Month
New Mexico is experimenting with Kindergarten-Plus, a proposal that extends the school year for disadvantaged students and provides more time with well-qualified teachers during the weeks before and after the kindergarten year. The results, due out this month, could reshape and reinvigorate early childhood education across the nation. More . . .

Wal-Mart, the Community-Friendly Corporation? Don't Buy It
There have been plenty of news reports about communities fighting the invasion of new Wal-Mart stores, but the untold story is that public subsidies to the giant retailer are harming America's schoolchildren. More . . .

Would You Send Your Mother to a Hospital Staffed by www.scab.org?
A strike by New Jersey nurses brings out the worst in officials at the Bergen Regional Medical Center. (And, yes, there really is a www.scab.org Web site.) More . . .

Ketchum If You Can: ED Pays $700,000 to Firm That Produced Illegal Medicare Ads
Ketchum Inc., the PR firm that oversaw production of the phony Medicare TV stories, also has a $700,000 contract with the U.S. Department of Education. More . . .

Giving Bush Credit Where Credit Isn't Due: Part Two
A strange time warp affects President Bush's supporters. John Kyl, a Republican senator from Arizona, is trying to puff up President Bush's image by crediting him with Clinton-era education rhetoric. And the Washington Times, either by design or by accident, describes good news from the Clinton era as something that came about during "the past five years." More . . .

Another Reason for Reading AFT's Most Recent Issue Brief
Administration officials continue to misinterpret "proficiency," one of the key terms that defines schools as "in need of improvement" under the No Child Left Behind Act. More . . .

Worth Reading
A quick look at recent articles, reports and books. More . . .

School's Out for Summer--And That's Not Good for Disadvantaged Students

The achievement gap between advantaged and disadvantaged students, and especially its growth during the summer months, is the subject of the "Beginning School Study," an ongoing Johns Hopkins research project, which found that "the increasing gap in test scores between the two groups of children over the first five years in elementary school accrued entirely from the fact that relatively affluent children continued to gain when school was closed whereas poor children stopped gaining or even lost ground [emphasis added]."

The disparity is due in part to the fact that far too many disadvantaged children lack rich cultural and literary experiences during the summer. Taking trips to museums, listening to live music, and even traveling for family vacations can help children build on the knowledge and skills they developed during the school year.

One of the favorite canards of the anti-public schoolers is to denigrate U.S. public schools by saying that the longer students stay in school the worse they do. But the "Beginning School Study" identifies larger forces that explain the achievement gap's increase between kindergarten and high school. You can find variations on the public-school bashers' mantra--and a slew of similar misbegotten statements in articles and books from the Hoover Institution, the Center for Education Reform and the Mackinac Center for Public Policy.

Then you can explore Alice Cooper's treatise on summer vacation or return to the land of common sense.

Related Information:

Kindergarten-Plus Results Due Out This Month

Two years ago, in response to growing evidence that early childhood education can help narrow the achievement gap, AFT president Sandra Feldman called for legislation to enact Kindergarten-Plus, an AFT-designed initiative that would extend the school year for disadvantaged students and provide more time with well-qualified teachers during the weeks before and after the kindergarten year. The proposal has struck a chord with lawmakers across the country.

New Mexico, thanks in part to the leadership of Gov. Bill Richardson, already has enacted a version of the proposal, and preliminary data suggest that the extra instruction time has helped students with early warning signs of learning disabilities. In Louisiana, a Kindergarten-Plus bill that just passed the state House of Representatives is now before the state Senate. The initiative also has drawn interest from legislators in Illinois, Rhode Island and Virginia.

Consensus is rare among education policymakers, but there is widespread agreement that closing the achievement gap, though difficult, is not impossible--and that starting in the early years is critical. That's why more and more educators and policymakers are seeking to make high-quality early childhood programs more available and more affordable, provide greater school-based opportunities for disadvantaged students outside the normal school year and school day, and, especially, strengthen public schools so they can help all students meet high standards.

This summer, we will see whether the end-of-year test results of New Mexico's Kindergarten-Plus confirm early indicators of success. If the results are positive, Kindergarten-Plus will have established itself as something educators and policymakers have been clamoring for: a research-backed initiative to level the playing field for disadvantaged students.

Related Information:

Wal-Mart, the Community-Friendly Corporation? Don't Buy It

In recent weeks, there have been plenty of news reports about communities fighting the addition of new Wal-Mart stores because of the giant retailer's harmful effect on local economies. But there's another angle to this story that community activists have overlooked. "Shopping for Subsidies," a new report from Good Jobs First, quantifies "the Wal-Mart effect"--the more than $1 billion in subsidies such as free land, access road construction, property tax abatements, sales tax rebates and outright grants of public money the giant corporation already receives. Wal-Mart's tax deals have been criticized for lining the pockets of the Walton family members, who are major campaign contributors to supporters of Wal-Mart's anti-worker agenda. But the untold story is how these tax deals harm America's schoolchildren.

Consider: Instead of watching $1 billion go to a company with more than $250 billion in annual revenues, communities could have used the missing $1 billion on their much more deserving schools. For instance, the freebies that Wal-Mart received could have provided local schools with smaller classes for 1 million students, high-quality early childhood education for 138,000 preschoolers, or Kindergarten-Plus for nearly 500,000 children. These calculations represent only the tip of the iceberg. According to the report, the $1 billion doesn't include many public subsidies to Wal-Mart that have yet to be disclosed, which means that the damage done by "the Wal-Mart effect" will continue to rise.

Wal-Mart uses a massive PR effort and generous campaign contributions to convince the world that it's a community-friendly company that pays its fair share of taxes. But the numbers say otherwise.

Related Information:

Would You Send Your Mother to a Hospital Staffed by www.scab.org?

The dedicated professionals in healthcare and education rarely go on strike, and when they do, the issues are serious. That's certainly the case for members of Health Professionals and Allied Employees (HPAE), an affiliate of AFT Healthcare, which represents more than 65,000 healthcare workers.

The strike, at Bergen Regional Medical Center, in Paramus, N.J., isn't just about the bread-and-butter issues of salaries and pensions. The nurses also are seeking safe staff-to-patient ratios, so they can provide patients the care and attention they need. Members wouldn't have gone on strike, an HPAE spokesperson said, "unless we felt certain that the quality of care was in jeopardy because of the hospital's refusal to address the shortage of nurses and other healthcare workers."

Rather than responsibly addressing the needs of patients and workers, the medical center has employed a dangerous and all-too-common tactic. It hired a scab outfit, Healthcare Consulting & Staffing Services (HCSS), to provide nurses who have no experience at the medical center and are poor substitutes for the highly trained full-time nurses.

When hospitals and medical centers hire scabs to break unions, the first casualty is patient safety. With HCSS and other scab outfits, patient safety is a low priority, and that's a sharp contrast to what motivates HPAE members. An RN who has been involved in these fights before described HCSS to RevolutioN magazine, which monitors scab firms. She said that HCSS's competency examination "is nothing more than an online self-exam that fails to adequately validate any skills or proficiencies."

To understand the temporary HCSS nurses' approach to patient safety, it's enough to know that the company operates a Web site, www.scab.org. With a name like that, HCSS can expect plenty of poorly qualified and discredited nurses who are willing to do anything for a buck. If officials at the Bergen Regional Medical Center continue to oppose safe staff-to-patient ratios and better working conditions for its highly qualified permanent healthcare professionals, patients would be wise to pull out their IVs and head to another facility.

Related Information:

Ketchum If You Can: ED Pays $700,000 to Firm That Produced Illegal Medicare Ads

Three weeks ago, the General Accounting Office (GAO) reported that promotional materials by the Health and Human Services Department (HHS) produced under a contract with PR firm Ketchum Inc., had violated federal statutes prohibiting the use of public dollars for propaganda involving the Bush administration's Medicare plan. You remember the news story with a woman, paid by HHS, who passed herself off as a reporter and closed her news story by saying, "I'm Karen Ryan, reporting from Washington."

HHS officials, no doubt, felt they had to take extraordinary measures to promote their misguided Medicare plan, which already is more than $100 million over budget, holds no real promise of reducing costs for consumers and is getting a cool reception from older Americans. Video news releases produced under the Ketchum contract violated federal law, however, because they included content that "was attributed to individuals purporting to be reporters, but actually hired by an HHS subcontractor," according to the GAO.

Ketchum's problems at HHS may raise questions for officials at the U.S. Department of Education, which has another $700,000 contract with the company. Given this administration's penchant for secrecy, it will probably take a Freedom of Information Act request to discover the contract's specifics.

Related Information:

Giving Bush Credit Where Credit Isn't Due: Part Two

In the last issue of AFT's Closer Look, we noted that the Bush-Cheney Web site credited President George W. Bush for improving student test scores between 1990 and 2003. A quick math and history refresher for the Bush-Cheney campaign: Bill Clinton was president from 1993 to 2001, and eight years covers more than half of the period in which these tests were given.

Now, Sen. John Kyl (R-Ariz.) is continuing the pro-Bush hyperspin by trying to give Bush credit not only for Clinton-era results, but also for Clinton-era rhetoric. Kyl writes in the Eloy (Ariz.) Enterprise that the phrase "Education is the new civil right" is a "formulation" of President Bush. But former Education Secretary Richard W. Riley, who, it should be noted, never claimed have coined the phrase, used it often--going as far back as 1997 at a White House briefing and in a 1999 speech.

Of course, political junkies will recall it's not the first time that President Bush has appropriated someone else's rhetoric to describe his education policies. He borrowed the phrase "Leave No Child Behind" from the Children's Defense Fund. Later, he switched it to "No Child Left Behind." Grammatically, that's a change from the imperative mood to the passive voice. Admittedly, it's a minor change, but two and a half years after Bush signed the law, it's clear the shift from imperative to passive could also describe the administration's approach to NCLB funding and implementation.

It seems this peculiar disease that afflicts the Bush-Cheney Web site and Sen. Kyl also has spread to the world of journalism--or at least to the Washington Times. A June 3 article began: "The overall well-being of American children has improved in the past five years . . . says a study released today." The only problem--the study referred to here, the Annie E. Casey Foundation's "Kids Count Data Book," didn't focus on the last five years, but on the period from 1996 to 2001. The Washington Times' editors didn't notice (didn't care?) that this error in the lead makes it seem as if children's lives improved during the Bush presidency when, in fact, the improvements came about largely during the Clinton years.

For the record, the study's good news includes these findings:

Child poverty reached an all-time low of 16 percent in 2000;
The teen birthrate fell by 24 percent between 1996 and 2001; and
The rates for infant mortality, child deaths and teen deaths dropped by 17 percent, 15 percent and 7 percent, respectively, between 1996 and 2001.

The false claims make it difficult to track the misleading statements coming from Bush supporters, but one thing is clear-- John Kyl and the Bush-Cheney campaign's webmaster probably get their news from the Washington Times.

Another Reason for Reading AFT's Most Recent Issue Brief

"Misunderestimating Proficiency," an item in the last issue of this newsletter, reported that President Bush was misinterpreting and dumbing down his own law, the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB), by improperly using the term "grade level" as a substitute for "proficiency." One might hope that Education Secretary Rod Paige would use a more accurate characterization of the law his department is responsible for implementing. But, speaking at Engleburg Elementary School in Milwaukee on May 24, Sec. Paige asked, "Is it unreasonable to ask that a third-grade child read on a third-grade level . . . ?" AFT's issue brief, "What's Proficiency?" explains that performing at grade level has nothing to do with states' calculations of student proficiency and adequate yearly progress.

Worth Reading and Listening

More Education Stats Than You'll Ever Need The U.S. Department of Education recently released its latest annual report, "The Condition of Education 2004." This is the place to look if you need to know the number of students enrolled in U.S. high schools (14.5 million), the percentage of students with a parent who has a bachelor's degree (31.3), how many undergraduates attend two-year institutions (6.2 million) or just about any other statistic related to education in the United States.

Arizona's Charter Schools Arizona is fast and loose with its charter school licensing, which makes the state ripe for charter school research, and the Progressive Policy Institute recently released a report on the state's charter schools, "The Rugged Frontier: A Decade of Charter Schooling in Arizona." The executive summary makes the broad claim that these schools are "performing well," but only later in the report does PPI note that just 52 of the state's 460 charter schools have enough students to meet the evaluation standards. For another look at Arizona's charter schools, see this report by Arizona State University researchers, who have less investment than the PPI authors in the success of the charter movement.

School Takeovers Analyzed, Attempted and Achieved Three recent independent articles provide a picture of the many ups and downs of taking over troubled schools. An article from the Newark Star-Ledger gives New Jersey a C- for its takeovers of the state's three largest school systems. An article in the Washington Post describes the latest twist in Mayor Anthony Williams' quest to take over D.C.'s schools. And an Associated Press article describes California officials' decision to take over Compton Community College.

California College System Cuts Enrollment National Public Radio reports on Calif. Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's decision to reverse a decades-old state guarantee that every student who successfully completes challenging high school courses would have a spot in one of the state's four-year colleges and universities. The report describes how the cost-cutting measure may have huge implications at all tiers of California's higher education system.

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