PATHS

MARCIA B. REBACK, president of the Rhode Island Federation of Teachers and Health Professionals, has it backwards in her Aug. 12 Commentary piece, "To fix schools, attack poverty."

Ms. Reback refers to "The Shape of the Starting Line," a report issued by her organization, in partnership with the National Education Association, that points out, among its other findings, that "poverty affects kids, including their ability to learn." Ms. Reback offers this as a defense against the observations of Valerie Forti, president of the Education Partnership, in her July 16 Commentary piece, "We don't have to accept defeat for R.I.'s schools." Ms. Forti highlights in her article the problems facing public schools in Rhode Island, and offers a number of suggestions for making improvements.

Instead of dealing with the issues raised by Ms. Forti, Ms. Reback deflects the debate from ways to fix our schools by claiming that we must first eliminate poverty. This is standard operating procedure for the union leadership in Rhode Island when it comes to solving the single most serious problem facing our state: the poor performance of our public schools, especially the urban ones.

In my former position as executive director of the Rhode Island Economic Development Corporation, I realized that if we do not have good schools we cannot have good jobs. In today's knowledge-based economy, poor schools penalize us twice: We fail to graduate an educated workforce, capable of working in jobs of the future; and knowledge-based workers and their employers look to the quality of public schools for their children when they make job-location decisions.

An analysis of the performance of Rhode Island's public schools relative to other New England states provides discouraging reading. Our performance is significantly lower than that of our neighbors.

Contrary to what the union leaders would have you believe, solving the problem is not about money. We spend as much as or more than our neighbors. Yet our performance is measurably worse.

Yet we are not alone in grappling with this issue. Some of the best minds in America are analyzing the situation and coming up with recommendations. One of these people is Terry Moe, political-science chairman at Stanford University, a Hoover Institution senior fellow, and a member of the Koret Task Force on K-12 Education.

In an article published in the July-August 2006 Stanford Alumni Association publication ("Thriving on Failure"), Professor Moe minces no words when defining the problems that must be dealt with to improve our public schools: "Why are our public schools so difficult to improve? The problem rests with two fundamental problems that stand in the way of progress. The first is a problem of incentives. The second is a problem of power."

Professor Moe defines the incentive problem: "Teachers have jobs with lifetime security, and their pay is based on a salary schedule that has nothing to do with how much their students actually learn. Mediocre teachers have the same lifetime security and pay as good teachers, and they have every reason to stick around, because almost nowhere else would their poor performance be tolerated."

Addressing the spending issues, Professor Moe writes: "Huge amounts of money have been pumped into the schools. Yet the recipients have had little incentive to spend it efficiently. The push for smaller classes, for example, is extraordinarily expensive. A mediocre teacher in a smaller class is still a mediocre teacher."

Professor Moe goes on to make suggestions as to how real improvement can be achieved. He observes, "If we want significant improvement, we need to target the incentives at the heart of the system. Fortunately, there are potent reforms capable of doing that.Accountability shapes incentives from above, through effective management. School choice, by contrast, shapes incentives from below, through grassroots actions. When parents are able to vote with their feet, and when they are given alternatives -- charter schools or private schools -- to the regular public schools, the latter are put on notice that they stand to lose kids and money if they don't perform."

This need to galvanize improvement is particularly critical in our urban schools, where students drop out at alarmingly high rates. Among black and Latino males, the dropout rate often exceeds 50 percent.

Ms. Reback would have us believe that fault lies not in our schools but in society. Poverty must be overcome in order to have a functioning public-school system.

William Damon, a professor of education and director of the Stanford Center on Adolescence, begs to differ. In the same Stanford publication, he points out: "The poverty issue is really important and it's a moral issue for the whole society. But there are two mistakes that we can make if we think about poverty in this context. One is to think that kids who are growing up in disadvantaged circumstances are somehow destined to end up on the wrong track. A lot of these kids end up doing very well, even through they've been challenged beyond belief by deprivation. So poverty is not determinative."

I suggest that we would be better served if our teachers, their union representatives, our school administrators, our elected officials, our parents, and our students faced the reality of the desperate consequences of the failure of our public-school systems, especially in the urban areas, and adopted choice and innovation as the change agent to improve the performance of our schools.

By the way, as the grandson of an immigrant who as an 8-year-old walked with his mother and two sisters from Russia to Amsterdam -- because they had only enough money for the boat to America -- I have experienced firsthand the power of a good education in overcoming poverty. All three of my grandfather's children attended college, as did all 16 of his grandchildren.

For over 150 years in America, a good education has been the most powerful tool in overcoming poverty. Let's work together to fix our schools and improve the lives of all Rhode Islanders.

Michael McMahon is the former executive director of the Rhode Island Economic Development Corporation.

 
The go-slow lights were blinking the other day as I drove past a neighborhood school. Cars were parked everywhere, virtually on top of each other, and mothers and fathers were leading little ones -- sometimes holding their hands -- to the red brick building. I could almost feel the knots in the stomachs, the excitement, the sense of something big happening.
 
The school year was starting, as it is in districts around the country. That event is indeed something big, but the question we Americans have been debating for some decades now is whether it is as big, as filled with possibilities, as it should be, whether the start of the school year is also the start of a significant educational experience, the sort of enlargement of mind and person once described in a speech by the brilliant education scholar Diane Ravitch.
 
"The schools must reassert the primary responsibility for the development of young people's intelligence and character," she said.
 
"Schools," she is quoted as arguing, "must do far more than teach children how to learn and how to look things up: They must teach them what knowledge has most value, how to use that knowledge, how to organize what they know, how to understand the relationship between past and present, how to tell the difference between accurate information and propaganda, and how to turn information into understanding."
 
Achieve this vision, and what you also achieve are richer, more rewarding lives than you will otherwise have, an improved democracy, a more competitive nation economically, more equality of income and vastly reduced poverty. Sadly, it's a vision rotting on the vine, as the Department of Education tells us in a report on how American students measure up with foreign students in science and math tests: not so well.
 
For instance, it's the case that our students who are 15 years old come in 21st out of the 28 countries in math, making me grateful for those seven worse countries and reminding me of a saying we used to have in my native state of Kentucky. When rankings of states in various categories of accomplishment were published, we were often next to last, but not last, and so we would grin and intone, "Thank God for Mississippi."
 
Evidence of the kind in the report is plentiful, and the question is what do you do beyond taking relieved note that you are not quite at the bottom of the heap. Spend more? The analyst whose writing brought the education report to my attention -- Dan Lips at the Heritage Foundation -- points out in a paper that federal spending has been increasing at an exceptional rate over the years with next to no dividends to be found and that we spend far more from all sources per student than most countries that outperform us. The total on public school spending, he says, is $500 billion a year. That comes to about $100,000 a student for the years stretching from kindergarten through the 12th grade in high school.
 
Lips favors vouchers and school choice as a means of using such ample resources to beneficial effect, contending that competition among private and public schools will energize a system now serving approximately 50 million students. I suspect he and other advocates of the idea are right. I am definitely for far more experimentation and moving more and more in the direction of vouchers to the extent we garner empirical data backing up what seems solid theory.
 
A nationwide voucher system is not going to happen anytime soon, however, and in the meantime we need to continue reforming education schools that put too little emphasis on classroom content, developing charter schools, looking hard at our malfunctioning school boards, giving principals increased authority on a perform-or-scat basis, measuring what is being done in schools so students can be rescued from the worst of them and finding ever more ways to encourage more of the best and brightest among our young people to make education their careers.
 
In the end, there is no one reform that is going to make all of our schools exemplars of the Ravitch vision, though there is an attitude that is crucial -- one that defines the educational ideal much as Ravitch does, that puts students before any other interest, that recognizes the huge importance of what's at stake ... and an attitude that is positive about what can be done, no matter what the obstacles.
 
Jay Ambrose, formerly Washington director of editorial policy for Scripps Howard newspapers and the editor of dailies in El Paso, Texas, and Denver, is a columnist living in Colorado. He can be reached at SpeaktoJay@aol.com.

Fourth-graders in traditional public schools nationwide did somewhat better on average than those in charter schools in reading and mathematics in 2003, a long-awaited federal report said yesterday.

Earlier versions of the data have been used as weapons in a lively political and academic war between charter school advocates and opponents, but the new National Center for Education Statistics study appeared to provide little new ammunition for either side and little guidance for people trying to judge their schools.

"What does the report say to a parent? Not much, frankly," said Mark Schneider, commissioner of the center, in a telephone news conference yesterday.

The center looked at 6,764 traditional public schools and 150 charter schools, which are public schools that operate independently. It said traditional schools scored 4.2 points higher in reading and 4.7 points higher in math on the 500-point National Assessment of Educational Progress test for fourth-graders, after adjusting for such student characteristics as family income. This was the first time such adjustments had been reported for the 2003 data.

The study emphasized that the results could have been distorted by several factors it could not adjust for, such as the lack of a random sample, different levels of parental support and different levels of learning before the students reached fourth grade.

The Washington Post reported yesterday that the District has 23 percent of its public school students in charter schools, a higher percentage than any other school district in the country. D.C. School Superintendent Clifford B. Janey has called for a moratorium on new charter schools but has received little support from elected officials, who note that voters have very little confidence in the traditional public schools.

Two recent studies show D.C. charters outperforming traditional schools, but they are subject to the same problems of inadequate data and difficult interpretation that the center's report acknowledged in its national study.

"These studies are just snapshots," said Tom Loveless, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. "They tell us how students in two kinds of schools are performing at one point in time. Unfortunately, they don't answer the question of which kind of school -- charter or traditional -- is better."

Schneider rejected the suggestion by some reporters that he might be playing down the significance of his report because of the political battle. He said national data could not help a parent trying to compare schools in a local neighborhood because individual schools vary widely in quality. "My advice to parents is shop around carefully," he said.

The report, available at http://nces.ed.gov , said that when researchers looked only at schools in cities with high minority populations, the difference in reading scores between the average traditional school and average charter school disappeared.

The study also tried to compare just charter schools associated with a local school system, such as the D.C. charter schools, with traditional public schools. In both reading and math for fourth-graders, there was no significant difference. Charter schools that have no tie to a system, and often draw students from several systems, scored lower than traditional schools.

Several experts said the study had either fortified or failed to shake their view of charters. American Federation of Teachers President Edward J. McElroy said the report "provides further evidence against unchecked expansion of the charter school experiment."

Jeanne Allen, president of the Center for Education Reform, criticized the methodology and said "charter schools are succeeding and do better in most cases."

Chester E. Finn Jr., president of the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation, which supports education research, said the study added little useful to the debate. "Bottom line: big yawn," he said.

On July 14, the U.S. Department of Education released a study that the teachers' unions are holding up as evidence that public schools are better than private schools. The study doesn't actually show this, and is riddled with methodological flaws anyway. If you tell the average American that public schools are better than private schools, she's likely to respond, "What have you been smoking?" In this case, the evidence shows that the average American is right.

The study tells us nothing whatsoever about the relative quality of public and private schools.

It takes raw test scores from isolated years and applies statistical controls for demographic factors like race, income, and disabilities. While the raw scores are higher in private schools, once you apply the statistical controls, public school students actually have similar or even higher scores. The teachers' unions are rushing to claim that this shows public schools are better than private schools. In fact, as the study itself clearly says, these data show nothing of the kind.

As every education researcher knows, single-year snapshots of test scores reflect student quality much more than school quality. The only real way to get at school quality is to examine year-to-year changes in test scores. A student whose test scores are high is probably just a good student; it's the student whose test scores are rising who shows the quality of his school. A much more likely explanation for these data is that students who enter private schools tend to have test scores a little lower than other students of the same race and socioeconomic status. That sounds counterintuitive, because we usually think of private school students as privileged. But they are only privileged in terms of their demographic status -- which this study controls for. It makes perfect sense that it's the low performers within each racial and socioeconomic group whose parents will make the sacrifices necessary to put them in private schools. They're the ones who need it the most.

But don't take our word for it. The study itself says the same thing -- in not one but two big sections labeled "Cautions in Interpretation," the study forthrightly states that these data tell us nothing whatsoever about the relative quality of public and private schools. The teachers' unions are just blowing smoke, as always.

The study is shot through with other methodological flaws.

Paul Peterson of Harvard University, examining the study's data, has discovered that the study only produces a positive finding for public schools because it uses the wrong variable to measure Limited English Proficient students. When the correct variable is substituted, the results are positive for private schools. He also points out that public schools are much more likely to classify students as disabled (about 13% versus about 3%). Peterson doesn't say it, but the main reason for this is that public schools get bigger budgets when they slap the "disabled" label on a child, a perverse incentive that private schools don't have. If this difference isn't accounted for, any attempt to compare public and private schools is invalid. Peterson will release his analysis at the annual American Political Science Association meeting this fall.

Andrew Coulson of the Cato Institute has also pointed out that the study controls for variables that are "endogenous," meaning that they are systematically related to the study's variable of interest, school sector (that is, public versus private schools). School size is systematically related to school sector, and absentee rates probably are as well, but the study controls for them. "Don't control for endogenous variables" is straight out of Social Science 101.

A much larger body of much better studies finds that, yes, private schools are better.

Those who claim this study as evidence that public schools do better are standing against an enormous scientific consensus. If the available research shows anything, it shows that private schools provide a better education than public schools. The consensus among empirical studies on this issue is as strong as on any social policy question. If social science tells us anything at all, it tells us that private schools do better.

While this study's method of looking at single-year snapshots can't even examine whether there's a causal relationship between school sector (public or private) and test scores, it just happens that there's a large body of very high-quality research that does allow us to evaluate this connection, and it overwhelmingly finds that private schools do better.

The most convincing evidence comes from seven studies using "random assignment," the gold standard for scientific method. In all seven studies, students who won a random lottery to use a school voucher at a private school had significantly greater test score gains than similar students who lost the lottery and stayed in public schools. Numerous studies using other methods have also produced a strong consensus in favor of vouchers.

Dr. Forster is a senior fellow and director of research at the Milton and Rose D. Friedman Foundation

A new survey released today on school choice will make news, but there likely won't be anything new. That's because every year Phi Delta Kappa International, an advocacy organization that is ideologically in line with the teachers' unions, releases its poll on the "public's attitudes toward the public schools" it claims to find low public support for vouchers and other programs encouraging school choice. 

Advance word on the report, embargoed until 10 a.m. today, doesn't raise our expectations. According to Chester E. Finn Jr., a senior fellow a the Hoover Institution and president of the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation, the survey uses more of its "pro-establishment phrasing" to get responses to align with its anti-choice bias. For instance, the 2004 survey asked respondents "Do you favor or oppose allowing students and parents to choose a private school to attend at public expense?" Forty-two percent favored PDK's characterization of school choice, while 54 percent opposed. The report's 2005 poll, which used the same question, found 38 percent in favor with 57 percent opposed, seemingly giving weight to the idea that school choice and voucher programs are unpopular and becoming more so. Look to see that trend continue with this year's report. 

But hold on. The Milton & Rose D. Friedman Foundation on Educational Choice began conducting a study in 2004 in which it slightly reworded PDK's question to more accurately reflect the program school-choice advocates support. Its question asked: "Do you favor or oppose allowing students and parents to choose any school, public or private, [note the word change] to attend using public funds?" In 2004, the Friedman Foundation study found that 63 percent favored its wording of the question, with 36 percent being opposed. Last year, using the same question, it found 60 percent in favor, with 33 percent opposed. In both years, the Friedman Foundation also asked its respondents the PDK-worded question and reached almost identical percentages of those in favor (2004, 41 percent; 2005, 37 percent) and those opposed (2004, 56 percent; 2005, 55 percent) as the PDKsurvey. Thus, the Friedman Foundation survey produced a 20-point swing in favor of school choice simply by adding the phrase "any school, public or private." 

Given the dramatic results, it might be wise to consider the Friedman Foundation an outlier. However, similarly conducted polls in Florida and Utah in recent years found equally dramatic swings depending on how the question is phrased. Other polls conducted more generally between 2001 and 2004 also found a majority of Americans support school choice when the question accurately reflects a choice, such as between public, private or parochial schools. 

The truth is school choice and voucher programs are popular with the public, no matter what PDK tells us every year. In 2005 alone, 38 states introduced school choice bills; 11 states saw progress on school choice bills in either legislative chamber; and six states either passed a school-choice program or expanded a pre-existing one. Meanwhile, the District's voucher program experience, begun in 2004, is nothing less than a resounding success. 

 All of which makes this year's PDK/Gallup survey the obvious outlier. Keep that in mind when the press trumpets PDK's findings as somehow conclusive.

The back-to-school shopping season is upon us. Americans are expected to spend more than $17 billion, or $527 per child, preparing for the school year. Parents will select gadgets and clothes in hopes of making the year a success. Merchants are blitzing the airwaves offering sales on everything from lunchboxes to laptops in hopes of scoring big during the year’s second biggest shopping season.

The back-to-school season testifies to the power of the free market and consumer choice, but it also highlights a major shortcoming: When it comes to the most important thing to determine a child’s academic success this year-his or her school-most parents have little or no choice at all.

Today most children attend a public school based on where they live. Families without the financial ability to move have little choice but to enroll their children in the assigned school. Of course, some families can afford to opt out of the public school system. The families of about one million children choose to forgo “free” public education and enroll their children in private schools, paying tuition in addition to the taxes they pay to support the local public schools. Another million students are home-schooled by their parents.

Over the past decade, reforms have given more parents the ability to choose their children’s schools. This year, more than 100,000 students will attend private schools thanks to school choice programs in a dozen states that make public education funds portable. Another million students will enroll in the 3,700 public charter schools across the nation. But the students participating in these school choice programs are still only a slim percentage of the nation’s 50 million students.

Imagine back-to-school season if all families had the power to select their children’s school. Parents would control the nearly $500 billion that is spent every year on public education in America. With this purchasing power, families would shop for the best schools, tutoring programs, and instructional tools for their children.

Schools, teachers, and other education providers would compete for parents’ business-just like banks compete for your checking business. They would compete to provide quality services that best address individual students’ needs. As in other markets, the most successful schools and education services would become models for others. Underperforming schools would have to shape up or risk closing their doors when families take their business elsewhere.

Critics of school choice claim that somehow elementary and secondary education is the one area of American life where competition and the free market can’t be trusted. Some argue that it would be wrong to subject the important public responsibility of public education to competition and consumer choice.

But growing evidence proves that school choice works. Where school choice policies have been implemented, parents’ satisfaction improves and students excel. There have been eight academic evaluations of school choice programs that award scholarships through lotteries. Each study found that students who won a scholarship to attend private school outperformed their peers who remained in public school.

But that’s not all. Academic research has found that competition due to school choice leads to public school improvement. Harvard economist Caroline Hoxby studied the effects of a school choice program in Milwaukee that gives low-income students scholarships to attend private school. She found that the competition caused by school choice led threatened public schools to improve their performance.

The lesson is simple: When families can choose their children’s schools, the children do better academically and schools start to focus on providing a quality education to attract students.

This shouldn’t surprise anyone. Just imagine what back-to-school shopping would be like without choice and competition. If parents could purchase products from only one store, sales would end, product quality would deteriorate, and variety would vanish.

American students shouldn’t languish in a system that American shoppers wouldn’t tolerate.

Critics of the Bush administration had a field day, or two, or three a while back when the U.S. Department of Education released a long-delayed report that purported to show private schools did not outperform public schools when students’ background characteristics were taken into account. Essentially, the report’s authors concluded, higher test scores among private-school students reflect the fact that they are wealthier and healthier on average than their public-school counterparts, not because of any intrinsic advantages of private education. See, the Bush-bashers said, this dishonest administration tries to bury any unpleasant news that doesn’t comport with its ideological presuppositions. Bush lied, schoolchildren cried, or something like that.

Another possibility, however, was simply that Education officials had concerns about the methodology of the study. Now, thanks to the indefatigable education researcher Paul Peterson at Harvard University, we have reason to believe such concerns were legitimate. Looking at the same National Assessment of Educational Progress testing data that the original researchers used, Peterson discovered that they made questionable choices about how to adjust for student characteristics. The use of Title 1, a federal program aimed at disadvantaged students, as a proxy for family poverty was poor choice. It ends up overestimating low-income kids in public schools and underestimating them in private schools.

The bottom line, Peterson found, was that more-sensible adjustments for student characteristics left private schools outperforming public schools in 11 of the 12 outcomes measured. Because the results of several experimental studies — in which low-income students were randomly selected from an applicant pool to attend private schools with vouchers — also showed a clear and significant private-school advantage, Peterson’s findings are very credible.

Lest doubt linger in respect of the value of school choice, a new report released today by a Harvard professor will settle the question. It responds to a recent study performed by the Department of Education that found public schools outperforming private institutions. The author of the response, Paul Peterson of Harvard's Program on Education Policy and Governance, has used the same data to reach a conclusion opposite that reached by the Education Department. Though Mr. Peterson's analysis is more credible than the research he rebuts, the real lesson from this duel is that policy wonks will never be able to tell with certainty whether schools are offering a good education. The right way to decide these things is to give parents, who can tell whether their children can read and add, the choices they need to manage their youngsters' education.

Private schools have long out-scored public schools in student achievement. The question has been why — do they do a better job teaching or just attract smarter students? The Department of Education analysis released last month tried to answer this question by using statistical techniques to separate out the effects of parental income and education and similar factors. After doing so, the analysis found that public schools were better at the actual teaching, while private schools presumably were just better at attracting those students who would succeed whatever school they attended.

Mr. Peterson has concluded that the earlier report used a faulty method for sorting out these other factors. For example, when measuring family poverty, which tends to have a significant impact on educational results, the Department of Education relied on statistics on participation in Title I, a federal program for disadvantaged students. However, Title I money is more widely available to public schools. If at least 40% of a public school's students qualify for free or reduced school lunch, the entire school can get Title I money. Even the regular students in such a school were counted as "disadvantaged" in the earlier study, effectively giving such a public school a pass if it failed to educate its better-off students.

Private schools, meantime, face more hurdles to receiving Title I aid and many don't, or receive much less than the public schools. Those schools didn't receive the same benefit of the doubt as public schools in the earlier report. After using different measures of how disadvantaged students were available in the same data-set, Mr. Peterson concluded that private schools in fact do a better job educating students in reading and math at almost every grade level. He's cautious about interpreting his own results. "The results should not be understood as showing that private schools outperform public schools," he warns, because at the end of the day the data aren't necessarily suited to proving a causal relationship of any kind.

Then again, that's the problem. The data used in both of these studies were compiled as part of the ongoing National Assessment of Educational Progress. Despite its grand name, even what sounds like a comprehensive study of education turns out to be open to conflicting interpretations.Mr. Peterson makes a case that the earlier study got it wrong, but we doubt his latest report will be the last word on the debate. That debate won't do a thing to help those low-income parents who can see, plain as day, that their local public schools are not teaching their children to read. Whatever conclusions one draws from Mr. Peterson's report, he has performed a valuable service in reminding everyone that statisticians will never agree on the meaning of test scores. Only vouchers can free individual children from the tyranny of dueling data.

CHARTER SCHOOLS

AN APPLE A DAY. Small schools are the education trend of the day. Bill Gates gives millions of dollars for the creation of small schools and the public is behind this growing movement as one potential reform that can help build communities in schools where little otherwise exists. That is, of course, until a small school tries to come to their neighborhood. Residents in the increasingly affluent Lincoln Park neighborhood of Washington, DC have convinced the DC Zoning Commission that AppleTree Institute for Education Innovation should not be able to open a preschool for 50 children in their neighborhood. Newswire first reported on the issue in February, when a community group calling itself Northeast Neighbors for Responsible Growth filed a lawsuit to prevent the school from opening, claiming the school would cause "irreparable” harm to the neighborhood. Now, zoning officials appear to be doing the group's bidding, considering new regulations that would require all school lots to be between 9,000 and 15,000 square feet and have 120 feet of space for parking and drop-offs. As Robert Cane, executive director of Friends of Choice in Urban Schools told the Washington Post, the requirements are "so great that the effect will be to make it impossible for small charter schools to locate in those neighborhoods." While charter schools and other small schools have been proven to yield better results, these residents and the zoning board are using the law to force schools to be bigger – and farther away. It used to be that families welcomed the "traffic" caused by parents and kids walking to and from school, and enlivening otherwise deserted streets. Now, just when there is an opportunity to bring back neighborhood schools, some modern-day families fear they'll be inconvenienced by the presence of children in the neighborhood. Robert Putnam's conclusions in his book Bowling Alone point to how the loss of social capital has had a powerful – and negative – impact on American communities. More on this in next week's Newswire.

STANDARDS AND ACCOUNTABILITY

SUMMERTIME BLUES. From kindergarten to 12th grade and 365 days a year, many students are forgetting to have fun. And the media is taking notice. A recent piece on NBC Nightly News highlighted the increasing amount of homework students are given during their summer break. Another piece in the New York Times noted the greater attention to academic achievement in kindergarten. NBC News went so far as to call summer vacation, "a quaint relic of the past." With increased focus on high-stakes testing, many schools claim that they have had to do away with recess and have to increase summer work. In Washington, the equivalent misguided policy prescription is called the "Washington Monument Ploy," where federal lawmakers threatened the public that they would have to close the famous public monument during the height of the tourist season if they failed to get more money in the budget. But regardless of why children are losing recess, it's not a welcome trend according to most rank and file educators and parents. With public parks and museums closing, and recess disappearing, younger students are doing more academic work, and summer vacation is filling up with book reports, math packets, and science projects. Co-author of The End of Homework Etta Kralovec told NBC Nightly News, "With summer homework, kids are still trapped in this student modality, and they don't ever really have a chance to experience other forms of creativity." While most children welcome and need the challenge of more rigorous education, they also need their time to play. That means schools need to become more efficient, rather than cutting out vital down time. For more insights on this on issue, check out the Parent Power! Library.