Brown Center Report on American Education

Transcript

RON NESSEN: Good morning. I want to welcome you to the Brookings Institution. And, as you know, this morning we are releasing the Second Annual Brown Center Report on Education, just as the new school year begins. That report will be presented by Tom Loveless, who is the director of the Brookings Institution's Brown Center on Education Policy. And he will explain their findings and their implications.

Among the items included in the 2001 Brown Center report are a number of issues related to the state of education in America, including the reading gap and whether it's widening or actually narrowing, how are urban school districts doing on state tests—another issue that Tom will cover—and also, what do foreign exchange students, here to spend some time in American high schools, think of their American high school colleagues? Those are some of the items that Tom will cover.

Just before he begins, I want to tell you that this event is being webcast live on the Brookings website at www.brookings.edu. The event also will be archived so you can go and look at the video later, listen to the audio and find a full transcript. And you'll also find at the website a great deal of background information on this year's report and on the previous work of the Brown Center. Tom is going to answer your questions after he makes a presentation of the report. We will also take questions and comments from those watching the live webcast. If you want to ask questions and you're watching on the Internet, you should send your questions to question@brookings.edu.

And with that by way of introduction, I now turn this over to Tom Loveless, the director of the Brown Center on Education Policy, to present this year's report.

Tom.

TOM LOVELESS: Thank you, Ron.

Let me welcome you all to Brookings. I'm glad you could come this morning. It's good to have the Second Annual Report out, which means it's actually an annual report now. The first year is just kind of for fun, and then the second one makes it real.

I also want to thank a few people before we get started. First of all, in the Brown Center, Paul DiPerna and Judy Light, who are staff in the Brown Center, for their help in producing the report, and Lipman Hearne, the firm of Lipman Hearne, which helps in terms of putting together the report, publishing it, and promoting the report, especially Rodney Ferguson from Lipman Hearne. We appreciate their help.

I'm going to speak from back here. And I have a mike on, but one of the virtues of having taught sixth grade for nine years is you never need to be miked ever again. But I will wear it for the webcast.

In terms of today, there are several items in the Brown Center Report. I don't have time to cover all of them, but I'm going to cover what's highlighted in yellow. We'll talk first about the reading and math achievement in the 1990's, during that decade. And then in the report you can read on your own an update on state tests, also a TIMSS analysis. That's the international assessment of U.S. math curriculum and instruction. I will be covering, "Is the reading gap really widening?" And then I'm going to skip high school culture and leave that for last. We'll talk about urban school achievement and come back and finish up with high school achievement.

So let's look at NAEP scores that were released this year in 2001. Here are the reading scores. You see that 8th and 12th grade don't take the reading test; did not take the reading test in 2000. Fourth graders did. And these scores essentially in reading are flat. You can see the fourth graders, 217 scale score in 1992; virtually identical in the year 2000. Twelfth grade—if you look back to '98, 12th graders have made no progress, eight graders had come up four points. Reading essentially is flat.

The other NAEP test known as the Trend—there are two NAEP tests, this is the main test—the Trend shows the same thing; reading essentially flat. Here's mathematics—this year's scores. Here there is substantial progress. Now, the main test is showing quite a bit more progress than the Trend. But nevertheless, take a look at some of these numbers. Just to use as a benchmark, 10 scale score points can be used roughly as a year's worth of gains across all the grade levels. So if you look at 12th grade, we have seven points worth of gains since 1990—during the 90's—the eighth grade level, 12 points, and at the fourth grade, 15 points. These are substantial gains, especially at the eighth and fourth grade level. This is over a year's worth of gain since 1990, which means that a fourth grader today is functioning roughly, if you buy these scores, like a fifth grader was functioning in 1990. They gained about a year.

Now, the big story, when the NAEP reading scores were released for fourth graders in April, was this widening gap between the better and worse readers in the United States. Let's take a look at the data and you'll see exactly what I'm talking about.

There were two reports that came out, one from the National Center on Educational Statistics, the other one from the National Education Goals Panel. They both concluded there was a widening gap, and here's the data they were looking at. Take a look up here on top. This is the 90th percentile—you can follow along probably better in the report to get these data—here's the 90th percentile. You can see that those kids up there—these are in the top 1/10th of readers in the fourth grade—they gained three points. Here's the 75th percentile, they also gained three points. Here are the bottom readers. Now, here's the 25th percentile; you see a slight decline. And here at the 10th percentile—the bottom 1/10th of readers who are nine years old—they really decline. They decline by seven scale score points from '92 to 2000.

Now, the first thing I want you to do—first of all, I do agree that if you look at these data, the gap widens. But one thing you can do right off the bat is notice that—if you take your hand and cover up the left side of the graph from '94 and before, it's not so clear that they're widening that much after 1994. In fact, they're actually narrowing a bit. Take a look at the 10th percentile—159, they jump up to 163; 189 jumps up to 193, and the tops kids are virtually unchanged. So most of the widening of the gap—it's not happening right now, it happened back between '92 and '94. Look at the drop of the 10th percentile—11 scale score points. So is the gap widening? The first point I would make is, think of the gap as having two phases in the 1990's, first the '92 to '94 period then the '94 to '98 period.

You can see this better if we look at state data. Here's what we did. We took the state test and we broke down the time period I just talked about into these two phases—'92 to '94 and '94 to '98—and we tested each state whether or not they had a statistically significant change. Those that showed improvement we slotted in the improvement category, those that declined we slotted in declines, and anybody in between was unchanged.

Now here are the better readers here at the bottom. Really, nothing happened in terms of a difference between the two phases—pretty neutral, three states improving—here is the neutral category—and only one state declining. You can see from '94 to '98 virtually the same thing. All of the action in the reading gap is happening among the bottom readers, the 25th percentile. Look at '92 to '94; zero states improving—here's the neutral category—16 states decline. So scores were dropping for our bottom readers during that time period. From '94 to 1998 it completely reverses. Take a look. Twelve states now improved during that period—there's the neutral category—and zero states decline. So, we have these two phases. When we talk about the reading gap we shouldn't consider it as one consistent trend over the entire decade.

Now, as I said, the NAEP test—there are two different NAEP tests. There's the main test and the Trend test. All the data I've talked to you about so far are on the main. Take a look at the Trend, you actually get an opposite impression of the reading gap. The reading gap has been narrowing on the Trend test. These are readers who are nine years old. And we have data on the Trend that goes back to 1971. The last time it was given was 1999. But take a look at what happened over this long period of time—over this 28 years. You see a widening of the gap in the 1980's. It reaches a peak right here at 116—this middle figure tells you the size of the gap—116 is the largest the gap ever got during this entire period, and then it began declining, first dramatically down to 104. It's kept declining through the decade. And right here, see the 100 figure for 1996? That's actually the lowest figure between these top and bottom readers since back here in 1980. So if you buy the Trend, the differences between our better and worse readers has actually narrowed during the 1990's. If you buy the main, it expanded but it expanded especially during the '92 to '94 period. So that's interesting.

And why is this important? I think there are two reasons. Number one, when the headlines came out, "Reading Gap Widening," you know what people's instinct was?—to go out and find out, what are we doing right now that's causing this gap to widen? Well, if there are two phases and you take a look at the main test, we shouldn't be out looking now to find out why it was widening. We should have been looking seven years ago because that's when it was widening. It's not widening now. And if you buy the Trend, we shouldn't even be looking for why it's widening at all because the gap is narrowing. So that's one reason.

A second reason that this is important is because, you know, there's an awful lot of talk about using the NAEP as a check on states for accountability purposes. Well, if the two NAEPs don't tell the same story about something as important as the reading gap, then it's very difficult to believe that that can be used as a reliable instrument to check states and see if they're measuring kids the way they should.

So here are the conclusions of this section of the report. Number one, the reading gap has two phases. Number two, the gap widened in the first phase and narrowed in the second. Both those statements are based on the main NAEP test. And then number three, on the Trend NAEP, the gap narrowed from 1990 to 1999, so that the reading gap is a complicated story but not that complicated.

Let me turn now to urban school achievement.

What we did with urban school achievement—one of the things that researchers have wanted to do but we don't have a national test to do this is to be able to compare one district, say, on the East coast with a district on the West coast. We can't do that today because they all take different tests. What we decided to do was to go into states that had a test that's been around for a couple of years, and we asked a different question. We said, how are urban districts doing versus, or in comparison to, all the other districts in its own state? So if we take a city like Los Angeles—how is Los Angeles doing versus the California state average? And if you'll take a look on page 33, we have tabled for you the top 50 cities in the United States. It's Table 11, page 33. If you want to give your eyes a real test, try to read that off the screen. [Laughter.] When I get tickets to a sporting event that's what I see on the field. Here's a blow-up of the top 10. Here's the top 10 big cities beginning with New York City, ranked down to Detroit.

Now, what we did is we computed what's known as a Z score. This is expressed in standard deviation units. Zero is the state's average. So New York City Public Schools, the state of New York average is zero. New York scores a little more than two standard deviations below the state average for the state of New York; LA, 1.31 standard deviations below the average for California, et cetera. So this allows us to put them at least on a common metric.

However, let me caution you—and I caution readers of the report—this is not for the purpose of "horseracing" these cities. You can't do it. They still take different tests, they have different rules for excluding and including different kinds of kids, they have different rates of poverty. As you see over here I've tabled the poverty and some demographic data for you in terms of race and ethnicity. So you can't horserace these cities. But what we can do is ask the question, how are these big city districts doing against their suburban and rural counterparts? And that's the question that's answered here. And of course we're all getting these results reported all the time in the newspaper.

Now here's a short little snappy summary of what those big cities look like. Of the top 50 cities, we have data for 39. Eight of them, or about 1/5th, scored at or above their state's average, so one out of five; four out of five scored below their state's average; 62 percent were one standard deviation below the mien—that's rather substantial—and then two standard deviations below the mien, 26 percent, one out of four cities. The cities are struggling. There's no news in that. They have a tough row to hoe when it comes to academic achievement.

But here's where we want to go with this. And essentially what you're seeing is the first phase of a longer study. We're going to survey districts now and try to draw some policy conclusions because it's very clear that urban districts vary in their achievement. You know, when we talk about urban schools we often talk about them as a block, but it's clear that some are performing better than others.

Here's what we did in Table 12. We took poor urban districts—so we restricted it to districts that had at least 40 percent of children on free lunch, and we tabled each state's mien—and see, North Carolina has only one district that met our qualification; that happens to be Charlotte Mecklenburg. It's scoring above the North Carolina average, but I would discount that because it's just one district. However, take a look at some of these other states and there's one pattern here that leaps out. I think it's very interesting. The table is dominated at the top—we rank-ordered these by Z scores, so the better states are at the top, worse states at the bottom—they're dominated by sunbelt states.

Take a look at the first seven states—North Carolina, Florida, Louisiana, Arizona, Georgia, Texas, California, Washington, Colorado. They're Southern or Western states, and the bottom of the table is dominated by states in either the Midwest or the East. Now, why is this? We're going to be conducting a nation-wide survey of all these urban districts over the next year and we're going to try to find out, what is it that they're doing that may allow some districts to rise to the top and some of these urban districts to be at the bottom? But we can speculate a little bit about why it may be.

First of all, these data may have nothing to do with education. They may have to do with the structure of poverty. It could very well be that in Southern and Western states, poor children in urban centers are matched with equally poor children in suburbs and in rural areas; especially in rural areas. And that's not as true in the Midwest and the East. In other words, you have sharper differences in terms of poverty between urban poor and suburban and rural districts in the East.

But there are some potential differences that relate to policy. The Southern states here were the first out of box in terms of setting state standards, of having tests, of having high school graduation requirements raised in the 1980's. Maybe that's what's having an effect. There's also the effect, possibly, of equalized funding. Southern and Western states have more equitable financial systems, and this has to do with the fact that the states provide more revenue for schools than states in the Midwest and the East. However, they also provide a lower per pupil expenditure rate for districts. So they spend less on education but they spend it more equitably. Perhaps that's what's pushing these urban districts in those states up to the top. We don't know.

What we want to do is also look at some really on-the-ground kinds of policies. For instance, this achievement variable that I've been referring to is a composite. We made a composite of fourth grade reading and eighth grade math. We want to ask the districts what they actually do in fourth grade reading and what they actually do in eighth grade math; the kinds of textbooks they use, the kind of teacher training that they employ, their class sizes, et cetera. So we'll be tying that and those policy characteristics to achievement later.

Let's turn now to the middle section of the report. This is the longest section. It's on high school culture. It starts, I believe, on page 21. And we decided to conduct a survey of foreign exchange students in the United States. And as far as I know—I did a literature search—this has never been done before. If there had been—I did manage to find a survey but it was of host families and it didn't have anything to do with schooling. What we've asked these foreign exchange students to do was to compare their schools back home with the high school campuses that they had been going to school here in the United States on. And here's what we found out.

The first question we asked them is a real simple one about, "Did you find the American school easier or more difficult?" Fifty-six percent said they found their classes here in the United States "much easier." Twenty-nine percent said "a little easier." This is really overwhelming, you know, eighty-five percent in the easier bracket. Look at the harder numbers: five percent "much harder," only six percent "a little harder." So the foreign exchange students found the American schools not quite as rigorous.

The second question, "Compared to students in your home country, do you think U.S. students spend more, less, or about the same amount of time on school work?" This tilts towards the less side—34 percent "much less," 22 percent "a little less," so a little over half on the less side. It's about two-to-one than the two response categories for spending "more" time. So the foreign exchange students don't see American kids spending as much time on schoolwork.

Now, this was a surprising finding. It had nothing to do, apparently, with the frequency of homework. I thought we'd get some real differences here. Instead, U.S. and foreign schools look almost the same. We asked the kids how often homework is assigned; "never," all the way up to "every day of the week," "three or four days of the week." You can see all the way across that the two bars look roughly equal. It's not the frequency of homework. It may, however, be the difficulty of homework, and it takes longer for students abroad to complete their work, but it's not the frequency.

And the next two questions deal with values. We asked the foreign exchange students, "Compared to students in your home country, how important do your U.S. friends think it is to do well in math?" And you can see it tilts towards the "a little less" side, with 17.5 percent saying "much less." But the modal response is about the same. Very few kids thought that they valued math more in the United States. But sort of remember this—take a snapshot of this and compare it to the next question. We asked the identical question for sports in the United States. The survey asked, "Compared to students in your home country, how important do your U.S. friends think it is to do well in sports?" And that's pretty overwhelming, "much more important"—over two-thirds of the foreign exchange students.

And you know what's unique about this, what I think is compelling about this is there are other countries in the world that are just as sports-crazy as the United States. Japan is just as baseball crazy as the United States. Soccer in the European countries, they are absolutely devoted to. What's different is that the adults do not allow athletics to seep into the high school campus and to interfere with the mission of the school, unlike the United States.

Another distraction—let's think of sports as one distraction distracting kids from their academic mission in high schools. A second distraction that's been documented decade after decade is part time work. We asked the foreign exchange students how much time they devote to a part time job. You can see about three-quarters of them devote no time. They don't have part time jobs. In the United States it is just the reverse, and we are an outlier in the world in this regard. About three-quarters of high school students have part time jobs in the United States. At some point in high school—in fact, the U.S. Commission on the Senior Year in High School [Commission on the High School Senior Year] called the senior year—actually it was a presidential commission that President Clinton appointed just before he left office—in their report they concluded that the senior year in high school is, quote, "a waste of time." And they said one of the reasons is everybody is working; they have a part time job. And when you ask European parents, by the way, why their kids don't work, they say, our kids have a job; it's called going to school. They have to learn as much as they can.

Finally we gave the students a list of reasons why kids go to school and we said please rate these as being "very important," "somewhat important," or "not very important" to students in your home country and also the United States. And here we have tabled the percentage that answered "very important" for the following reasons. Now, the first one is sort of the classical learning for learning's sake argument, that the reason why you go to school is to learn math, science, literature and history. This is more apparent abroad than it is in the United States. I don't think this is an American teenager problem, I think this is an American problem, period.

The second—and this, by the way, was another counter-intuitive finding. I was surprised at this finding on occupation—to prepare for an occupation. I expected the U.S. to outscore, actually, foreign countries, and we didn't on this particular dimension. And then when I though more about it—Barbara Schneider and David Stevenson released a book just two years ago—I recommend it highly, it's a great book—it's called "The Ambitious Generation." And what they did is study teens in high school and their aspirations. They found that the generation of kids in school right now are probably the most ambitious generation the United States has ever had when it comes to education. But they are completely clueless as to how they find the knowledge at high school that will hook up to the occupations that they want to pursue. They all want to be doctors and lawyers. Even the ones in remedial English want to be lawyers. Even the ones who have not taken a science class want to be doctors. And yet they still want to be doctors. So one key thing that has to happen is we need to link up and show kids, not only the knowledge that's necessary for certain professions, but now they can find it in their high schools.

Here are two common reasons why kids go to school: see their friends—teenagers are social animals all over the world—and to prepare for college. And I suspect, by the way, that this reason right here, to prepare for college, in the United States takes on significance that reverberates back to that other graph about preparing for an occupation. I think a lot of American kids think, I don't need to worry about preparing for an occupation right now. I'll prepare for college and then when I get to college they'll prepare me for an occupation. That's not as evident in other countries.

Here is the picture then—the portrait that is painted from this survey of the foreign exchange students. American schools are easier. American students don't work as hard. American students don't care as much about success at mathematics, they care more about success at sports. American students devote more time to part time jobs than students abroad. They are skeptical of the value of learning for its own sake in comparison to foreign students. American students are less aware of how school prepares them for an occupation than students in other countries, but American students are equally aware that school prepares them for college. And high schoolers in the U.S. and all over the world enjoy being with their friends at school.

As I finish this section, let me just make sure that I stress one thing. I do not want to engage in teen bashing. This is about teen culture, but teenagers are really not in charge of what's going on here.

James Coleman published a book—he conducted this beautiful study in the 1950's, a half century ago, and basically concluded all of these things about American high school kids. And one of the things that he stressed was teen culture is really in the hands of adults. Adults structure high schools in such a way that sports are emphasized within that structure. It's not because teens do it. American employers hire teens for part time jobs. Those jobs, by the way, are all dead-end jobs. No one ever takes a job as a teenager and later has it as a career, or very few people do. That's not the fault of teenagers who are doing that. So, as Coleman stressed a half century ago, we need to think about holding adults responsible for fixing this situation. It's really not in the hands of teens.

Let me now conclude and wrap up. There are four things I hope you take away today. First of all, math scores were up in the 1990's and reading scores were flat. Second, the two NAEP tests give different stories on the reading gap. If you recall, the main test says that it's widening; the Trend says it's narrowing. Number three, urban schools vary in achievement. Urban districts serving poor children appear to do better in the sunbelt states. And we're going to be investigating that to see if that, indeed, holds up. And then number four, U.S. high school culture contains formidable obstacles to academic excellence, among them the low values teens place on academic accomplishments, the high value placed on athletic success, and the distraction of part time work.

So I'm going to stop right there, and I'd be happy to take any of your questions.

Let me add one more thing, too, on the foreign exchange student study. What we decided when we launched it, and we conducted the survey last spring, was a very natural comparison group, because it's tough. We make no claim—I make no claim that this is a representative sample. They're not. They're not representative of their countries. These are above-average students and they probably come from above-average SES households, although we didn't collect a lot of personal data from the students. But the natural comparison group would be American students who are going abroad. So we spent this summer surveying American kids who have now come home from Europe and Asian countries and South American countries, and we're asking them the same set of questions. We don't have those data analyzed yet but we're looking forward to taking a look at that. It's going to be interesting to see if they confirm what we saw here.

Question, Ben?

Q: I'm Ben Wildavsky with US News.

Your Table 12 on page 34 on the poor urban districts, you show Texas and California right next to each other. And I'm thinking back about a year or a year and a half ago to David Grissmar's Rand study which, essentially, showed Texas at the top when you control for race and income and socioeconomic stuff, and California at the bottom. Can you help me understand why there is such a disparity?

MR. LOVELESS: Yeah. Our analysis is just one point in time and Grissmar's analysis was growth over time. So Grissmar was looking at how much did Texas and California grow? And he compared that—Texas grew a lot, California did not. We're just looking at one particular point in time. This happens to be their own test last year.

Questions?

Yes.

Q: Glenda Partee with American Youth Policy Forum.

I, too, was going to ask about the differences in the foreign students to—those that came here to study versus those that stayed at home to study. But in that line, did you miss a lot of the kids that were in youth apprenticeships and those kinds of part time work experiences that were part of their high school education versus U.S. kids that often have part time jobs that are not considered part of their academic program?

MR. LOVELESS: No. If they were in an apprenticeship and working part time, hopefully they would have answered—I mean, the way we worded it was, "Did you work part time last year?" So, hopefully they would have responded affirmatively. You're talking about the exchange students themselves. They should have responded affirmatively.

Q: [Inaudible.]

MR. LOVELESS: Assuming you picked up those kids in the exchange program, right. We don't know because we didn't—it's a very tricky thing when you survey high school kids. You can't ask a whole lot of questions about them personally. You can ask their attitudes, but not that many questions about them. So we didn't collect a tremendous amount of data about them. My guess is that kids who are coming from strict apprenticeship programs in Europe, let's say, were not heavily represented in this sample.

However, you know, I'd speculated about what would happen if they were. My guess is that the gaps between, say, European schools and ours would even be wider. They would even be wider. And the reason why I say that is the one thing that we do know in comparing, say, American low-track kids, vocational education kids, with kids in European and Asian vocational, technical schools, is that those schools really do teach math and science and ours don't, in terms of voc ed. So my guess is, any of the differences described here would even be wider if we'd included that particular kind of student.

Yes?

Q: Dianne Piche with the Citizens' Commission on Civil Rights.

Just to follow up, I was just interested in the sample high schools for the foreign exchange student survey. Were they disproportionately middle class schools or did you interview, or survey, foreign exchange students in high poverty schools as well?

MR. LOVELESS: They are disproportionately in above-average schools

Q: Right.

MR. LOVELESS: Slightly above-average, not hugely so, but yes, they are above-average.

Other questions?

Tamara [Henry]?

Q: Yeah, I wanted to ask you about the reading gap. When you show the difference in the tests—if you do the main NAEP and you compare it with the Trend, the main NAEP suggests differences in socioeconomic status because you're asking the kids to read something and then compare it with outside experiences. So are we saying here that it's best to just deal with what kids actually learn in the classroom if we're going to have a more accurate picture of what students know as opposed to broad experiences the students—that they bring into the learning process?

MR. LOVELESS: You're right; you're absolutely right. The two tests are different, and the Trend test is more of an old-fashioned test. It's multiple choice and it's very self-contained. The child reads a passage and answers questions directly about that passage. The main test may ask what are known as contextual questions. So, for instance, on the NAEP website they post, as an example, the one that you just mentioned. They'll ask the child, read this passage. Now, can you think of a character from television or film or a book that compares with this character? And that asks the child then to go outside that particular passage and do something else. And very often that kind of passage does then correlate with the experiences—the sum of the experiences that child's had, and it can tap, at that point, SES differences. And that is a problem.

Now, whether we should be doing one or the other—we do both, and I think it's actually a good idea that we do both right now until we know what it means, the fact this gap is widening on one and narrowing on the other. I think we need to simply explore and further explain why is it that this gap is doing this on one test and not on the other? Right now it's just good to have the information. If we just had one of these tests I'm not sure we'd be getting the full picture.

Q: But isn't it fair, with the Trend, if you're only dealing with a student's ability to process information?

MR. LOVELESS: There's a huge debate about that; about which one is fairer. There's a huge debate about that. The people who believe very strongly, for instance, in extended response items believe that those items actually have a built-in fairness to them because they allow the child to tap his or her own experiences in the world in order to answer that question. So there is a very large debate about that.

Yes?

Q: ?development, and I have focused particularly lately at school size at the high school level. Did you look at all and how these results correlated with school size? There was a wonderful study a year ago that the National World Trust did of looking at the school size and how it related to the achievement gap. And what they found was that small schools are not a cause of better outcomes for kids, but that they are a facilitating factor. They allow conditions to occur that enable the gap to be closed, or to be reduced. And particularly, they're better for kids from low-income and minority households.

The other thing that they do that struck me in terms of your—part of that high school and sports, is that they shun—the small schools allow more kids to participate in more stuff, and the more extracurricular activities they participate in, sports or otherwise, the better they tend to do in school. Did you look at any of that?

MR. LOVELESS: No, on neither analysis. On neither the survey nor the gap analysis did they look at school size. But you're quite right, there is research that suggests that school size has an effect. But there's also research on the other side of this, and that is when you have small schools very often you can't offer the kind of wide range of curriculum that you're able to offer to children otherwise. Or, for instance, all those extracurricular activities and the sports and what have you, like charter schools that are very small, find that they're having to partner up with local public schools to offer those kinds of things to kids.

Q: Sure, but each kid tends to participate more even if the variety is less.

MR. LOVELESS: That may be.

Q: I was just wondering if you've looked at that.

MR. LOVELESS: I have not. I have to tell you, I'm not terribly persuaded yet on the school size issue, mainly because I still think it matters what happens in classrooms and the curriculum that a child is taught. And so if the school is big and it has a rigorous curriculum and good teaching, my guess is it's better than a small school that does not. And to me that's still where the rubber meets the road. That's why I'm somewhat skeptical.

Q: In regards to the confusion about the foreign exchange students, the obstacles that you identified, they seem to be especially responses to policy. And I was wondering, is it your personal opinion or do you know of any research showing ways to change that for the better, to make things?.?

MR. LOVELESS: Well, I think some of the small private schools and some of the charter schools have been able to do it, and a collection of public schools as well have been able to sort of turn around teen culture. Do I know how they do it? No, I don't know the recipe. [Chuckles.] I wish I did. But I totally agree with you. I don't think that the answer lies in policy. It might