Archives for the month of: September, 2012
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Thanks, NCLB. Thanks, Race to the Top

By dianeravitch
September 6, 2012 //
9

A reader described the start of the new school year. It began on a sad note:

School started for me yesterday.  We had twos of professional development which meant our principal and a few other suits lecturing us about what we needed to do to keep our school from closing.  At one point the principal said, “if you have a problem with what I’m telling you, maybe this isn’t the right school for you”  very nice on the 2nd day of the new school year.
Today our local superintendent came for a minute.  He seems very sad.  He looked defeated.  He came to wish us well and tell us that NY state is now deciding which schools live or die.  NYC is no longer in the loop.  He said he doesn’t agree with the state but the bottom line is that everything hinges on the results of the ELA and Math state exams.  He said it didn’t look promising.
I work in an urban school with a high percentage of challenging children.  Each year as more children go to Charters we get those who nobody wants.   The numbers of elementary students are declining while the numbers of middle school are increasing as Charters cherry pick the best students and leave us the rest.
This is not considered.  ELA and Math scores only will decide our fate.
To have our Superintendent so defeated before one child has set foot into my school this year is troubling.  He said he just wanted to be honest with us.
What a way to start a new school year.

Categories Accountability, NCLB (No Child Left Behind), New York, Race to the Top

What Clinton Didn’t Mention

By dianeravitch
September 5, 2012 //
31

I first met Bill Clinton in Little Rock in 1984.

When he was President, I heard him speak on many occasions.

I never heard anyone speak as eloquently about the challenges in K-12 education.

Tonight, I watched his boffo performance and was once again wowed by his ability to get deeply substantive and at the same time, chatty and personal.

The man truly has a gift of oratory.

He briefly talked about education. He talked about the importance of bringing down the cost of college and student loans.

He didn’t mention K-12.

I listened closely.

He didn’t mention Race to the Top.

Maybe it was an oversight but I doubt it.

How can you talk about cooperation and shared responsibility in the same breath with a “race” to “the top” for our children?

How can you say “we are all in this together” while you are telling children that they have to race to see who is best at taking tests and the poor kids almost always are the losers?

Categories Race to the Top

Are Young Teachers OK with Test Obession?

By dianeravitch
September 5, 2012 //
9

A post described an article in USA Today about the high attrition of teachers in recent years. The article quotes people who say that new young teachers must be comfortable with endless testing because it is all they ever knew. As one person says, these new teachers were 11 years old when NCLB passed. They have lived with test, test, test all their lives as students, so they must be okay with inflicting test, test, test on their students.

This teacher disagrees:

I am a young and inexperienced teacher, I am not afraid to admit it! I yes I did grow up with NCLB and standardized testing, and I guess they are right, I am obsessed with it, I AM OBSESSED WITH GETTING RID OF IT!!!

Categories Education Reform, Teachers and Teaching, Testing

Deborah Meier on Reform Strategies and Democracy

By dianeravitch
September 5, 2012 //
6

Deborah Meier comments on a post about efforts in Philadelphia to weaken or eliminate collective bargaining:

INTERESTINGLY, ALMOST NO ONE FEELS OBLIGED to defend their strategies, etc in terms of its impact on a democratic society!  IF, just suppose, it raised test scores we seem prepared to dump democratic norms on the behalf of test scores.  The grand old USA is–might we mention–an experiment in democracy!  (It was not primarily founded on the principles of the market place–that was true, after all, of the decadent European nations we were breaking away from as well.)

Categories Education Reform, Philadelphia, Testing, Unions

Read This and Share My Nausea

By dianeravitch
September 5, 2012 //
36

In an article in USA Today, a bevy of commentators explain why it may be a good thing that the teaching profession is now getting younger and less experienced.

The article reports:

Recent findings by Richard Ingersoll at the University of Pennsylvania show that as teacher attrition rates have risen, from about 10% to 13% for first-year teachers, schools are having to hire large numbers of new teachers. Between 40% to 50% of those entering the profession now leave within five years in what Ingersoll calls a “constant replenishment of beginners.”

The end result: a more than threefold increase in the sheer number of inexperienced teachers in U.S. schools. In the 1987-88 school year, Ingersoll estimates, there were about 65,000 first-year teachers; by 2007-08, the number had grown to more than 200,000. In the 1987-88 school year, he found, the biggest group of teachers had 15 years of experience. By the 2007-08 school year, the most recent data available, the biggest group of teachers had one year experience.

The brand new teachers, as Susan Fuhrman says, are “very used to standardized testing,” she says. “They’ve grown up with it in some way. Maybe that’s healthy, in that they would be less obsessed with it.”

Fuhrman is president of Teachers College and also a member of the board of directors of Pearson.

Tim Daly, whose organization The New Teacher Project, was founded by Michelle Rhee, loves the idea of all these new teachers. TNTP exists to recruit them. He says that most were 11 years old when NCLB was passed, so they don’t know anything different from standardized testing and being held accountable for raising test scores. For them, it is the norm.

No voice in the article explains why experience matters.

No one asks why the teaching profession is being systematically dismantled.

Apparently having three years under your belt these days makes you a “grizzled veteran.”

Categories Accountability, Education Reform, Pearson, Testing

Is Chicago a National Model for School Reform?

By dianeravitch
September 5, 2012 //
10

Thanks to loyal reader Prof. W. for forwarding this story.

Chicago public schools have been under mayoral control since 1995.

Mayor Daley hired Paul Vallas to reform the schools. He went on to reform the schools in Philadelphia, New Orleans, and Haiti, and now he is reforming schools in Bridgeport while running a national consulting business on reforming schools.

Then Mayor Daley promoted Arne Duncan to reform the schools. Duncan called his reforms “Renaissance 2010.” Before he left for DC in 2009 Duncan opened 100 new schools and closed many neighborhood schools.

Then came Ron Huberman to continue the Daley reforms.

And now Mayor Emanuel carries on in the Daley tradition, having recently instructed his hand-picked school board to close or privatize more schools.

And what’s the upshot of nearly two decades of reform?

“Twenty years of reform efforts and programs targeting low-income families in Chicago Public Schools has only widened the performance gap between white and African-American students, a troubling trend at odds with what has occurred nationally.

Across the city, and spanning three eras of CPS leadership, black elementary school students have lost ground to their white, Latino and Asian classmates in testing proficiency in math and reading, according to a recent analysis by the University of Chicago Consortium on School Research.”

The Consortium report had the following conclusions:

• Graduation rates have improved dramatically, and high school test scores have risen; more
students are graduating without a decline in average academic performance.
• Math scores have improved incrementally in the elementary/middle grades, while
elementary/middle grade reading scores remained fairly flat for two decades.
• Racial gaps in achievement have steadily increased, with white students making slightly more
progress than Latino students, and African American students falling behind all other groups.
• Despite progress, the vast majority of CPS students have academic achievement levels that are
far below where they need to be to graduate ready for college.

Some more quotes from the report:

“Chicago schools are not what they were in 1990. Graduation rates have improved tremendously, and students are more academically prepared than they were two decades ago. ACT scores have risen in recent years, and elementary math scores are almost a grade level above where they were in the early 1990s. However, average test scores remain well below levels that indicate students are likely to succeed in college.

This is not a problem that is unique to Chicago. Nationwide, the typical high school graduate does not perform at college-ready levels. Chicago students do not perform more poorly than students with similar economic and ethnic backgrounds at other schools in Illinois.” p. 78

Over the course of the three eras of school reform, a number of dramatic system-wide initiatives were enacted. But instead of bringing dramatic changes in student achievement, district-wide changes were incremental -when they occurred at all. We can identify many individual schools that made substantial, sometimes dramatic, gains over the last 20 years, but dramatic improvements across an entire system of over 600 schools are more elusive.

Past research at CCSR suggests that that the process of school improvement involves careful attention to building the core organizational supports of schools -leadership, professional capacity, parent/community involvement, school learning climate, and instruction (Bryk, et al., 2010).

Building the organizational capacity of schools takes time and is not easily mandated at the district level. Nevertheless, the extent to which the next era of school reform drives system-wide improvement will likely depend on the extent to which the next generation of reforms attends to local context and the capacity of individual schools throughout the district.” p. 79

It is hard to see how this rate of change will eliminate poverty or close the achievement gaps (which have widened).

And will anyone be held accountable?

Categories Charter Schools, Chicago, Corporate Reformers, Duncan, Arne, Education Reform, Emanuel, Rahm, Poverty, Segregation , Racial Isolation and Integration, Testing, Vallas, Paul

“Sign Me Up!”

By dianeravitch
September 5, 2012 //
5

This teacher read about the push in Philadelphia to weaken, perhaps eliminate collective bargaining. The School Reform Commission with the guidance of its advisor the Boston Consulting Group (big proponent of privatization without unions and parent to Bain) thinks that if it can create a flexible workforce with performance pay and no job protections, this will attract better teachers. This reader responds:

Oh boy, low pay and no protection of any kind, whatsoever. Sign me up. What is the thought process behind “better teachers without a union”? Do they truly believe those Gates funded teacher groups that claim they don’t need a union or a contract?

Categories Boston Consulting Group, Philadelphia, Unions

Gary Rubinstein Fact-Checks Mass. School

By dianeravitch
September 5, 2012 //
15

We all would like to believe in miracles.

There aren’t many, especially with reference to schools that miraculously “turn around” in one year.

It is comforting to believe that a school can change from the worst to the best almost overnight. It is a made-for-Hollywood scenario.

Last night at the Democratic convention, Governor Deval Patrick talked about the one-year turnaround of a school named Orchard Gardens.

Gary Rubinstein checked and learned that 80% of the teachers were fired. Then he went to the Massachusetts Department of Education website. Not exactly one of the best schools in the state.

Why do so many politicians think that the best way to fix a school is to fire almost everyone (or everyone) and start over?  Wouldn’t it be more productive to help the school, add resources where needed, remove those who are truly incompetent, do whatever it takes to make the school work well for its students? Why is mass firing the preferred solution?

Categories Accountability

After-School Programs Work Best If They Promote Interest

By dianeravitch
September 5, 2012 //
6

Carla Sanger runs an outstanding after-school program called LA’s Best. It serves nearly 30,000 students after school in Los Angeles. I invited her to explain why she has dedicated 25 years to this program and why she believes in it. Here is her response:

My biggest legacy from my father as principal of the largest elementary school in Baltimore in the 50’s (over 2,000 students) was this—How we learn, especially as children, matters.   I have been directing after school enrichment programs since 1973 when, as a supervisor of day care services for the State of New Jersey, I opened Mi Hogar, a nationally recognized after school program for kids 5-14.   It is wonderful to see how after school programs have become a sufficiently significant issue in efforts for reform of public education and some results of the effectiveness of high quality after school programs are both profound and unambiguous.

Dewey’s claim one hundred years ago that thinking follows interest has evidence in new research.   Today, there is more evidence than ever from neuroscience research into how children learn and acquire knowledge in and out of formal educational settings.   For example, Stumm and Chamorro-Premuzic (2011), state that interest and curiosity are the basis for motivating the “Hungry Mind”  The more a student exhibits curiosity which is based in human interest, the more a child can become engaged1. 

Educators understand that engagement is a necessary condition for deep learning.  Curiosity and interest open the door, and once that door is opened a student is engaged.  Hands-on experiential learning activities that allow a student to learn more about things that matter to him/her are key to ensuring that enjoyable and deep learning occurs.  For years this has been the primary vision of high quality, community-involved programs during and after school that respond to the whole child through a balance of education, enrichment, recreation and nutrition activities.

Today, with so many schools and districts forced to focus myopically on boosting test scores as a proxy for academic achievement, after school programs have come to be seen as yet another means to achieve that end.  Increasing numbers of after school programs do this by using the majority of hours in a child’s out of school time program focused on cognitive development at best, rote remediation at worst.  Many teachers would be first to agree that these after school programs are often the only space and time students have to discover and pursue interests, build community, and connect meaningfully with adults from their community.  Some of the best examples of this after school programming responding to individual interests can be found in the country’s most well-known private schools. 

“Time To Succeed” is a new initiative driven by the National Center on Time and Learning (NCTL), a non profit Boston research firm.  A wide coalition has been formed to restructure the school day to increase after school programs that focus on academics with the message that higher achievement is highly correlated with expanded learning time.  Time to Succeed model programs tout “injecting” art, music, and enrichment into academic activities.  In reality, within academically focused after school programs, community-staffed enrichment activities are often eliminated or not offered because of a lack of time or funding in these models.    The NCTL leaders who state that they are educators and not after school providers seem unaware that there are many educators in after school programs with a mission to respond to the whole child.

Time to Suceed has the opportunity to provide some important research for all K-12 educators.  Is it that kids aren’t learning because 9-3 is not enough time or is it because students are not sufficiently engaged in 9-3 lessons?     

Chris Gabrieli, chair of NCTL was quoted in the August 5th 2012 New York Times to have said in reference to the critical academic subjects that after school should prioritize, “The more time you spend practicing or preparing to do something the better you get at it.”    Some educators and researchers would say that is only true if you are engaged and like what you are doing as evidenced by the flat educational outcomes of the last decade.  What will be the longitudinal results in terms of educational attainment  for a critical mass of students in public education who have more time “on task” in hours beyond the school day?    How important is community involvement in the model of critical subject delivery during and after school?   

Education has been, is and always will be personal.  Children and families need choices  in after school models as they do in regular school day programs.  The response to Time to Succeed must not be at the expense of other after school program delivery models that emphasize the whole child, community engagement, and as much time for social, emotional, physical and intellectual activities and play as catching up on academics missed in the regular school day. 

This focus on critical subject time after school might  help some students excel in the regular school day but deprive others of activities to express their interests, curiosities, and fears from which to build engagement and thinking.  Robert Halpern from the Erikson Institute for Graduate Study said, “While after school programs certainly have a place in helping children come to enjoy the meaning in reading and writing, it is not their role – nor is it in their interest-to commit themselves to fostering academic achievement in its narrow sense.  When they do, it tends to distort their activities which then becomes more like the worst of what happens in the classrooms rather than the best.”2

LA’s BEST is one community based youth development after school program that has balanced education, recreation and enrichment activities with community educators for 25 years.  LA’s BEST has longitudinal research to show that over time kids in LA’s BEST compared with students not in the program from the same schools are 30% less involved in crime and 20% less likely to drop out. 

The programs that produce these results are far from “a thing of the past” because they have less accountability than more academically oriented approaches.   Rather they are as critical for some students to succeed as any programs that focus primarily on academic achievement.   And whether the regular school day or after school program prioritizes academic activities or children’s interests—real success will be correlated most with how engaged the students become in what matters most—how they are learning.   

1 Sophie von Stumm, Benedikt Hell, and Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic(2011) The Hungry Mind: Intellectual Curiosity Is the Third Pillar of Academic Performance, Perspectives on Psychological Science, 6, pp;l 574-577

2Robert Halpern, A Different Kind of Child Development Institution: The History of After-School Programs for Low Income Children, Teachers College Record Volume 104, Number 2, March 2002, p204  Copyright by Teachers College, Colombia University 0161-4681

Categories Education Reform

School of One Dropped by 2 of 3 Pilot Schools

By dianeravitch
September 5, 2012 //
19

A bombshell report about the highly touted “School of One” revealed that students in the program did no better on state tests than those in traditional math programs.

School of One is an online program that was piloted in 3 schools.

Two of the three schools have dropped it, but the Bloomberg administration plans to expand it to more schools.

School of One was developed by Joel Rose, who was TFA, Broad Academy, Edison, then worked for Chis Cerf and Joel Klein at the NYC Department of Education. The NYC Parent Blog describes the history of the School of One here and points to some important ethical issues.

Time magazine cited School of One as one of the best inventions of 2009, before it was implemented.

It won a $5 million grant from the US Department of Education as one of the most innovative programs in the nation.

The city put $9 million into the program so far, and previously projected the cost at $46 million. It will be added to four more schools, with the help of the federal grant.

Categories Blended Learning, Curriculum, Klein, Joel, NYC, On-Line Education
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