Archives for the year of: 2013
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Lower Hudson Valley: The Disconnect Between the State and the Public

By dianeravitch
December 5, 2013 //
12

Most of the noise against the shoddy implementation of Common Core in New York has been heard in Long Island, but parents and educators are even angrier in the Lower Hudson Valley than in New York. Here is an excellent explanation by veteran journalist Gary Stern..

This is one of the best analyses I have read about why state officials and the public are on a collision course. Can the Regents continue to push such a wildly unpopular set of policies? How long can they continue to say they they are right and the public is wrong?

Stern writes, for example:

The big picture

The State: New York’s public schools have done a poor job of educating its students. Large numbers of students have received high school diplomas despite being unprepared for college or the workforce. They have poor writing skills, do not grasp key math concepts, and are not adept at problem-solving or working in teams. Minorities in big city school systems have been most poorly served, but even suburban schools are not where they need to be. Educational standards need to be not only higher but transformed to reflect the high-tech, constantly changing needs of industry and to keep our state and nation competitive. Get on board or get out of the way.

The LoHud: A state-imposed, one-size-fits-all approach to reform is naïve and counter-productive. Many suburban school systems do a fine job, pushing their students to excel while leaving room for creativity, individualism and local emphasis on the arts. Here’s the thing: parents and local school officials always have a better sense of their schools’ strengths and weaknesses than state and federal bureaucrats trying to adapt business models to education. The state’s approach to reform is foolish and losing credibility by the day. Get out of our backyards.

The Common Core learning standards

The State: The Common Core standards are smarter, more up-to-the-moment and, yes, tougher than our former educational goals. They present a coherent, rich framework for what students need to know and how students need to be able to think. School districts can still devise their own curricula, lesson plans and creative local programming – as long as students meet the standards. Yes, the transition to the Common Core is difficult and challenging but cannot wait. Today’s students deserve the best possible education this year and next year, not when schools feel they are comfortable with the Core.

The LoHud: The standards are pretty good, better in some areas than others. We need time to review them. However, any good will that the Common Core might have inspired is being lost because its implementation in New York has been irresponsibly rushed. We’re building the plane in mid-flight. The standards for each grade assume that students have grown up with the Common Core, but they haven’t. Teachers and curriculum leaders are grasping to figure out what the state wants instead of doing their jobs. The roll-out needs to be halted for a couple of years so we can figure out what comes next. Stop the madness.

Testing

The State: A limited amount of standardized testing is a necessary way to see if students are progressing. The results can be used as a tool to improve instruction. Our new tests are tougher but also better. We had to put them in place right away to ensure districts would align themselves to the Common Core. Without the new tests, the change would have been too slow. We need to find ways to reduce overall testing, in part by encouraging districts to use other methods for their teacher evaluations. And, yes, we will keep moving toward on-line testing until we’re ready.

The LoHud: Are you kidding? You want us to reduce testing? We set up new pre- and post-tests because we had to rush our teacher evaluations systems into place. The new 3-8 tests set us up for failure to prove your contentions that the schools are failing. Your cut scores are non-sense (which the state quietly acknowledges by not requiring remediation for all students who failed to hit state targets). Now you won’t let us see the tests, meaning that we can’t learn what our students need. And now the state is introducing new high school tests? Here we go again. Oh, by the way, we have a million questions that have to be answered before we’re ready for on-line tests.

Categories Common Core, Testing

Daniel Wydo Disaggregates PISA Scores by Income

By dianeravitch
December 5, 2013 //
86

Daniel Wydo, a teacher in North Carolina, sent this analysis of 2012 PISA:

Here’s what the mainstream media will NOT tell you about 2012 PISA. When comparing U.S. schools with less than 10% of students qualifying for free/reduced lunch, here’s how U.S. students (of which almost 25% are considered poor by OECD standards and of which nationally on average about 50% qualify for free/reduced lunch) rank compared to all other countries including one I chose to purposely compare – Finland (of which about 5% are considered poor by OECD standards):

*Shanghai is disqualified for obvious reasons.

Science literacy

U.S. schools with less than 10% free/reduced – score=556 [1st in the world]

Finland – ranked 4th in the world

Reading literacy

U.S. schools with less than 10% free/reduced – score=559 [1st in the world]

Finland – ranked 5th in the world

Mathematics literacy

U.S. schools with less than 10% free/reduced – score=540 [5th in the world]

FInland – ranked 11th in the world

The NCES also disaggregated the mathematics data further based on seven total proficiency levels (Below Level 1, Level 1, Level 2, Level 3, Level 4, Level 5, and Level 6). The outcomes, as expected, were perfectly aligned with what we would expect in terms of the levels of poverty our students endure. For example, on the mathematics literacy scale, U.S. schools with less than 10% free/reduced lunch had 94% of students score at a “Level 2” proficiency or above (a “Level 2” proficiency equates to being able to use basic mathematics in the workplace), whereas schools with more than 75% free/reduced lunch had 54% of students score at a “Level 2” proficiency or above, of which 46% of the 54%, scoring at a “Level 2” proficiency or higher, scored at a “Level 2” or “Level 3” proficiency with only 6% scoring at a “Level 4” proficiency, 2% scoring at a “Level 5” proficiency, and so few scoring at a “Level 6” proficiency, the reporting standards were not met. Virtually no students from schools with less than 10% free/reduced lunch ranked at the “Below Level 1” proficiency (reporting standards were not met), and a mere 5% were ranked at “Level 1” proficiency. On the flip side, a whopping 46% of students in schools with more than 75% of free/reduced lunch scored at a “Level 1” proficiency or at “Below Level 1” proficiency (28% and 18% respectively).

The dissagregated data for science and reading, based on the various proficiency levels, followed the example set in mathematics, although maybe not quite to the extent of variability when comparing schools with less than 10% free/reduced lunch to schools with more than 75% free/reduced lunch..

This is not a new phenomenon. For every administration of PISA and TIMSS, when controlling for poverty, U.S. public school students are not only competitive, they downright lead the world. Even at home nationally, when controlling for poverty, public school students compete with private school students in Lutheran, Catholic, and Christian schools when analyzing NAEP data. This is my own synopsis of the Braun (2006) study using large samples of NAEP data and using HLM to compare private school students to public school students:

In 4th grade reading (after adjusting for student characteristics – so an apples to apples comparison can be made based on SES and other student characteristics) it’s a wash – there is no difference in scores between the private schools and the public schools. In 4th grade mathematics, after adjustments, public schools outperformed private schools significantly. In 8th grade Reading, after adjustments, private schools outperformed public schools significantly, with the exception of Conservative Christian schools, which performed similarly to public schools, both of which were outperformed by Catholic and Lutheran students. In 8th grade mathematics, it’s another wash except for a very important caveat. While Catholic schools followed the trend with and without adjustments, Lutheran school and Conservative Christian schools didn’t. Lutheran schools were significantly higher, increasing the average among private schools, while Conservative Christian schools were significantly lower, decreasing the average among private schools.

http://nces.ed.gov/nationsreportcard/pubs/studies/2006461.asp

One has to wonder why our media continues to barely report the connection between child poverty and their performance at school. The school reformers want nothing to do with it other than to claim there are miracle schools and teachers out there, although upon further analysis these are the schools that usually game the system and do a ‘data dance’ – most namely, charter schools.

The reports continue to be all about our failing or “mediocre” schools and incompetent teachers. I like the simple observation made by researchers in the past – if the argument is to be made that U.S. public schools and teachers are failing, then we have huddled all of our incompetent teachers and principals in our urban and rural schools, for they are the ones that struggle or “fail” – this is evidenced in the PISA data I provided and appears at every turn when outcomes are disaggregated based upon child poverty. Or are our urban and rural schools and teachers “failing” or “struggling” any more than our urban or rural police forces? Response times are higher in urban and rural areas (for different reasons), and crime rates are higher in our urban areas, so does this mean that our urban and rural police officers are failures? Can you imagine police unions if we were to erase officer tenure, step ladder structure for pay increases, LIFO, and bust their unions – and then demonize them because they can’t seem to solve the crime problems of our urban areas? Can anyone say value-added modeling for police officers estimating their effects on crime rates during their beat? The difference between police officers and teachers, specifically in this analogy, is that we are push-overs, ah-hem, I mean caretakers.

Categories International, Poverty, Testing

German-Style Apprenticeship Programs Grow in South Carolina

By dianeravitch
December 5, 2013 //
16

Like many other states, South Carolina has been wooing foreign corporations, hoping to create new jobs and stimulate the economy.

When a German firm relocated to produce heavy engines, it was unable to find enough skilled workers.

So the company leader “did what he would have done back home in Germany: He set out to train them himself. Working with five local high schools and a career center in Aiken County, S.C. — and a curriculum nearly identical to the one at the company’s headquarters in Friedrichshafen — Tognum now has nine juniors and seniors enrolled in its apprenticeship program.”

“South Carolina offers a fantastic model for what we can do nationally,” said Ben Olinsky, co-author of a forthcoming report by the Center for American Progress, a liberal Washington research organization, recommending a vast expansion in apprenticeships.

“Despite South Carolina’s progress and the public support for apprenticeships from President Obama, who cited the German model in his last State of the Union address, these positions are becoming harder to find in other states. Since 2008, the number of apprentices has fallen by nearly 40 percent, according to the Center for American Progress study.

“As a nation, over the course of the last couple of decades, we have regrettably and mistakenly devalued apprenticeships and training,” said Thomas E. Perez, the secretary of labor. “We need to change that, and you will hear the president talk a lot about it in the weeks and months ahead.”

“In November, the White House announced a new $100 million grant program aimed at advancing technical training in high schools. But veteran apprenticeship advocates say the Obama administration has been slow to act.

“The results have not matched the rhetoric in terms of direct funding for apprenticeships so far,” said Robert Lerman, a professor of economics at American University in Washington. “I’m hoping for a new push.”

“In Germany, apprentices divide their time between classroom training in a public vocational school and practical training at a company or small firm. Some 330 types of apprenticeships are accredited by the government in Berlin, including such jobs as hairdresser, roofer and automobile electronics specialist. About 60 percent of German high school students go through some kind of apprenticeship program, which leads to a formal certificate in the chosen skill and often a permanent job at the company where the young person trained.

“If there is a downside to the German system, it is that it can be inflexible, because a person trained in a specific skill may find it difficult to switch vocations if demand shifts.

“In South Carolina, apprenticeships are mainly funded by employers, but the state introduced a four-year, annual tax credit of $1,000 per position in 2007 that proved to be a boon for small- to medium-size companies. The Center for American Progress report recommends a similar credit nationwide that would rise to $2,000 for apprentices under age 25.

The emphasis on job training has also been a major calling card overseas for South Carolina officials, who lured BMW here two decades ago and more recently persuaded France’s Michelin and Germany’s Continental Tire to expand in the state.”

South Carolina has 28,000 people working for German corporations.

What’s the lure?

“Of course, there are other reasons foreign companies have moved here. For starters, wages are lower than the national average. Even more important for many manufacturers, unions have made few inroads in South Carolina.”

Interesting, since Germany itself has strong unions.

Just as the textile industry fled South Carolina for nations where wages were lower and there were no unions, South Carolina now meets that need for European nations.

Categories Economy, Students

Anthony Cody: Standards Or Standardization?

By dianeravitch
December 5, 2013 //
75

Anthony Cody notes that the definition of education has become increasingly utilitarian, thus narrowing what is taught and learned only to the skills that make students college-and-career ready. Joy in learning, aesthetic delight in the arts, the intellectual pleasure of history and literature take a backseat to that which is marketable. Are we all meant to serve the needs of corporate America?

He writes:

“One of the undercurrents fueling concerns about the Common Core is the relentless focus on preparation for “college and career.” Education has always had dual aspirations – to elevate mind and spirit, through the investigation of big ideas, and the pursuit of fine arts and literature, and the service of the economic needs of individuals and society. What we are feeling in our modern culture is the absolute hegemony of commercial aims, as if every activity that does not produce profit is under assault.

“And in our classrooms there is a parallel assault on activities that do not “prepare for college and career,” which has been redefined, in practical terms, as preparation for the tests that have been determined to be aligned with that goal. Preparation for college and career has begun to feel more and more like “preparation to make yourself useful to future corporate employers.”

Cody finds that Mario Savio’s famous rant in 1964 against the ties between the university and the corporations presaged what is happening today. Savio might as well have been speaking for the moms and dads of today when he said fifty years ago:

“There’s a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart, that you can’t take part! You can’t even passively take part! And you’ve got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels…upon the levers, upon all the apparatus, and you’ve got to make it stop! And you’ve got to indicate to the people who run it, to the people who own it, that unless you’re free, the machine will be prevented from working at all!”

Cody adds:

“In our classrooms, the use of standardized tests to measure and monitor learning, and the imposition of ever-more tightly managed and even scripted curricula, make teachers and students feel as if we are part of a machine. The canaries in the coal mine are the students who do not fit in. But our modern system has a pharmacological answer for that, as this recent New York Times magazine article reported that more than one in ten children between ages 4 and 17 are now diagnosed with ADHD, and many of them are medicated daily. That is 6.4 million children. Before the early 1990s, this number was less than 5%. What has changed? According to the report,

“During the same 30 years when A.D.H.D. diagnoses increased, American childhood drastically changed. Even at the grade-school level, kids now have more homework, less recess and a lot less unstructured free time to relax and play. It’s easy to look at that situation and speculate how “A.D.H.D.” might have become a convenient societal catchall for what happens when kids are expected to be miniature adults. High-stakes standardized testing, increased competition for slots in top colleges, a less-and-less accommodating economy for those who don’t get into colleges but can no longer depend on the existence of blue-collar jobs — all of these are expressed through policy changes and cultural expectations, but they may also manifest themselves in more troubling ways — in the rising number of kids whose behavior has become pathologized.”

“Our education system, in attempting to make everyone fit the same standardized mold, so as to be of maximum usefulness to future employers, is medicating those who don’t fit the mold.”

Cody ends with a veiled prediction that spring 2014 may see the biggest effort ever by parents to remove their children from standardized testing.

Categories Common Core, Economy, Education Industry, For-Profit

Bruce Baker on PISA and Poverty and Petrilli

By dianeravitch
December 4, 2013 //
17

Bruce Baker has this habit of introducing facts, evidence, and sharp analysis–as well as humor–to controversial issues.

Here is take on PISA Day (drum roll, please). It begins like this:

“With today’s release of PISA data it is once again time for wild punditry, mass condemnation of U.S. public schools and a renewed sense of urgency to ram through ill-conceived, destructive policies that will make our school system even more different from those breaking the curve on PISA.

“With that out of the way, here’s my little graphic contribution to what has become affectionately known to edu-pundit class as PISA-Palooza. Yep… it’s the ol’ poverty as an excuse graph – well, really it’s just the ol’ poverty in the aggregate just so happens to be pretty strongly associated with test scores in the aggregate – graph… but that’s nowhere near as catchy.”

Read the whole post.

Today, he posted again, this time to chide Mike Petrilli of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute for discounting the importance of poverty. Petrilli referred to Occam’s Razor to explain relatively poor math performance by U.S. students. Occam’s Razor is the proposition that ““among competing hypotheses, the hypothesis with the fewest assumptions should be selected.”

Relying on Occam’s Razor, Petrilli writes:

“So what’s an alternative hypothesis for the lackluster math performance of our fifteen-year-olds? One in line with Occam’s Razor?
Maybe we’re just not very good at teaching math, especially in high school.”

Baker invents a new principle: Petrilli’s Hammer. Or in other words, when you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail.

Read the post. It is vintage Bruce Baker.

Categories International, Poverty, Testing

North Carolina Appeals Court Says No to For-Profit Virtual K12 Corporation

By dianeravitch
December 4, 2013 //
21

A North Carolina Appeals Court turned down K12, the publicly traded corporation that operates virtual charters.

It wanted to open a virtual charter in the state, but the State Board of Education did not act on its request, so it was denied.

K12 sued, and for now, has lost.

When the Legislature goes back into session, we will see whether the rejection sticks.

K12 has a history of astute lobbying and strategic political contributions.

K12 gets very poor marks from researchers and poor results, but that never stands in the way of its expansion.

Besides, the expansion of online charters is a priority for ALEC.

Categories ALEC, Charter Schools, North Carolina, On-Line Education

Arthur Camins on International Test Scores

By dianeravitch
December 4, 2013 //
6

Arthur Camins is director of the Center for Innovation in Engineering and Science Education at the Stevens Institute of Technology in Hoboken, New Jersey.

He left the following comment about the PISA results:

The release of NAEP, TIMSS and PISA scores always produces debate. How do we compare with others (and on what)? Among us, who has improve and who has not? Are we improving and, if so, are we improving fast enough?

You and others have cogently argued that quickly leaping to favored policy implications usually lacks much evidence and is often misleading.

Arguments in a democracy are natural and could be healthy, but I worry we are not making much progress when it comes to current education policy. Maybe a dose of engineering design thinking can help.

An essential step in such thinking is defining and delimiting the problems. The biggest problem with education is the US is not test scores. Rather, three central problems plague public education the United States. The most dramatic is inequity. There are vast inequities in educational resources and in the conditions of students’ lives, resulting in persistent race- and class-based disparities in educational outcomes.

Second, we are far too focused on a narrow range of outcomes — reading and math test scores — and not enough on a broader range of subject matter or essential domains, such as critical thinking, creativity and collaborative skills. Third, we gravitate toward partial quick solutions, rather than thinking systemically and having the patience allow strategies time to develop, take hold and be refined.

Next, we need to consider both values and technical constraints for ideal solutions. For example, we need to ask what mix of collaborative and competitive strategies align with our values and research on systems that have been successful in sustaining significant educational improvement.
In addition, since ideal solutions always prove better in theory than in practice, we need to plan for optimization– repeated cycles of testing, redesign and retesting.

Finally, to make progress we need mobilize the necessary political will. To do so, we need to hear more about common sense, high-leverage solutions– framed as messages that respect people’s intelligence and tap into their values, aspirations and sense of fairness.

I made several suggestions about these messages last week on the Washington Post’s education blog, The Answer Sheet:http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/answer-sheet/wp/2013/11/30/how-thinking-like-an-engineer-can-help-school-reform/

Categories Education Reform, International, Testing

PISA Showed We Need a Game-Changer, Not More of the Same Failed policies

By dianeravitch
December 4, 2013 //
25

A reader sent this tweet from Arne Duncan:

Arne Duncan ‏@arneduncan 17h
The bad news from #OECDPISA: US is running in place while other countries lap us. Good news: We’re laying the right foundation to improve.

This is very sad. If PISA shows anything, it is that the policies of the Bush-Obama administrations have not reached their one singular goal: higher test scores.

NCLB was signed into law on January 8, 2002. Since that time, every public school in the nation has followed the same federally-mandated prescription. It doesn’t work.

A reporter asked me last night whether the US performance over the past half century shows that no reforms work. I disagreed strongly. There was never any nationwide school reform that affected every school and every district until NCLB. Only since 2002 have we had a single federal policy. Before we had different districts adopting different programs and reforms, as they chose. PISA shows that the past decade of annual testing of basic skills in grades 3-8 failed. No other country in the world tests every child every year. No other country places as much value on test scores as we do. No other country fires principals and teachers and closes schools based on test scores.

Arne’s tweet is like a basketball coach who tells his team to use the same game plan again and again and again. It fails every time. Yet he says we must stick to his game plan anyway.

It makes no sense. We need a game changer. We need reduced class sizes for the students who struggle. We need bilingual teachers for English learners. We need experienced teachers but we are losing them. We need medical care for the students who never get a check-up. We need pre-K to help kids get a good start. We need after school programs and summer programs. We need healthy communities and healthy families and healthy children.

We need a national commitment to the well-being of all our children. Our children are our society’s future. We must treat them as our own.

Categories Duncan, Arne, NCLB (No Child Left Behind), Race to the Top

A UK View of PISA Results

By dianeravitch
December 4, 2013 //
32

The Policy Consortium in the UK  has a good overview of the British response to the PISA scores.

Each political party is pointing fingers at the other for the scores not being as high as they would wish.

The Conservatives say it is Labor’s fault.

The Labor party says it is the fault of the Conservatives.

But here are some good takeaways.

“… it is important to attract the most talented teachers to the most challenging classrooms and teacher shortage and disciplinary climate are inter-related.

Moreover, despite what Michael Gove asserts, a qualified teaching force is a key driver of quality and performance, the PISA data shows. Two findings are key here: first, the quality of a school (or college) cannot exceed the quality of its teachers. Second, principals of disadvantaged schools have difficulty attracting well qualified teachers, so students suffer doubly.

And more:

Much has been said in the media about the influx of migrant groups such as the Roma undermining provision for the indigenous population (all part of the attack on the EU by right-wing media). But, again, the PISA report shows this is first and foremost an issue of resources. “The concentration of immigrants in a school is not associated, in itself, with poor performance”, it says.

Nor is it a question of fairness. High-performing school systems tend to allocate resource more equitably across advantaged/ disadvantaged schools. Also, combining high performance with a high degree of equity is possible – it happens in some countries.

Another observation, with which all political parties would claim to be in tune, is that “schools with more autonomy over curricula and assessments tend to perform better when they are part of a school system with greater collaboration between principals and teachers”.

So, rather than sniping across the political garden fence, politicians should try to build a consensus around policy options that improve performance and equity. Four such actions which the PISA report clearly identifies are:

  • targeting low performance regardless of socio economic status
  • targeting disadvantaged pupils through additional resources or finance
  • improving the quality of teaching staff, focusing on time for teachers themselves to learn
  • including marginalised students in mainstream education

And here is another important finding:

From the outset, the need for a good start is clearly identified. For example, the report shows, one year of pre-school improves performance in maths by one year of schooling.

Better staff-student relations are associated with greater student engagement. “Too many students do not make the most of the learning opportunities available to them because they are not engaged with school and learning. Drive, motivation and confidence in oneself are essential if students are to fulfil their potential”.

Categories Education Reform, International, Testing

Helen Ladd: Our Schools Need Experienced Teachers

By dianeravitch
December 4, 2013 //
19

Helen F. Ladd is a distinguished professor of public policy and economics at Duke University.

In this article, which appeared in the News-Observer in North Carolina, Ladd explains why the schools need experienced teachers, not just a steady supply of novices who serve for two or three years, then leave.

She writes:

In an effort to keep educational costs in check, America’s cash-strapped states, local school districts and charter schools are hiring less-costly novice teachers. Some of the new hires are energetic college graduates supplied for two-year stints by programs such as Teach for America.

In the late 1980s, most of the nation’s teachers had considerable experience – only 17 percent had taught for five or fewer years. By 2008, however, about 28 percent had less than five years of experience. The proportions of novices in the classroom are particularly high in schools in underprivileged areas. Some observers applaud the rapid “greening” of the teaching force because they think that experienced teachers are not needed. But this view is short-sighted. Although a constant flow of new recruits is healthy, research shows that teacher experience matters in important ways:

Experienced teachers, on average, are more effective at raising student achievement. In research I have done with colleagues in North Carolina, experienced teachers greatly boost student achievement in elementary, middle and high schools alike. This pattern holds even after we adjust for the fact that experienced teachers are more likely to work in schools with more advantaged students.

She and her colleagues recently completed a study of teacher effectiveness in North Carolina among math teachers, and they found that:

…math teachers become increasingly effective at raising student test scores through about 15 years, at which point they are about twice as effective as novices with two years of experience. The productivity gains are less dramatic for middle school English teachers but follow the same trajectory.

Experienced teachers also strengthen education in numerous ways beyond improving test scores. Our research suggests that as North Carolina middle school teachers gain experience, they become increasingly adept at producing other important results, such as reducing student absences and encouraging students to read for recreational purposes outside of the classroom. More experienced teachers often mentor young teachers and help create and maintain a strong school community.

Also, as other research has shown, constant teacher turnover is disruptive for schools and harmful to students, especially in disadvantaged schools. All too often, inexperienced teachers are initially assigned to disadvantaged schools, where the challenges of maintaining order and effectively instructing students are very high.

TFA teachers may do a good job, but by year three, more than 80% are gone, and the schools must bear the cost of recruiting, training, and mentoring another crop of novice teachers. This constant churn of staff is not good for the school community.
The challenge for public schools is to retain and support teachers as they gain experience and grow more effective. For that, they need adequate salaries and good working conditions.

 

 
Categories North Carolina, Teach for America TFA, Teachers and Teaching
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