Archives for the month of: June, 2016
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Larry Cuban on the Hype of Blended Learning

By dianeravitch
June 18, 2016 //
17

Larry Cuban is a keen observer of the marketing of new technologies to schools. In this post, he looks at the common practice of claiming that the product being sold causes guaranteed success, I.e. a “proof point.” The salesmanship involved is akin to the advertisers’ claim that their product will cure all illnesses, calm your itch, make you beautiful, and fix your hearing.

Schools have long been targets of fast-talking salesmen, but now the snake oil is presented professionally as a miracle cure to raise test scores. In addition to the usual profit motive, there is today the entrepreneur’s devout faith in disruptive innovation. Heaven help the schools. When they come calling, slam the door and don’t let them put their foot in it.

Categories Blended Learning, Education Industry, Education Reform, For-Profit

Deborah Meier: The Value of Tenure and Seniority

By dianeravitch
June 18, 2016 //
25

Deborah Meier, founder of Central Park East in New York City and the Mission Hill school in Boston, explains the rationale for tenure and seniority from her perspective as a principal:

 

 

“Tenure and seniority are often attacked by people of good will. As a former principal of several schools, I embrace it. The culture of Central Park East and Mission Hill depended on both, even if there were occasions when I wished otherwise. I’m not alone, as a principal, in this view.

 

 

The kind of noncompetitive shared “ownership” over the school that the staff and faculty displayed over and over and over again rested in large measure on their not having to balance their personal self-interest and their devotion to the school. There is nothing evil in our desire to have a steady paycheck, to feel secure even if you irritate those in charge, and to want to be able to plan one’s life ahead. These are healthy qualities that human beings should not be ashamed of. As FDR once noted, “freedom from fear” is one of the basics that democracy rests on—–fear makes for bad practice of teaching and democracy.

 

 

My capacity to provide leadership where needed, and build a strong staff rested on the fact that there were some rules of the game we couldn’t change, and were not available to our temporary biases. I could be strong and as persuasive as I could be without fear of intimidating others to follow my lead, or silence even young and inexperienced staff from venturing forth with their opinions—as long as I did not have the power to wreak havoc on their lives—and cut off the lively ideas that might otherwise inconvenience me. Experience close to home reminds me that even tenured teachers can lose their jobs if they annoy the principal too much in settings where staff cohesion is weak. Only such “irritation” is sufficient to get many principals to take the trouble to “get rid” of a staff member—-and cause can always be dug up when the desire is strong enough.

 

 

Finally, it’s hard to believe that some wouldn’t be influenced by having to pay senior teachers so much more than first year teachers, thus creating a tendency to punish experienced teachers who have to constantly outperform newer and younger colleagues. If we want people to stay we need to offer them a good shot at making decent pay as they get older. Given that most newbies leave within the first 5 years—perhaps inevitable—it makes sense to pay them less as they learn the craft, and while they have fewer adult responsibilities. But once again, as with tenure, if decisions about pay are made by one’s principal there is a never-ending tendency to “please the boss”. When someone should not be teaching there should be peer reviews, with the principal being a part of the process, for weeding out those who, at the present time, do not seem ready to be teachers.

Categories Education Reform, Teacher Tenure, Teachers and Teaching

Bolivia to Bill Gates: You Can Keep Your Chickens!

By dianeravitch
June 18, 2016 //
54

Bill Gates recently advised poor people to raise chickens to improve their lives.

He had Africa in mind, but he also offered chickens to Bolivia.

The Bolivian government was offended by Gates’ offer. Bolivia raises millions of chickens and exports them to the world.

“How can he think we are living 500 years ago, in the middle of the jungle not knowing how to produce?” Bolivian Development Minister Cesar Cocarico told journalists. “Respectfully, he should stop talking about Bolivia.”

Wouldn’t it be great if public schools and superintendents could respond like that to Bill Gates? Something like this: “We are professional educators and we know what we are doing. Please don’t offer money to try out your experiments on our children. Please take your advice and your money elsewhere.”

Categories Education Reform, Gates Foundation, Bill Gates

Success Academy Students Finally Gain Admission to Elite High Schools

By dianeravitch
June 17, 2016 //
91

Six eighth grade students at Eva Moskowitz’s charter chain Success Academy passed the examination for New York City’s elite high schools. This is the first time that any student from Success Academy has passed the rigorous exam in the three years that she had students in this grade.

Moskowitz offered this information in a meeting with the New York Daily News editorial board.

Six students out of 54 Success Academy eighth-graders who took the Specialized High Schools Admissions Test were offered seats in 2016 at one of the elite high schools that rely on the test, like Stuyvesant, Brooklyn Tech or Bronx Science, Moskowitz said in a wide-ranging interview with the Daily News Editorial Board.

That’s up from zero kids who gained seats in 2014 and 2015.

The performance is below the city average acceptance rate of nearly 19%. However, all of the Success Academy kids who took the test and gained acceptance are black or Hispanic, making her acceptance rate of 11% about twice the citywide average for students of color. Only 4% of black students and 6% of Hispanic students who took the test got offers in 2016.

“It’s a rigorous test, and the kids have to prepare for it,” Moskowitz said. “Truth be told, our kids, most of them did not study for it. They took it cold.”

Students who pass the difficult test often practice for months, and there’s a cottage industry of prep firms that train kids specifically for the exam.

But Moskowitz said the Success Academy kids who got in did so without the drilling.

“I’m very proud of the fact that our kids are flexible thinkers,” Moskowitz said. “They have read a lot and done a lot of mathematics.”

Just under a quarter of Success Academy eighth-graders took the test, roughly the same as the city average for black and Hispanic kids.

Moskowitz says that the kids didn’t take any practice tests, didn’t drill, didn’t need any extra help to get ready.

She makes it sound easy because all of her students are “flexible thinkers” who have done a lot of reading and mathematics.

But if this is so, why did only six of 54 students who took the test pass it? Why not all 54? The 54 are “just under a quarter” of the charter chain’s eighth graders. Why didn’t all 220 or so take the test and pass it? Aren’t they all flexible thinkers who have done a lot of reading and mathematics? Shouldn’t they all be able to sit for the exam without any preparation?

Bear in mind that the 220 who finished eighth grade are about 40% of those who started, reflecting a 60% attrition rate. With their “grit” and the academic prowess learned at SA charters, why were only six students able to pass the exams?

Stanford economist Caroline Hoxby wrote a study in 2009 that was widely hailed by charter advocates, claiming that students in NYC charters nearly closed the “Scarsdale-Harlem” achievement gap. The implication was that attendance in a charter school for eight years would raise the achievement of all charter students, not just six of 220, or even six of 54.

Categories Charter Schools, Education Reform, Harlem Success Academy

George Joseph: How Trump’s Pal Carl Icahn Profits from His Charters

By dianeravitch
June 17, 2016 //
10

Presumptive Republican nominee has said that billionaire Carl Icahn is the kind of person he would pick as Secretary of the Treasury.

It seems there is a magnetic attraction between billionaires and charter schools.

Investigative journalist George Joseph took a closer look at Carl Icahn’s investment in charter schools:

Like Trump, Carl Icahn has also named a school after himself—seven charter schools in New York City to be exact (Icahn Charter School 1, Icahn Charter School 2, Icahn Charter School 3, etc.). And as with Trump University, the money trail suggests the organization running these schools may have served to enrich its billionaire founder, Icahn, at the expense of its own students. An AlterNet investigation finds that Carl Icahn appears to have treated his charity like a personal piggy bank, using it to make potentially tens of millions for himself while benefiting from tens of millions in tax deductions.

In 1997, Carl Icahn made a $100 million tax-deductible “contribution” to his public charity, the Foundation for a Greater Opportunity, scoring about a $45 million income tax reduction, according to an estimate by Gregg Polsky, a law professor at UNC. In January 2006, Icahn’s foundation suddenly sold back the stock gift to an Icahn corporation, Modal LLC. The $100 million gift in American Railcar Industries Inc. shares was conspicuously sold three days before the company was to go public, a process that often sparks a short-term hike in share value. The convenient date of the sale strongly suggests Icahn knew his limited liability corporation, rather than his educational charity, would make a killing off the public offering.

Isn’t it wonderful how some people, like Icahn, have figured out how to do good and make money at the same time?

Categories Billionaires, Charter Schools, Corporate Reform, Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, Education Reform, Privatization

Denis Ian on the True Cost of the Teacher Exodus: The End of Wisdom

By dianeravitch
June 17, 2016 //
22

Denis Ian is a reader of the blog.

 

He writes:

 

 

“There are simple reasons why teachers are fleeing the profession, college prep programs are drying up, and master teachers are rushing to retirement. This reform has gutted any attraction the profession ever held. But, as a master teacher, I see the destruction in different terms than just stark numbers.

 

“Teachers know how schools change over time. Serve a few decades and you’re not much bothered by the continuous, subtle adjustments from year to year. Schools are ever in a state of reform. They have to be.

 

“Way back when, the drug stuff had us all alarmed … and the beer stuff, too. That was everyday teen stuff leaking into our narrow world. We had run-ins with hygiene and sex and cigarettes. And, of course, drunk driving. Daring schools talked about daring stuff beyond classrooms … like alcohol and divorce … and physical abuse.

 

“Then there was AIDS. That was extra-delicate and owned a frantic immediacy. The right words were so hard to find. Lots of times, I felt like I was killing innocence. 

Other moments were colored by usual stuff. Usual for adults, trauma for kids. Big difference.

 

“Not many of us got much help from teacher-prep programs or post-grad classes. Not about those issues. There weren’t many best-sellers on the issues that seeped into our classrooms. No sexy titles like you might find today … like “ Beer and the Back Seat” … which would kill two sins at once. Or “I’ll Love You for All of Next Week” … which might seem cute, but is likely to be an overly graphic how-to manual for very young teens in this age of sexual over-kill. That’s the sad trend.

 

 

“Sexting is now a middle school sport. And cell phones are sex toys. Hazing never really goes away … it just morphs into some new ugliness. 

Today, schools are nimble emergency responders … making mighty efforts to cushion kids for any and all eventualities. Lots of schools have figured out how to deal with very different students with very different issues who weren’t part of the landscape even a few years ago. Not an easy feat when the student body itself is lost in the weeds of immaturity. Lots of adults become stumble-bumblers in such situations … and it’s often these kids who sort of tutor us big dopes.

 

 

“My point? Where does generation after generation of teachers get their wisdom for things like this? … and for other topics that seem invisible to outsiders?

 

“Who whispers to them?

 
Who makes the greenhorns less green and the naive less naive? Who gives the next generations their reality booster shot? … and gets them to understand the nuances of their craft? Who oracles them?

 

 

“Know who? The folks walking out that back door. And they’re leaving in droves. 

They’re walking away from the New Nonsense and the New Idiocy. They’re leaving because they have something the New Intruders have never possessed … integrity. And they won’t ever compromise that. And they won’t betray kids. Not ever.

 

 

“This sudden exodus isn’t just the usual changing of the guard. Nope. When this brigade of Old Souls … these Gray Heads … gather up their experiences and box their lives and leave for good … they’ll be packing up decades of wisdom that will no longer be at the ready for the newbies who are never, ever as ready as they think.

 

 

“The most important things learned about teaching happen in whispers, asides, or in simple observations. 

It happens in fable form and in funny-sincere recollections of long disappeared characters. And it could happen anywhere … at any time. In hallways. At a copy machine. Or the parking lot. In a stairwell or in an empty classroom … very late in the day … when the school goes silent save for the sounds of sloshy mops and things on squeaky wheels. 

And now those splendid souls …the Wisdomers … they’re leaving. Vanishing.

 

 

“And in their moving vans are the moving stories young teachers need to know … because those stories are informal survival guides. They’re reference material for soothing young souls and spackling torn hearts. What’s in those boxes are manuals for curing failure and repairing kids who’ve had a bottom-bounce. Those are medicine boxes with un-named elixirs for hurts of all sorts. And all of this magic is flying out the back door of schools.

 

 

“Those master teachers are the antidote for this sick reform. But they’ll be gone when their wisdom is most needed.

 

 

“Someday … not sure when, but someday … we’ll come to our senses. We’ll have a national mea culpa. And we’ll get our educational priorities back in common sense rhythms. But it’s not going to be easy at all. It’s gonna be hard stuff.

 

 

“All of the wisdom whispers will have disappeared. And “starting from scratch” won’t be a cliche any more. It’ll be a reality. A bad reality.

 

 

“Wish us luck. We’re gonna need it.

 

 

“Denis Ian”

Categories Education Reform, Teachers and Teaching

Jeff Bryant: Denver as the Latest “Reform” Lie

By dianeravitch
June 17, 2016 //
21

Jeff Bryant writes here about Denver, which has recently been heralded as the new model of corporate reform

Not so fast, he writes.

Across the city, Denver has opened 27 charter schools in the last five years, and plans to start up six more in the 2016-17 school year – effectively doubling the number of charter schools in the city in less than six years, according to a recent report from the Center for Popular Democracy, a left-leaning research and advocacy organization in Washington, DC. Yet this rush to expand charters is hardly justified by the performance of the ones already in operation.

According to CPD, based on the school performance framework Denver uses to evaluate its own schools, “Forty percent of Denver charter schools are performing below expectations.” And of those schools, 38 percent are performing significantly below expectations.

Nevertheless, numerous articles and reports in mainstream media outlets and education policy sites enthusiastically tout Denver as the place to see the next important new “reform” in education policy in action.

People in live in Denver and send their children to public schools see a different narrative from that of the reformers:

Instead of a glowing example, they point to warning signs. Rather than a narrative of success, their stories reveal disturbing truths about Denver’s version of modern urban school reform – how policy direction is often controlled by big money and insiders, why glowing promises of “improvement” should be regarded with skepticism, and what the movement’s real impacts are, especially in communities dominated by poor families of color.

The conflicts of interest abound and no one seems to care:

As the Colorado Independent reports, two members of the controlling school board majority in 2013, Barbara O’Brien and Landri Taylor, headed up organizations that contracted directly with the city school district. The two consistently voted with attorney Mike Johnson, whose law firm earned $3.8 million from the district during his tenure on an advisory committee before stepping up to the board.

Taylor, who was appointed to the board in 2013 and had the advantage of running as an incumbent in 2015, was well known as a key backer of opening new charter schools. After winning the election in 2015, he abruptly resigned earlier this year for family reasons.

To replace Taylor, the board picked MiDian Holmes who, according to Chalkbeat Colorado, is “an active member in the school reform advocacy group Stand for Children,” a pro-charter organization that has made large donations to school board candidates running on a pro-reform platform. (Holmes eventually resigned when background checks revealed she is a convicted child abuser, and the board seat is, at this date, vacant.)

Is this is reform, what does corruption look like?

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Denver, Education Industry, Privatization

Researcher: VAMS Are NEVER Accurate, Reliable, or Valid”

By dianeravitch
June 17, 2016 //
36

Audrey Amrein-Beardsley reports here on new research by Steven Klees of the University of Maryland, which concludes that the contribution of individual teachers to student learning cannot be isolated or quantified as “value-added modeling” claims to do.

Accumulating evidence continues to demonstrate that the teacher evaluation systems imposed by Arne Duncan in the Race to the Top is invalid, inaccurate and unreliable. How many teachers and principals have been fired because of these flawed metrics?

http://vamboozled.com/vams-are-never-accurate-reliable-and-valid/

Open the article for her many links.

She writes:

The Educational Researcher (ER) journal is the highly esteemed, flagship journal of the American Educational Research Association. It may sound familiar in that what I view to be many of the best research articles published about value-added models (VAMs) were published in ER (see my full reading list on this topic here), but as more specific to this post, the recent “AERA Statement on Use of Value-Added Models (VAM) for the Evaluation of Educators and Educator Preparation Programs” was also published in this journal (see also a prior post about this position statement here).

After this position statement was published, however, many critiqued AERA and the authors of this piece for going too easy on VAMs, as well as VAM proponents and users, and for not taking a firmer stance against VAMs given the current research. The lightest of the critiques, for example, as authored by Brookings Institution affiliate Michael Hansen and University of Washington Bothell’s Dan Goldhaber was highlighted here, after which Boston College’s Dr. Henry Braun responded also here. Some even believed this response to also be too, let’s say, collegial or symbiotic.

Just this month, however, ER released a critique of this same position statement, as authored by Steven Klees, a Professor at the University of Maryland. Klees wrote, essentially, that the AERA Statement “only alludes to the principal problem with [VAMs]…misspecification.” To isolate the contributions of teachers to student learning is not only “very difficult,” but “it is impossible—even if all the technical requirements in the [AERA] Statement [see here] are met.”

Rather, Klees wrote, “[f]or proper specification of any form of regression analysis…All confounding variables must be in the equation, all must be measured correctly, and the correct functional form must be used. As the 40-year literature on input-output functions that use student test scores as the dependent variable make clear, we never even come close to meeting these conditions…[Hence, simply] adding relevant variables to the model, changing how you measure them, or using alternative functional forms will always yield significant differences in the rank ordering of teachers’…contributions.”

Therefore, Klees argues “that with any VAM process that made its data available to competent researchers, those researchers would find that reasonable alternative specifications would yield major differences in rank ordering. Misclassification is not simply a ‘significant risk’— major misclassification is rampant and inherent in the use of VAM.”

Klees concludes: “The bottom line is that regardless of technical sophistication, the use of VAM is never [and, perhaps never will be] ‘accurate, reliable, and valid’ and will never yield ‘rigorously supported inferences” as expected and desired.

Categories Accountability, Education Reform, Teacher Evaluations

John Thompson: Two Years in a KIPP Blue Ribbon School

By dianeravitch
June 17, 2016 //
17

John Thompson, teacher and historian, writes here about KIPP in Oklahoma City. Will Oklahoma City surrender its public school to corporate charter chains?

Thompson writes:

A deeply emotional battle has erupted in Oklahoma City after its KIPP Reach Middle School attempted to take over the Martin Luther King Elementary School building, while promising to serve the entire neighborhood. OKC’s KIPP has no experience with pre-school through 4th grade instruction, but it promised to send its school leaders to Success Academy for guidance!?!? The charter not only has a much lower percentage of low-income students than OKC’s neighborhood middle schools, (76% vs 90+%) but it serves about 40% as many special education students as MLK. It co-locates with Moon Elementary where 21% of the students are homeless, and it would take over MLK where 17.2% are homeless. Only 1% of KIPP’s students are homeless.

After 15 years, KIPP has not been able to expand its student population beyond 300, but it now wants to quadruple its student body to 1200. It cites its 2012 Blue Ribbon School award as evidence that the No Excuses middle school could become a neighborhood pre-k to 8th grade school without pushing out excessive numbers of high-challenge students. Ironically, KIPP’s Blue Ribbon School application offers an overwhelming case against their attempt to take over an entire feed group.

2014-2015 STATISTICAL PROFILE 1-28-16 (2).pdf

Click to access 2011-2012%20STATISTICAL%20PROFILE%20pdf.pdf

Click to access ok2-kipp-reach-college-preparatory-school.pdf

In August, 2010, 285 students enrolled in KIPP. In October, 81% of its students were low-income, and 11.6% were on special education IEPs. By the spring, however, only 226 remained to be tested, which represented the loss of 1/5th of the students. Ten students, or 10% of the tested students, were alternatively assessed, meaning that they were on special education IEPs. So, at first glance, KIPP’s claim to accept the “same” students would seem to be an exaggeration, but it could not be seen as irrational. But, what did the other grades look like?

By 8th grade in 2011, however only 32 students were tested, and only 22 of them were eligible for free and reduced lunch! Only three special education students remained to be tested. And this was not an unusual year. The Blue Ribbon application provides data for 2006 through 2011, and it reveals a clear pattern. During those years, on average of nine 5th graders were on IEPs. By 8th grade the average number of tested IEP students was 1.4%! From FY2007 to FY2011, KIPP did not report a single 7th or 8th grade student on an IEP who passed an end-of-the-year math or reading test.

The next year, however, this attrition story got even worse. Using data from the Office of Civil Rights on FY 2011-2012, the Center for Civil Rights Remedies’ “Charter Schools, Civil Rights, and School Discipline” listed OKC’s KIPP as the charter school with the nation’s 3rd highest percentage of black suspensions. KIPP now claims that it made a reporting error, and that it actually suspended 45%, not 71% of its black students. However, KIPP has not questioned the OCR’s report that 100% of KIPP’s special education students were suspended that year (for a 126% suspension rate), as six of that small cohort was expelled; half of the students who were arrested were on IEPs.

Charter Schools, Civil Rights and School Discipline: A Comprehensive Review — The Civil Rights Project at UCLA

http://ocrdata.ed.gov/Page?t=s&eid=246435&syk=6&pid=2000

By the way, there is an interesting epilogue to those two years. In 2012, KIPP’s normative attrition rate of 15% to 18% rose to 26%. Given the secrecy of KIPP’s effort to expand dramatically and to participate in a mass charterization campaign in Oklahoma City, the chronology is confusing, but at some point KIPP set a goal of reducing its black suspension rate to 25%. So, it doesn’t seem to be a coincidence that KIPP changed from a school which typically had a low-income rate exceeding 80%, which reported that 9% to 13% of incoming students were on IEPs, to one that starts the year as a 70% to 77% low-income school where as few as 5.6% of students are on IEPs. I guess that KIPP decided that if it couldn’t be so free to push out higher-challenge students that it should avoid enrolling them at the beginning.

Click to access KIPP_2015_ReportCard_KIPP_Reach_College_Preparatory.pdf

Categories Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Democracy, Education Industry, Oklahoma, Privatization

Joanne Yatvin: If I Were Queen of Schools

By dianeravitch
June 16, 2016 //
49

Joanne Yatvin is a former teacher, principal, and superintendent who is now retired.

Having complained long and loud about the misguided school reform schemes that have dominated public education over the past several years, I think it’s time for me to step up and offer my own ideas for making schools work. Be warned that my proposals are not only unorthodox, but also teacher-biased, and cheap. Well, at least cheaper than the test-drenched practices now in place.

My version of school reform is based on two premises: (1) poverty and its accoutrements are the major causes of students’ poor academic performance (2) the principals and teachers who live their professional lives in schools are the ones best qualified to make decisions for schools and to implement them.

Convert schools in high poverty areas to full-time community centers.

By moving as many community services as possible into school buildings and making them available in the evenings and on weekends, schools could provide social supports to poor families more efficiently and economically and also add recreational and self-improvement activities now in short supply.

In restructuring school building use, the only adjustment to the daytime programs would be the addition of basic health and dental care for students. During evening and weekend hours, however, libraries, gyms, meeting rooms and computer labs would be open, offering a variety of activities for adults and young people. In addition, inexpensive and nutritious evening meals could be offered in the school lunchroom.

Turn over the management of high-poverty schools to professional educators.

We need to lure the best principals and teachers into low performing schools by offering them incentives of autonomy, professional advancement, and higher salaries. Under the leadership of a dynamic principal, chosen by the school staff and parents, schools would be empowered to create their own structures, including a principal’s cabinet and grade level instructional teams. Within each team, roles and salaries would be differentiated according to teachers’ expertise, and willingness to take on additional responsibilities.

Evaluate teachers on their own performance, not those of students

Although principals’ views of teachers’ competence are not perfect, having a wise and alert administrator observing what teachers do to help students learn is the only rational way to evaluate them. Not only formal observations should count, but also classroom drop-ins, finding a teacher in the library helping some kids with research, noticing how often a teacher volunteers to do something extra for the school, seeing a teacher eating lunch at her desk while she reads student essays, an teacher leadership among colleagues.

Offer early retirement to burned-out teachers and incentives for ineffective younger teachers to resign or transfer to non-teaching positions.

At present, removing an unsuccessful teacher in any school district is a long, unpleasant and expensive process. But the problem is not teacher tenure. It is the lack of evidence of failure that makes attempting to remove a teacher look arbitrary or vengeful. The first step to improve the situation is to insure systematic evaluations of teachers with prompt feedback and offers of assistance. Ultimately, all teachers marked for dismissal should be provided with counseling, a dignified resignation process, and some incentives.

Cut reliance on commercial educational materials for students while increasing teachers’ professional development opportunities

Rather than depending on slick commercial programs and their disposable materials (i.e. workbooks), schools would do better to invest in high quality literature, technology, and reference books for students and professional books and university courses for teachers.

Increase the size and power of the school library and make the librarian a key figure in the education of students

Every school needs a full-time professional librarian/technologyst along with an aide so that the library is open full time during the school day and perhaps for a while after school closes. Not only should every class have a regular weekly library time, but also times when teachers can sign up to send small groups for specific assistance in finding and using library materials. School librarians should also meet with teacher teams to plan units to be taught and make sure that the materials students need are available. To make these things happen fully funding a school library should be a high priority for the principal and the school district.

Provide poor children with the background knowledge and support they may have missed at home and in their community.

What makes school difficult for most poor children is not their lack of ability but their meagerness of social, cultural and literary experiences. What many have missed out on is being read to, having substantive conversations with adults, visiting museums, parks, forests, and beaches, and being members of an educated community. To learn academic content and skills successfully, poor children need a school environment that is not only welcoming and supportive, but also rich in books, hands-on activities, cooperative learning, and exposure to the world outside their home community. Every high poverty school should receive additional funding for student field trips and in-school music and drama performances.

Reduce the number of standardized tests and the time devoted to test preparation

Not only do standardized tests now dominate schools’ curricula and classroom teaching time, they are extremely expensive and of little value beyond informing local districts and state officials about schools’ average test scores. Within our schools today tested subjects crowd out other subjects, and test preparation becomes almost a subject in itself. In addition, tests influence teaching style in general making it shallow and formulaic to fit the limitations of a multiple choice testing format. Both students and schools would be better served if standardized tests were given only every four years and classroom teachers were allowed to use their own methods and judgment to determine the extent and quality of each student’s learning.

Make every school a place where students want to be

In the recent studies of test scores from school to school and district to district, researchers cite student absenteeism and indifference to learning as some of the causes of low scores and stagnation in student progress. If instead of advocating for better teaching and more rigorous students expectations, schools concentrated on providing classes and assignments that appealed to students’ interests and also gave all students opportunities to make decisions and play important roles in school operations we would see better performance from everyone.
Although I could add a few more change proposals to my list, I believe that those above are the basics. Through my experience as a teacher and a principal I learned a lot about what helps teachers to teach well, children to learn, and schools to be the healthy, happy places I have known and the even better ones I still dream of.

Categories Education Reform, Librarians, Real Education, Teachers and Teaching, Testing
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