Bill Phillis, founder of the Ohio Coalition for Equity and Adequacy of School Funding, reports on a new study that undercuts the rationale for state takeovers.
He writes:
Research study: Students learn no less in poor, urban schools than other schools
OSU Professor of Sociology, Dr. Douglas Downey, lead author of a recent study , found that students in urban districts with high concentrations of disadvantaged students learn as much during the school year as those in wealthier districts. Disadvantaged students, of course, start school at a lower level of development, but according to the research study, disadvantaged students don’t lose ground while in school.
This research (and common sense) helps dispel the myth that districts serving high concentrations of disadvantaged students are “failing” just because of low test scores.
This study should inform state officials who are bent on state takeover of school districts (HB 70.) Because a school district has low test scores is not justification for state takeover. (Besides Ohio’s takeover of Youngstown and Lorain have not improved the districts.)
If state officials want the state to takeover some school districts, all districts should be in the pool of candidates for takeover, not just those that serve high concentrations of disadvantaged students.
Ditch HB 70. Just do it.
The Distribution of School Quality: Do Schools Serving Mostly White and High-SES Children Produce the Most Learning?
First Published August 23, 2019 Research Article https://doi.org/10.1177/0038040719870683
Abstract
What is schools’ role in the stratification system? One view is that schools are an important mechanism for perpetuating inequality because children from advantaged backgrounds (white and high socioeconomic) enjoy better school learning environments than their disadvantaged peers. But it is difficult to know this with confidence because children’s development is a product of both school and nonschool factors, making it a challenge to isolate school’s role. A novel approach for isolating school effects is to estimate the difference in learning when school is in versus out, what is called impact. Scholars employing this strategy have come to a remarkable conclusion—that schools serving disadvantaged children produce as much learning as those serving advantaged children. The empirical basis for this position is modest, however, and so we address several shortcomings of the previous research by analyzing a nationally representative sample of about 3,500 children in 270 schools from the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study–Kindergarten Cohort of 2011. With more comprehensive data and better scales, we also find no difference in impact on reading scores across schools serving poor or black children versus those serving nonpoor or white children. These patterns challenge the view that differences in school quality play an important role shaping achievement gaps and prompt us to reconsider theoretical positions regarding schools and inequality.
William L. Phillis | Ohio Coalition for Equity & Adequacy of School Funding | 614.228.6540| ohioeanda@sbcglobal.net| www.ohiocoalition.org
Diane Ravitch's blog 
This is interesting research that appears to be indicating why privatization is not getting the superior results it claimed it could get. Once again, this is not surprise to anyone that taught poor, minority students. If we think of learning as a 50 yard dash, poor students are not starting at the same point that middle class students are. They are running from significantly behind the starting point of the race. At the end of the race, they will still be behind even though they ran as fast as the middle class students. Poor students are gaining a significant “impact” in learning, but they are starting from a disadvantageous point, and they remain behind. This is one reason why the academic GAP is difficult to reduce.
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Imagine two kids.
One’s Saturday looks like this: Dad makes pancakes, and over breakfast, Mom and Dad discuss what’s happening at Mom’s job. “What’s a merger?” asks little Andrea, and Mom explains that it’s when two companies come together to make one. “You know how Mr. Landsford married Ms. Liu, and they each had two kids and now have four kids? It’s like that. Then the family packs off to the Science museum to look at the Tyrannosaur bones and the new AI exhibit, and all day long, the parts hold CONVERSATIONS with their kid.
The other’s Saturday looks like this: Mom and her boyfriend sleep late because they were getting high last night with some friends. The boyfriend gets up and stumbles through the trailer to the kitchen and yells, “Where the F’s the cereal?” He’s mad because the kid ate it for dinner the night before, and there’s none left. This wakes Mom, and she and the boyfriend have a fight, and there’s a lot of screaming and yelling, and the only verbal interaction between the “adults” and the kid is that one of them tells her to “Shut the F up.” The kid leaves and heads out behind the Trailer Park where there’s always interesting stuff left by the bums and drug addicts who sleep there.
Young children experience a critical period in their lives when they acquire vocabulary and new syntax at incredibly rapid rates. By the time a kid is six years old, under normal circumstances, he or she has acquired, unconsciously and automatically, and incredibly complex grammar of a language–one so complex that spelling it explicitly out requires VOLUMES. All this automatic, unconscious language learning lays a foundation for later learning. But some kids grow up in ambient linguistic environments in which they don’t hold CONVERSATIONS with adults, and they don’t have interesting, novel experiences involving lots and lots of new, semantically related vocabulary.
Now, suppose that an elementary school wanted to compensate for the early spoken linguistic deficit with a program designed to introduce, systematically, in spoken language, complex syntactic forms and domain-related vocabulary. THEY WOULDN’T FIND ANY SUCH PROGRAM IN EXISTENCE because such things are treated in the puerile Gates/Coleman “standards” bullet list, and they wouldn’t be able to create one for the same reason. Such a program would deviate from the script.
There are two great lessons in the study cited in this post: a) kids bring different experiences to the ballgame, and b) they are on different developmental schedules because of that. And, so, any sort of one-size-fits-all evaluation system of the kind that has been forced down the throats of teachers and schools by the Education Deformers will serve only TO LOCK IN AND PERPETUATE unequal status via the Pygmalion/Rosenthal Effect.
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Now, imagine that those two children had been switched in the cradle.
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Lots of middle class and wealthy people have no idea of the amount of stress and lack of opportunity poor students face.
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Exactly. No freaking clue.
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It’s not quite fair with those two scenarios, Bob. Try this one. It’s FAR more common in my high poverty school.
Saturday morning, mom sleeps in because she’s working three jobs just to keep a roof over the family’s head, and she got off her last job at 4 am. She will be heading back to work another job at 1 pm. She really wants to take her kids to a museum, but even if she had the time, she couldn’t afford it, because the museum costs $10 a person. Transportation is hard to come by, because her city has terrible public transportation. She works with her children on their homework, but she has precious little time and may not understand what the new curriculum is demanding. There is a computer in the home, but no money to pay for internet. She cooks for her children when she can, but she’s often not home, so the children cook and clean and look after each other. After school tutoring and other programs can’t help her older children, because they have to pick up their younger brothers and sisters after school and get them home.
Be careful to label those in poverty as all drug-addled idiots, Bob. Some of my students come from homes like that, but not most of them. The parents are trying, but our “modern” economy doesn’t give them what they need to survive.
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This is brilliantly, beautifully said. I did not, emphatically did not, mean to suggest that the second child’s situation was representative of a general condition. I meant only to illustrate one situation, one kid, and why she might not have the development, going into school, of the other. I agree with you completely. And thank you, thank you very, very much, for ensuring that that description was not taken as a general characterization.
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Again, thank you, Threatened.
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You make such an important point, Threatened.
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The fact is that the poor in the United States overwhelmingly care about their kids and work hard every day just trying to hold things together. But their struggles take an enormous toll on what they can offer their kids in terms of experiences, time, proper nutrition, proper medical care, and so on. I emphatically did not mean to suggest otherwise or to blame the poor. I actually described, in those scenarios above, two kids very like ones I’ve encountered recently. My point was to explain how vastly different what kids bring to school with them can be and how one set of experiences can put a kid very, very far behind, making one-size-fits-all evaluation systems absurd, prima facie.
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My pleasure, Bob. I just wanted to make sure that others realized what you meant. I know that you didn’t mean that your scenario represented all, but not everyone on here realizes that.
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and way too often what they know culturally is simply ignored
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Yes!!!
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The beatings of the poor will continue until morale improves
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This is a very long article about the state takeover of schools in Gary, IN, a poor area not far from where I live. Kids are tested every three weeks to learn the state standards. A emergency manager was hired. The state gave MGT Consulting Group, based in Tallahassee, Fla., a $6.2 million contract to serve as Gary’s emergency manager. Hinckley has a team of 12-15 people working on the emergency management. More than 80 percent of Gary students failed both parts of the 2017 ISTEP exam.
Today, teachers follow the 8-Step Continuous Improvement Process. It combines student data, regular assessments, and remediation.
A 2012 law made this state takeover possible. A separate 2017 law, Senate Bill 567, was directed at Gary and a lesser intervention for another troubled district, Muncie Community Schools.
The two laws gave Hinckley as the emergency manager, absolute power over the district. That means, the Gary superintendent and elected school trustees are reduced to advisors. 28 schools have been abandoned.
I personally spoke with a teacher who worked in Gary a few years back. He had not had a salary increase for 8 years.
Indiana is BIG into state takeovers to solve all the problems and of course, repeated testing on state standards will make all of these children happy to work harder and perform better. There was no URL for this article.
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Can Gary Schools Be Saved By A State Takeover?
By Eric Weddle, IPB News | Published on February 16, 2018
The Gary Community Schools Corporation faces massive debt and academic failures. In a last-ditch attempt to save the schools, state lawmakers took the extreme option last year to take it over by using laws that transferred financial and academic control to a state-hired emergency manager.
It was a controversial move that lawmakers hoped would give Gary Schools a second chance even as decades of decline in population and industry continue to drag down the district’s enrollment and state funding.
But there’s little evidence to say whether this method can save a school corporation on the brink. Other urban districts in similar situations have struggled under intervention for years with varied results.
More than 10,000 students have fled the district in the past decade for charter schools or nearby city schools. Today enrollment has fallen to around 4,700 K-12 students.
The person expected to fix it all is Lake County-native Peggy Hinckley, the emergency manager. To save the corporation — she must reinvent the district by consolidating schools, reshaping academic programs and attracting new students. It’s more than finding savings….
Improving academics is a key priority, Hinckley says. More than 80 percent of Gary students failed both parts of the 2017 ISTEP exam. This week state education officials alleged cheating by staff took place on those tests at one school….
By the end of February, Gary Schools Corp. will be $115 million in debt. It owes the IRS $7.1 million, not including fees and interest, for skipping on paying payroll taxes in 2013. It owes more than $2 million to utility companies, including $1 million to gas company NIPSCO.
The state gave MGT Consulting Group, based in Tallahassee, Fla., a $6.2 million contract to serve as Gary’s emergency manager. Hinckley has a team of 12-15 people working on the emergency management. The contract calls for Hinckley to make compelling improvements in the classroom and the accounting books. Financial incentives worth nearly $1.5 million are available if she meets fiscal and academic benchmarks….a visual and performing arts academy that could be closed as part of Hinckley’s cost reduction plan….
More than 500 students left the district in the wake of the takeover last year, and more than 60 percent of K-12 students who live in Gary have chosen to attend a charter school or nearby city school instead of the district….
“Then the copy machine broke down. So we had teachers going out, paying for copies, buying copy machines for the classrooms,” McKinley says.
One of Hinckley’s first actions was to spend around $1.2 million in federal Title 1 funds on new books for the entire district…
Today, teachers follow the 8-Step Continuous Improvement Process. It combines student data, regular assessments, and remediation. It’s not uncommon to use these methods — but it’s never been done in Gary.
Hinckley used the process when she was superintendent at Warren Township in Indianapolis. The program led to academic gains and national recognition.
At Gary she’s introduced curriculum maps, similar to pacing guides, to ensure students are learning the state standards. Students are assessed every week three weeks to gauge if they are learning on pace or need extra help. The students who are falling behind get extra attention.
“So it’s the idea of — you kind of scoop them up every three weeks provide some remediation and then help them,” Hinckley says.
Two elementary schools also offer extended days in an attempt to shift the chronic academic failures there. Last year, less than 3 percent of students at Beveridge and 13 percent of students at Jacques Marquette passed both parts of the ISTEP exam.
“So it’s the idea of — you kind of scoop them up every three weeks provide some remediation and then help them,” Hinckley says
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In my opinion, this is a pile of hogwash. Gary needs money and children need teachers and supplies. Why spend $6.2 million on emergency management when that money could be used to help the district? Indiana depends upon local taxes. This idea works in wealthy districts, but not poor ones.
Repeated testing, every three weeks, on the state standards will kill any love of learning that might have been accomplished by having small class sizes and certified teachers.
A few years back, some students at a school in Gary had had enough of being in a school where the boiler didn’t work. There was water on the floor in some hallways and the drinking faucets had been turned off. Mold was growing in the band room. Kids were wearing their coats in the classrooms. One day, they went outside in the snow to protest. They were covered by a local paper and eventually the state provided the money to purchase a new boiler.
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This is off topic but Big Brother is watching from China over Hong Kong students who protest. This report is coming from Hong Kong.
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Hong Kong schools told to report number of masked students
Oct. 7, 2019
High schools in Hong Kong have been asked to report to the government how many students boycott classes or wear a mask to school on Tuesday, following a long weekend of anti-government protests.
Monday was a public holiday in the city. Tuesday would mark the return to school after three days of citywide protests, during which people wore masks to show their anger towards a new anti-mask law.
Many secondary school students have been active participants of Hong Kong’s ongoing civil unrest. They have marched on the streets, formed human chains advocating for democracy, and sometimes, engaged in violent clashes with police.
Two school principals told the South China Morning Post that the Education Bureau had sent a message on Sunday telling them to report the number of students who boycott classes, wear a mask to school, and whether students are staging any non-cooperation movements…
https://inks.tn/i8n9?utm_source=email&utm_medium=share&utm_campaign=share_button
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