Responding to a post of the same name by Larry Lee of Alabama, SomeDam Poet writes:
“The stories that data never tell”
The stories that data never tell
Are known to the teachers very well
The pride in art
The joy of song
A brand new start
In something long
The growth that’s gauged
By smiles and laughs
And not encaged
By tests and graphs
Politico Morning Education reports that the U.S. Department of Education finds that an extraordinary proportion of black and Hispanic students are enrolled in high-poverty schools. The combination of racial segregation and poverty is a clear indicator of high risk for students. They will not have the benefits of peer effects which comes from economically and racially diverse schools. Nor are they likely to have the small classes, rich curriculum, and extra resources they need.
“MINORITY KIDS CLUSTERED IN HIGH-POVERTY SCHOOLS: Nearly half of black and Hispanic public school students attended high-poverty schools during the 2014-15 school year, compared to 8 percent of white students. That’s according to the 43rd “Condition of Education” report, out today and produced by the National Center for Education Statistics, which is part of the Education Department’s Institute of Education Sciences. Traditional public schools that are considered high-poverty — defined as having more than three quarters of their students qualify for free- and reduced-price lunch — made up 24 percent of all schools. In that same year, 36 percent of charter schools were considered high-poverty. About 2.5 million students were reported homeless during the 2014-15 school year, with the largest numbers of homeless students enrolled in schools located in cities and suburbs.”
This is a danger signal for our schools but for our society.
Rob Barnett teaches mathematics in a D.C. public high school.
He is faced every year with a dilemma. Does he pass or fail the student who is not ready, who has not mastered the course?
He notes that D.C.’s graduation rate has soared, yet its NAEP scores are virtually unchanged since 2005. Its PARCC scores are even worse.
NCLB and Race to the Top pressured teachers like him to get the graduation rate, at any cost. If you can’t succeed, give the appearance of success.
He has an idea for a very different way to design schooling: Mastery learning.
Why should a student have to retake and pass an entire year when there are parts of the course he understood and parts he did not?
What do you think?
Christian school @BetsyDeVosED is visiting in her #trumpbudget ad doesn't accept special education students… twitter.com/i/web/status/8…—
Jennifer Berkshire (@BisforBerkshire) May 23, 2017
If you are a BadAss Teacher, or if you want to be one, or if you want to learn about their activities, you will not want their fourth annual conference in Seattle this summer.
BATs will be heading into summer with their 4th Annual Education Conference in Seattle, Washington at The Seattle Labor Temple.
Titled Back to School With BATs the conference, to be held on 7/22, will focus on Whole Child Education and cultural diversity.
How can we meet the social/emotional/cultural needs of our children?
The 7/23 event at Westlake Park will have participants engage in a powerful restorative justice circle!
#WeChoose public education, not the illusion of choice.
Keynotes for the event will be Dr. Wayne Au and Dr. Denisha Jones.
For event information and registration please go here: https://sites.google.com/view/backtoschoolwithbats/home
To learn more about the BATs”
Twitter @BadassTeachersA #TBATs
Facebook https://www.facebook.com/groups/BadAssTeachers/
Instagram @badassteachersa
Pinterest https://www.pinterest.com/nationalbats/
BAT Blog http://badassteachers.blogspot.com/
Bruce Baker at Rutgers University created a valuable graph that shows the relationship between every states’ number of charter schools and its fiscal effort.
Some states appear to think that opening charters relieves them of their responsibility to fund public schools. They choose to “reform” by handing schools off to private entrepreneurs, thus relieving the state of the duty to provide adequate and equitable funding.
Education Week is a paradox. On one hand, it has many excellent reporters who check facts and write lucidly without partisanship. On the other, the corporate entity has become a selling platform for technology and charter schools.
I used to blog regularly at EdWeek, in a column called “Bridging Differences,” with Deborah Meier. No one ever changed what I wrote. I know that editorial independence is central to a journal’s integrity.
But since I departed (and even before), Education Week needed advertising from the industry on which it was reporting, and it began to turn into a platform for the industry. EdWeek also receives funding from the Gates Foundation and the Walton Foundation, each of which has its own agenda.
And so I regularly open my email box to find advertisements from EdWeek for tech products, webinars, seminars, panels, events, etc.
The latest was a solicitation for a webinar about “Mastering the Charter School Market.” Part of the pitch was that charters would capture 20-40% of the “market” by 2035.
Where did they get that figure? I thought about it. Then I discovered the source: The projection was made by Bellwether Partners, a consulting firm founded by reformer Andrew Rotherham, a leader in the charter school movement who represents charter corporations and advocates. This 2015 report (slide 60) says that the charter schools will have 22-38% of the “market” by 2035. That assumes that the numerous scandals associated with deregulation and the resistance of parents and educators to privatization have not slowed the movement long before then.
I am posting this after the event, because this is not an advertisement but rather a post expressing my concern about Edweek’s descent into marketing for the edBiz, whether it is technology or charters.
The registration form can be found here.
Rita Moore, a pro-public education advocate, won a hotly contested seat on the Portland, Oregon, school board. Her son attended Portland public schools, and she has long been involved in support of public education. She holds a Ph.D. in political science.
She ran against a candidate who was principal of a KIPP school in Houston and worked also for TFA. See here.
In her response to a survey of candidates, she expressed her views about the importance of public education.
What is your stance on the movement to privatize education?
I am fundamentally opposed to efforts to privatize education. Free public education is America’s gift to the world. It has been the foundation of our society, the bedrock of our democracy, and the engine of economic growth, producing the American dream and making the US the capital of innovation.
Privatizing education is not good for students or this city. I am completely opposed to it, as is the vast majority of voters and residents of Portland. Public education is a door that all kids have the right to walk through and which we as a society have the obligation to fully fund.
Congratulations, Rita Moore!
John Thompson, historian and teacher, submitted this article:
The Oklahoma City Public Schools is being clobbered by state budget cuts that could approach $50 million over two years. Anyone who doubts that money matters should take note of the collapse in morale as exhausted educators flee even faster from the school system and, often, the profession.
I remain a loyal supporter of President Obama, but we can’t forget that when his administration gave the OKCPS around $50 million, most of it had punitive strings attached. The regulations that accompanied Obama’s School Improvement Grants (SIG) made it virtually inevitable that its $5 million per school grants, and the energies of educators, would mostly be wasted. The predictable result was an increase in teacher turnover, educators who are even more inexperienced and beaten down, and legislators who are even less likely to fund urban schools.
I understand why President Obama felt obligated to promote teacher-bashing policies as a part of a “carrot and stick” approach to school improvement. It hurts to ask but, gosh, what if we could have spent the additional $50 million in ways that made sense?
Oklahoma City’s SIG efforts failed, but they did so across the nation. Even the corporate reform true believer Matt Barnum acknowledges, “Past research on federal turnaround programs have shown positive effects in California and Massachusetts, mixed or no effects in North Carolina, Tennessee and Michigan, and negative results in Texas.” But, he grasps at straws citing the 3rd year of California SIG, which seems to be an exception because its “gains in student learning likely stemmed from improvements in the professional opportunities for teachers.” Barnum then claims, illogically, that a study of the Ohio SIG gives evidence that the federal program “produced notable gains.”
https://www.brookings.edu/research/continued-support-for-improving-the-lowest-performing-schools/
Actually, the authors, Deven Carlson, Stéphane Lavertu, Jill Lindsey, and Sunny L. Munn conclude:
Overall, the study provides convincing evidence that interventions such as the SIG turnaround
models have the potential to improve school quality very quickly, which is consistent with the
theory underlying school turnaround reforms as well as research in other contexts. We also find,
however, that initial positive impacts dissipated after the first 2-3 years of implementation.
Click to access EvaluatingtheOhioImprovementProcess_Final_4.11.17.pdf
Curiously, student achievement gains occurred during the chaotic years of the school turnarounds and transformations, but not afterwards. How could that be possible?
When announcing the SIG experiment, President Obama’s Secretary of Education Arne Duncan claimed that The Turnaround Challenge was his “bible.” But, that study and a large body of social science and cognitive science explained that “aligning curricula to higher standards, improving instruction, using data effectively, [and] providing targeted extra help to students … is not enough to meet the challenges that educators – and students – face in high-poverty schools.” But, that shortcut was encourageded by SIG regulations.
Click to access TheTurnaroundChallenge_SupplementalReport.pdf
http://www.livingindialogue.com/real-crisis-in-education-reformers-refuse-to-learn/
Carlson et. al also conducted qualitative research which yielded three “Three key takeaways” from the state’s SIG effort, Ohio Improvement Process (OIP):
Additional funding for improvement personnel was the largest contributor to successes. OIP was hindered by culture challenges, most notably being a perception of compliance being more important than student improvement and stakeholder fatigue from too much change. Lastly, schools that experienced high levels of principal turnover or low principal effectiveness saw more challenges implementing OIP. Even in a school with strong principal leadership and relatively high fidelity of OIP implementation, student academic performance has not improved on state tests.
A generation of well-funded, output-driven school reforms has shown that old-fashioned, input-driven efforts like hiring counselors and mentors can increase graduation rates, and teacher supports are more likely to raise math scores, especially for younger students. But as was reported in the qualitative portion of the new SIG study, the key issue is whether low-skilled students can be taught to read for comprehension, and accountability-driven reform has failed at that task. We have long known that students must “learn to read,” in order to then “read to learn.” Test-driven reform has often demonstrated a capacity to raise test scores by teaching kids to decode, but it has been an utter failure in improving the reading skills necessary for meaningful learning.
Sure enough, an Ohio SIG leader explained:
We are working extremely hard trying a number of different things. We have … (a) phenomenal curriculum and instruction department; we have a scope and sequence, teachers receive a pacing guide; we offer extensive PD, we buy new resources – students are really resource rich. But (we’re) not really able to answer the question of why no growth, except that that we just haven’t hit the mark in how to help students who are not reading on grade level.”
In other words, the driving force of the SIG was a rebranding of the simplistic, and doomed, instruction-driven, curriculum-driven shortcut for improving the highest-challenge schools. As one leader explained, “The Ohio Improvement Process is teaching and learning. That’s the bottom line.”
But what were they teaching? First, they focused on math and reading test scores. More fundamentally, as one district leader explained the goal, “We decided on using that as a formative assessment to guide our work throughout the district, throughout the school year to better prepare our students to take the summative assessment, for them to be successful in the summative assessment.”
What teacher wouldn’t be thrilled to learn that they are no longer required to teach-to-the-test? To teach in high-pressure SIG schools, they must only teach to high-stakes summative assessments!
Not surprisingly, Carlson et. al learned that, “There is lots of push back from staff on testing because kids are tested a lot here.” Given the long history of the latest, half-baked “silver bullets” being repeatedly imposed on schools, it wouldn’t be surprising to hear, “During the first two years of OIP implementation, teachers felt the focus was on compliance.” The rushed turnarounds and transformations, especially in the first 2/3rds of the program, resulted in teachers “in the compliance mode going through the motions.”
But here’s the kicker. The seeds of so-called student performance gains were nurtured during this time of the “perception of compliance being more important that student improvement.” And there are only two explanations for that counter-intuitive pattern. Perhaps, more money works. Or perhaps the culture of compliance “works.” Under-the-gun educators will find a way to jack up test metrics even when they are meaningless.
To really improve high-challenge schools, we must first lay a foundation of student supports. Teacher supports using aligned and paced instruction can’t work until aligned and coordinated socio-emotional supports are in place. School improvement requires administrators to break out of their cultures of compliance and invest in the team effort to create trusting and loving school cultures.
As in Ohio, the SIG was driven by “a lack of understanding on the state’s part regarding what actually happens during the course of a day in some schools. … It’s like triage all day. Teachers are spent at the end of the day or they can’t really take the time to focus on this OIP because you know ‘Johnny’s mom got shot yesterday, they witnessed the murder,’ or …”
It’s not enough to do what one district did and purchase “fidget boxes” and “wiggle seats” to settle down students who are acting out their distress. As Johns Hopkins’ research shows, a system must establish Early Warning Systems to address chronic absenteeism before it spins out of control, and train and organize a “second team” of caring adults to make home visits and provide remediation.
Click to access NYC-Chronic-Absenteeism-Impact-Report.pdf
In theory, schools could have used SIG to invest in wraparound services so that its teacher supports could then produce better instruction, but I expect that Ohio’s (and Oklahoma City’s) experiences were typical. There are only so many hours in a day, and so many days in a three-year grant. When SIG demanded “transformative” gains in bubble-in scores in such a short time, systems did what they do best. They complied, hoping that “this too will pass.”
In my experience, teachers have been more successful in finding new careers than finding ways to teach for mastery in SIG-driven, test-driven schools. Fortunately, SIG is dead. Unfortunately, mandates for its failed approach to instruction are not. But, this post-reform hangover shouldn’t persist much longer than the so-called student performance gains that were produced by its turnarounds and transformations.
I just hope that the demand that educators give up a pound of flesh before legislators will adequately fund our schools might also fade away.
From Politico Education:
EDUCATION SECRETARY BETSY DEVOS MEETS WITH HOMESCHOOL ADVOCATES: DeVos spent roughly 45 minutes late Monday afternoon listening to the needs of homeschooling families during a meeting with officials from the Home School Legal Defense Association. William Estrada, director of federal relations with the group, tells Morning Education they sought to convey to DeVos that homeschooling shouldn’t be included in any efforts to use public funds for vouchers because homeschoolers don’t want the government regulation that could come with it. They also conveyed to DeVos that homeschoolers should continue to have their diplomas treated “fairly” so they have access to federal aid once they enter higher education – something that’s previously been spelled out in department guidance. Estrada said the meeting was a “true meeting of the minds” and DeVos was “very supportive.”
– The group’s meeting with DeVos included Mike Smith, a founder of the group, and Tricia Powell, a local parent who homeschools her children, Estrada said. DeVos has previously expressed support for homeschooling, and the group backed her during her Senate confirmation process. “It was very clear that she’s an advocate for all students, all children, whether they are in public schools, private schools or home schools, and we appreciated having the opportunity to chat with her,” Estrada said.”
Politico also reports that Minnesota legislators have passed a tax credit bill that will enable wealthy individuals and corporations to give their taxes to a private corporation that turns them into vouchers. Governor Mark Dayton has said he will veto any voucher bills but this one is embedded in the state budget.
Let’s hope that Governor Dayton vetoes this program and forced the legislature to strip out the vouchers.
