Group items tagged

"Advocacy that remains blind to evidence is a dangerous thing-especially in the pursuit of equity and democracy."

"Why are the corporate reformers creating schools for poor and/or minority children that engage in practices that affluent parents would never accept for their own kids?"

"When Teach for America entered the national stage it was applauded as a fresh, innovative approach to education. Now, well into its second decade of providing teachers to struggling schools across the country, is it still a good idea for our children? Has bringing in smart, young college graduates improved the education that American children are receiving?"

"Atkins wrote a very important piece about a meeting he and a few other progressive bloggers had at the Democratic National Convention with Howard Dean, the former DNC chairman, and American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten. I already wrote about Atkins's insightful observation about the usefulness of narrative in countering the corporate reformy movement; now I want to get to the meat of the meeting."

Now that six months have gone by, it's time to check in on our three miracle schools and see if their improvements have continued in a steady rate. Only someone who knows nothing about education and schools would expect these improvements to continue. Why would they? If you get new students each year and often a new crop of new teachers, why would scores continue to rise until they eventually reach 100%?

They're everywhere: The superintendent of the state's Recovery School District. Two of his top deputies. The head of a local nonprofit that acts as gatekeeper for millions in federal dollars earmarked to start new charter schools. And when a new state school board is seated in January, the board member who will represent most of New Orleans. At every corner of the city's education establishment, you'll find alumni of Teach for America, a group founded two decades ago to channel some of the country's most promising and ambitious college students into underserved urban classrooms.

By 2015, with the help of a $50 million federal grant, program recruits could make up one-quarter of all new teachers in 60 of the nation's highest need school districts. The program also is expanding internationally. That growth comes as many districts try to make teachers more effective. But Teach for America has had mixed results.

The most famous teacher in the United States right now is Salman Khan, creator of Khan Academy.  Khan Academy is a collection of nearly 3,000 online youtube tutorials mainly about math and science.  Bill Gates watches the videos with his kids, and has made Khan a household name.  Because of Khan, a new buzz-word in education is the 'flipped' classroom where kids are expected to watch videos the night before and then do their 'homework' in class, supervised by the teacher.

The New York City reform model is centered upon closing 'failing' schools and opening new ones. Some of these 'failing' schools have been pillars of their communities for decades. One such school I read about in The New York Times is Jamaica High School in Jamaica, Queens. This large high school opened in 1925. But it is in the process, now, of being shut down. New York City rates schools on an A to F scale and if a school gets an 'F' or a 'D' or three consecutive 'C's, then it runs the risk of getting shut down. I thought I'd take a look at the last Jamaica High School progress report to see if there was anything 'interesting.' What I found is that Jamaica High School, in the 2009 to 2010 school year did very well on the regents component of their 'progress' score. They ranked, in fact, 164th out of 424 schools. In this post, I'll explain how the 'Weighted Regents Pass Grades' are calculated and how Jamaica High School fared quite well on this metric.  Below is from Jamaica High's 2009-2010 progress report.  The left bar graph is the comparison to their peer group and the right graph is the comparison to all city schools.  Click on the image to enlarge it.

When something keeps on appearing as a byproduct of an activity, eventually you might begin to wonder if perhaps the byproduct is actually the objective. The one result that education reform efforts seem to have in common is turmoil in our schools, especially those where there is high poverty. Let's take a look at the strategies being employed, and what they are yielding

It's a lot more satisfying showing that a 'failing' school is being unfairly closed than showing that a 'miracle' school is getting accolades it doesn't deserve. I applied the same analysis I recently did for Jamaica High School to the just announced closure of a New York City school since 1913, Washington Irving High School.  I learned that they had very respectable Regents 'progress' scores compared to the rest of the New York City High Schools.  A weighted Regents pass rate of 1 means that the students did just as expected on the Regents.  Higher than 1 means they outperformed expectations. 

In Huntsville, Alabama, the school board has decided to spend $1.7 million to bring Teach For America interns to district classrooms. This has prompted an assistant professor at the University of Alabama, Huntsville, to raise some critical questions. This is the third post in this series.

There is a growing backlash against National Education Association President Dennis Van Roekel's recent collaborations with Teach for America leader Wendy Kopp on the issue of teacher preparation. Some NEA members have written on blogs that they are furious at Van Roekel, and early childhood expert Nancy Carlsson-Paige just declined an opportunity for her and her son, actor and activist Matt Damon, to be nominated for the Friend of Education Award from the NEA.

The actor Matt Damon and his mother, a professor of education, on Wednesday turned down an award from the country's largest teachers union after reading an opinion article that the union's president had co-authored with the founder of Teach for America. Writing that she was "confused by your collaboration" with Teach for America, Dr. Nancy Carlsson-Paige said she and her son, Mr. Damon, no longer desired to be nominated for the National Education Association's Friend of Education Award.

The decision by Dennis Van Roekel to co-author a column with Teach For America director Wendy Kopp continues to generate negative reaction among educators, the latest being the decision by Nancy Carlsson-Paige and her son Matt Damon to reject the union's Friend of Education award. The response by the union has been defensive.

Two months ago Anthony Cody graciously allowed me to publish the results of my investigations into Teach for America's "research." You can read those pieces here and here. I would like to offer some closure to my investigation by providing interested parties with a brief discussion of some material left off of TFA's "research page." I need to acknowledge here that I am not the first to point out this contradictory research.

Almost all of us say that as a nation we should work out our differences and unite to solve our problems. But we don't mean it. Exhibit A is the bad blood between the National Education Association, the nation's largest teacher union, and Teach for America, the most popular public-service option for graduates of selective colleges.

...In other words: if we restricted teachers to only those who attend the top 50 colleges and universities in the country, we would pretty much have to make every graduate a teacher to meet our current demand.

This year, the gloves came off, as teachers faced unprecedented attacks on our right to collective bargaining, as well as continued attempts to tie our pay and job security to test scores. Some of these attacks were blatant, as in Wisconsin, but most were veiled behind a cloak of rhetoric about education reform. Today I want to review some of the posts that attempted to bell the corporate education reform cat.

Perhaps the most controversial issue in Ed Reform is whether or not it is fair to tie teacher evaluation to their 'performance' as defined by reformers as how their students do on standardized exams.  Since even reformers acknowledge that teachers aren't able to take students from a low starting score to any absolute target of high performance, they have devised something that is intended to be fair.  It is known as 'value-added.' The idea, which has been around for about 30 years, is that there could be a way to compare how a teacher's students do on some test with how those same students would have done in a parallel universe where they had an 'average' teacher instead.  If it is possible to make such a measurement, it would determine that teacher's individual contribution to his student's 'learning.' To someone who is not a teacher, this sounds reasonable enough.  When you've spent time in schools, though, you know some of the basic problems with standardized tests.