Group items tagged

This paper uses the Schools and Staffing Survey to examine the determinants of teacher salaries  in the U.S. using a spatial econometric framework.  These determinants include teacher salaries  in nearby districts, union activity in the district, union activity in neighboring districts, and other  school district characteristics.  The results confirm that salaries for both experienced and  beginning teachers are positively affected by salaries in nearby districts.  Investigations of the  determinants of teacher salaries that ignore this spatial relationship are likely to be mis-specified.   Including the effects of union activity in neighboring districts, the study also finds that union  activity increases salaries for experienced teachers by as much as 18-28 percent but increases  salaries for beginning teachers by a considerably smaller amount.   

"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.""

Faced with a $30 million shortfall in its $295 million budget for the 2011-12 school year, the Adams 12 school district in north Denver laid off custodians, furloughed teachers, trimmed programs, reduced benefits-and then took its budget scalpel to student activities. The district dropped middle-school sports, cut back on travel for its high-school teams, and pared $500,000 from the $2 million budget that supports afterschool activities like the Math Olympiad and spelling bee at Centennial Elementary, the technology and drama clubs at Rocky Top Middle School, and the anime (Japanese animation) and Knowledge Bowl clubs at Mountain Range High.

In response to the question, 'Are teachers activists?' my answer is: No. Not inherently. Teaching brown kids math, helping recent immigrants master English, or even making an occupational commitment to public education, are none of them inherently radical acts, though they are often characterized as such. This is not to say that choosing education as a profession is in dissonance with struggling for social justice. It is when we believe that it is enough-that simply being a teacher by trade is activism-that we enter into dangerous territory. For this belief is complicit with a plethora of assumptions detrimental to justice, including the notion that learning is inevitably about competition, class mobility and community escape.

The "democratic engagement" faction within civics education has recently re-energized and is pressing hard on schools to push kids into activism. -- Chester Finn

Interest in Student Growth Modeling (SGM) and Value Added Modeling (VAM) arises from educators concerned with measuring the effectiveness of teaching and other school activities through changes in student performance as a companion and perhaps even an alternative to status. Several formal statistical models have been proposed for year-to-year growth and these fall into at least three clusters: simple change (e.g., differences on a vertical scale), residualized change (e.g., simple linear or quantile regression techniques), and value tables  (varying salience of different achievement level outcomes across two years). Several of these methods have been implemented by states and districts.  This paper reviews relevant literature and reports results of a data-based comparison of six basic SGM models that may permit aggregating across teachers or schools to provide evaluative information.  Our investigation raises some issues that may compromise current efforts to implement VAM in teacher and school evaluations and makes suggestions for both practice and research based on the results.

"Here's a fact that may not surprise you: the children of the rich perform better in school, on average, than children from middle-class or poor families. Students growing up in richer families have better grades and higher standardized test scores, on average, than poorer students; they also have higher rates of participation in extracurricular activities and school leadership positions, higher graduation rates and higher rates of college enrollment and completion. Whether you think it deeply unjust, lamentable but inevitable, or obvious and unproblematic, this is hardly news. It is true in most societies and has been true in the United States for at least as long as we have thought to ask the question and had sufficient data to verify the answer. What is news is that in the United States over the last few decades these differences in educational success between high- and lower-income students have grown substantially."

"In this study, we test the idea that new charters hit their mark early in their operations and do not vary much after that. The notion originated from time spent in young charter schools studying their experience as new organizations and as agents of education reform. Interviews with school staff along with our own observations of school activities and operations have formed the impression that the "rules" of a school get set early on in the life of the school. By rules, we mean the adult and student cultures, the formal and informal procedures for identifying and addressing problems, and the school community's commitment to student learning as the primary focus of the school. These are obviously richly nuances facets of a school with myriad potential interactions among them, just as with any social organization. Yet, however they come about, we have observed that they are shaped quickly in new schools. Moreover, these norms and behaviors are sturdy and difficult (though not impossible) to change later on."

"But to apply a letter grade or a numerical ranking to a professional is to radically misunderstand the complex set of qualities that make someone good at what they do. It is an effort by economists and statisticians to quantify activities that are at heart matters of judgment, not productivity. Professionals must be judged by other professionals, by their peers. Nowhere is this more true than among educators, whose success at teaching character, wisdom, and judgment cannot be measured by standardized tests. "

In this week's show (Part One of a two part series), Education Radio continues to disrupt the dominant narrative of corporate education reform by investigating the organization Teach for America (TFA). TFA is one of many insidious examples of how the language of social justice and equity is hijacked and appropriated, and instead employed to further the goals of the neoliberal education reform agenda. This agenda includes a firm belief that education should primarily serve the interests of private profit and as with all neoliberal education reformers, TFA is actively intensifying racial and class inequality, and the destruction of education as an essential public good along with the continued decimation of unions - two institutions that are primary determinants of a democratic society.

When the Michigan legislature returns from recess next week, and votes funds for higher education (far more meager than they used to be, but never mind), it will vote on Section 273a, passed by the House Appropriations Subcommittee, which, according to the Lansing State Journal, reads: It is the intent of the legislature that a public university that receives funds in section 236 shall not collaborate in any manner with a nonprofit worker center whose documented activities include coercion through protest, demonstration, or organization against a Michigan business.

Those who think that there is too much pressure to "teach to the test" find this time of year to be infuriating. Schools typically cease to focus on their regular curriculum and begin to prepare their students for these venerated exams. Laura Klein Some schools stop all social studies and science classes, as well as gym, art and enrichment activities, so they can spend all day on test prep in Math and English. This overhaul of the curriculum is extreme, but not unique. Unfortunately, for the students, it sends a larger signal that learning for the year is just about done.

For-profit colleges and universities have a well-deserved reputation for deceptive recruiting, low-quality programs, and sky-high prices. Now you can add union suppression to that reputation. A branch of the for-profit college mega-provider Kaplan University has noticed that some of its teaching staff are considering a union, and the management is not pleased. Recently, administrative staff at a branch of Kaplan International Centers (KIC) in New York City issued a memo to teachers to explain "the risk" of showing an interest in "union organizing." And the contents of the memo are revealing of the smears and innuendo that for-profit education institutions and other employers use to squelch union organizing activities and to make employees uneasy of asserting their rights to collective action.

But a review of the best evidence on teachers' sentiments shows that educators are not unhappy because they resent the new emphasis on teacher evaluations, a key element of President Obama's Race to the Top program; in fact, according to a separate survey of 10,000 public school teachers from Scholastic and the Gates Foundation, the majority support using measures of student learning to assess teachers, and the mean number of years teachers believe they should devote to the classroom before being assessed for tenure is 5.4, a significant increase from the current national average of 3.1 years. But polling shows teachers are depressed by the increasing reliance on standardized tests to measure student learning-the "high stakes" testing regime that the standards and accountability movement has put in place across the country and that Race to the Top has reinforced in some states and districts. Teachers are also concerned that growing numbers of parents are not able to play an active role in their children's education, and they are angry about the climate of austerity that has invaded the nation's schools, with state and local budget cuts threatening key programs that help students learn and overcome the disadvantages of poverty.

The double-entry-journal incident was part of my induction into New York City public schools. There, the rubric (which usually emphasized appearance and format) ruled supreme; if you did everything just so, you could get a good score, while if you diverged from the instructions but had a compelling idea, you could be penalized. I saw rubrics applied to student work, teachers' lessons, bulletin boards, classroom layout, group activities, and standardized tests. I will comment on the last of these-rubrics on standardized tests-and their bearing on the recent publication of New York City teachers' value-added ratings (their rankings based on student test score growth).

A new generation of education advocacy groups has emerged to play a formidable political role in states and communities across the country. Those groups are shaping policy through aggressive lobbying and campaign activity-an evolution in advocacy that is primed to continue in the 2012 elections and beyond. Bearing names meant to signal their intentions-Stand for Children, Democrats for Education Reform, StudentsFirst-they are pushing for such policies as rigorous teacher evaluations based in part on evidence of student learning, increased access to high-quality charter schools, and higher academic standards for schools and students. Sometimes viewed as a counterweight to teachers' unions, they are also supporting political candidates who champion those ideas. Though the record of their electoral success is mixed, such groups' overall influence appears to be growing, and it has already helped alter the landscape of education policy, particularly at the state level.

Sixteen years ago, Charlotte Danielson, an Oxford-trained economist, developed a description of good teaching that became the foundation for attempts by federal and state officials and school districts to quantify teacher performance. The Danielson method - articulated in her book, "Enhancing Professional Practice: A Framework for Teaching" (ASCD, 1996) - describes good teaching using numerous criteria within four broad areas of performance: the quality of questions and discussion techniques; a knowledge of students' special needs; the expectations set for learning and achievement; and the teacher's involvement in professional development activities. "If all you do is judge teachers by test results," Ms. Danielson told Ginia Bellafante in an interview for a Big City column in the Metropolitan section of The New York Times last month, "it doesn't tell you what you should do differently."

Education reform does not suffer from lack of energy or activity. Everywhere you look-Congress, state legislatures, local school boards, wherever-scores of eager-beavers are filing bills, proposing solutions, calling for change, and otherwise trying to "push the ball forward." Yet for all the effort, for all the pain, we see little gain. What gives? The conventional answer, in most reform circles, comes down to: "the opposition of special interests." Teachers unions, school administrators, colleges of education, textbook publishers, and other defenders (and beneficiaries) of the status quo fight change at every step and guard their selfish prerogatives jealously. That may all be true, but our challenges are much more fundamental. It's not that the wrong people are in charge. It's that there are so many cooks in the education kitchen that nobody is really in charge. And that is a consequence of an antiquated governance structure that practically forces all those cooks to enter and remain in the kitchen.

The success of school-choice initiatives is commonly measured in reading and math scores. But how does being admitted to a preferred school affect other parts of a student's life? In an article in Education Next, Harvard University's David J. Deming argues for looking beyond school-based outcomes, suggesting that that kind of growth can be achieved in ways that do not necessarily lead to long-term success. Instead, he analyzes the impact of winning a school choice lottery on the criminal activity of students in North Carolina's Charlotte-Mecklenburg school district over a period of seven years.

Now that the full list has been released, the evidence confirms that many organizations active in New York City and New York State received large grants from the Waltons last year - including a million-dollar grant to Eva Moskowitz's Success Charter Network, listed under the Foundation's efforts to "Shape Public Policy." The huge amounts in play here (over $159 million nationally in 2011 alone) should give pause to those concerned about the influence of corporate money in school reform in our community.