Group items tagged

After several years of state and local budget cuts, thousands of school districts across the nation are gutting summer-school programs, cramming classes into four-day weeks or lopping days off the school year, even though virtually everyone involved in education agrees that American students need more instruction time.

"Investing in public eduation initiatives, from quality pre-kindergarten programs to lowering class size in elementary schools, pays big dividends for the state's economic and social welfare, according to a report from the Education Law Center and Penn State University Professor Dana Mitra. "

ProPublica analyzed new data from the U.S. Department of Education Office of Civil Rights along with other federal education data to examine whether states provide students equal access to programs - such as Advanced Placement or higher-level math and sciences classes - that researchers say will help them later in life. We found that in some states, high-poverty schools are less likely than wealthier schools to have students enrolled those programs.

The UFT is a vital part of a national movement for education reform. Since its early days, the union has advocated for the conditions that are best for student learning and that help teachers to be most effective. This includes a broad range of initiatives, such as smaller class size, adequate funding for schools, school-based health clinics, mentoring for new teachers and professional development for all teachers, to name just a few.

State Education Commissioner John B. King, Jr. told school superintendents from across the state that the education reforms adopted by the New York State Board of Regents will help make high school graduates in New York "college- and career- ready."  King, speaking at the New York State Council of School Superintendents 2011 Fall Leadership Summit in Saratoga Springs, said too many of New York State public high school graduates are not prepared for college and work.  He noted that roughly 40 percent of students entering community colleges across the state have to take remedial classes.

D.C. teacher Stephanie Black sent me an absorbing e-mail that began with a favorable review of my book "Work Hard. Be Nice" on KIPP school founders Dave Levin and Mike Feinberg. Then she explained why her positive feelings about the KIPP charter school network had deepened her distaste for the D.C. teacher evaluation program, IMPACT.

Imagine you're a parent of a seven-year-old who has just come home from school with her end-of-year report card. And the report card provides marks for only two subjects, and for children who are in grade-levels different from hers. Furthermore, there's nothing on the report card to indicate how well these children have been progressing throughout the year. There are no teacher comments, like "great participation in class" or "needs to turn in homework on time." And to top it off, the report gives a far harsher assessment of academic performance than reports you've gotten from other sources. That's just the sort of "report card" that was handed to America yesterday in the form of the National Assessment of Education Progress. And while the NAEP is all well and good for what it is -- a biennial norm-referenced, diagnostic assessment of fourth and eighth graders in math and reading -- the results of the NAEP invariably get distorted into all kinds of completely unfounded "conclusions" about the state of America's public education system.

"The New York Times Magazine has a long article about Eva Moskowitz and her chain of charter schools in New York City. The charter chain was originally called Harlem Success Academy, but Moskowitz dropped the word "Harlem" when she decided to open new schools in gentrifying neighborhoods and wanted to attract white and middle-class families. I spent a lot of time on the phone with the author, Daniel Bergner. When he asked why I was critical of Moskowitz, I said that what she does to get high test scores is not a model for public education or even for other charters. The high scores of her students is due to intensive test prep and attrition. She gets her initial group of students by holding a lottery, which in itself is a selection process because the least functional families don't apply. She enrolls small proportions of students with disabilities and English language learners as compared to the neighborhood public school. And as time goes by, many students leave."

In New York City public schools, a student's educational outcomes and opportunity to learn are statistically more determined by where he or she lives than their abilities, according to A Rotting Apple: Education Redlining in New York City, released by the Schott Foundation for Public Education. Primarily because of New York City policies and practices that result in an inequitable distribution of educational resources and intensify the impact of poverty, children who are poor, Black and Hispanic have far less of an opportunity to learn the skills needed to succeed on state and federal assessments. They are also much less likely to have an opportunity to be identified for Gifted and Talented programs, to attend selective high schools or to obtain diplomas qualifying them for college or a good job. High-performing schools, on the other hand, tend to be located in economically advantaged areas.

Special-education kids who would have been segregated in the past will be shifted into classrooms with general-education students under an ambitious program being launched in city public schools this fall. The move is intended to boost the students' performance by giving them more exposure to their peers - while keeping them closer to home by requiring for the first time that all schools accept them. But some educators say the push is financial rather than educationally driven - and will likely deprive students of services and cause havoc in the classrooms.

Last week the New York Times provided valuable, disturbing information by reporting recent research on the growing educational achievement gap between rich and poor students, which has grown substantially over the past few decades, even while the achievement gap between black and white students has narrowed. As the author of one study put it, "family income appears more determinative of educational success than race." Yet, as is often true of the Times, what it gives with one hand, it takes with the other. For example, as the media watchdog group, Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting has long documented, while the paper of record frequently provides factual information about events, its interpretation of the facts buttresses against drawing the "wrong" conclusions about political-economic power relationships.

As the poor get poorer, and college tuitions keep rising, the media declare that no one without a B.A. qualifies for a living wage. Something's rotten in this proposition. It isn't that way in Finland, for example. Finland didn't do it overnight, but they built their education system around critical democratic habits: competence and trust. They didn't trade off one for the other. Looking for a trust-proof solution is the fragile error. David Remnick says it well in the March 12th New Yorker: Democracy, he writes: "At best, it's an ambition, a state of becoming," and "the fragility of democratic aspiration is a brutal fact of history." Every time we try an end-run around it we at best distract ourselves from useful next steps, and more often undermine our own aspirations.

In this paper we report on work estimating the stability of value-added estimates of teacher effects, an important area of investigation given public interest in workforce policies that implicitly assume effectiveness is a stable attribute within teachers. The results strongly reject the hypothesis that teacher performance is completely stable within teachers over long periods of time, but estimates suggest that a component of performance appears to persist within teachers, even over a ten-year panel. We also find that little of the changes in teacher effectiveness estimates within teachers can be explained by observable characteristics.

America's public schools and prisons are stark images of the fact of racial, gender, and socioeconomic inequity in our society-inequity that is both perpetuated by and necessary for the ruling elite to maintain their artificial status as that elite. The research, coming from the U.S. Department of Education, and the media coverage are not evidence we are confronting that reality or that we will address it any time soon. The research and the media coverage are proof we'll spend energy on the research and the coverage in order to mask the racism lingering corrosively in our free state while continuing to blame the students who fail for their failure and the prisoners for their transgressions.

Question: Why do wealthy kids usually do better in school than poor kids? Answer: Disadvantaged children face a host of challenges to academic success. These challenges fall into two broad categories.

On May 23, the Romney campaign released its education policy white paper titled "A Chance for Every Child: Mitt Romney's Plan for Restoring the Promise of American Education." If you liked the George W. Bush administration's education reforms, you will love the Romney plan. If you think that turning the schools over to the private sector will solve their problems, then his plan will thrill you. The central themes of the Romney plan are a rehash of Republican education ideas from the past thirty years, namely, subsidizing parents who want to send their child to a private or religious school, encouraging the private sector to operate schools, putting commercial banks in charge of the federal student loan program, holding teachers and schools accountable for students' test scores, and lowering entrance requirements for new teachers. These policies reflect the experience of his advisers, who include half a dozen senior officials from the Bush administration and several prominent conservative academics, among them former Secretary of Education Rod Paige and former Deputy Secretary of Education Bill Hansen, and school choice advocates John Chubb and Paul Peterson.

Part 1 of our documentary, A TALE OF TWO SCHOOLS: Race and Education on Long Island, was produced for ERASE Racism by award-winning filmmaker David Van Taylor, Vice President of Lumiere Productions. It follows three high school senior boys: one African American student from a black district and an interracial pair of friends from a diverse, majority-white district. The film shows, in vivid human terms, how context determines educational experiences and outcomes-irrespective of the student's motivation and aptitude.

"This post is about rolling out some of the left over data I have from my various endeavors this summer.  These data include data from New York State personnel master files (PMFs) linked to New York City public schools and charter schools, NYC teacher value-added scores, and various bits of data on New York City charter and district schools including school site budget/annual financial report information. Here, I use these data combined with some of my previous stuff, to take a first, cursory shot at characterizing the teaching workforce of charter school teachers in New York City. All findings use data from 2008 to 2010."

"The education reform debate is fueled by a seemingly endless and even fruitless point-counterpoint among the corporate reformers-typically advocates for and from the Gates Foundation (GF), Teach for America (TFA), and charter chains such as Knowledge Is Power Program (KIPP)-and educators/scholars of education. Since the political and public machines have embraced the corporate reformers, GF, TFA, and KIPP have acquired the bully pulpit of the debate and thus are afforded most often the ability to frame the point, leaving educators and scholars to be in a constant state of generating counter-points. This pattern disproportionately benefits corporate reformers, but it also exposes how those corporate reformers manage to maintain the focus of the debate on data. The statistical thread running through most of the point-counterpoint is not only misleading (the claims coming from the corporate reformers are invariably distorted, while the counter-points of educators and scholars remain ignored among politicians, advocates, the public, and the media), but also a distraction. Since the metrics debate (test scores, graduation rates, attrition, populations of students served, causation/correlation) appears both enduring and stagnant, I want to make a clear statement with some elaboration that I reject the "ends-justify-the-means" assumptions and practices-the broader "no excuses" ideology-underneath the numbers, and thus, we must stop focusing on the outcomes of programs endorsed by the GF or TFA and KIPP. Instead, we must unmask the racist and classist policies and practices hiding beneath the metrics debate surrounding GF, TFA, and KIPP (as prominent examples of practices all across the country and types of schools)."

"As a CPS alumnus of the strikes of '83, '85, and '87, and as a parent of two Chicago Public Schools students, I know how hard strikes are on students and families. But as a CPS teacher with 12 years of experience, I encourage my students to understand the facts before they make up their minds. I can't speak for the union, but I can help shed light on some of the facts underlying this week's labor dispute."