Group items tagged

Recent analyses challenge common wisdom regarding the superiority of private schools relative to public schools, raising questions about the role of school processes and climate in shaping achievement in different types of schools. While holding demographic factors constant, this multilevel analysis of National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) mathematics data on over 270,000 fourth and eighth graders in over 10,000 schools examines differences among schools on five critical factors: (1) school size, (2) class size, (3) school climate/parental involvement, (4) teacher certification, and (5) instructional practices. This study provides nationally representative evidence that both teacher certification and some reform-oriented mathematics teaching practices correlate positively with achievement and are more prevalent in public schools than in demographically similar private schools. Additionally, smaller class size, more prevalent in private schools, is significantly correlated with achievement.

I know I said I'd stop addressing the Third Way report on Middle Class Schools, but I do have one more thing to point out. Third Way issued a memo in which it aggressively attacked my assertion that they had used district level data to characterize middle class schools. Again, this assertion was relevant to showing the absurdity of their classification scheme, but there were numerous other problems with the report.

U.S. Senator Patty Murray (D-WA) introduced the Facilitating Outstanding Classrooms Using Size Reduction (FOCUS) Act of 2011 [bill summary, PDF], which the Senator says would provide states with the resources they need to reduce class sizes across the early grade levels in order to provide students and teachers with an educational environment that encourages maximum student academic growth. Murray's bill will also put in place evaluation tools to assess the program's effectiveness.

The findings are also a reminder not to make assumptions about who are the unhappiest educators. It's not necessarily the burned-out veteran, or those working with the most challenging student populations. In reality, when comparing teachers with higher and lower job satisfaction, the survey shows no real difference in their years of experience, the grades they taught or the proportions of their students from low-income households.  However, there were real differences in the day-to-day experiences of the less satisified and the more satisified teachers. The unhappier teachers were more likely to have had increase in average class sizes, and to have experienced layoffs in their district. They also had more students coming to class hungry, and had more families needing help with basic social services. There was also a marked gap among the teachers when it came to how much they believed they were viewed as professionals by their peers. Among the unsatisfied teachers that rate was 68 percent, compared with nearly 90 percent of the satisfied teachers.  The survey also found a connection between the satisfied teachers and their relationships with their students' families. Happier teachers work at schools where they say there's a better plan in place for engaging parents in their children's learning. 

In some states, parents frustrated with the public school system may have a new tool to fix their child's education. Parent trigger laws, passed in some form in four states already, give dissatisfied parents the power to fire teachers, convert a public school to a charter, or even shut down the school altogether. As one can imagine, such a dramatic solution to the problem of public education has created quite a controversy. Parents and educators alike are asking: should parents have their fingers on the trigger of public education? For the answer, we speak with Leonie Haimson, the executive director of Class Size Matters, a parent advocacy group in New York City that pushes for smaller class sizes in public schools. We also speak with Gwen Samuel, president of Connecticut Parent Union. 

In 'Class Warfare' lawyer Steven Brill demonstrates his litigation skills as he lays out his case against teachers' unions and the so-called anti-reformers.  His argument is clear, concise, and compelling.  As prosecutor, he calls mainly on the witnesses that will strengthen his case, skillfully cross examining them and shrewdly striking from the record almost anything that might introduce a reasonable doubt. Brill's argument can be summarized in four main points, which I'll first enumerate  and then challenge one by one.

I often hear the following argument: Improving teacher quality is more cost-effective than other options, such as reducing class size (see here, for example). I am all for evaluating policy alternatives based on their costs relative to their benefits, even though we tend to define the benefits side of the equation very narrowly - in terms of test score gains. But "improving teacher quality" cannot yet be included in a concrete costs/benefits comparison with class size or anything else. It is not an actual policy. At best, it is a category of policy options, all of which are focused on recruitment, preparation, retention, improvement, and dismissal of teachers. When people invoke it, they are presumably referring to the fact that teachers vary widely in their test-based effectiveness. Yes, teachers matter, but altering the quality distribution is whole different ballgame from measuring it overall. It's actually a whole different sport.

The young teacher started right off making a rookie mistake in the opening minutes of his first class, on his very first day. "How many of you know what a liter is?" he asked his high school math class. "Give me a thumbs up if you know, thumbs down if you don't." None of the kids responded, so he entreated, "Come on, I just need to know where you are. Thumbs up if you know, thumbs down if you don't." An experienced teacher would not have asked students to volunteer their ignorance. An experienced teacher might have held up an empty milk carton and asked someone to identify it. Once someone had said, "that's a quart of milk," the veteran might have pulled out a one-gallon container to be identified. Only then would she have shown them a liter container, explaining that most countries in the world use a different measuring system, et cetera. But the rookie didn't know any better. He'd graduated from Yale that spring, had a few weeks of training that summer, thanks to Teach for America, and then was given his own classroom.

"First I want to clarify what I mean by us all. I believe the Chicago teachers strike is an important stand in the battle to improve, even save, public education in the United States. The strike, if successful, will benefit teachers, students and parents, not only in Chicago but across the entire country, as well as both unionized workers and non-unionized workers. This strike has the potential to go down in history along with other labor actions, such as those in Homestead, Lawrence, Paterson, Ludlow and Flint that ultimately built the union movement in the United States and transformed life for what used to be known as the working-class but what politicians today euphemistically refer to as the middle class. That is why I strongly support this strike and why I am wearing a red t-shirt to work in support of the teachers and public education."

A few months back I got into an interesting discussion with my high school friends on Facebook about the books we read in our tenth grade advanced English class at Westhill High School in Stamford. My friend Debbie, who's clearly even more of a pack rat than my mother, still had the syllabus, and was able to rattle off impressively long list of books that we'd read and analyzed. When I compared it to the number of books my daughter, a high school sophomore, will get through this year in her advanced English class, it's really quite astounding. But actually, it's not. When I look at the school calendar, the entire month of March is lost to CMT/CAPT testing.  And that's just the actual testing. Much of the month before will be devoted to exercises that prepare students for the tests. Not for reading great works of literature and learning to use critical thinking skills, but rather for learning test taking skills.

South Side High School in Rockville Centre pushed inclusion a step further this school year, requiring all 11th-graders to take the toughest literature course offered -- no matter what their academic standing. Principal Carol Burris said school officials want to elevate standards for everyone, so they're offering only one English class: International Baccalaureate Language and Literature, Higher Level. "The best curriculum you have should be the curriculum for everyone," she said.

My colleague Greg Anrig's critique of Charles Murray's Coming Apart: The State of White America 1960-2010, discusses Murray's claim that top-tier universities perpetuate a genetically superior elite, whose privilege further isolates them from working-class Americans. As Anrig points out, class privilege in higher education is a problem The Century Foundation takes seriously (our own research shows that 74 percent of the students at highly selective colleges come from the richest socioeconomic quartile, while just 3 percent come from the bottom fourth).  The fact is that among high school students who score in the top 25th percentile on standardized tests, socioeconomic background remains the most significant predictor of whether they will go on to earn a college degree.

Believe it or not, I wake up every morning eager to go to work. I never know what's going to happen in my classes, but I invariably look forward to them. My students never fail to surprise me. I feel privileged to introduce newcomers to my language. But now, if they don't pass tests likely designed for English speakers, I face losing my job. This is particularly disturbing because I see patterns, especially among kids who did not actually want to be uprooted, torn away from their friends, family and quite often even their parents. I had several students last year who spoke almost no English, and learned next to nothing the entire year. When I checked their records, I learned that two of them had not only passed junior high English classes (not E.S.L., but regular English), but had also passed Spanish. Without my crystal ball I can only speculate on how they managed this. But it doesn't take a genius to figure out that their value-added scores would not have put me in a favorable light. Under New York State's new paradigm, two years of kids like that would leave me selling pencils on the corner.

This morning, Mayor Michael Bloomberg and Chancellor Dennis Walcott appeared at an American University forum with U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, and the mayors and school superintendents from Chicago and Los Angeles. A video of the forum is here. Bloomberg defended giving out invalid and inaccurate Teacher Data Reports as providing "information" to parents, saying it was "arrogance" to suggest that peddling wildly inaccurate information was a bad idea. He made a feeble attempt at backtracking from a prior statement that in his ideal world, he would fire half of the teachers and double class size. "Class size is important," he opined, but not as important as other things such as teacher quality. At the very end of the program, Bloomberg displayed his education acumen and keen political ear by declaring that "teaching to the test is exactly what we should do." And in defense of this position, he invoked a Pete Seeger song, "Waist Deep In The Big Muddy."

"The uproar over high-stakes testing associated with Common Core in New York State and complaints that children are being tested on things they were not taught, has obscured the deepening of racial, ethnic and class divisions in education in New York and the United States. Not only are the tests unfair, but according to a new study by the National Urban Research Group (NURG), math instruction and the educational system in the United States are deeply unfair, especially to Black and Latino students from poorer families."

"There continues to be much bluster out there in ed reformy land that money really isn't all that important - especially for traditional public school districts. That local public schools and districts already have way too much money but use it so inefficiently that any additional dollar would necessarily be wasted. An extension of this line of reasoning is that therefore differences in spending across districts are also inconsequential. It really doesn't matter - the reformy line of thinking goes - if the suburbs around Philly, Chicago or New York dramatically outspend them, as long as some a-contextual, poorly documented and often flat out wrong, blustery statement can be made about a seemingly large aggregate or per pupil spending figure that the average person on the street should simply find offensive. Much of this bluster about the irrelevance of funding is strangely juxtaposed with arguments that inequity of teacher quality and the adequacy of the quality of the teacher workforce are the major threats to our education system. But of course, these threats have little or nothing to do with money? Right? As I've explained previously - equitable distribution of quality teaching requires equitable (not necessarily equal) distribution of resources. Districts serving more needy student populations require smaller classes and more intensive supports if their students are expected to close the gap with their more advantaged peers - or strive for common outcome goals. Even recruiting similarly qualified teachers in higher need settings requires higher, not the same or lower compensation. Districts serving high need populations require a) more staff - more specialized, more diverse and even more of the same (core classroom teacher) staff, of b) at least equal qualifications. That means they need more money (than their more advantaged neighbors) to get the job done. If they so happen to have substantially less money, it's not a matter of simply tradin

"While much is known about the effects of class size and teacher quality on achievement, there is little evidence on whether policymakers can improve education by utilizing non-instructional resources. We exploit plausibly exogenous within-school variation in counselors and find that one additional counselor increases boys' reading and math achievement by over one percentile point, and reduces misbehavior of both boys and girls. Estimates imply the marginal counselor has the same impact on overall achievement as increasing the quality of every teacher in the school by nearly one-third of a standard deviation, and is twice as effective as reducing class size by hiring an additional teacher."

Assembling diverse classes is an oft-stated goal among New York City private schools, with brochures featuring beaming multicultural students. But this September Dalton will approach a rare benchmark: Nearly half of the incoming kindergarten class will be students of color.

When the new book 'Class Warfare' came out, the story of the current ed reform movement featuring TFA and KIPP, I refused to buy it, since I didn't want anyone to profit from passing fiction and fantasy off as non-fiction. But when I received a complimentary copy as a gift from my frequent debate opponent, Whitney Tilson, I promised that I would, at least, read it. Analyzing a short research paper or an hour long debate is one thing, but a 500 page book - well, I was hoping that I wouldn't find much to say about it since I really don't have the time, yet I can't resist.

n a whopping 437 pages, Steven Brill's Class Warfare: Inside the Fight to Fix America's Schools (Simon & Schuster, 2011) recounts a dramatic and vicious battle between two education camps: on the one side, hedge fund managers, aggressive chancellors, determined charter school leaders, teachers who work endlessly, all fighting for reform as they define it; on the other, the big unions who use their clout to block, complicate, or slow down reform. The book has good guys, bad guys, and a surprise twist. Yet it does not stop to consider what education is, what it contains, or what ends it serves. This weakness is not particular to Brill or his book; it is at the core of the battles he describes. But Brill takes part uncritically.