Group items tagged

As a specialist in testing during a 33-year career spent working for New York City, I believe Pearson is to blame for the current mess we find ourselves in regarding the state exams, which are given to 1.2 million students each year in grades three through eight. But the state is even more culpable, making bad decisions about the design of the program, particularly the contractual requirements related to field testing. Now the partners are stuck, and neither can admit the situation is beyond repair. Here are my concerns, based on what I know about the Pearson experience and my many years in test research and development

In the '60s it was an ambitious experiment in progressive education. Today John Dewey High graduates its final class after being closed as a failing high school. What led the Gravesend facility from success to shut-down?

The charter school movement has been a major political success, but it has been a civil rights failure. As the country continues moving steadily toward greater segregation and inequality of education for students of color in schools with lower achievement and graduation rates, the rapid growth of charter schools has been expanding a sector that is even more segregated than the public schools. The Civil Rights Project has been issuing annual reports on the spread of segregation in public schools and its impact on educational opportunity for 14 years. We know that choice programs can either offer quality educational options with racially and economically diverse schooling to children who otherwise have few opportunities, or choice programs can actually increase stratification and inequality depending on how they are designed. The charter effort, which has largely ignored the segregation issue, has been justified by claims about superior educational performance, which simply are not sustained by the research. Though there are some remarkable and diverse charter schools, most are neither. The lessons of what is needed to make choice work have usually been ignored in charter school policy. Magnet schools are the striking example of and offer a great deal of experience in how to create educationally successful and integrated choice options.

The NewSchools Venture Fund (NSVF) is a nonprofit organization with ten years of experience in K-12 education. NSVF is an interesting organization for the following reasons: * NSVF invested in a number of management organizations before management organizations were well-known * NSVF is an excellent example of venture philanthropy, or the application of venture capitalism to philanthropic giving * NSVF is an influential organization The purpose of this post is to provide some descriptive information about NSVF grants and changes in spending over time. I am using data pulled from NSVF's IRS 990s between the years 2002 and 2010. I then compiled that information to create a dataset of all NSVF grants

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.

Last week, Diane Ravitch called for a cite on a frequently used factoid from the Big Book of Eduformers: research shows that students with effective teachers make three times the progress of students with ineffective teachers. More than a few commenters found the cite: Eric Hanushek, "The Trade-off between Child Quantity and Quality," Journal of Political Economy 100 no. 1 (1992): 84-117 (at p. 107). The research conclusions are based on the data from the Gary Income Maintenance Experiment, which took place between 1971 and 1975, and which involved 1920 exclusively low-income black children.

One pervasive reformy argument is that our entire education system may be instantly transformed to be more productive and efficient by instantly adopting untested reformy policies and/or untested solutions of sectors other than education. Further, that we must take these bold leaps of faith because the public education system itself is too corrupt, too bloated, too inefficient to provide any useful lessons! Perhaps the whole system can be replaced with you-tube videos. Or perhaps we can just fire all of the teachers with more than 10 years experience and pay the rest based on the test scores they produce! Or perhaps some other lessons of industry can cure the (unsubstantiated) ills of American public schooling!

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.

"The organization that was launched to serve public schools so poor or dysfunctional they couldn't attract qualified teachers now sends fully a third of its recruits to privately run charter schools, many with stellar academic reputations, flush budgets and wealthy donors. TFA also sends its rookies, who typically have just 15 to 20 hours of teaching experience, to districts that have recently laid off scores of more seasoned teachers."

"Several months ago I described the problems in a study that seemed to have great policy relevance, but little empirical support for its contentions.  Sadly, examples of studies like these abound in education, and another is currently making headlines.  "Vouchers Boost Blacks' College Enrollment Rates," claim the stories-- and boy do the effects seem large! A "24 percent increase" in college attendance among black recipients of those vouchers-- what a dream. And it must be an accurate statement, right, since this was an experiment?"

"From my experience, education reporters are smart, knowledgeable, and attentive to detail. That said, the bulk of the stories about testing data - in big cities and suburbs, in this year and in previous years - could be better. Listen, I know it's unreasonable to expect every reporter and editor to address every little detail when they try to write accessible copy about complicated issues, such as test data interpretation. Moreover, I fully acknowledge that some of the errors to which I object - such as calling proficiency rates "scores" - are well within tolerable limits, and that news stories need not interpret data in the same way as researchers. Nevertheless, no matter what you think about the role of test scores in our public discourse, it is in everyone's interest that the coverage of them be reliable. And there are a few mostly easy suggestions that I think would help a great deal. Below are five such recommendations. They are of course not meant to be an exhaustive list, but rather a quick compilation of points, all of which I've discussed in previous posts, and all of which might also be useful to non-journalists."

"Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg has made school choice a foundation of his education agenda, and since he took office in 2002, the city opened more than 500 new schools; closed, or is in the process of closing, more than 100 ailing ones; and created an environment in which more than 130 charter schools could flourish. No neighborhood has been as transformed by that agenda as Harlem. When classes resume on Thursday, many of its students will be showing up in schools that did not exist a decade ago. The idea, one that became a model for school reform nationwide, was to let parents shop for schools the same way they would for housing or a cellphone plan, and that eventually, the competition would lift all boats. But in interviews in recent weeks, Harlem parents described two drastically different public school experiences, expressing frustration that, among other things, there were still a limited number of high-quality choices and that many schools continued to underperform."

"I am in the process of writing a long piece that recounts the experiences of former KIPP teachers.  The following represents some of the data from just one interview, with minimal contextualizing and no analysis.   Names have been changed to protect the identities of participants."

"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."

Quick.  What comes to mind when you hear "Democratic Education?"  Pause… Okay, years ago the first thing coming to mind would be that there was at least a Civics class being taught in the school.  Later, I would add that there should be a student government.  Then I would have thought that an experiential piece should be included, like a mock presidential election or town hall meeting. Much later I came to understand that teaching about how our democracy works (even including a "mock" event or a student council with limited decision making) is a pale imitation of the lived experience of democracy.  And therein lies the rub.

School reformers are a dime a dozen these days, with education policy a suddenly sexy field and more than a few people willing to challenge the status quo. But it wasn't always so. Back in the 1960s, when Fordham Institute president Checker Finn got his start as an education gadfly, contrarian thinking was hard to come by. In Troublemaker: A Personal History of School Reform Since Sputnik, Finn takes readers on a magic bus ride through the most momentous twists and turns of the past 40 years of education history-many of which he found himself in the middle of. What lessons should today's reformers take from past education battles? Which critical episodes are most often overlooked? And does Finn's own life experience make him optimistic or pessimistic about America-and its schools-going forward?

The Center For American Progress has published another report justifying the firing of teachers today, based on statistical models that may some day become valid. "Designing High Quality Evaluation Systems," by John Tyler, recounts the standard reasons why of educators do not trust high-stakes test-driven algorithms, and even contributes a couple of new insights into problems that are unique to high school test scores. An urban teacher reading Tyler's evidence would likely conclude that he has written an ironclad indictment of value-added models for high-stakes purposes. But, as is usually true of CAP's researchers, he concludes that the work of economists in improving value-added models is so impressive that education will benefit from their experiments if educators don't blow it.

The software program unleashed in this classroom is the brainchild of Salman Khan, an Ivy League-trained math whiz and the son of an immigrant single mother. Mr. Khan, 35, has become something of an online sensation with his Khan Academy math and science lessons on YouTube, which has attracted up to 3.5 million viewers a month. Now he wants to weave those digital lessons into the fabric of the school curriculum - a more ambitious and as yet untested proposition. This semester, at least 36 schools nationwide are trying out Mr. Khan's experiment: splitting up the work of teaching between man and machine, and combining teacher-led lessons with computer-based lectures and exercises.

The departure of half the core teaching staff at an elite Upper West Side elementary school has roiled parents who worry test prep is destroying the school's creative spirit. In July, close to half of the parents at the Special Music School signed a letter decrying the "apparent shift in school culture" and the new principal's leadership.  "This is not the same place it was three years ago," said a 3rd-grade parent, who like most interviewed, asked to remain anonymous for fear of negative repercussions for their children. "There's a lot of talk about data and test prep, and I didn't used to hear that." The school, which until recently was a program at PS 199, provides an almost private-school like experience for musically gifted students who must audition in kindergarten and again in 5th grade for middle school.

Shortly before Thanksgiving, The New York Times reported that criminal charges have been filed against 20 students in an affluent New York suburb for allegedly cheating on the SAT. Some are accused of paying stand-ins up to $3,500 per test to take the exam for them; others accepted payment to take the test. Bernard Kaplan, the principal of Great Neck North High School, which five of the accused students attended, suggested that the experience of his community is the tip of an iceberg. "I think it's widespread across the country," he told The Times. "We were the school that stood up to it." We have every reason to believe he's right. While criminal authorities and the Educational Testing Service, which administers the exam, investigate, parents and educators should ask: What have we done to lead teens to such an act of desperation?