Group items tagged

The New England Common Assessment Program is on its way out in New Hampshire. The state Department of Education is planning to implement a new standardized test system to measure reading and math proficiency starting in 2013-14, said Paul Leather, deputy commissioner of education. The state will discontinue using the NECAP for reading and math after one more round of testing in October, and then roll out the Smarter Balanced Assessment the next school year. Leather described the new test a stronger assessment with no increased cost.

This paper examines the policy context of charter school adoption and implementation in Indianapolis -- the only city in the U.S. with independent mayoral authorizing authority. Our study identifies specific implications of this hybrid of mayoral control, including expanded civic capacity and innovation diffusion across Indianapolis area public school systems. This qualitative study utilizes over 30 in-depth interviews conducted with key stakeholders. Legislative, state, and school district documents and reports were analyzed for descriptive evidence of expanded civic capacity, school innovation, and charter/non-charter school competitive pressures. The case of Indianapolis reframes the mayoral role in education reform, and expands the institutional framework for charter school authorizing.

Lessons Learned from Classroom Observations, Principal-Teacher Conferences, and District Implementation

A collection of Los Angeles teachers plans to force a vote among the district's teaching corps that, if passed, would require their union to advocate for "teacher-led" changes to the teacher-evaluation system-and for a moratorium on layoffs while it's implemented.

Outlined in a new contract in 2009, delineated in the 2009-10 school year, and implemented in 2010-11, TEVAL, as the system is known, requires at least three "professional conferences" between an instructional leader performing classroom observations and each teacher. The conferences help to home in on areas on strength and weakness and provide a path for improvement. The system also integrates student-achievement results. TEVAL is only part of the district's three-pronged improvement efforts, but it's emblematic of New Haven's commitment to reform in partnership with its teachers' union.

"NJ Spotlight today posted a story on upcoming Task Force deliberations and public hearings over whether the state should continue to target funding in its school finance formula to local districts on the basis of counts of children qualifying for free or reduced priced lunch.  That is, kids from families who fall below the 185% income threshold for poverty. The basic assumption behind targeting additional resources to higher poverty schools and districts is that high need districts can leverage the additional resources to implement strategies that help to improve various outcomes for children at risk. "

"The situation with vouchers in Louisiana is obviously quite complicated, and there are strong opinions on both sides of the issue, but I'd like to comment quickly on the new "accountability" provision. It's a great example of how, too often, people focus on the concept of accountability and ignore how it is actually implemented in policy."

A recent article about the implementation of new teacher evaluations in Tennessee details some of the complicated issues with which state officials, teachers and administrators are dealing in adapting to the new system. One of these issues is somewhat technical - whether the various components of evaluations, most notably principal observations and test-based productivity measures (e.g., value-added) - tend to "match up." That is, whether teachers who score high on one measure tend to do similarly well on the other (see here for more on this issue).

Jack Schneider of Carleton College has written a clear, original, thought-provoking book about three significant strands in the fabric of contemporary school reform:  the "small schools" movement, Teach For America, and the Advanced Placement program.  In the process, he manages both to emphasize how in his estimation they are improving public schools and to highlight some of the ironies involved in their implementation.  Not until his concluding chapter, however, does he really come to grips with their most significant vagaries and limitations.

When Barack Obama ascended to the Presidency, he was fired up with a desire to improve America's schools, which he felt were falling behind those of other advanced countries. He decided to bring "the best minds in the country" in to help them with this task- CEO's of successful businesses, heads of major foundations, young executives from management consulting firms- to figure out a strategy to transform America's schools, especially those in low performing districts. He promised them full support of his Administration when they finally came up with effective strategies including the use of federal funding to persuade, and if necessary, compel local districts to implement them Notably missing in this brain trust were representatives of America's teachers and school administrators, but their absence was not accidental.

Pau Hill and Marguerite Roza's response to my recent report - with Kevin Welner - and series of blog posts seems to offer as its central argument that we're simply a curmudgeons, offering lots of complaints about the rigor of their arguments and their suggestions for improving schooling productivity and efficiency, but providing no creative or immediately useful ideas or solutions for school districts or states in these tough economic times. My first response would be that bad ideas are bad ideas, even in the absence of alternatives. The fact that budgets are tight and many schools are underperforming is not an argument for implementing unproven, ill-considered policy solutions. That said, my second response is that Kevin Welner and I did in fact offer our own solutions, both in our policy brief and elsewhere.

Late yesterday, the New Jersey Department of Education Released its long awaited report on the state school finance formula. For a little context, the formula was adopted in 2008 and upheld by the court as meeting the state constitutional standard for providing a thorough and efficient system of public schooling. But, court acceptance of the plan came with a requirement of a review of the formula after three years of implementation. After a change in administration, with additional legal battles over cuts in aid in the interim, we now have that report.  The idea was that the report would suggest any adjustments that may need to be made to the formula to make the distributions of aid across districts more appropriate/more adequate (more constitutional?). I laid out my series of proposed minor adjustments in a previous post. Reduced to its simplest form, the current report argues that New Jersey's biggest problem in public education is its achievement gap - the gap between poor and minority students and between non-poor and non-minority students.  And the obvious proposed fix? To reduce funding to high poverty, predominantly minority school districts and increase funding to less poor districts with fewer minorities. Why? Because money and class size simply don't matter. Instead, teacher quality and strategies like those  used in Harlem Childrens' Zone do! Here's my quick, day-after, critique

One common strain of modern education reform has a direct, yet familiar logic: An education crisis persists despite more spending, smaller classes, or curricular changes. We have ignored the major cause of student achievement: teacher quality. Seniority and tenure have diluted the pool of talented teachers and impeded student learning. Reformers such as Michelle Rhee have acted on this assumption, implementing test-based accountability measures, merit pay, and lesser job protections. Unfortunately, the current educational reform movement shares its logic with the early-twentieth-century American eugenics movement, which in efforts to improve our gene pool, wrote a horrific chapter in our history. In suggesting this provocative comparison, I hope to guide readers through three shared errors. Both eugenics and modern school reform view education too deterministically, share a faith in standardized tests, and exaggerate the fixedness of traits.

Put three rockstars of the education world in a room together and you get this fantastic panel from last week's Netroots Nation on the future of public education, the importance of community organizing and the path towards systemic education reform to provide every child with a fair and substantive opportunity to learn.  The panelists were education historian Diane Ravicth, John H. Jackson, President & CEO of the Schott Foundation for Public Education, and Ken Bernstein, a long-time teacher and education advocate. All three had harsh words for policymakers pedaling ineffective or untested policies as viable reform strategies. "We don't have an innovation challenge, we have an implementation challenge," Jackson said. We know what policies work. Countless studies have shown the importance of early childhood education, access to healthcare and guidance counselors, and support for teachers. But the practical, systemic solutions that come out of that body of research are ignored in favor of a political agenda that seeks to privatize and dismantle a public institution that is vital to our nation's economy and democratic well-being.

"During the 2010, 2011, and 2012 legislative sessions, a combination of federal policy incentives and newly elected governors and legislative majorities in many states following the 2010 elections sparked a wave of legislation addressing teacher effectiveness. More than 20 states passed legislation designed to address educator effectiveness by mandating annual evaluations based in part on student learning and linking evaluation results to key personnel decisions, including tenure, reductions in force, dismissal of underperforming teachers, and retention. In many cases states passed multiple laws, with later laws building on previous legislation, and also promulgated regulations to implement legislation. A few states acted through regulation only. In an effort to help policymakers, educators, and the public better understand how this flurry of legislative activity shifted the landscape on teacher effectiveness issues-both nationally and at the state level-Bellwether Education Partners analyzed recent teacher effectiveness legislation, regulation, and supporting policy documents from 21 states that took major legislative or regulatory action on teacher effectiveness in the past three years. This analysis builds on a previous analysis of teacher effectiveness legislation in five states that Bellwether published in 2011. Our expanded analysis includes nearly all states that took major legislative action on teacher effectiveness over the past three years."

"AFT president Randi Weingarten has recently changed positions on value-added methods (VAM) for teacher evaluation, but maintains support for Common Core (CC). With that shift to rejecting VAM, based on the solid evidence base that shows high-stakes implementation of VAM is at least complicated if not misleading, I would like to request that Weingarten and AFT apply that same analysis to CC."

"Proponents of the Common Core have likened the struggle to implement it to the Civil Rights Movement. As we reflect on the 50th anniversary of the height of that movement, we must consider how these standards and the related testing are threatening students' rights to education, not upholding them. As one critical example, the Common Core's strict interpretation of "close reading of a text" dismisses the notion that students' own thoughts and experiences, and how they connect to a text, are integral to reading. Rather, student voices are silenced in their own classrooms, and literacy is reduced to the ability to navigate standardized tests."

"In the following post, veteran educator Stan Karp explains why the problems surrounding the implementation of the Common Core are less about the substance of the standards and more about the context in which they were introduced. Karp taught English and journalism in Paterson, N.J., for 30 years and is an editor of Rethinking Schools magazine, where this appeared."

"The New York Regents are the masters of the non-response response.  The day after they published their recommendations entitled Adjustment Options to Common Core Implementation, this was the Newsday headline: Pullback on Common Core: Regents Delay Tougher NY Test Requirements for High School Students Until 2022. That headline on Tuesday came from the Regents' third recommendation: "Give students more time to meet the Common Core standards." That sounds impressive until you discover that nothing was pulled back at all."

"But even good ideas can be torpedoed by bad execution. In New York, officials rushed to impose tests and consequences way before students were ready. And Louisiana, New Mexico and other states are skimping on or simply bungling implementation. If officials are trying to make these standards unattainable, they're doing a great job. No wonder students, their parents and teachers are angry, anxious and demoralized."