Group items tagged

A new report by the Schott Foundation documents policies and practices of the New York City Department of Education that create and reinforce unequal opportunities to learn ("A Rotting Apple"). It maintains that what is taking place in the nation's largest school district amounts to no less than education redlining because the census tract in which students live determines the quality of education they receive. It's a provocative argument. But there's another side of the story that needs to be told. In an ideal world, there would be equal opportunities to learn by all students regardless of the location of their residence. The only country that has come close to that educational Eden is Finland. That's because differences in income are modest. The U.S. is the antithesis. The yawning gap between family incomes explains why.

Educational interventions are often evaluated and compared on the basis of their impacts on test scores. Decades of research have produced two empirical regularities: interventions in later grades tend to have smaller effects than the same interventions in earlier grades, and the test score impacts of early educational interventions almost universally "fade out" over time. This paper explores whether these empirical regularities are an artifact of the common practice of rescaling test scores in terms of a student's position in a widening distribution of knowledge. If a standard deviation in test scores in later grades translates into a larger difference in knowledge, an intervention's effect on normalized test scores may fall even as its effect on knowledge does not. We evaluate this hypothesis by fitting a model of education production to correlations in test scores across grades and with college-going using both administrative and survey data. Our results imply that the variance in knowledge does indeed rise as children progress through school, but not enough for test score normalization to fully explain these empirical regularities.

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.

Is educational innovation the way to close the achievement gap? A lot of smart people are hoping it will solve the problem. In the past few months I've been around a lot of innovations. I have watched the Khan Academy (and Sal Khan himself) in action, dug into 'blended learning,' Rocketship and KIPP, and looked at some Early College High School programs. I've been reading about new iPad applications and commercial ventures like Learning.com, and teachers have been writing me about how they are using blogs to encourage kids to write, and Twitter for professional development. In many schools kids are working in team to build robots, while other schools are using Skype to connect with students across the state or nation. I've even watched two jazz groups - one in Rhode Island, the other in Connecticut - practice together on Skype! 'Innovation' per se is not sufficient, of course. We need innovations that level the playing field and give all kids - regardless of their parents' income - the opportunity to excel.

In the wake of news that a Chicago charter school network receives hundreds of thousands of dollars from fees on student misconduct, some educators are raising questions about the fairness of the practice.

Central Falls, Rhode Island may seem like an unlikely standard bearer for a reading or public school revolution - it is the poorest district in the state with more than 85% of its students on free or reduced lunch plans. And, the city itself recently went bankrupt. Yet, a remarkable collaboration between The Learning Community charter school and surrounding non-charter public elementary schools continues to demonstrate that students are hungry to learn and that, in the words of The Learning Community credo, poverty is not a barrier to success.  The collaboration is part of what is called the Growing Readers Initiative - an effort to share best practices between teachers from different systems to turnaround some of the lowest reading scores in the state.

Elmore's edited text illuminates a rarely discussed yet important aspect of school reform efforts: the critical reflective analysis of one's perspective (personal bias), or the connection between our experiences and our interpretations of those experiences. The volume's title and theme draw from a professional development exercise requiring conscious reflection on old points of view drawn from the experiences of educational reformers, theorists, leaders, researchers, and policy makers who have been on the front line of K-12 school reform. Contributors include Howard Gardner, Rudy Crew, Larry Cuban, Jeff Henig, Deb Meier, and Mike Smith, among others. This collection offers an insightful examination of some challenging educational issues of our time, including standardized testing; the role of special education; performance pay; the relationship between social theory and practice; teacher unionism; program development, implementation, and evaluation; the social role of education; and community involvement. The result is timely, as present educational policy is being reassessed on state and national levels.

One pattern of failure in education reform is that political leadership and the public focus attention and resources on solutions while rarely asking what problems we are addressing or how those solutions address identified problems. The current and possibly increasing advocacy of charter schools is a perfect example of that flawed approach to improving our schools across the U.S. Let's start with two clarifications. First, the overwhelming problems contributing to school quality are pockets of poverty across the country and school policies and practices mirroring and increasing social inequities for children once they enter many schools.

In The Louisiana Recovery School District: Lessons for the Buckeye State, the Thomas B. Fordham Institute criticizes local urban governance structures and presents the decentralized, charter-school-driven Recovery School District (RSD) in New Orleans as a successful model for fiscal and academic performance. Absent from the review is any consideration of the chronic under-funding and racial history of New Orleans public schools before Hurricane Katrina, and no evidence is provided that a conversion to charter schools would remedy these problems. The report also misreads the achievement data to assert the success of the RSD, when the claimed gains may be simply a function of shifting test standards. The report also touts the replacement of senior teachers with new and non-traditionally prepared teachers, but provides no evidence of the efficacy of this practice. Additionally, the report claims public support for the reforms, but other indicators-never addressed in the report-reveal serious concerns over access, equity, performance, and accountability. Ultimately, the report is a polemic advocating the removal of public governance and the replacement of public schools with privately operated charter networks. It is thin on data and thick on claims, and should be read with great caution by policymakers in Ohio and elsewhere.

As a parent I find it easy to understand the appeal of charter schools, especially for parents and students who feel that traditional public schools have failed them. As a historical sociologist who studies race and politics, however, I am disturbed both by the significant challenges that plague the contemporary charter school movement, and by the ugly history of segregationist tactics that link past educational practices to the troubling present. 

The largest charter school network in the United States is operated by people in and associated with the Gulen Movement (GM), a secretive and controversial Turkish religious sect. With 135 schools enrolling more than 45,000 students, this network is substantially larger than KIPP, the well-known charter management organization with only 109 schools. A lack of awareness about this situation persists despite it being addressed in a national paper and in articles about Gulen charter schools in Utah (also here), Arizona, (also here), Illinois, Tennessee, Pennsylvania (also here), Indiana, Oklahoma (and here), Texas (also here), Arkansas, Louisiana (also here), New Jersey, Georgia, and North Carolina. It was also reported that the FBI and the Departments of Labor and Education are investigating practices at these schools.

Efforts to revamp public education are increasingly focused on evaluating teachers using student test scores, but school districts nationwide are only beginning to deal with the practical challenges of implementing those changes.

Now our small community is faced with the unthinkable - we may be forced to close a highly performing public school to hand that school lock, stock and barrel over to a Charter School.  Shocking, isn't it?  How could this happen?  Charter school law was intended to help children who are under-served and falling through the cracks of traditional education systems.  Unfortunately, across the country there are more and more charter schools popping up which are taking advantage of loopholes to create pseudo-private schools with questionable admissions practices, high "suggested donation" requirements from parents and low representation of truly underprivileged children.

A venerable maxim of successful organizational management declares that an executive's authority should be commensurate with his or her responsibility. In plain English, if you are held to account for producing certain results, you need to be in charge of the essential means of production. In American public education today, however, that equation is sorely unbalanced. A school principal in 2012 is accountable for student achievement, for discipline, for curriculum and instruction, and for leading (and supervising) the staff team, not to mention attracting students, satisfying parents, and collaborating with innumerable other agencies and organizations. Yet that same principal controls only a tiny part of his school's budget, has scant say over who teaches there, practically no authority when it comes to calendar or schedule, and minimal leverage over the curriculum itself. Instead of deploying all available school assets in ways that would do the most good for the most kids, the principal is required to follow dozens or hundreds of rules, program requirements, spending procedures, discipline codes, contract clauses, and regulations emanating from at least three levels of government--none of which strives to coordinate with any of the others. In short, we give our school heads the responsibility of CEO's but the authority of middle-level bureaucrats.

The question today is whether a democratic society needs public schools subject to democratic governance. Why not turn public dollars over to private corporations to run schools as they see fit? Isn't the private sector better and smarter than the public sector? The rise of charter schools has been nothing short of meteoric. They were first proposed in 1988 by Raymond Budde, a Massachusetts education professor, and Albert Shanker, the president of the American Federation of Teachers. Budde dreamed of chartering programs or teams of teachers, not schools. Shanker thought of charters as small schools, staffed by union teachers, created to recruit the toughest-to-educate students and to develop fresh ideas to help their colleagues in the public schools. Their originators saw charters as collaborators, not competitors, with the public schools. Now the charter industry has become a means of privatizing public education. They tout the virtues of competition, not collaboration. The sector has many for-profit corporations, eagerly trolling for new business opportunities and larger enrollments. Some charters skim the top students in the poorest neighborhoods; some accept very small proportions of students who have disabilities or don't speak English; some quietly push out those with low scores or behavior problems (the Indianapolis public schools recently complained about this practice by local charters).

The two teachers systematically dissect the video, noting a variety of missteps. There are a few unquestionable errors of mathematics: Khan uses incorrect terminology at a couple of points. Khan is also inconsistent in his language about positive and negative numbers (using plus when he means positive, or minus when he means negative), which is perhaps a lesser sin, but poor practice and misleading for students. He's also inconsistent in his use of symbols, sometimes writing "+4", sometimes writing "4", never explaining why he does or doesn't. He making the kind of mistakes that would reduce his score on the Mathematical Quality of Instruction observational instrument, used in the Gates-funded Measures of Effective Teaching Project.

"Why are the corporate reformers creating schools for poor and/or minority children that engage in practices that affluent parents would never accept for their own kids?"

"I hope over the next several months to compile a series of posts where I look at what states have done to achieve their executive granted waivers from federal legislation. Yeah… let's be clear here, that all of this starts with an executive decision to ignore outright, undermine intentionally and explicitly, federal legislation. Yeah… that legislation may have some significant issues. It might just suck entirely. Nonetheless, this precedent is a scary one both in concept and in practice. Even when I don't like the legislation in question, I'm really uncomfortable having someone unilaterally over-ride or undermine it. It makes me all the more uncomfortable when that unilateral disregard for existing law is being used in a coercive manner - using access to federal funding to coerce states to adopt reform strategies that the current administration happens to prefer. The precedent at the federal level that legislation perceived as inconvenient can and should simply be ignored seems to encourage state departments of education to ignore statutory and constitutional provisions within their states that might be perceived similarly as inconvenient. Setting all of those really important civics issues aside - WHICH WE CERTAINLY SHOULD NOT BE DOING - the policies being adopted under this illegal (technical term - since it's in direct contradiction to a statute, with full recognition that this statute exists) coercive framework are toxic, racially disparate and yet another example of misplaced blame."

School reforms abound today, yet even the boldest and most imaginative among them have produced-at best-marginal gains in student achievement. What America needs in the twenty-first century is a far more profound version of education reform. Instead of shoveling yet more policies, programs, and practices into our current system, we must deepen our understanding of the obstacles to reform that are posed by existing structures, governance arrangements, and power relationships. Yet few education reformers-or public officials-have been willing to delve into this touchy territory. The Thomas B. Fordham Institute and the Center for American Progress have teamed up to tackle these tough issues and ask how our mostly nineteenth-century system of K-12 governance might be modernized and made more receptive to the innumerable changes that have occurred-and need to occur-in the education realm. We have commissioned fifteen first-rate analysts to probe the structural impediments to school reform and to offer provocative alternatives.