Group items tagged

"Last month, the U.S. Census Bureau released its annual public K-12 school finance report (and accompanying datasets). The data, which are for FY 2009 (there's always a lag in finance data), show that spending increased roughly two percent from the previous year. This represents much slower growth than usual. These data are a valuable resource that has rightfully gotten a lot of attention. But there's a serious problem within them, which, while slightly technical, hasn't received any attention at all: The vast majority of public charter schools are not included in the data."

"The Los Angeles Unified School District squanders more than $500 million a year on an academic-improvement strategy that has consistently proven to be ineffective, researchers concluded in a report released Tuesday. The nation's second-largest school system spends 25% of its teacher payroll ($519 million a year) to compensate teachers for completing graduate coursework. These courses are a primary means by which teachers earn credits that translate to raises. Yet such training has shown no overall benefit in improving student performance, said Kate Walsh, president of the Washington-based National Council on Teacher Quality, which conducted the research."

As public school students and educators throughout Florida prepared to return to schools that have fewer teachers, larger classes and smaller budgets, a for-profit charter school company, Charter Schools USA, paid for 2,000 employees to attend a pep rally. The rally included controversial charter schools proponent Michelle Rhee and Gov. Rick Scott - the man who pushed for $1.35 billion in cuts for public schools and increased funding for charter and virtual schools.

Introduction to 9 articles from different authors as part of NYT Room for Debate series.

Middle-class public schools educate the majority of U.S. students but pay lower teacher salaries, have larger class sizes and spend less per pupil than low-income and wealthy schools, according to a report to be issued Monday.

Students packed the lobby of Chicago Public Schools headquarters Thursday to deliver a critical report on school discipline policies that contends the district spends more than 14 times as much on school security as it does on student counseling.

Those who wish to dismantle public services in the U.S. seem to share a general belief - accepted, to some extent, even by people who generally support public sector spending - that government is a massive, incompetent blob.

This report provides a first-of-its-kind descriptive summary of private school expenditures. It includes comparisons of expenditures among different types and affiliations of private schools, and it also compares those expenditures with public school expenditures for districts in the same state and labor market. Results indicate that (1) the less-regulated private school sector is more varied in many key features (teacher attributes, pay and school expenditures) than the more highly regulated public schooling sector; (2) these private school variations align and are largely explained by affiliation -- primarily religious affiliation -- alone; and (3) a ranking of school sectors by average spending correlates well with a ranking of those sectors by average standardized test scores.

School board elections are supposed to be quintessential America contests. Moms and Main Street small-business owners and retired teachers campaign by knocking on doors, writing letters to the editor and debating at elementary schools. Then friends and neighbors troop to the polls and make their choices. But what happens when all the pathologies of national politics-over-the-top spending by wealthy elites and corporate interests, partisan consultants jetting in to shape big-lie messaging, media outlets that cover spin rather than substance-are visited on a local school board contest? Emily Sirota is finding out.

Despite being promoted as a viable alternative to traditional public schools, privately owned charter schools in Texas have higher attrition rates for black students than comparable urban public schools, says a University of Texas at Austin study. Dr. Julian Vasquez Heilig's research shows that, although many privately operated charter schools claim that 90 percent or more of their students go on to college and many, such as the Houston-based KIPP chain of schools, spend 30-60 percent more per pupil than comparable urban school districts, more black students drop out and leave charter schools.

If somebody told me, 15 years ago, when I was spending many of my days working with community groups in the Bronx and East New York dealing with the consequences of the crack epidemic, that you could solve the problems of neighborhoods under siege by insulating students in local schools from the conditions surrounding them, and devoting every ounce of teachers energies to raising their test scores, I would have said "what planet are you living on?." Students were bringing the stresses of their daily lives into the classroom in ways that no teacher with a heart could ignore, and which created obstacles to concentrating in school, much less doing their homework , that people living in middle class communities couldn't imagine. To be effective in getting students to learn, teachers had to be social workers, surrogate parents, and neighborhood protectors as well as people imparting skills, and at times, the interpersonal dimensions of their work were more important than the strictly instructional components. Now, such thinking is considered a form of educational heresy.

Those who think that there is too much pressure to "teach to the test" find this time of year to be infuriating. Schools typically cease to focus on their regular curriculum and begin to prepare their students for these venerated exams. Laura Klein Some schools stop all social studies and science classes, as well as gym, art and enrichment activities, so they can spend all day on test prep in Math and English. This overhaul of the curriculum is extreme, but not unique. Unfortunately, for the students, it sends a larger signal that learning for the year is just about done.

Evidence (and evidence-based reform) are entirely neutral on the nature of teaching. Whatever works is what is valued. The distinction between teaching driven by accountability and teaching informed by evidence is crucial. Using test scores to evaluate teachers and schools, at least as defined by NCLB, runs the risk of focusing teachers on a narrow band of reading and math skills, and school and district leaders often try to improve performance by "alignment," trying to get teachers to spend more time on the skills and knowledge likely to be assessed. In contrast, evidence-based policies have no such limitations.

Those dreaded state tests are here again. All third-to eighth-graders in New York began Tuesday the first of three consecutive days of English Language Arts assessment, to be followed next week by three days of math tests. And those state tests have never been longer. A typical third-grader last year spent 150 minutes over three days taking the ELA test and 100 minutes over two days on the Math exam. This year, all students will spend 270 minutes in the ELA exam and 270 minutes in the Math test - 90 minutes over each of six days. The stakes also have never been higher, not for the pupils who take the tests or the teachers whose evaluations will be based on their students' performance or the schools that could face closure if pupil scores drop.

It has been a challenging week for many third- through eighth-grade public school students in New York City, as they have started their days on Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday with the federally mandated English Language Arts exams. But as Gotham Schools reported on Wednesday, the week has been especially challenging for some students with special needs. This year, test-taking time has doubled for all students. For those students with disabilities who are given more time to complete the tests, "testing can stretch as long as three hours on each day of testing. That means the students could spend more than half of the school day - and more than 18 hours total - on state exams this week and next," Jessica Campbell reports for Gotham.

I may not be able to prove that my literature class makes a difference in my students' test results, but there is a positive correlation between how much time students spend reading and higher scores. The problem is that low-income students, who begin school with a less-developed vocabulary and are less able to comprehend complex sentences than their more privileged peers, are also less likely to read at home. Many will read only during class time, with a teacher supporting their effort. But those are the same students who are more likely to lose out on literary reading in class in favor of extra test prep. By "using data to inform instruction," as the Department of Education insists we do, we are sorting lower-achieving students into classes that provide less cultural capital than their already more successful peers receive in their more literary classes and depriving students who viscerally understand the violence and despair in Steinbeck's novels of the opportunity to read them. It is ironic, then, that English Language Arts exams are designed for "cultural neutrality." This is supposed to give students a level playing field on the exams, but what it does is bleed our English classes dry. We are trying to teach students to read increasingly complex texts, but they are complex only on the sentence level - not because the ideas they present are complex, not because they are symbolic, allusive or ambiguous. These are literary qualities, and they are more or less absent from testing materials.

Educators spend most of their time distanced from their colleagues. Instead of forcing them to compete with each other, we should help them find new ways to work together.

I don't spend much time debunking our most powerful educational fad: value-added assessments to rate teachers. My colleague Valerie Strauss eviscerates value-added several times a week on her Answer Sheet blog with the verve of a Samurai warrior, so who needs me? Unfortunately, value-added is still growing in every corner of our nation, including D.C. schools, despite all that torn flesh and missing pieces. It's like those monsters lumbering through this year's action films.We've got to stop them! Let me fling my small, aged body in their way with the best argument against value-added I have seen in some time.

In today's Washington Post is another story about "merit pay" for teachers. But this one, by national education correspondent Lyndsey Layton, spends some space on my own thoughts on the topic. For those new to the issue, or coming to the Pink Blog from Tweets about the article, let me summarize my views as succinctly as I can

In a recent blog post, Larry Cuban muses about the enthusiasm of some superintendents, school board members, parents, and pundits for expensive, new technologies, such as "iPads, tablets, and 1:1 laptops." Without any clear evidence, they spend massively on the newest technology, expecting that "these devices will motivate students to work harder, gain more knowledge and skills, and be engaged in schooling." They believe such devices can help students develop the skills they will need in a 21st century labor market-and hope they will somehow help to narrow the achievement gap that has been widening between rich and poor. But, argues Cuban, for those school leaders "who want to provide credible answers to the inevitable question that decision-makers ask about the effectiveness of new devices, they might consider a prior question. What is the pressing or important problem to which an iPad is the solution?" Good question. Now, good enough? I am not so sure. It still implicitly assumes an iPad must be a solution to some-thing in education.