Education Links

Approximately three weeks ago teachers at Flushing High School began interviewing for their current positions at the turnaround school that will replace ours on July 1st-Rupert B. Thomas Academy at Flushing Campus.  In addition to preparing students for Regents exams and calculating final grades, my colleagues were working non-stop to gather portfolio materials and letters of recommendations for the reapplication process. Some had interviews during their lunch or prep periods while others still have yet to interview.  Whereas conversations around this time of the year generally include happy sentiments of completing another year, this time it was, "Did you go yet?  What did they ask?  How did you do?"  Colleagues who have successfully held their positions for anywhere from five to thirty years were dressed in their best business attire, pacing nervously in front of the conference room where the interviews were taking place.

Readers may recall that I posted a blog criticizing the College Board for its shameful campaign attacking American education. The ad says that the education system is "crumbling" and calls on the presidential candidates to talk more about education. The College Board asserts that American education is bad and getting worse. I received two great responses. One came from the brilliant scholar Yong Zhao, now at the University of Oregon. He makes reference to a valuable comment by Brian, which follows Yong Zhao

One of New York City's wealthiest charter school operators is expected to be approved for a 50% increase in per-pupil management fees

While the number of charter schools is growing rapidly, questions have been raised about whether charter schools are appropriately serving students with disabilities. GAO was asked: (1) How do enrollment levels of students with disabilities in charter schools and  traditional public schools compare, and what is known about the factors that may contribute to any differences? (2) How do charter schools reach out to students with disabilities and what special education services do charter schools provide? (3) What role do  Education, state educational agencies, and other entities that oversee charter schools play in ensuring students with disabilities have access to charter schools? GAO analyzed federal data on the number and characteristics of students with disabilities; visited  charter schools and school districts int hree states selected on the basis of the number of charter schools in the state, among other things; and interviewed representatives of federal, state, and other agencies that oversee charter schools.

To date, the education policy and philanthropy communities have placed a premium on funding charter schools that have high concentrations of poverty and large numbers of minority students. While it makes sense that charter schools have focused on high-needs students, thus far this focus has resulted in prioritizing high-poverty charter schools over other models, which research suggests may not be the most effective way of serving at-risk students. There is a large body of evidence suggesting that socioeconomic and racial integration provide educational benefits for all students, especially at-risk students. Today, some innovative charter schools are pursuing efforts to integrate students from different racial and economic backgrounds in their classrooms. A new report,  Diverse Charter Schools: Can Racial and Socioeconomic Integration Promote Better Outcomes for Students? by Richard D. Kahlenberg and Halley Potter explores this topic.

The public charter school movement has grown rapidly in the 20 years since the first public charter school opened in 1992, with over 5,600 schools now serving more than two million students. One of the most exceptional developments within the first two decades of the movement has been the rise of high performing public charter schools with missions intently focused on educating students from traditionally underserved communities. Given that the demographics of these communities are often homogenous, it is no surprise the demographics of these schools are that way as well. In fact, the student populations at these public charter schools usually mirror the populations in nearby district schools. While much media attention rightly has been given to these schools, the past decade or so also has seen a noteworthy rise in high performing public charter schools with missions intentionally designed to serve racially and economically integrated student populations. These schools are utilizing their autonomy to achieve a diverse student population through location-based strategies, recruitment efforts and enrollment processes. Perhaps most notably, a growing number of cities-and the parents and educators in them-are welcoming both types of public charter school models for their respective (and in some cases unprecedented) contributions to raising student achievement, particularly for students who have previously struggled in school. This brief showcases this development in three of these cities: Denver, Washington, D.C., and San Diego.

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.

Nearly six decades after Brown v. Board of Education, the landmark U.S. Supreme Court decision that ushered in an era of efforts to integrate public schools, charter school advocates and researchers are shining a light on a number of those independent public schools that are integrated by design. Two new reports-one from the National Alliance of Public Charter Schools, another from the Century Foundation and the Poverty & Race Research Action Council-examine charter schools that have racially and socioeconomically diverse enrollments as part of their school missions. Researchers and advocates say that there is increasing demand for such schools, but that national educational priorities and policies are not necessarily stacked in their favor.

When the Richmond and Louisville metro areas reached a school desegregation crossroads in the 1970s, they went in different directions. After the Supreme Court prevented a plan to consolidate Richmond's schools with those in Henrico and Chesterfield counties, the city was left to pursue a futile desegregation plan on its own. White and middle-class flight continued unabated. Meanwhile, a court-ordered consolidation of the Louisville-Jefferson County, Ky., schools produced Ku Klux Klan opposition. But the fuss eventually died down and the region took ownership of its desegregation policy without court supervision. Metro Louisville ultimately implemented a voluntary student assignment plan based on the geographic distribution of students by race and poverty. The benefits have extended beyond education. From 1990 to 2010, black-white residential segregation in Louisville-Jefferson County fell at nearly twice the rate as in metro Richmond, according to research by Genevieve Siegel-Hawley, an assistant professor in the Department of Education Leadership at Virginia Commonwealth University.

A recent report by the New York Civil Liberties Union exposed the escalating number of students who have been suspended since Mayor Michael Bloomberg took control of the city's schools more than a decade ago. Some believe one contributing factor may lie in the growing number of the public charter schools created during his tenure that develop their own discipline codes and have higher than average suspension rates. Advocates for Children, a nonprofit that represents the legal rights of public school children, believe that the rise in charters (77 in 2008 and 135 in 2012) has gone hand in hand with the fact that a number of them exclude children-particularly those with special needs-at higher than average rates.

Members of the board, steeped in a culture of corporate jargon and buzzy management theories, wanted the school to institute austerity measures and re-engineer its academic offerings around inexpensive, online education, the emails reveal. Led by Rector Helen Dragas, a real estate developer appointed six years ago, the board shared a guiding vision that the university could, and indeed should, be run like a Fortune 500 company.

The foundations-idea complex has also set its sights on remaking another of the key institutions of our democracy-the public school-in its own managerial image. There's no other way to account for the distorted, counter-empirical shape of the American debate over education. The overarching trends are plain enough: As wealth inequality swells, so do the coffers of private foundations, even as the recession has caused government budgets to shrink. As long as the motives of government and foundations are aligned, that's not necessarily a problem. But the funders of education reform seek nothing less than the wholesale retooling of public schools, at a time when the nation's school budgets are stretched to the breaking point. And the writing on the chalkboard grows clearer by the minute: Their market-based educational reforms don't work.

Isolating the effect of a given teacher on student achievement (value-added modeling) is complicated when the student is taught the same subject by more than one teacher. We consider three methods, which we call the Partial Credit Method, Teacher Team Method, and Full Roster Method, for estimating teacher effects in the presence of co-teaching. The Partial Credit Method apportions responsibility between teachers according to the fraction of the year a student spent with each. This method, however, has practical problems limiting its usefulness. As alternatives, we propose two methods that can be more stably estimated based on the premise that co-teachers share joint responsibility for the achievement gains of their shared students. The Teacher Team Method uses a single record for each student and a set of variables for each teacher or group of teachers with shared students, whereas the Full Roster Method contains a single variable for each teacher, but multiple records for shared students. We explore the properties of these two alternative methods and then compare the estimates generated using student achievement and teacher roster data from a large urban school district. We find that both methods produce very similar point estimates of teacher value added. However, the Full Roster Method better maintains the links between teachers and students and can be more robustly implemented in practice. 

Here's my operational definition of screwed for this post. A district is identified as screwed (new technical term in school finance… as of a few posts ago) if a) the district has more than 50% higher census poverty than other districts in the same labor market and b) lower per pupil state and local revenues than other districts in the same labor market. As I've explained on numerous previous occasions, it is well understood that districts with higher poverty rates (among other factors) have higher costs of providing equal educational opportunity to their students. I then tally the percent of statewide enrollments that are concentrated in these screwed districts to determine the share of kids screwed by their state. And here are the rankings… or at least the short list of states that screw the largest share of low income students

Our guest author today is Dr. Clifford B. Janey, former superintendent for the Newark Public Schools, District of Columbia Public Schools, and Rochester City School District. He is currently a Senior Weismann Fellow at the Bankstreet College of Education in New York City, and a Shanker Institute board member. For too many students, families, and communities, the high school diploma represents either a dream deferred or a broken contract between citizens and the stewards of America's modern democracy. With the reform movement's unrelenting focus on testing and its win/lose consequences for students and staff, the high school diploma, which should signify college and work readiness, has lost its value. Not including the over seven thousand students who drop out of high school daily, the gap between the percentage of those who graduate and their readiness for college success will continue to worsen the social and income inequalities in life.

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.

Diane Ravitch reviews: US Education Reform and National Security by Joel I. Klein, Condoleezza Rice, and others

This report takes a closer look at the powerful forces behind the Committee and their playbook for "saving" New York. The Committee's backers are primarily big business interests, billionaires, and other leading lights of New York State's "one percent." They played a key role in crashing New York's economy through their own style of gambling, won billions in government bailouts, but now insist on "fiscal responsibility" for the rest of the state. Though the Committee frames its agenda as altruistic and public-minded, its backers stand to profit substantially from the policies for which it advocates. These policy payoffs include not just casino gambling legalization, but pension reform, new and continued corporate tax loopholes, and favorable development policies.

Louisiana's "School Performance Score" (SPS) is the state's primary accountability measure, and it determines whether schools are subject to high-stakes decisions, most notably state takeover. For elementary and middle schools, 90 percent of the SPS is based on testing outcomes. For secondary schools, it is 70 percent (and 30 percent graduation rates).* The SPS is largely calculated using absolute performance measures - specifically, the proportion of students falling into the state's cutpoint-based categories (e.g., advanced, mastery, basic, etc.). This means that it is mostly measuring student performance, rather than school performance. That is, insofar as the SPS only tells you how high students score on the test, rather than how much they have improved, schools serving more advantaged populations will tend to do better (since their students tend to perform well when they entered the school) while those in impoverished neighborhoods will tend to do worse (even those whose students have made the largest testing gains). One rough way to assess this bias is to check the association between SPS and student characteristics, such as poverty.