From Scathing Purple Musings
by Bob Sykes
A new report shows little change in scores on national standardized tests for students in Florida’s low-income voucher program.
They attend private schools at taxpayer expense.
The report on the Tax Credit Scholarship Program was released Wednesday. It was prepared for the state Department of Education by Northwestern University economist David Figlio.
The national percentile ranking for program participants in 2009-10 dropped 1.2 points in reading and 1.7 points in math from the prior year.
That put the typical program student at the 45th national percentile in reading and 46th in math.
Those scores are compared to all students tested nationally, not just low-income children.
Nearly 35,000 students participate in the program.
They are not required to take the Florida Comprehensive Assessment Test, or FCAT, given to public school students.
Coming on the heals of a new study which concludes that Florida’s growing list of “choice options” is harming the state’s public schools, this is not good news for republican policy-makers. With data unsupportive of the supposed superiority of charter schools - and now vouchers – will Rick Scott and the state’s republicans pivot again to emphasizing that “choice” is really the only thing that matters?
http://bobsidlethoughtsandmusings.wordpress.com/2011/09/01/will-sketchy-voucher-results-bring-back-the-choice-mantra-again-in-florida/
Monday, January 2, 2012
Vouchers join charter schools and merit pay as failed reforms
From Scathing Purple Musings
by Bob Sykes
Perhaps I misread Emily Sirota. Her August 2 Huffington Post piece was filled with ed reformer “excuse” taunts and led me to draw the conclusion that she, too, was on the market solutions bandwagon. But anyone who posts such an effective dismissal of vouchers and the motivation of their backers while outing an advocacy group with a cleverly misleading name is worth mentioning.
Sirota’s piece speaks to Denver’s voucher fight and the details she provides mirror facts on the ground in Florida. Writes Sirota:
Make no mistake about it: my longtime opposition to vouchers has always been driven by the cold hard data. In other words, it comes in response to what we know vouchers will do to our community, and what they have already done to other communities.
Today, Colorado ranks near the bottom of the nation in terms of funding its public schools, and our legislature just enacted yet another massive cut to K-12 education. That means a new voucher scheme’s further reductions to public school resources would be catastrophic. Think: even larger class sizes, fewer teaching resources, crumbling school buildings and ultimately, even worse results than the already abominable 51.8 percent graduation rate at DPS.
The most crystal clear example voucher’s inadequacy in from Milwaukee’s voucher system. Sirota provides the data she mentions above:
Additionally, we know that vouchers do not work to improve overall student achievement. Only a few months ago, the Wisconsin State Journal reported that test results from Milwaukee’s voucher system definitively show “voucher students performing ‘similar or worse’” than students in public schools. Meanwhile, the system is now facing calls for a federal investigation into accusations that it is aggressively discriminating against children with learning disabilities.
Like in Colorado, Florida’s republicans plow forward with vouchers. Voices like Sirota’s draw opposition. One such group is Democrats for Education Reform (DFER).
…. we should also be concerned that this is only the beginning of the larger effort here in Colorado to destroy public education. I say that because one of the key Manhattan-based groups that has been pushing vouchers, “Democrats for Education Reform,” announcedthis week that it is specifically trying to defeat me in 2011 and instead elect its hand-picked slate of candidates to take over the Denver Public School board.
This front group, which the Washington Post says is financed “largely by hedge fund managers” on Wall Street, celebrates on its website “the revival of the private school voucher movement.” Likewise, one of the group’s founding hedge funders publicly champions vouchers, and the group has explicitly promoted candidates who push vouchers. And perhaps most troubling of all, the group’s Colorado affiliate is advised by an outspoken advocate for vouchers who also runs a local education policy organization my opponent co-chaired.
The group’s board of directors are the unusual suspects in the corporate ed reform movement like Whitney Tilson and Tom Vander Ark. DFER are active in Florida. Its director testified in front in both houses of Florida’s legislature in the run-up to SB736′s passage.
http://bobsidlethoughtsandmusings.wordpress.com/2011/08/17/a-thorough-takedown-of-vouchers-in-colorado-and-why-it-matters-in-florida/
by Bob Sykes
Perhaps I misread Emily Sirota. Her August 2 Huffington Post piece was filled with ed reformer “excuse” taunts and led me to draw the conclusion that she, too, was on the market solutions bandwagon. But anyone who posts such an effective dismissal of vouchers and the motivation of their backers while outing an advocacy group with a cleverly misleading name is worth mentioning.
Sirota’s piece speaks to Denver’s voucher fight and the details she provides mirror facts on the ground in Florida. Writes Sirota:
Make no mistake about it: my longtime opposition to vouchers has always been driven by the cold hard data. In other words, it comes in response to what we know vouchers will do to our community, and what they have already done to other communities.
Today, Colorado ranks near the bottom of the nation in terms of funding its public schools, and our legislature just enacted yet another massive cut to K-12 education. That means a new voucher scheme’s further reductions to public school resources would be catastrophic. Think: even larger class sizes, fewer teaching resources, crumbling school buildings and ultimately, even worse results than the already abominable 51.8 percent graduation rate at DPS.
The most crystal clear example voucher’s inadequacy in from Milwaukee’s voucher system. Sirota provides the data she mentions above:
Additionally, we know that vouchers do not work to improve overall student achievement. Only a few months ago, the Wisconsin State Journal reported that test results from Milwaukee’s voucher system definitively show “voucher students performing ‘similar or worse’” than students in public schools. Meanwhile, the system is now facing calls for a federal investigation into accusations that it is aggressively discriminating against children with learning disabilities.
Like in Colorado, Florida’s republicans plow forward with vouchers. Voices like Sirota’s draw opposition. One such group is Democrats for Education Reform (DFER).
…. we should also be concerned that this is only the beginning of the larger effort here in Colorado to destroy public education. I say that because one of the key Manhattan-based groups that has been pushing vouchers, “Democrats for Education Reform,” announcedthis week that it is specifically trying to defeat me in 2011 and instead elect its hand-picked slate of candidates to take over the Denver Public School board.
This front group, which the Washington Post says is financed “largely by hedge fund managers” on Wall Street, celebrates on its website “the revival of the private school voucher movement.” Likewise, one of the group’s founding hedge funders publicly champions vouchers, and the group has explicitly promoted candidates who push vouchers. And perhaps most troubling of all, the group’s Colorado affiliate is advised by an outspoken advocate for vouchers who also runs a local education policy organization my opponent co-chaired.
The group’s board of directors are the unusual suspects in the corporate ed reform movement like Whitney Tilson and Tom Vander Ark. DFER are active in Florida. Its director testified in front in both houses of Florida’s legislature in the run-up to SB736′s passage.
http://bobsidlethoughtsandmusings.wordpress.com/2011/08/17/a-thorough-takedown-of-vouchers-in-colorado-and-why-it-matters-in-florida/
10 Reasons vouchers are a bad idea
With an assist from, the Keystone State Education Coalition, from PSBA.com
1. Vouchers divert resources from public education but do not adequately reduce costs. When a student leaves a school district to enroll in a nonpublic school, the district's costs associated with that student do not just disappear. Students typically do not exit the school district in neat groups of 30 nor are they all from the same grade or class. Therefore, school districts are unable to reduce certain fixed costs necessary in the operation of a school – transportation, utilities, debt service and employee payroll, to name a few.
2. Parental satisfaction is not an adequate measure of student or school success or accountability. There are many factors to consider when assessing a school's achievement level and progress. A 2005 study on charter schools by the Economic Policy Institute* suggests that parents may choose a school for other than academic reasons.
3. There is inconclusive evidence that students who utilize vouchers automatically make better strides in private or parochial schools than they would in public school. Studies conducted in Milwaukee, Cleveland and Washington, D.C.* have not found that students utilizing vouchers make any better progress in private or parochial schools than they did while in public school.
4. Private and parochial schools are NOT open to every child. It is disingenuous to claim that vouchers open the door to "parental choice" when in fact the choice is really being given to the nonpublic school. Private and parochial schools are able to decide if they want to accept vouchers, and then how many and which students they want to admit. Public schools accept and educate students regardless of race, religion, ethnicity, academic performance and special needs. Nonpublic schools are able to "cherry pick” the students they would welcome into their school.
5. Parents have choices now if they are not satisfied with their children's public school education. Pennsylvania currently offers alternatives to the traditional brick-and-mortar public school. Parents may enroll their children in charter schools and pay no tuition. They also may choose to educate their child in private or parochial schools or home school.
6. Vouchers eliminate accountability to taxpayers. The implementation of a school tuition voucher program violates the fundamental principle of "no taxation without representation." This pillar of democracy is based on the tenet that where public dollars are being spent, taxpayers have both the right and responsibility to hold an institution, and those officials in charge of an institution, accountable for that fiduciary duty. Voters are able to hold local school board members accountable through elections, but have no way to hold private schools accountable for use of these public funds.
7. Pennsylvanians do not support tuition vouchers. According to the Pennsylvania Omnibus survey conducted by the Center for Opinion Research at Franklin and Marshall College in 2010 (see details of the findings on What does the public say?), two out of three Pennsylvanians oppose using tax dollars for school vouchers, with opposition being held across political parties, all regions of the state, age groups and races.
8. Nonpublic schools lack transparency. Private and parochial schools are not required to make their financial records, academic achievement data or board of trustees meetings open to scrutiny as publics are under the provisions of the Right-to-Know Law and Sunshine Law. Without these and other such accountability measures, there are no safeguards against fraudulent, unethical or illegal behavior or misuse of funds.
9. Nonpublic schools do not hold students to the same rigorous academic standards as public schools. Students enrolled in nonpublic schools are not subjected to state-approved academic standards and assessments. Further, private and parochial schools are not required to publish student achievement data, so often consistent and comparable data is unavailable.
10. Creating a separate education system does nothing to address inadequacies or issues with the existing public school system. Rather than remove a select few, disadvantaged students from a school that may be underperforming, why not assist public schools to correct or increase their capacity to correct problems so that all students are able to thrive? Pennsylvania’s constitutional directive to maintain a “thorough and efficient system of public education” must not be ignored. Efforts and resources should be focused on building up, not diminishing, public education in Pennsylvania.
http://www.psba.org/issues-advocacy/issues-research/vouchers/special-issue-theanswer.asp
1. Vouchers divert resources from public education but do not adequately reduce costs. When a student leaves a school district to enroll in a nonpublic school, the district's costs associated with that student do not just disappear. Students typically do not exit the school district in neat groups of 30 nor are they all from the same grade or class. Therefore, school districts are unable to reduce certain fixed costs necessary in the operation of a school – transportation, utilities, debt service and employee payroll, to name a few.
2. Parental satisfaction is not an adequate measure of student or school success or accountability. There are many factors to consider when assessing a school's achievement level and progress. A 2005 study on charter schools by the Economic Policy Institute* suggests that parents may choose a school for other than academic reasons.
3. There is inconclusive evidence that students who utilize vouchers automatically make better strides in private or parochial schools than they would in public school. Studies conducted in Milwaukee, Cleveland and Washington, D.C.* have not found that students utilizing vouchers make any better progress in private or parochial schools than they did while in public school.
4. Private and parochial schools are NOT open to every child. It is disingenuous to claim that vouchers open the door to "parental choice" when in fact the choice is really being given to the nonpublic school. Private and parochial schools are able to decide if they want to accept vouchers, and then how many and which students they want to admit. Public schools accept and educate students regardless of race, religion, ethnicity, academic performance and special needs. Nonpublic schools are able to "cherry pick” the students they would welcome into their school.
5. Parents have choices now if they are not satisfied with their children's public school education. Pennsylvania currently offers alternatives to the traditional brick-and-mortar public school. Parents may enroll their children in charter schools and pay no tuition. They also may choose to educate their child in private or parochial schools or home school.
6. Vouchers eliminate accountability to taxpayers. The implementation of a school tuition voucher program violates the fundamental principle of "no taxation without representation." This pillar of democracy is based on the tenet that where public dollars are being spent, taxpayers have both the right and responsibility to hold an institution, and those officials in charge of an institution, accountable for that fiduciary duty. Voters are able to hold local school board members accountable through elections, but have no way to hold private schools accountable for use of these public funds.
7. Pennsylvanians do not support tuition vouchers. According to the Pennsylvania Omnibus survey conducted by the Center for Opinion Research at Franklin and Marshall College in 2010 (see details of the findings on What does the public say?), two out of three Pennsylvanians oppose using tax dollars for school vouchers, with opposition being held across political parties, all regions of the state, age groups and races.
8. Nonpublic schools lack transparency. Private and parochial schools are not required to make their financial records, academic achievement data or board of trustees meetings open to scrutiny as publics are under the provisions of the Right-to-Know Law and Sunshine Law. Without these and other such accountability measures, there are no safeguards against fraudulent, unethical or illegal behavior or misuse of funds.
9. Nonpublic schools do not hold students to the same rigorous academic standards as public schools. Students enrolled in nonpublic schools are not subjected to state-approved academic standards and assessments. Further, private and parochial schools are not required to publish student achievement data, so often consistent and comparable data is unavailable.
10. Creating a separate education system does nothing to address inadequacies or issues with the existing public school system. Rather than remove a select few, disadvantaged students from a school that may be underperforming, why not assist public schools to correct or increase their capacity to correct problems so that all students are able to thrive? Pennsylvania’s constitutional directive to maintain a “thorough and efficient system of public education” must not be ignored. Efforts and resources should be focused on building up, not diminishing, public education in Pennsylvania.
http://www.psba.org/issues-advocacy/issues-research/vouchers/special-issue-theanswer.asp
How are charter schools doing? Not that good.
From Education Matters
by Jim Horne
The first national charter school study was conducted in 2009 by CREDO at Stanford, and the co-funders of the study (the Walton Foundation and Pearson) were not enamored by the results. So bad were they for charter school fans that the study, though given skimpy coverage by the LA Times, was never reported by WaPo or the NYTimes, and received minimal coverage from one news magazine, U. S. News and World Report, which obviously did not get the memo:
On average, charter schools are not performing as well as their traditional public-school peers, according to a new study that is being called the first national assessment of these school-choice options. The study, conducted by the Center for Research on Education Outcomes at Stanford University, compared the reading and math state achievement test scores of students in charter schools in 15 states and the District of Columbia—amounting to 70 percent of U.S. charter school students—to those of their virtual "twins" in regular schools who shared with them certain characteristics. The research found that 37 percent of charter schools posted math gains that were significantly below what students would have seen if they had enrolled in local traditional public schools. And 46 percent of charter schools posted math gains that were statistically indistinguishable from the average growth among their traditional public-school companions. That means that only 17 percent of charter schools have growth in math scores that exceeds that of their traditional public-school equivalents by a significant amount.
In reading, charter students on average realized a growth that was less than their public-school counterparts but was not as statistically significant as differences in math achievement, researchers said.
"We are worried by these results," Margaret Raymond, director of CREDO and lead author of the report, Multiple Choice: Charter School Performance in 16 States, said at a news conference. "This study shows that we've got a 2-to-1 margin of bad charters to good charters." . . . .
This new study released in Friday's news dump, entitled "Charter-School Management Organization: Diverse Strategies and Diverse Student Impacts," has more bad news for school privatizers who prefer the charter route. Even though a swarm of urban school colonizers from Gates, Walton, and the New Schools Venture Fund helped set up the parameters for this study in order to get the most favorable outcome, and even though the Gates "research" hothouse, the Center for Reinventing Public Education co-authored the study, there's enough bad news for charter proponents that mirrors years of previous research on charters that this study, too, has been ignored by the corporate media. Ed Week had a piece on the new study entitled "Academic Gains Vary Widely for Charter Networks," and Time had a pre-release gloss by corporate spinner extraordinaire, Andy Rotherham. That was it for coverage, except for a misleading and dissembling press release by Jim Peyser at the New Schools Venture Fund. And only one of the national charter school associations offered a press release on this big event. And most telling, the Gates "research" hothouse that co-authored the study, the Center for Reinventing Public Education, does not even mention it anywhere on its website. Shhhh.
Mathematica led the study, and as their Press Release indicates, the study "was commissioned by NewSchools Venture Fund, with the generous support of the Bill Melinda Gates Foundation and the Walton Family Foundation." An undisclosed number of the sludge-tank "thought leaders," including Andy Rotherham, carefully set up the parameters for the sample to pump the corporate welfare Charter Management Organizations (CMOs). These are the corporate non-profit tax sponges preferred by the vulture philanthropy movement.
Even though the names of the CMOs are not listed in the Report, Jim Peyser, insider and hovering point man for the NSVF's involvement in the study, mentions these well-funded total compliance testing camps as representative of the CMOs that were part of the study: KIPP, Aspire, Achievement First, Noble Network, Uncommon Schools.
Rotherham, now writing for Time, was given, in fact, exclusive access to the Report in order to spin the story the best way possible before the release. And as lead spinner, Rotherham gave it the ole' college try. A few clips with comments:
Rotherham spinning in Time:
The study found that, in general, students at charter-network schools outperform similar students at traditional public schools, although sometimes not by very much.
Findings from the Study's Executive Summary: Test score impact estimates for the average CMO after two to three years in middle school are positive in all four subjects, but they are not statistically significant.
The overall average impacts mask a great deal of variation among CMOs. Two years after students enroll in the CMOs covered by the impact analysis, they experience significantly positive math impacts in half of these CMOs (11 of 22), while students in about one-third of the CMOs (7 of 22) do significantly worse in math. Similarly, students in nearly half of the CMOs (10 of 22) experience significantly positive impacts in reading, while students in about a quarter of CMOs (6 of 22) experience reading impacts that are significantly negative. Table 3 shows that half of the CMOs (11 of 22) have significantly positive impacts in math or reading and nine have significantly negative impacts in one or both subjects; 10 of the 22 CMOs have significantly positive impacts in both subjects while only four have significantly negative impacts in both subjects (p. xxvii).
That is, even with all the advantages that charter schools enjoy, and even with the selective culling that took place to create the sample for this study, charters are, on average, doing no better than the public schools that the charterites want to shut down.
Table 1 from the Report illustrates two of the primary reason that charters have a test performance advantage over public school: charters regularly have fewer students who are English language learners, and fewer students with special needs and disabilities.
Notice, too, that this study compares charters to the host district average, rather than the schools in the immediate vicinity. Gary Miron and others have noted elsewhere that these district comparisons often mask even larger percentages of ELL and SPED children in the poorest communities where charters replace public schools.
And how about class size differences between charters and their public counterparts in the host districts?
Class sizes and pupil-to-instructor ratios are also smaller in CMO schools than in their host districts. The average pupil-to-instructor ratios in math and reading are about 20.9 students per instructor; by contrast, in comparison schools the ratios are 23.5 in math and 23.2 in reading (p. xxiv)
And how about that "creaming" reputation that charters have, drawing as they do students with higher achievement to begin with, thus making any subsequent comparisons to public school students skewed? Remember that we know from Table 1 above that the sample for this study was disproportionately African American and Hispanic when compared to the host district. From the Report:
Students Entering CMO (Middle) Schools Typically Have Prior Achievement Levels That Are Similar to the Local Average and Somewhat Higher Than the Local Average For Black And Hispanic Students
. . . most CMOs attract somewhat higher achieving students of color relative to those served by their host districts. Thirteen of 22 CMOs in our sample serve black students who had significantly higher average pre-entry reading test scores than the averages for their black peers in the host district; only two CMOs served black students with scores significantly lower than those of black students locally. Likewise, the pre-entry reading scores of Hispanic students in 13 of 23 CMOs were significantly higher than Hispanic averages locally, and only three CMOs served Hispanic students with significantly lower baseline reading achievement than that of other Hispanic students in their districts. The percentages are similar for reading test scores. Thus, while CMOs attract a disproportionate number of black and Hispanic students, these students tend to have higher test scores on average when they enter the CMO than their black and Hispanic peers in the host districts (pp. 19-20).
The concluding section of the study takes up this subject again, in discussing peer effects (my bolds):
. . .because CMOs operate schools of choice, the families they attract are different in both measurable and unmeasurable ways, which may give rise to peer effects. The selection process of students is driven in part by who learns about and chooses to apply to CMO schools. It is possible that the parents or students who end up enrolling in some CMO schools are more motivated or have other assets. In addition, CMOs can encourage certain families to apply or enroll in their school; even those with random lotteries can target their recruitment efforts and ask students to sign agreements to attend regularly and do their homework. An individual student may benefit from being in the same school and classroom with other students with higher levels of motivation or parental support. If peer effects are contributing to CMO impacts, this does not mean that our impacts are improperly measured. Indeed, our experimental results suggest the impacts are accurate. But it could affect our understanding of the mechanisms behind the impacts: Peer effects may explain why CMO students do better than they would have had they been placed in a school or classroom where there are fewer students like themselves. If that turns out to be true, it would also have important implications for policy: Similar effects might not be achieved, for example, if CMO practices were directly applied to conventional public schools that are not schools of choice. While peer effects can be challenging to estimate, future research should explore their importance (p. 75).
Besides Rotherham, the other propaganda spin comes from Jim Peyser of the venture philanthropy outfit, NewSchools City Funds, a spinoff of NSVF. Peyser is intent on making the claim that larger is better (volume, volume, volume!) and that TFA is better (cheaper, cheaper, cheaper!):
There is a statistically significant association between math achievement in CMOs and the percentage of new teachers coming from Teach For America and Teaching Fellows teachers. This finding not only demonstrates the value of TFA to the charter school sector, but it underscores the importance of alternative teacher preparations programs in general to addressing public education’s human capital challenges. Other staffing decisions (including opportunities for tenure) were not associated with positive impacts.
This is what the Report actually says (my bolds):
Math impacts are higher among CMOs that rely more heavily on TFA and the Teaching Fellows programs as sources of new teachers. Specifically there is a statistically significant association between math impacts and the percentage of new teachers from these two sources, both of which tend to recruit and provide some training to recent graduates of highly selective colleges. One should be cautious about placing substantial weight on this finding because this is one of the many secondary hypotheses tested and the positive association could be due to random chance (p. 69).
Another of Peyser's misleading conclusion that he would like to see in the Report has to do with size of CMOs (Peyser's bolds):
The strongest CMOs tend to be larger than the lower performing ones, countering a long-held hypothesis that scale and quality are incompatible.
And yet the Report makes a specific warning against drawing the conclusion that Peyser draws (my bolds):
Large CMOs in our sample tend to have positive impacts, while small CMOs are more likely to have negative impacts. This might indicate that funders have had some success in supporting the expansion of CMOs that are more effective. In particular, eight of the 12 large CMOs (those operating more than 8 schools in 2009-10) have significant positive impacts in at least one subject, while only 3 of the 10 small CMOs (those operating 8 or fewer schools in 2009-10) have significant positive impacts in at least one subject. Meanwhile, only 2 of 12 large CMOs have significantly negative impacts in at least one subject, while 7 of 10 small CMOs have significantly negative impacts in at least one subject. CMOs that have positive impacts in both reading and math operate an average of 12 schools, while those with negative impacts in both subjects operate an average of 6 schools. Despite this pattern effectiveness is not related to size in a linear way: Correlations between math and reading CMO impacts and CMO size are not statistically significant (p. 58).
. . . .
We also looked at whether absolute CMO growth (change in the number of schools operated by the CMO between fall 2004 and fall 2009) and relative CMO growth (the number of schools operated by the CMO in fall 2009 divided by the number of schools operated by the CMO in fall 2004) are associated with two-year impacts in math and reading. In both of these cross-sectional analyses, we found no statistically significant associations (p. 59).
Finally, there are other findings of this study that you would never see mentioned by Rotherham, Peyser, or Arne Duncan: no positive impact could be attributed to performance-based teacher compensation, singular curricular or instructional approaches (think Common Core), or the constant use of "formative" testing to prepare for more testing:
Several other notable CMO-level characteristics do not show significant relationships with impacts.
We found no significant relationship between impacts and three other factors that we posited might contribute to student achievement. Specifically, impacts are not correlated with (1) the extent to which CMOs define a consistent educational approach through the selection of curricula and instructional materials, (2) performance-based teacher compensation, or (3) frequent formative student assessments (although impacts are larger when teachers frequently use student test results to modify lesson plans). Nor are impacts significantly associated with school or class sizes. Math impacts are positively correlated with more hours of annual instruction, but this relationship appears to be largely due to the association of instructional time with behavior policies and coaching. We ran multivariate regressions of impacts on key practices that were significantly associated with impacts in bivariate regressions. In the multivariate regressions, the association between impacts and instructional time declined substantially and became not statistically significant (p. xxx).
One has to wonder what it will take for this latest Gates/Walton/Broad failure to become too obvious to ignore. The elephant trumpets, the corporate spinners and scammers double down, and the politicians concur that In God We Trust.
http://www.schoolsmatter.info/2011/11/new-charter-study-by-mathematica-with.html
by Jim Horne
The first national charter school study was conducted in 2009 by CREDO at Stanford, and the co-funders of the study (the Walton Foundation and Pearson) were not enamored by the results. So bad were they for charter school fans that the study, though given skimpy coverage by the LA Times, was never reported by WaPo or the NYTimes, and received minimal coverage from one news magazine, U. S. News and World Report, which obviously did not get the memo:
On average, charter schools are not performing as well as their traditional public-school peers, according to a new study that is being called the first national assessment of these school-choice options. The study, conducted by the Center for Research on Education Outcomes at Stanford University, compared the reading and math state achievement test scores of students in charter schools in 15 states and the District of Columbia—amounting to 70 percent of U.S. charter school students—to those of their virtual "twins" in regular schools who shared with them certain characteristics. The research found that 37 percent of charter schools posted math gains that were significantly below what students would have seen if they had enrolled in local traditional public schools. And 46 percent of charter schools posted math gains that were statistically indistinguishable from the average growth among their traditional public-school companions. That means that only 17 percent of charter schools have growth in math scores that exceeds that of their traditional public-school equivalents by a significant amount.
In reading, charter students on average realized a growth that was less than their public-school counterparts but was not as statistically significant as differences in math achievement, researchers said.
"We are worried by these results," Margaret Raymond, director of CREDO and lead author of the report, Multiple Choice: Charter School Performance in 16 States, said at a news conference. "This study shows that we've got a 2-to-1 margin of bad charters to good charters." . . . .
This new study released in Friday's news dump, entitled "Charter-School Management Organization: Diverse Strategies and Diverse Student Impacts," has more bad news for school privatizers who prefer the charter route. Even though a swarm of urban school colonizers from Gates, Walton, and the New Schools Venture Fund helped set up the parameters for this study in order to get the most favorable outcome, and even though the Gates "research" hothouse, the Center for Reinventing Public Education co-authored the study, there's enough bad news for charter proponents that mirrors years of previous research on charters that this study, too, has been ignored by the corporate media. Ed Week had a piece on the new study entitled "Academic Gains Vary Widely for Charter Networks," and Time had a pre-release gloss by corporate spinner extraordinaire, Andy Rotherham. That was it for coverage, except for a misleading and dissembling press release by Jim Peyser at the New Schools Venture Fund. And only one of the national charter school associations offered a press release on this big event. And most telling, the Gates "research" hothouse that co-authored the study, the Center for Reinventing Public Education, does not even mention it anywhere on its website. Shhhh.
Mathematica led the study, and as their Press Release indicates, the study "was commissioned by NewSchools Venture Fund, with the generous support of the Bill Melinda Gates Foundation and the Walton Family Foundation." An undisclosed number of the sludge-tank "thought leaders," including Andy Rotherham, carefully set up the parameters for the sample to pump the corporate welfare Charter Management Organizations (CMOs). These are the corporate non-profit tax sponges preferred by the vulture philanthropy movement.
Even though the names of the CMOs are not listed in the Report, Jim Peyser, insider and hovering point man for the NSVF's involvement in the study, mentions these well-funded total compliance testing camps as representative of the CMOs that were part of the study: KIPP, Aspire, Achievement First, Noble Network, Uncommon Schools.
Rotherham, now writing for Time, was given, in fact, exclusive access to the Report in order to spin the story the best way possible before the release. And as lead spinner, Rotherham gave it the ole' college try. A few clips with comments:
Rotherham spinning in Time:
The study found that, in general, students at charter-network schools outperform similar students at traditional public schools, although sometimes not by very much.
Findings from the Study's Executive Summary: Test score impact estimates for the average CMO after two to three years in middle school are positive in all four subjects, but they are not statistically significant.
The overall average impacts mask a great deal of variation among CMOs. Two years after students enroll in the CMOs covered by the impact analysis, they experience significantly positive math impacts in half of these CMOs (11 of 22), while students in about one-third of the CMOs (7 of 22) do significantly worse in math. Similarly, students in nearly half of the CMOs (10 of 22) experience significantly positive impacts in reading, while students in about a quarter of CMOs (6 of 22) experience reading impacts that are significantly negative. Table 3 shows that half of the CMOs (11 of 22) have significantly positive impacts in math or reading and nine have significantly negative impacts in one or both subjects; 10 of the 22 CMOs have significantly positive impacts in both subjects while only four have significantly negative impacts in both subjects (p. xxvii).
That is, even with all the advantages that charter schools enjoy, and even with the selective culling that took place to create the sample for this study, charters are, on average, doing no better than the public schools that the charterites want to shut down.
Table 1 from the Report illustrates two of the primary reason that charters have a test performance advantage over public school: charters regularly have fewer students who are English language learners, and fewer students with special needs and disabilities.
Notice, too, that this study compares charters to the host district average, rather than the schools in the immediate vicinity. Gary Miron and others have noted elsewhere that these district comparisons often mask even larger percentages of ELL and SPED children in the poorest communities where charters replace public schools.
And how about class size differences between charters and their public counterparts in the host districts?
Class sizes and pupil-to-instructor ratios are also smaller in CMO schools than in their host districts. The average pupil-to-instructor ratios in math and reading are about 20.9 students per instructor; by contrast, in comparison schools the ratios are 23.5 in math and 23.2 in reading (p. xxiv)
And how about that "creaming" reputation that charters have, drawing as they do students with higher achievement to begin with, thus making any subsequent comparisons to public school students skewed? Remember that we know from Table 1 above that the sample for this study was disproportionately African American and Hispanic when compared to the host district. From the Report:
Students Entering CMO (Middle) Schools Typically Have Prior Achievement Levels That Are Similar to the Local Average and Somewhat Higher Than the Local Average For Black And Hispanic Students
. . . most CMOs attract somewhat higher achieving students of color relative to those served by their host districts. Thirteen of 22 CMOs in our sample serve black students who had significantly higher average pre-entry reading test scores than the averages for their black peers in the host district; only two CMOs served black students with scores significantly lower than those of black students locally. Likewise, the pre-entry reading scores of Hispanic students in 13 of 23 CMOs were significantly higher than Hispanic averages locally, and only three CMOs served Hispanic students with significantly lower baseline reading achievement than that of other Hispanic students in their districts. The percentages are similar for reading test scores. Thus, while CMOs attract a disproportionate number of black and Hispanic students, these students tend to have higher test scores on average when they enter the CMO than their black and Hispanic peers in the host districts (pp. 19-20).
The concluding section of the study takes up this subject again, in discussing peer effects (my bolds):
. . .because CMOs operate schools of choice, the families they attract are different in both measurable and unmeasurable ways, which may give rise to peer effects. The selection process of students is driven in part by who learns about and chooses to apply to CMO schools. It is possible that the parents or students who end up enrolling in some CMO schools are more motivated or have other assets. In addition, CMOs can encourage certain families to apply or enroll in their school; even those with random lotteries can target their recruitment efforts and ask students to sign agreements to attend regularly and do their homework. An individual student may benefit from being in the same school and classroom with other students with higher levels of motivation or parental support. If peer effects are contributing to CMO impacts, this does not mean that our impacts are improperly measured. Indeed, our experimental results suggest the impacts are accurate. But it could affect our understanding of the mechanisms behind the impacts: Peer effects may explain why CMO students do better than they would have had they been placed in a school or classroom where there are fewer students like themselves. If that turns out to be true, it would also have important implications for policy: Similar effects might not be achieved, for example, if CMO practices were directly applied to conventional public schools that are not schools of choice. While peer effects can be challenging to estimate, future research should explore their importance (p. 75).
Besides Rotherham, the other propaganda spin comes from Jim Peyser of the venture philanthropy outfit, NewSchools City Funds, a spinoff of NSVF. Peyser is intent on making the claim that larger is better (volume, volume, volume!) and that TFA is better (cheaper, cheaper, cheaper!):
There is a statistically significant association between math achievement in CMOs and the percentage of new teachers coming from Teach For America and Teaching Fellows teachers. This finding not only demonstrates the value of TFA to the charter school sector, but it underscores the importance of alternative teacher preparations programs in general to addressing public education’s human capital challenges. Other staffing decisions (including opportunities for tenure) were not associated with positive impacts.
This is what the Report actually says (my bolds):
Math impacts are higher among CMOs that rely more heavily on TFA and the Teaching Fellows programs as sources of new teachers. Specifically there is a statistically significant association between math impacts and the percentage of new teachers from these two sources, both of which tend to recruit and provide some training to recent graduates of highly selective colleges. One should be cautious about placing substantial weight on this finding because this is one of the many secondary hypotheses tested and the positive association could be due to random chance (p. 69).
Another of Peyser's misleading conclusion that he would like to see in the Report has to do with size of CMOs (Peyser's bolds):
The strongest CMOs tend to be larger than the lower performing ones, countering a long-held hypothesis that scale and quality are incompatible.
And yet the Report makes a specific warning against drawing the conclusion that Peyser draws (my bolds):
Large CMOs in our sample tend to have positive impacts, while small CMOs are more likely to have negative impacts. This might indicate that funders have had some success in supporting the expansion of CMOs that are more effective. In particular, eight of the 12 large CMOs (those operating more than 8 schools in 2009-10) have significant positive impacts in at least one subject, while only 3 of the 10 small CMOs (those operating 8 or fewer schools in 2009-10) have significant positive impacts in at least one subject. Meanwhile, only 2 of 12 large CMOs have significantly negative impacts in at least one subject, while 7 of 10 small CMOs have significantly negative impacts in at least one subject. CMOs that have positive impacts in both reading and math operate an average of 12 schools, while those with negative impacts in both subjects operate an average of 6 schools. Despite this pattern effectiveness is not related to size in a linear way: Correlations between math and reading CMO impacts and CMO size are not statistically significant (p. 58).
. . . .
We also looked at whether absolute CMO growth (change in the number of schools operated by the CMO between fall 2004 and fall 2009) and relative CMO growth (the number of schools operated by the CMO in fall 2009 divided by the number of schools operated by the CMO in fall 2004) are associated with two-year impacts in math and reading. In both of these cross-sectional analyses, we found no statistically significant associations (p. 59).
Finally, there are other findings of this study that you would never see mentioned by Rotherham, Peyser, or Arne Duncan: no positive impact could be attributed to performance-based teacher compensation, singular curricular or instructional approaches (think Common Core), or the constant use of "formative" testing to prepare for more testing:
Several other notable CMO-level characteristics do not show significant relationships with impacts.
We found no significant relationship between impacts and three other factors that we posited might contribute to student achievement. Specifically, impacts are not correlated with (1) the extent to which CMOs define a consistent educational approach through the selection of curricula and instructional materials, (2) performance-based teacher compensation, or (3) frequent formative student assessments (although impacts are larger when teachers frequently use student test results to modify lesson plans). Nor are impacts significantly associated with school or class sizes. Math impacts are positively correlated with more hours of annual instruction, but this relationship appears to be largely due to the association of instructional time with behavior policies and coaching. We ran multivariate regressions of impacts on key practices that were significantly associated with impacts in bivariate regressions. In the multivariate regressions, the association between impacts and instructional time declined substantially and became not statistically significant (p. xxx).
One has to wonder what it will take for this latest Gates/Walton/Broad failure to become too obvious to ignore. The elephant trumpets, the corporate spinners and scammers double down, and the politicians concur that In God We Trust.
http://www.schoolsmatter.info/2011/11/new-charter-study-by-mathematica-with.html
Sunday, January 1, 2012
2011 the year teachers became the enemy
From Ed Week
by Anthony Cody
This year, the gloves came off, as teachers faced unprecedented attacks on our right to collective bargaining, as well as continued attempts to tie our pay and job security to test scores. Some of these attacks were blatant, as in Wisconsin, but most were veiled behind a cloak of rhetoric about education reform. Today I want to review some of the posts that attempted to bell the corporate education reform cat.
I started the year taking on Eric Hanushek, the Hoover Institute economist whose theories inform Michele Rhee and Bill Gates. I wrote this, titled Battling the Bad Teacher Bogeyman:
Leaders like Hanushek systematically lead us away from real solutions that they have decided society is unwilling to contemplate. His views are guiding the education "reformers" - you will hear him cited by Bill Gates, Michelle Rhee and Arne Duncan. Reducing class size is too expensive. Likewise quality pre-school, libraries, dental care, health care, nutrition, etc. They actively ignore the many things along these lines that their chosen role model, Finland, has done. Simply offer a bonus for higher test scores, fire the bottom five percent, and you have the perfect combination of carrot and stick. And vilify anyone, especially our teachers' unions, that say this is not the best way to improve our schools, by accusing them of protecting bad teachers.
Later that month, I took a closer look at the platform advanced by Michelle Rhee's new organization, in this post: Rhee's Plan, Students (Test Scores) First!
It is bizarre to portray this as a way of elevating the teaching profession. Under the system Rhee describes, teachers will be subject to annual reviews based on their test scores, and if these scores are unsatisfactory, teachers can be dismissed. In the absence of due process protections, an administrator can use test data to "prove" that one is "ineffective" and that is the end of your career. As has been recently shown, the "value added" methods used for these purposes are highly unreliable, and are likely to result in many good teachers being mislabeled as ineffective.
I hardly needed to do much work to uncover what Jonah Edelman's Stand For Children has been up to - he laid it all out for us in a video that should be closely viewed by anyone who doubts that advocates for corporate reform are actively coordinating their efforts. But I made sure my readers saw it, in this post, Jonah Edelman Reveals Corporate Education "Reform" at Work in Illinois.
A subsequent interview with Diane Ravitch about the Edelman video led to a request from the director of Teach Plus that we not judge her program so harshly. I offered her a chance to address my readers, but she failed to respond after I posted this critical look, Teach Plus, Astroturf in Indiana?
First, we have a heavily funded group bringing forward teachers to reinforce their policy perspective. This creates the appearance of widespread support for practices which are highly controversial within our profession.
Second, Teach Plus has embraced the practice of widespread staff firings as a wise strategy for school improvement. Experience and research do not show this to be effective. On the contrary, this takes our most challenged schools and subjects them to further trauma and disruption, to no good end.
Third, Teach Plus has attempted to create policy that would shield "promising young teachers" from the brunt of these firings. There is a great deal of evidence that teacher effectiveness, on a wide range of indicators - not just test scores - increases as teachers gain experience. Why should we embrace policies that favor "promising young teachers," many of whom may be interns who have only a two-year long commitment to the classroom, over more experienced teachers?
Fourth, the law that resulted from this lobbying by Stand For Children and Teach Plus mandates that test scores be a significant part of teacher evaluation, and does away with the professional advisory board that informs the legislature about these issues.
I carried quite a few stories related to Teach For America, including reviews of research, and commentaries from one former TFAer, and another, as well as coverage of concerns raised by civil rights groups over the concentration of poorly prepared teachers in high poverty schools. This last led to a post titled The Dialogue Heats Up over Teach For America, where I wrote:
Current education policy does not seem concerned about the issue of stability and retention, especially at our low performing schools. There is an attitude of disrespect towards teachers who work there, as if they are the reason for the low performance of their students, and thus we are better off with a situation that churns the staff. Many of the "solutions" the Department of Education mandates for chronically low performing schools require at least half of the staff to be fired or transferred. And most of the emphasis of our policies focuses on test scores. As I suggested in my post, there are many qualities of a good teacher that are not reflected in tests, that take years to develop. Designating interns with little training or experience as "highly qualified" seems to fit this pattern of disregarding the need to build stability at low performing schools as one of the conditions for improvement. And defenses of these practices that are based on the test scores these teachers achieve fail to recognize the other dimensions of good teaching that are not measured by these scores.
The granddaddy of many of these corporate reform efforts is, of course, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. In September, they sponsored NBC's Education Nation, and the Teacher Town Hall event was dominated by an interview with Melinda Gates herself. I wrote about what I saw in this post, Circular Reasoning at the Gates: Education Nation off to a Confusing Start:
In spite of all the billions they have spent, it appears that the Gates Foundation is laboring under the same logical fallacy that doomed No Child Left Behind. In a way which employs circular reasoning, they have defined great teaching as that which results in the most gains on end of year tests, and then spent millions of dollars identifying indicators of teaching that will yield the best scores.
The most deceptive strategy is how they then try to pretend that these indicators are "multiple measures" of good teaching. In fact, these are simply indicators of teaching practices associated with higher test scores. In spite of Mrs. Gates' feint at the opening of her response, everything she describes, all these things that supposedly go beyond test scores - peer observations, student perceptions - are only deemed valid insofar as they are correlated with higher test scores.
I tried to sketch out the role I see the Gates Foundation playing in this post, Bill Gates' Big Play: How Much Can Money Buy in Education?
I described what I see as the Gates Foundation's modus operandi:
Since the accountability devices in NCLB were clumsy and punitive, invent a host of new mechanisms to reward success as well as punish failure. As much a possible, target these interventions down to the level of the individual teacher and student, to ensure compliance. Redefine professionalism for teachers so that it no longer means you have autonomy and responsibility for your work. Instead, being professional means you get paid for your results, and are subject to termination if you fail to help your students achieve what the predictive models project they ought to. Since teachers have been firmly opposed to this, do not make test scores the only means by which their performance is measured. Call this one of "multiple measures." But make sure other elements that are measured also align with growth in test scores.
As I wrote a couple of weeks ago, 2011 was the year that people began to awaken to the danger our public education faces. Let's hope 2012 is the year we gather the strength to de-claw this cat for good!
http://blogs.edweek.org/teachers/living-in-dialogue/2011/12/belling_the_corporate_educatio.html?mid=56
by Anthony Cody
This year, the gloves came off, as teachers faced unprecedented attacks on our right to collective bargaining, as well as continued attempts to tie our pay and job security to test scores. Some of these attacks were blatant, as in Wisconsin, but most were veiled behind a cloak of rhetoric about education reform. Today I want to review some of the posts that attempted to bell the corporate education reform cat.
I started the year taking on Eric Hanushek, the Hoover Institute economist whose theories inform Michele Rhee and Bill Gates. I wrote this, titled Battling the Bad Teacher Bogeyman:
Leaders like Hanushek systematically lead us away from real solutions that they have decided society is unwilling to contemplate. His views are guiding the education "reformers" - you will hear him cited by Bill Gates, Michelle Rhee and Arne Duncan. Reducing class size is too expensive. Likewise quality pre-school, libraries, dental care, health care, nutrition, etc. They actively ignore the many things along these lines that their chosen role model, Finland, has done. Simply offer a bonus for higher test scores, fire the bottom five percent, and you have the perfect combination of carrot and stick. And vilify anyone, especially our teachers' unions, that say this is not the best way to improve our schools, by accusing them of protecting bad teachers.
Later that month, I took a closer look at the platform advanced by Michelle Rhee's new organization, in this post: Rhee's Plan, Students (Test Scores) First!
It is bizarre to portray this as a way of elevating the teaching profession. Under the system Rhee describes, teachers will be subject to annual reviews based on their test scores, and if these scores are unsatisfactory, teachers can be dismissed. In the absence of due process protections, an administrator can use test data to "prove" that one is "ineffective" and that is the end of your career. As has been recently shown, the "value added" methods used for these purposes are highly unreliable, and are likely to result in many good teachers being mislabeled as ineffective.
I hardly needed to do much work to uncover what Jonah Edelman's Stand For Children has been up to - he laid it all out for us in a video that should be closely viewed by anyone who doubts that advocates for corporate reform are actively coordinating their efforts. But I made sure my readers saw it, in this post, Jonah Edelman Reveals Corporate Education "Reform" at Work in Illinois.
A subsequent interview with Diane Ravitch about the Edelman video led to a request from the director of Teach Plus that we not judge her program so harshly. I offered her a chance to address my readers, but she failed to respond after I posted this critical look, Teach Plus, Astroturf in Indiana?
First, we have a heavily funded group bringing forward teachers to reinforce their policy perspective. This creates the appearance of widespread support for practices which are highly controversial within our profession.
Second, Teach Plus has embraced the practice of widespread staff firings as a wise strategy for school improvement. Experience and research do not show this to be effective. On the contrary, this takes our most challenged schools and subjects them to further trauma and disruption, to no good end.
Third, Teach Plus has attempted to create policy that would shield "promising young teachers" from the brunt of these firings. There is a great deal of evidence that teacher effectiveness, on a wide range of indicators - not just test scores - increases as teachers gain experience. Why should we embrace policies that favor "promising young teachers," many of whom may be interns who have only a two-year long commitment to the classroom, over more experienced teachers?
Fourth, the law that resulted from this lobbying by Stand For Children and Teach Plus mandates that test scores be a significant part of teacher evaluation, and does away with the professional advisory board that informs the legislature about these issues.
I carried quite a few stories related to Teach For America, including reviews of research, and commentaries from one former TFAer, and another, as well as coverage of concerns raised by civil rights groups over the concentration of poorly prepared teachers in high poverty schools. This last led to a post titled The Dialogue Heats Up over Teach For America, where I wrote:
Current education policy does not seem concerned about the issue of stability and retention, especially at our low performing schools. There is an attitude of disrespect towards teachers who work there, as if they are the reason for the low performance of their students, and thus we are better off with a situation that churns the staff. Many of the "solutions" the Department of Education mandates for chronically low performing schools require at least half of the staff to be fired or transferred. And most of the emphasis of our policies focuses on test scores. As I suggested in my post, there are many qualities of a good teacher that are not reflected in tests, that take years to develop. Designating interns with little training or experience as "highly qualified" seems to fit this pattern of disregarding the need to build stability at low performing schools as one of the conditions for improvement. And defenses of these practices that are based on the test scores these teachers achieve fail to recognize the other dimensions of good teaching that are not measured by these scores.
The granddaddy of many of these corporate reform efforts is, of course, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. In September, they sponsored NBC's Education Nation, and the Teacher Town Hall event was dominated by an interview with Melinda Gates herself. I wrote about what I saw in this post, Circular Reasoning at the Gates: Education Nation off to a Confusing Start:
In spite of all the billions they have spent, it appears that the Gates Foundation is laboring under the same logical fallacy that doomed No Child Left Behind. In a way which employs circular reasoning, they have defined great teaching as that which results in the most gains on end of year tests, and then spent millions of dollars identifying indicators of teaching that will yield the best scores.
The most deceptive strategy is how they then try to pretend that these indicators are "multiple measures" of good teaching. In fact, these are simply indicators of teaching practices associated with higher test scores. In spite of Mrs. Gates' feint at the opening of her response, everything she describes, all these things that supposedly go beyond test scores - peer observations, student perceptions - are only deemed valid insofar as they are correlated with higher test scores.
I tried to sketch out the role I see the Gates Foundation playing in this post, Bill Gates' Big Play: How Much Can Money Buy in Education?
I described what I see as the Gates Foundation's modus operandi:
Since the accountability devices in NCLB were clumsy and punitive, invent a host of new mechanisms to reward success as well as punish failure. As much a possible, target these interventions down to the level of the individual teacher and student, to ensure compliance. Redefine professionalism for teachers so that it no longer means you have autonomy and responsibility for your work. Instead, being professional means you get paid for your results, and are subject to termination if you fail to help your students achieve what the predictive models project they ought to. Since teachers have been firmly opposed to this, do not make test scores the only means by which their performance is measured. Call this one of "multiple measures." But make sure other elements that are measured also align with growth in test scores.
As I wrote a couple of weeks ago, 2011 was the year that people began to awaken to the danger our public education faces. Let's hope 2012 is the year we gather the strength to de-claw this cat for good!
http://blogs.edweek.org/teachers/living-in-dialogue/2011/12/belling_the_corporate_educatio.html?mid=56
Blame the teachers
From the New York Times
by Dave Eggers and Nínive Clements Calegari
WHEN we don’t get the results we want in our military endeavors, we don’t blame the soldiers. We don’t say, “It’s these lazy soldiers and their bloated benefits plans! That’s why we haven’t done better in Afghanistan!” No, if the results aren’t there, we blame the planners. We blame the generals, the secretary of defense, the Joint Chiefs of Staff. No one contemplates blaming the men and women fighting every day in the trenches for little pay and scant recognition.
And yet in education we do just that. When we don’t like the way our students score on international standardized tests, we blame the teachers. When we don’t like the way particular schools perform, we blame the teachers and restrict their resources.
Compare this with our approach to our military: when results on the ground are not what we hoped, we think of ways to better support soldiers. We try to give them better tools, better weapons, better protection, better training. And when recruiting is down, we offer incentives.
We have a rare chance now, with many teachers near retirement, to prove we’re serious about education. The first step is to make the teaching profession more attractive to college graduates. This will take some doing.
At the moment, the average teacher’s pay is on par with that of a toll taker or bartender. Teachers make 14 percent less than professionals in other occupations that require similar levels of education. In real terms, teachers’ salaries have declined for 30 years. The average starting salary is $39,000; the average ending salary — after 25 years in the profession — is $67,000. This prices teachers out of home ownership in 32 metropolitan areas, and makes raising a family on one salary near impossible.
So how do teachers cope? Sixty-two percent work outside the classroom to make ends meet. For Erik Benner, an award-winning history teacher in Keller, Tex., money has been a constant struggle. He has two children, and for 15 years has been unable to support them on his salary. Every weekday, he goes directly from Trinity Springs Middle School to drive a forklift at Floor and Décor. He works until 11 every night, then gets up and starts all over again. Does this look like “A Plan,” either on the state or federal level?
We’ve been working with public school teachers for 10 years; every spring, we see many of the best teachers leave the profession. They’re mowed down by the long hours, low pay, the lack of support and respect.
Imagine a novice teacher, thrown into an urban school, told to teach five classes a day, with up to 40 students each. At the year’s end, if test scores haven’t risen enough, he or she is called a bad teacher. For college graduates who have other options, this kind of pressure, for such low pay, doesn’t make much sense. So every year 20 percent of teachers in urban districts quit. Nationwide, 46 percent of teachers quit before their fifth year. The turnover costs the United States $7.34 billion yearly. The effect within schools — especially those in urban communities where turnover is highest — is devastating.
But we can reverse course. In the next 10 years, over half of the nation’s nearly 3.2 million public school teachers will become eligible for retirement. Who will replace them? How do we attract and keep the best minds in the profession?
People talk about accountability, measurements, tenure, test scores and pay for performance. These questions are worthy of debate, but are secondary to recruiting and training teachers and treating them fairly. There is no silver bullet that will fix every last school in America, but until we solve the problem of teacher turnover, we don’t have a chance.
Can we do better? Can we generate “A Plan”? Of course.
The consulting firm McKinsey recently examined how we might attract and retain a talented teaching force. The study compared the treatment of teachers here and in the three countries that perform best on standardized tests: Finland, Singapore and South Korea.
Turns out these countries have an entirely different approach to the profession. First, the governments in these countries recruit top graduates to the profession. (We don’t.) In Finland and Singapore they pay for training. (We don’t.) In terms of purchasing power, South Korea pays teachers on average 250 percent of what we do.
And most of all, they trust their teachers. They are rightly seen as the solution, not the problem, and when improvement is needed, the school receives support and development, not punishment. Accordingly, turnover in these countries is startlingly low: In South Korea, it’s 1 percent per year. In Finland, it’s 2 percent. In Singapore, 3 percent.
McKinsey polled 900 top-tier American college students and found that 68 percent would consider teaching if salaries started at $65,000 and rose to a minimum of $150,000. Could we do this? If we’re committed to “winning the future,” we should. If any administration is capable of tackling this, it’s the current one. President Obama and Education Secretary Arne Duncan understand the centrality of teachers and have said that improving our education system begins and ends with great teachers. But world-class education costs money.
For those who say, “How do we pay for this?” — well, how are we paying for three concurrent wars? How did we pay for the interstate highway system? Or the bailout of the savings and loans in 1989 and that of the investment banks in 2008? How did we pay for the equally ambitious project of sending Americans to the moon? We had the vision and we had the will and we found a way.
Dave Eggers and Nínive Clements Calegari are founders of the 826 National tutoring centers and producers of the documentary “American Teacher.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/01/opinion/01eggers.html
by Dave Eggers and Nínive Clements Calegari
WHEN we don’t get the results we want in our military endeavors, we don’t blame the soldiers. We don’t say, “It’s these lazy soldiers and their bloated benefits plans! That’s why we haven’t done better in Afghanistan!” No, if the results aren’t there, we blame the planners. We blame the generals, the secretary of defense, the Joint Chiefs of Staff. No one contemplates blaming the men and women fighting every day in the trenches for little pay and scant recognition.
And yet in education we do just that. When we don’t like the way our students score on international standardized tests, we blame the teachers. When we don’t like the way particular schools perform, we blame the teachers and restrict their resources.
Compare this with our approach to our military: when results on the ground are not what we hoped, we think of ways to better support soldiers. We try to give them better tools, better weapons, better protection, better training. And when recruiting is down, we offer incentives.
We have a rare chance now, with many teachers near retirement, to prove we’re serious about education. The first step is to make the teaching profession more attractive to college graduates. This will take some doing.
At the moment, the average teacher’s pay is on par with that of a toll taker or bartender. Teachers make 14 percent less than professionals in other occupations that require similar levels of education. In real terms, teachers’ salaries have declined for 30 years. The average starting salary is $39,000; the average ending salary — after 25 years in the profession — is $67,000. This prices teachers out of home ownership in 32 metropolitan areas, and makes raising a family on one salary near impossible.
So how do teachers cope? Sixty-two percent work outside the classroom to make ends meet. For Erik Benner, an award-winning history teacher in Keller, Tex., money has been a constant struggle. He has two children, and for 15 years has been unable to support them on his salary. Every weekday, he goes directly from Trinity Springs Middle School to drive a forklift at Floor and Décor. He works until 11 every night, then gets up and starts all over again. Does this look like “A Plan,” either on the state or federal level?
We’ve been working with public school teachers for 10 years; every spring, we see many of the best teachers leave the profession. They’re mowed down by the long hours, low pay, the lack of support and respect.
Imagine a novice teacher, thrown into an urban school, told to teach five classes a day, with up to 40 students each. At the year’s end, if test scores haven’t risen enough, he or she is called a bad teacher. For college graduates who have other options, this kind of pressure, for such low pay, doesn’t make much sense. So every year 20 percent of teachers in urban districts quit. Nationwide, 46 percent of teachers quit before their fifth year. The turnover costs the United States $7.34 billion yearly. The effect within schools — especially those in urban communities where turnover is highest — is devastating.
But we can reverse course. In the next 10 years, over half of the nation’s nearly 3.2 million public school teachers will become eligible for retirement. Who will replace them? How do we attract and keep the best minds in the profession?
People talk about accountability, measurements, tenure, test scores and pay for performance. These questions are worthy of debate, but are secondary to recruiting and training teachers and treating them fairly. There is no silver bullet that will fix every last school in America, but until we solve the problem of teacher turnover, we don’t have a chance.
Can we do better? Can we generate “A Plan”? Of course.
The consulting firm McKinsey recently examined how we might attract and retain a talented teaching force. The study compared the treatment of teachers here and in the three countries that perform best on standardized tests: Finland, Singapore and South Korea.
Turns out these countries have an entirely different approach to the profession. First, the governments in these countries recruit top graduates to the profession. (We don’t.) In Finland and Singapore they pay for training. (We don’t.) In terms of purchasing power, South Korea pays teachers on average 250 percent of what we do.
And most of all, they trust their teachers. They are rightly seen as the solution, not the problem, and when improvement is needed, the school receives support and development, not punishment. Accordingly, turnover in these countries is startlingly low: In South Korea, it’s 1 percent per year. In Finland, it’s 2 percent. In Singapore, 3 percent.
McKinsey polled 900 top-tier American college students and found that 68 percent would consider teaching if salaries started at $65,000 and rose to a minimum of $150,000. Could we do this? If we’re committed to “winning the future,” we should. If any administration is capable of tackling this, it’s the current one. President Obama and Education Secretary Arne Duncan understand the centrality of teachers and have said that improving our education system begins and ends with great teachers. But world-class education costs money.
For those who say, “How do we pay for this?” — well, how are we paying for three concurrent wars? How did we pay for the interstate highway system? Or the bailout of the savings and loans in 1989 and that of the investment banks in 2008? How did we pay for the equally ambitious project of sending Americans to the moon? We had the vision and we had the will and we found a way.
Dave Eggers and Nínive Clements Calegari are founders of the 826 National tutoring centers and producers of the documentary “American Teacher.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/01/opinion/01eggers.html
Advocating for children gets teacher in trouble
From the Washington Post
by Pam Emerson
I came across my son’s first and second grade report cards last night. There were so many certificates and medals declaring him to be a winner that it was hard to locate the actual grade reports. He was gifted back then, as his exceptional verbal skills allowed him to easily express ideas and demonstrate knowledge much better than his classmates.
By the middle of third grade, the reports from school were less than positive. His teacher suggested I take him to a doctor to be screened for Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD). That doctor happened to be a psychologist who believed a token economy system would motivate my son to complete his homework and stop arguing with my husband when confronted about his falling grades. The school officials were pleased we had followed their advice, and the token economy got us through third grade. His next teacher was not such a stickler over homework, so fourth grade was a much smoother experience. Unfortunately, I discovered early in my son’s fifth grade year that the fourth grade teacher failed to teach my son very much.
I will be forever grateful to Superwoman, the fifth grade teacher who squeezed what my son missed into a fifth grade year that was his best ever. Just days into the school year, she called me with the same suggestion his teacher had made two years earlier.
I agreed to place my son on a stimulant drug within weeks of that phone call. Everything you may have heard about stimulant drugs is true; they help overactive kids sit still long enough to complete academic tasks, such as homework. Elementary school teachers adore stimulant drugs for this fact alone. One hyperactive, overtalkative child can distract enough students to have a negative impact on a school’s Annual Yearly Performance (AYP) as measured by end-of-year multiple choice tests. Elementary school principals live in fear of not making AYP, and classroom teachers feel the effects of that fear every day of the school year. It is only natural for a classroom teacher to feel resentment when a child like my son shows up on her class roster. Having your performance judged by how well students recall information drilled into them throughout the school year is a hard pill to swallow. One hyperactive, overtalkative student can distract a dozen who walk the fine line between passing and failing their end-of-year tests.
For the next five years, I allowed his doctors to prescribe a variety of stimulant and nonstimulant medications in an attempt to find the magic balance that would cure my son’s “homework avoidance” problem without turning him into a skeleton. The transition to high school was difficult in that homework load increased as did the percentage it counted toward the final grade. The stimulant drugs helped my son pay attention and participate in class, but their effects wore off eventually so he could sleep. The most frustrating part for me was knowing he could score 100 percent on his tests and still earn a D in the class due to missing homework assignments. What was the point of all that homework? Were teachers trying to ruin my life?
I realized the only way I would ever find out the reason why public education was failing my son was to place myself right smack in the middle of the local schools and conduct my own investigation. My search for answers has led me to places I would never have imagined, including graduate school and the steps of my local congressman’s office. I have seen the best in people, especially children, and I have seen the worst. I switched careers and became a special education teacher out of the naive belief that I could make a difference in the lives of other children with special learning needs.
My biggest challenge in fitting into the public school system has been and continues to be my tendency to think like a parent first, and a teacher second. I insist the needs of the individual child come first, which is legally what a special education teacher is supposed to do.
In reality, every aspect of public education now revolves around test scores and teachers are expected to make compromises to assure their students pass so the school will make AYP. If this means the student doesn’t learn how to read or does not spend enough time with his non-disabled peers, I am supposed to keep my mouth shut.
I have never been good at doing that in the face of what I perceive to be injustice. When a lack of staffing prevented students from receiving the special education interventions needed to close the achievement gap between them and their peers, I went to my principal for help. She assured me that she had been doing everything possible to obtain more staffing.
I should have let it rest then, but I couldn’t. The next think I did was a “kiss of death” in terms of my future at that school. I dared to go directly to someone who could have made a difference but instead sent my principal’s boss to my school to make sure I paid dearly for breaking the chain of command. The remainder of the school year was very unpleasant, but every time I was humiliated in front of other teachers or given increasing job demands, I became more determined to find a way to tell my story to someone who cares enough to do something about it.
I now have the answer to my question of whether teachers are crazy or mean with their unrealistic homework demands. As individuals, they are neither. However, a group of desperate, overworked and extremely stressed-out people under the constant threat of being punished if their students perform poorly on tests can make poor decisions, especially when the person accountable for their behavior looks the other way.
Because they have little to no control in terms of what they teach and how, teachers often resent being “given” students who are a challenge to teach. Without daily support for the special education students in their classes, educators may even view behaviors that are directly related to the child’s disability as purposeful acts of disobedience. When this happens, they resort to the same method the Department of Education has decided to use on them: punishment.
The difference in how children are treated, depending on their socioeconomic status, shocked a former suburban housewife like me. The only reason I witnessed it first-hand is because in searching for answers about my own child’s struggle, I stumbled into a new career and the first job I found just happened to be in a poor neighborhood.
When I packed up my things and left my old school to take a position back on the side of town where my own children go to school, I brought with me the warm memories of working with some very special children.
I also brought documentation of how those children were educated, my failed efforts to advocate for them and the very important people who chose not to help.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/class-struggle/post/dont-hurt-the-children-in-front-of-me/2011/12/01/gIQAN2l5LP_blog.html?mid=56
by Pam Emerson
I came across my son’s first and second grade report cards last night. There were so many certificates and medals declaring him to be a winner that it was hard to locate the actual grade reports. He was gifted back then, as his exceptional verbal skills allowed him to easily express ideas and demonstrate knowledge much better than his classmates.
By the middle of third grade, the reports from school were less than positive. His teacher suggested I take him to a doctor to be screened for Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD). That doctor happened to be a psychologist who believed a token economy system would motivate my son to complete his homework and stop arguing with my husband when confronted about his falling grades. The school officials were pleased we had followed their advice, and the token economy got us through third grade. His next teacher was not such a stickler over homework, so fourth grade was a much smoother experience. Unfortunately, I discovered early in my son’s fifth grade year that the fourth grade teacher failed to teach my son very much.
I will be forever grateful to Superwoman, the fifth grade teacher who squeezed what my son missed into a fifth grade year that was his best ever. Just days into the school year, she called me with the same suggestion his teacher had made two years earlier.
I agreed to place my son on a stimulant drug within weeks of that phone call. Everything you may have heard about stimulant drugs is true; they help overactive kids sit still long enough to complete academic tasks, such as homework. Elementary school teachers adore stimulant drugs for this fact alone. One hyperactive, overtalkative child can distract enough students to have a negative impact on a school’s Annual Yearly Performance (AYP) as measured by end-of-year multiple choice tests. Elementary school principals live in fear of not making AYP, and classroom teachers feel the effects of that fear every day of the school year. It is only natural for a classroom teacher to feel resentment when a child like my son shows up on her class roster. Having your performance judged by how well students recall information drilled into them throughout the school year is a hard pill to swallow. One hyperactive, overtalkative student can distract a dozen who walk the fine line between passing and failing their end-of-year tests.
For the next five years, I allowed his doctors to prescribe a variety of stimulant and nonstimulant medications in an attempt to find the magic balance that would cure my son’s “homework avoidance” problem without turning him into a skeleton. The transition to high school was difficult in that homework load increased as did the percentage it counted toward the final grade. The stimulant drugs helped my son pay attention and participate in class, but their effects wore off eventually so he could sleep. The most frustrating part for me was knowing he could score 100 percent on his tests and still earn a D in the class due to missing homework assignments. What was the point of all that homework? Were teachers trying to ruin my life?
I realized the only way I would ever find out the reason why public education was failing my son was to place myself right smack in the middle of the local schools and conduct my own investigation. My search for answers has led me to places I would never have imagined, including graduate school and the steps of my local congressman’s office. I have seen the best in people, especially children, and I have seen the worst. I switched careers and became a special education teacher out of the naive belief that I could make a difference in the lives of other children with special learning needs.
My biggest challenge in fitting into the public school system has been and continues to be my tendency to think like a parent first, and a teacher second. I insist the needs of the individual child come first, which is legally what a special education teacher is supposed to do.
In reality, every aspect of public education now revolves around test scores and teachers are expected to make compromises to assure their students pass so the school will make AYP. If this means the student doesn’t learn how to read or does not spend enough time with his non-disabled peers, I am supposed to keep my mouth shut.
I have never been good at doing that in the face of what I perceive to be injustice. When a lack of staffing prevented students from receiving the special education interventions needed to close the achievement gap between them and their peers, I went to my principal for help. She assured me that she had been doing everything possible to obtain more staffing.
I should have let it rest then, but I couldn’t. The next think I did was a “kiss of death” in terms of my future at that school. I dared to go directly to someone who could have made a difference but instead sent my principal’s boss to my school to make sure I paid dearly for breaking the chain of command. The remainder of the school year was very unpleasant, but every time I was humiliated in front of other teachers or given increasing job demands, I became more determined to find a way to tell my story to someone who cares enough to do something about it.
I now have the answer to my question of whether teachers are crazy or mean with their unrealistic homework demands. As individuals, they are neither. However, a group of desperate, overworked and extremely stressed-out people under the constant threat of being punished if their students perform poorly on tests can make poor decisions, especially when the person accountable for their behavior looks the other way.
Because they have little to no control in terms of what they teach and how, teachers often resent being “given” students who are a challenge to teach. Without daily support for the special education students in their classes, educators may even view behaviors that are directly related to the child’s disability as purposeful acts of disobedience. When this happens, they resort to the same method the Department of Education has decided to use on them: punishment.
The difference in how children are treated, depending on their socioeconomic status, shocked a former suburban housewife like me. The only reason I witnessed it first-hand is because in searching for answers about my own child’s struggle, I stumbled into a new career and the first job I found just happened to be in a poor neighborhood.
When I packed up my things and left my old school to take a position back on the side of town where my own children go to school, I brought with me the warm memories of working with some very special children.
I also brought documentation of how those children were educated, my failed efforts to advocate for them and the very important people who chose not to help.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/class-struggle/post/dont-hurt-the-children-in-front-of-me/2011/12/01/gIQAN2l5LP_blog.html?mid=56
The Times Union looks at education through rose colored glasses
The Times Union looks at local education through rose colored glasses. They sum up our problems as a lack of communication between an administration they constantly fawn over and an ignorant public who doesn’t know what is really happening in our schools.
I wonder if they have ever considered that they the editors are the ones that have no idea what is happening and the reason is they rely on just one source and that’s the superintendent and his staff who have six figures worth of reasons to put a positive spin on what is occuring in our schools. The editors are like Bernie Madoff’s investors who asked him if everything was all right.
Jacksonville has two interstate highways that intersect; we are on the ocean and have a major river, a port, an international airport and one of the best park systems in the country. We have the Jags and how we are close to entertainment hubs in central Florida and southern Georgia. We have lots of room for growth and much of the infrastructure is already in place to do so and we are a pro business city, in a pro business state that doesn’t have an income tax. Why instead of bribing businesses to come aren’t we turning businesses away? Is it because like the Times Union postulates the public is, bussiness owners are simply ignorant or do they see something that the editors don’t and that’s our education system is not top tier, it’s not where it could and should be?
There will be no quick save either but we could start the process of turning our schools around and making our system something top to bottom, not just pockets here and there, that we can be proud of but it’s never going to happen while we have the same leadership at 1701 Prudential drive and the Times Union with their constant passes and calls for patience just doesn’t get it.
There are solutions that don’t break the bank, reinvent the wheel or out source our schools to education management organizations that we could be employing but up till now the administrations only solutions have been to rotate administrators around and dump more work onto teachers. Disciplined schools, rigorous classes and teacher buy in elude the superintendent because he is more concerned with the appearance of doing good rather than actually doing good because the later is harder.
Take off you glasses Mr. Editor, take off your glasses
Chris Guerrieri
Stake Holder
I wonder if they have ever considered that they the editors are the ones that have no idea what is happening and the reason is they rely on just one source and that’s the superintendent and his staff who have six figures worth of reasons to put a positive spin on what is occuring in our schools. The editors are like Bernie Madoff’s investors who asked him if everything was all right.
Jacksonville has two interstate highways that intersect; we are on the ocean and have a major river, a port, an international airport and one of the best park systems in the country. We have the Jags and how we are close to entertainment hubs in central Florida and southern Georgia. We have lots of room for growth and much of the infrastructure is already in place to do so and we are a pro business city, in a pro business state that doesn’t have an income tax. Why instead of bribing businesses to come aren’t we turning businesses away? Is it because like the Times Union postulates the public is, bussiness owners are simply ignorant or do they see something that the editors don’t and that’s our education system is not top tier, it’s not where it could and should be?
There will be no quick save either but we could start the process of turning our schools around and making our system something top to bottom, not just pockets here and there, that we can be proud of but it’s never going to happen while we have the same leadership at 1701 Prudential drive and the Times Union with their constant passes and calls for patience just doesn’t get it.
There are solutions that don’t break the bank, reinvent the wheel or out source our schools to education management organizations that we could be employing but up till now the administrations only solutions have been to rotate administrators around and dump more work onto teachers. Disciplined schools, rigorous classes and teacher buy in elude the superintendent because he is more concerned with the appearance of doing good rather than actually doing good because the later is harder.
Take off you glasses Mr. Editor, take off your glasses
Chris Guerrieri
Stake Holder
The Times Union wants a plan to improve education, here you go
We need three things
1. A realistic curriculum
2. Teacher buy in
3. Discipline
These can be implemented without breaking the bank or reinventing the wheel.
I honestly believe changing the schedule would do the greatest amount of good. If you are not willing to mandate it at all the intervene schools, I would suggest a pilot program for the new intervene schools. We can’t continue to do things the same way and hope things miraculously change.
The district is going to more reading in the content area classes and I think this is an excellent idea. However, the teachers need to be trained how to do this before the new school year begins. If they are trained over the course of the year there will be diminished returns.
Adding more requirements to classes, such as reading assignments, to the content area classes leads to other problems. Teachers feel overworked as it is which means adding more things to their plate will both be met with resistance and often be applied in an uneven fashion. In short, if you are going to put something on their plate and you want it to succeed then you really should take something off of it.
The state mandated word walls, complicated daily agendas, mini lessons, focus lessons, massive data notebooks and two page lesson plans with scripted questions have been insisted on in the intervene schools for years. We can all see how well this is working. I would seriously consider streamlining the agenda and lesson plans and strongly encouraging word walls but not making them mandatory. It also seems to be a huge waste of both manpower and resources to require teachers to keep a telephone book sized ring binder of printed data on their students, when all the information is on the computer; literally at their fingertips already.
Furthermore I recommend making the learning schedules more flexible. If the first third of a class is use reinforcing reading skills then it just makes sense that classes will fall behind on the leaning schedule. Besides it seems to make sense that we make sure kids learn some things rather than just be exposed to many things.
It’s not just reading that should be taught in the content area classes but writing as well. The state just said they are really going to increase the rigor on the FCAT writing tests. Many of our kids are taught format writing for the test not actually how to write. Continuing in years past this has been the one area that the intervene schools have done well in. If these free points are suddenly taken away from those schools I can imagine a scenario where things get worse and do so quickly. If we want to see appreciable gains or at least minimize points lost, imagine a class where a third of the class is spent writing about a topic, a third reading about the topic and the final third learning about a topic.
If teachers then had topics provided to them rather than having to create them themselves they would be more likely to use them. It takes a lot of time and effort to find an appropriate reading and develop questions around them. Also remember many of these kids don’t have the skills that they need which means before we can move them forward we have to catch them up.
Continuing with reading, I think it would be a great idea is all the intervene schools offered at least one section of creative writing, yearbook and/or student newspaper. These writing based classes would help out. At my school I don’t think we offered any of these classes.
Discipline should be addressed. Teachers have become experts of ignoring bad behavior and putting out fires, which takes away from the learning environments. If a teacher spends just ten minutes a class doing these things that’s a month of academic time lost over the course of a year. A few bad apples can indeed spoil a cart and we would have such tremendous addition with just a little subtraction.
I recommend creating mini grand parks at the schools where kids would go to for weeks at a time. If they didn’t do their work they would have another day added, if they missed a day they would have another day added. They would go to lunch after the normal lunch period but not be allowed to sit together and as a group have two restroom breaks a day. In these mini grand park kids would sit individually at tables or in study carrels not allowed to talk. There work would be provided to them and when they had questions or needed help they would raise their hands to ask for it. After two weeks I am sure kids would not want to return and I can imagine it being a powerful inducement to behave especially if they were sent there after just two referrals. Remember for a consequence to be meaningful, it must be meaningful. Right now we woefully lack meaningful consequences.
It could be staffed by academic coaches, assistant principals and by teachers periodically willing to give up a planning period here and there.
Grade recovery should be changed. It should only be for kids that try hard but just don’t get it and need a little more or for kids who have legitimate reasons for missing many days. So many kids use it as a fall back and just show up to cut up. That should be stopped immediately and it should be announced from day one that is how things are. Behavior, effort and attendance must count for something.
After the first nine weeks I suggest regrouping kids by ability. I know this has become a taboo concept in some education circles but it would allow the schools to have accelerated groups and groups that needed extra attention. We scream differentiate our curriculum but doesn’t this just make things harder? It would be much easier to teach one group of kids on the same level rather than three groups of kids at the same time who were on different levels.
Finally I would encourage your administrators to allow teachers to fail students, something we haven’t been able to do for years, and write referrals. Teachers should not be scared to write referrals or fail kids. If a teacher does these things it doesn’t necessarily make them bad. Preparing kids for life, which has consequences for a lack of effort and bad behavior should be the minimum of what we are doing.
By having a realistic schedule/curriculum that better suits the students’ needs, exchanging teacher busy work for work that will assist the kids to learn and catch up and by instilling discipline, I think immediate and appreciable gains can be achieved.
None of this is reinventing the wheel and I imagine most if not all are things you have already thought of. Its now just time we put these measures into our schools.
1. A realistic curriculum
2. Teacher buy in
3. Discipline
These can be implemented without breaking the bank or reinventing the wheel.
I honestly believe changing the schedule would do the greatest amount of good. If you are not willing to mandate it at all the intervene schools, I would suggest a pilot program for the new intervene schools. We can’t continue to do things the same way and hope things miraculously change.
The district is going to more reading in the content area classes and I think this is an excellent idea. However, the teachers need to be trained how to do this before the new school year begins. If they are trained over the course of the year there will be diminished returns.
Adding more requirements to classes, such as reading assignments, to the content area classes leads to other problems. Teachers feel overworked as it is which means adding more things to their plate will both be met with resistance and often be applied in an uneven fashion. In short, if you are going to put something on their plate and you want it to succeed then you really should take something off of it.
The state mandated word walls, complicated daily agendas, mini lessons, focus lessons, massive data notebooks and two page lesson plans with scripted questions have been insisted on in the intervene schools for years. We can all see how well this is working. I would seriously consider streamlining the agenda and lesson plans and strongly encouraging word walls but not making them mandatory. It also seems to be a huge waste of both manpower and resources to require teachers to keep a telephone book sized ring binder of printed data on their students, when all the information is on the computer; literally at their fingertips already.
Furthermore I recommend making the learning schedules more flexible. If the first third of a class is use reinforcing reading skills then it just makes sense that classes will fall behind on the leaning schedule. Besides it seems to make sense that we make sure kids learn some things rather than just be exposed to many things.
It’s not just reading that should be taught in the content area classes but writing as well. The state just said they are really going to increase the rigor on the FCAT writing tests. Many of our kids are taught format writing for the test not actually how to write. Continuing in years past this has been the one area that the intervene schools have done well in. If these free points are suddenly taken away from those schools I can imagine a scenario where things get worse and do so quickly. If we want to see appreciable gains or at least minimize points lost, imagine a class where a third of the class is spent writing about a topic, a third reading about the topic and the final third learning about a topic.
If teachers then had topics provided to them rather than having to create them themselves they would be more likely to use them. It takes a lot of time and effort to find an appropriate reading and develop questions around them. Also remember many of these kids don’t have the skills that they need which means before we can move them forward we have to catch them up.
Continuing with reading, I think it would be a great idea is all the intervene schools offered at least one section of creative writing, yearbook and/or student newspaper. These writing based classes would help out. At my school I don’t think we offered any of these classes.
Discipline should be addressed. Teachers have become experts of ignoring bad behavior and putting out fires, which takes away from the learning environments. If a teacher spends just ten minutes a class doing these things that’s a month of academic time lost over the course of a year. A few bad apples can indeed spoil a cart and we would have such tremendous addition with just a little subtraction.
I recommend creating mini grand parks at the schools where kids would go to for weeks at a time. If they didn’t do their work they would have another day added, if they missed a day they would have another day added. They would go to lunch after the normal lunch period but not be allowed to sit together and as a group have two restroom breaks a day. In these mini grand park kids would sit individually at tables or in study carrels not allowed to talk. There work would be provided to them and when they had questions or needed help they would raise their hands to ask for it. After two weeks I am sure kids would not want to return and I can imagine it being a powerful inducement to behave especially if they were sent there after just two referrals. Remember for a consequence to be meaningful, it must be meaningful. Right now we woefully lack meaningful consequences.
It could be staffed by academic coaches, assistant principals and by teachers periodically willing to give up a planning period here and there.
Grade recovery should be changed. It should only be for kids that try hard but just don’t get it and need a little more or for kids who have legitimate reasons for missing many days. So many kids use it as a fall back and just show up to cut up. That should be stopped immediately and it should be announced from day one that is how things are. Behavior, effort and attendance must count for something.
After the first nine weeks I suggest regrouping kids by ability. I know this has become a taboo concept in some education circles but it would allow the schools to have accelerated groups and groups that needed extra attention. We scream differentiate our curriculum but doesn’t this just make things harder? It would be much easier to teach one group of kids on the same level rather than three groups of kids at the same time who were on different levels.
Finally I would encourage your administrators to allow teachers to fail students, something we haven’t been able to do for years, and write referrals. Teachers should not be scared to write referrals or fail kids. If a teacher does these things it doesn’t necessarily make them bad. Preparing kids for life, which has consequences for a lack of effort and bad behavior should be the minimum of what we are doing.
By having a realistic schedule/curriculum that better suits the students’ needs, exchanging teacher busy work for work that will assist the kids to learn and catch up and by instilling discipline, I think immediate and appreciable gains can be achieved.
None of this is reinventing the wheel and I imagine most if not all are things you have already thought of. Its now just time we put these measures into our schools.
Governor Scott says one thing does another. Is he the governor of all of us or just the Tea Party?
From Scathing Purple Musings
by Bob Sykes
Lakeland republican senator Paula Dockery dropped her gubernatorial bid when she realized she couldn’t compete with Rick Scott’s money. Nonetheless, she served on his transition team after Scott’s victory over Alex Sink. In today’s Orlando Sentinel story by Aaron Deslatte, Dockery has some sharp criticism for Scott:
“I think he has governed very differently than what he campaigned on,” said Sen. Paula Dockery, a Lakeland Republican who served on Scott’s transition team but has criticized his decisions to kill the high-speed train and cut education and environmental spending.
Dockery says Scott, who had lived in Florida for only seven years when he ran for governor, refused to take advice from experienced politicos and has been slow to reach out beyond his tea-party base.
“He’s going to keep seeing the [poll] numbers where they are until he starts reading the people a little better,” Dockery said. “You have a responsibility as governor to listen to everyone. Unless he makes that shift, he’s going to stay where he is.”
Well Scott is listening. And to be fair, he’s proposal to increase education spending by $1 billion is a step in the right direction. But Scott proved he still is contemptuous of the state’s teachers and the public school institution in his much publicized meeting with teachers in Osceola county:
Scott, holding a roundtable discussion with the teachers, said he is a strong supporter of education. “If we’re going to do well as a state, if our families are going to do well, it’s going to be tied to education.”
But he said the public views the public-education system as one unwilling to police itself. “The perception is that it’s not an accountable system,” he said, and too many people feel “we’re not getting value for the dollars we’re putting in the government.”
Scott said he understands that teachers work hard and knows, given budget cuts and a new merit-pay law, that “there’s a lot of stress.”
But during the nearly two-hour long discussion with Neptune teachers, the governor made it clearly he believes firmly that public education needs to change. He said he held the event because “I’m trying to get ideas from teachers.”
Nobody’s buying that last line. It’s called lip service. Education policy in Florida is dictated by an ideologically driven and ethically challenged legislature. For Scott’s $1 billion increase to actually provide help to districts, a significant slash will be needed to the unfunded mandates the last handful of republican-dominated legislatures have heaped upon them.
Republicans don’t want this conversation to come up as it will unmask their rhetorical talking points. Thus far they’ve been able to sell loosening their stranglehold as “allowing more flexibility.” You can be assured that the mention of “unfunded mandates” by reporters will make more than one republican squirm.
http://bobsidlethoughtsandmusings.wordpress.com/2012/01/01/rick-scotts-governed-very-differently-than-what-he-campaigned-on/?mid=56
by Bob Sykes
Lakeland republican senator Paula Dockery dropped her gubernatorial bid when she realized she couldn’t compete with Rick Scott’s money. Nonetheless, she served on his transition team after Scott’s victory over Alex Sink. In today’s Orlando Sentinel story by Aaron Deslatte, Dockery has some sharp criticism for Scott:
“I think he has governed very differently than what he campaigned on,” said Sen. Paula Dockery, a Lakeland Republican who served on Scott’s transition team but has criticized his decisions to kill the high-speed train and cut education and environmental spending.
Dockery says Scott, who had lived in Florida for only seven years when he ran for governor, refused to take advice from experienced politicos and has been slow to reach out beyond his tea-party base.
“He’s going to keep seeing the [poll] numbers where they are until he starts reading the people a little better,” Dockery said. “You have a responsibility as governor to listen to everyone. Unless he makes that shift, he’s going to stay where he is.”
Well Scott is listening. And to be fair, he’s proposal to increase education spending by $1 billion is a step in the right direction. But Scott proved he still is contemptuous of the state’s teachers and the public school institution in his much publicized meeting with teachers in Osceola county:
Scott, holding a roundtable discussion with the teachers, said he is a strong supporter of education. “If we’re going to do well as a state, if our families are going to do well, it’s going to be tied to education.”
But he said the public views the public-education system as one unwilling to police itself. “The perception is that it’s not an accountable system,” he said, and too many people feel “we’re not getting value for the dollars we’re putting in the government.”
Scott said he understands that teachers work hard and knows, given budget cuts and a new merit-pay law, that “there’s a lot of stress.”
But during the nearly two-hour long discussion with Neptune teachers, the governor made it clearly he believes firmly that public education needs to change. He said he held the event because “I’m trying to get ideas from teachers.”
Nobody’s buying that last line. It’s called lip service. Education policy in Florida is dictated by an ideologically driven and ethically challenged legislature. For Scott’s $1 billion increase to actually provide help to districts, a significant slash will be needed to the unfunded mandates the last handful of republican-dominated legislatures have heaped upon them.
Republicans don’t want this conversation to come up as it will unmask their rhetorical talking points. Thus far they’ve been able to sell loosening their stranglehold as “allowing more flexibility.” You can be assured that the mention of “unfunded mandates” by reporters will make more than one republican squirm.
http://bobsidlethoughtsandmusings.wordpress.com/2012/01/01/rick-scotts-governed-very-differently-than-what-he-campaigned-on/?mid=56
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