National Center for Education StatisticsFebruary 2007 The Nation's Report Card: America's High School Graduates--Results from the 2005 NAEP High School Transcript StudyNational Center for Education StatisticsFebruary 2007
National Center for Education Statistics
February 2007
The Nation's Report Card: America's High School Graduates--Results from the 2005 NAEP High School Transcript Study
National Center for Education Statistics
February 2007
The big news about these two studies is already out (See here and here). High school students are taking what on paper look like more-rigorous courses and are getting better grades, yet they're doing no better on the 2005 NAEP Reading assessment than 15 years ago. And their math scores aren't so hot, either (changes to the '05 NAEP Math assessment don't permit ready comparisons with previous assessments). What to do about this disconnect will be the topic of considerable debate for years to come. But there's more to these reports than what was blasted across newspaper headlines. Consider, for example:
The accompanying transcript survey offers even more tantalizing tid-bits:
In short, these two reports are packed with important data. Read the headlines, but then take the time to dig through them yourself. Find them here and here.
EdSource
February 2007
This report provides a concise overview of California's recent experiences with state and federal accountability systems. The Golden State's story (at least as recounted here) begins with the Public Schools Accountability Act of 1999, which installed a standardized testing system whose scores would be translated into an Academic Performance Index (API). Schools would then be ranked from 1 (lowest) to 10 (highest) according to their students' API scores. Since that time, two accountability frameworks have accompanied the testing regime: the Immediate Intervention/Underperforming Schools Program, and the High Priority Schools Grant Program. A state-sponsored study by the American Institutes for Research (AIR) found that, while API scores have improved substantially, the accountability regimes account for few of those gains. Among other things, AIR blamed implementation failures on lack of district support and the disconnect between the planning and implementation of schools' "action plans." The report also highlights friction between the state's accountability system and that conjured by the federal No Child Left Behind (NCLB) act. Like many states, what counts as progress in California doesn't count for "adequate yearly progress" under NCLB. California's response to NCLB's cascade of sanctions tells another common tale: 76 percent of chronically-failing California schools avoided a serious overhaul by choosing the "other major restructuring" option, i.e. the "loophole option," while only 2 percent reopened as charters (13 percent did nothing). The report closes with an overview of California's latest accountability legislation, the Quality Education Investment Act, which provides more funding and stricter oversight for the lowest schools on the API pole. By the very nature of its topic, this paper is dry as toast. But the dogged reader will find useful glimpses of how a muddle of micromanaged accountability systems affects the districts, schools, and students over whose shoulder it operates. The report is available to purchase for $6, here.
When Tom Vander Ark left the Gates Foundation at the end of last year, the edu-world curiously awaited his next move. During his dynamic tenure as the foundation's executive director of education programs, Vander Ark oversaw the distribution of $3.5 billion in scholarship and grant programs and helped build Gates's reputation for engaged and innovative (if not always successful) philanthropy.
It wasn't totally surprising, then, when a January press release announced that Vander Ark would become president of the cutting-edge X PRIZE Foundation (XPF), one of the few nonprofits that can claim to push the envelope as hard as Gates.
The brainchild of St. Louis entrepreneur Peter Diamandis, the foundation launched with a bang in 1996 by offering a $10 million prize (the X PRIZE) to the first team whose spacecraft could take three people into space and back, twice in two weeks. (He got the idea from the Orteig Prize, which in 1919 promised $25,000 to a pilot who could fly non-stop across the Atlantic--Charles Lindbergh, a previously unknown airmail pilot, won that prize in 1927.)
By 2004, when Mojave Aerospace Ventures took home the Ansari X PRIZE (renamed for a donor) for its SpaceShipOne, 26 teams from seven nations had spent 10 times the amount of the prize purse developing and building their entries. Compare that bang for your buck with NASA, which probably spends about $10 million a year on Tang, and the revolutionary power of the X PRIZE is obvious.
Now Diamandis (and Vander Ark) apparently wants to do for education what he did for space travel. XPF's website has announced that an education prize is in the works. Given all the billions that have been poured into education, could such a prize be to our education system what the Ansari X PRIZE was to NASA: a way to bypass a bloated bureaucracy and produce an admittedly small-scale, but astonishingly effective solution to a fundamental policy issue?
Yes, says Vander Ark in a recent interview. First, it would create leverage by generating research and other activities costing much more than the prize amount. Second, it would be performance-based, paying out only when there's a winner. Third, it would reduce costs since cash is scarce for most competitors (unlike government agencies). Finally, in Vander Ark's words, it would create "focal points for innovation" by bringing dispersed minds together on one well-defined problem.
Fair enough. But what would warrant such a prize? After all, education reform isn't rocket science--and in many ways, it's more difficult. Perhaps XPF could award the prize to the first high-poverty high school to graduate all of its students on time into credit-bearing college work. Or to the first team to design a financially viable, easily replicable, high-achieving private school for poor and minority students. (The Catholic church could use the money.) Or to a preschool that got all of its poor students "ready to learn" by kindergarten. Or to the first ed college (or ed prep organization) to have 300 teachers bring 100 percent of their high-need students up to proficiency in their first year of teaching.
But even these illustrative ideas don't quite capture the "audacity," as XPF's website puts it, that is at the core of the X PRIZE. To compete with space travel, the education X PRIZE needs to be even bigger and bolder.
So let us offer our own challenge: What achievement do you think would be worthy of X PRIZE acclaim? Creative and worthwhile ideas will be awarded with publication in next week's Gadfly. (And we'll share them with Tom Vander Ark, too.) Send them to [email protected].
The South Florida Giant Underground Weirdness Magnet is at it again. How else to explain the events that brought Miami resident Dalila Rodriguez together with a copy of Vamos a Cuba? Seems Ms. Rodriguez, a Cuban émigré--er, exile--removed the book from her son's school library and is refusing to return it because, she contends, it soft-pedals life on Fidel's Fantasy Island. The School Board had itself previously banned the book, but held off when the ACLU challenged its action. "[The school board] is leaving us in legal limbo" says Rodriguez, "so we're leaving them in limbo, too." For now the book is safely inside her "lockbox," where it shall remain. "It had some educational facts," she notes, "but it's still erroneous." We empathize with Ms. Rodriguez and her fellow Cuban exiles, but this form of book "borrowing" is just as bad as book banning. And if it catches on with other interest groups, we fear that library shelves across America will soon be barren. (Especially the biology section.)
"Cuban mom raids school library," by Tania de Luzuriaga, Miami Herald, February 22, 2007. (Print edition only)
"Church Schools Face Challenge from Charters," by Sarah Garland, New York Sun, February 27, 2007
"A New Model for Schools in the Boston Archdiocese," by Katie Zezima, New York Times, February 24, 2007
Passionate classroom debates over Nietzsche and Proust are not every student's cup of tea. And for too long, those who struggled with such approaches to learning found their way to auto shop or wood shop, and abandoned math, science, and history along the way. But some schools are wising up and using vocational ed to reconnect students to higher-level learning. Salvador Vergara, for example, hated math and eventually dropped out of high school. Amps and ohms, not classroom math and chemistry, were his thing. Until he entered and won a recent SkillsUSA competition in Los Angeles--where students compete in such categories as plumbing, cosmetology, architectural drafting, web page design, and welding--by wowing the judges with his electrical schematic. Now he understands that amps and ohms and how they work rest on those classroom lessons in math and chemistry courses. "I wish I'd known about this in high school," he said. Luckily for Vergara, he eventually found the training that his high school lacked, and he's now on track to make $100,000 a year as an electrician. (He also finished high school and is going to use that money to go back to college and earn a degree in psychology.) Just goes to show--doesn't matter how you learn that core course material--so long as you learn it.
"Works skills winning new respect," by Bob Sipchen, Los Angeles Times, February 26, 2007
Sergeant Joe Friday of Dragnet fame was content with "just the facts"; the Department of Education's Inspector General is not so humble. How else to explain his animus toward the Reading First program, recently found by OMB to be one of only four "effective" programs in the entire Education Department? This week's escapade features federal agents sifting through the five-year-old conference proceedings of the Reading Leadership Academies to prove that some (but not all) reading programs were highlighted as effective. Wait, it's a crime to bring attention to interventions that work? Isn't that the point of most conferences? Education Week, always hot on the trail of this alleged "scandal" (while chronically ignoring all manner of true outrages, such as the fact that most Education Department programs have been found not to work and yet continue to get funded, usually with more dollars each year), played its assigned role as faithful rapporteur. But it, too, has veered into interpretation, last week labeling former Reading First director Chris Doherty's "tone" as "aggressive and arrogant" because he...dared to enforce the law! Never mind that its own on-the-ground reporting has shown the program (and its "aggressive" management) to be a blessing. OK, everyone, time for a vocabulary test. Please define "cognitive dissonance."
"Ed. Dept. Allowed Singling Out of ‘Reading First' Products," by Kathleen Kennedy Manzo, Education Week, February 23, 2007
"E-mails Reveal Federal Reach Over Reading," by Kathleen Kennedy Manzo, Education Week, February 20, 2007
National Center for Education Statistics
February 2007
The Nation's Report Card: America's High School Graduates--Results from the 2005 NAEP High School Transcript Study
National Center for Education Statistics
February 2007
The big news about these two studies is already out (See here and here). High school students are taking what on paper look like more-rigorous courses and are getting better grades, yet they're doing no better on the 2005 NAEP Reading assessment than 15 years ago. And their math scores aren't so hot, either (changes to the '05 NAEP Math assessment don't permit ready comparisons with previous assessments). What to do about this disconnect will be the topic of considerable debate for years to come. But there's more to these reports than what was blasted across newspaper headlines. Consider, for example:
The accompanying transcript survey offers even more tantalizing tid-bits:
In short, these two reports are packed with important data. Read the headlines, but then take the time to dig through them yourself. Find them here and here.
EdSource
February 2007
This report provides a concise overview of California's recent experiences with state and federal accountability systems. The Golden State's story (at least as recounted here) begins with the Public Schools Accountability Act of 1999, which installed a standardized testing system whose scores would be translated into an Academic Performance Index (API). Schools would then be ranked from 1 (lowest) to 10 (highest) according to their students' API scores. Since that time, two accountability frameworks have accompanied the testing regime: the Immediate Intervention/Underperforming Schools Program, and the High Priority Schools Grant Program. A state-sponsored study by the American Institutes for Research (AIR) found that, while API scores have improved substantially, the accountability regimes account for few of those gains. Among other things, AIR blamed implementation failures on lack of district support and the disconnect between the planning and implementation of schools' "action plans." The report also highlights friction between the state's accountability system and that conjured by the federal No Child Left Behind (NCLB) act. Like many states, what counts as progress in California doesn't count for "adequate yearly progress" under NCLB. California's response to NCLB's cascade of sanctions tells another common tale: 76 percent of chronically-failing California schools avoided a serious overhaul by choosing the "other major restructuring" option, i.e. the "loophole option," while only 2 percent reopened as charters (13 percent did nothing). The report closes with an overview of California's latest accountability legislation, the Quality Education Investment Act, which provides more funding and stricter oversight for the lowest schools on the API pole. By the very nature of its topic, this paper is dry as toast. But the dogged reader will find useful glimpses of how a muddle of micromanaged accountability systems affects the districts, schools, and students over whose shoulder it operates. The report is available to purchase for $6, here.
