Ohio Auditor of State Mary Taylor recently released special audits as part of an investigation into Daniel Burns, a former district administrator at the Toledo and Cleveland school districts who is accused of stealing $820,000 from the two districts over the course of eight years…. One can’t help but wonder if there is a “Deep Throat” somewhere lurking in the shadows of Cleveland or Toledo waiting to tell all. If you are out there, Gadfly would love to hear from you. Read the full post here.
The Dayton Public Schools, in Fordham’s hometown, rang out 2009 with an announcement that it faces a $5 million budget shortfall caused by rising home foreclosures and delinquent property taxes. A mere two weeks later the head of the Dayton Education Association announced that she couldn’t support the district’s participation in the state’s “Race to the Top” application. Her logic, “The requirements of the grant itself ask for too much….Too many strings.” …This is like a starving man refusing a steak because he is asked to cook it for himself. Read the full post here.
Center for Research on Education Outcomes
January 2010
This brief report supplements CREDO’s June 2009 national study on charter performance in 15 states and the District of Columbia. The January 2010 report focuses on the school years 2003-04 through 2008-09, and looks at roughly 20,000 students in grades 3-8 across 49 New York City charter schools.
The results of the New York City report show significantly better results for most students and student subgroups in math (with the exception of students with disabilities, Limited English Proficient students, retained students, and students in poverty) and better results for students in reading (students enrolled for 1 year, students with disabilities, Limited English Proficient students, and retained students).
Although there are a number of differences between the national study and the NYC study – including vastly different results in mathematics, wherein more than half of the NYC charter schools showed statistically significant growth in math, as compared to just seventeen percent in the national study – one common theme is that students enrolled in charters seem to perform better over time. Specifically, the New York City report indicates that after three years in a NYC charter school, students showed a four point advantage in reading and 15 point advantage in math as compared with students in traditional public schools. Copies of both the New York City and national reports are available here.
This post by my Ohio colleagues is very important. It forecasts a major challenge for Race to the Top (RTT) scoring.
Jamie and Eric suggest that Ohio got lots of its districts to sign on to its RTT application because the proposal is, well, pretty weak. We're seeing in lots of other places (Michigan, Florida, California, Louisiana, etc.) that stakeholders won't sign on when the application is strong.
So we have a problem. The Department wants both--strong applications and lots of stakeholder support--but these variables appear to be negatively correlated. We all hope for a couple outlier states, ones that are somehow able to move off the line and into the upper right corner.
But of those many states with proposals on the line, which will the feds favor? Which variable carries more weight?
--Andy Smarick
Former Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings gave a speech at the Naples Beach Hotel and Golf Club last week and -- no surprise here -- she is still defending No Child Left Behind. According to this Naples Daily News story, she told a luncheon crowd of 300 people that:
....the No Child Left Behind Act passed under the former administration has done what it promised in narrowing the achievement gap between white and minority students, but said much remains to be done. She stopped short of saying the measures by the current administration would help the country go the extra mile, but sounded a note of hope about the initial steps.No Child Left Behind, enacted eight years ago Friday, helped slim the achievement gap between white and minority students, and more students have become proficient in reading and math, Spellings said.
???????Much of the progress has been in elementary schools and middle schools, because that is where it was designed to have an impact,??????? she said. ???????In high school there is still much to do.
Spellings said she's bolstered by President Obama and Secretary Duncan's efforts on education reform but stopped short of offering praise. ???????Despite some of our many differences, I'm really pulling for them. ... I'm not going to get overly excited yet, because as we Texans say, ???????I've been to this rodeo before, '" she said.
Quotable:
"To maintain the union and the trade, we need young men and women. So we thought maybe we should start our own charter school."
- Armand E. Sabitoni, General Secretary-Treasurer of the Laborers' International Union of North America
"Julia Steiny: Charter School is 'Labor of Love' for Union," The Providence Journal
Notable:
$4.2 million:
Amount it would cost to restore each Hawaii furlough day, under Governor Lingle's new proposal. The union proposal would cost $7 million per recovered furlough day.
"Lingle Proposes New Plan to End Teacher Furloughs," Education Week (subscription required)
If you haven't seen it already, this article in this month's??Atlantic is well worth a read, and will certainly get a lot of attention from people on all sides of the education debate.
The article focuses on how Teach for America has been tracking data and conducting extensive retroactive analyses in an attempt to determine what makes teachers effective (and whether they are selecting for indicators that do)--something that virtually nobody has been able to reliably do.
What struck me most about the article, though, was not the subtle conclusions from this work but the real obvious one that keeps staring us in the face: Inexperienced teachers without traditional certification--ala TFA--perform at??least as well as, if not better than, their more experienced, certified peers. Or to put it another way, the billions of dollars we spent on teacher training and certification every year appear to be adding little value when it comes to student achievement gains.
In the midst of the biggest economic downturn since the Great Depression, when every policy change is evaluated by how much money it will save, why aren't reformers clamoring to end arguably one of the most wasteful (and potentially least effective) requirements in education?
Perhaps it's a failure of imagination? While it's common knowledge that existing teacher certification programs as a whole add very little value, even the education reform community has been forced to adopt a "if you can't beat ???em, join ???em" mentality when it comes to the issue of teacher preparation.
Take for example, Teacher U. The leaders of three of the most successful CMOs in the nation--including, in full disclosure, my previous employer, Achievement First--have come together to reclaim teacher preparation by starting their own training program in the service of the existing mandates on teachers. I know that these leaders are committed to trying to figure out what really drives achievement in the classroom and to working to align teacher preparation courses to those indicators, so the fact that they're starting their own teacher preparation program is not troubling. What troubles me is that the existence of one or two quality programs--lead by reformers--will make it that much harder to eliminate these courses as barriers to entry into the classroom. And we all know that the exception does not prove the rule. That a quality teacher preparation program exists does not mean 100% of all teachers to be forced into preparation programs of varying quality across the country.
Instead, why don't take advantage of the current push for savings anywhere we can find them, by redoubling our efforts to tear these certification walls down. At the same time, let's make sure that in the push for better data systems under Race to the Top we put accountability for teacher training programs at the top of the list. Only then, under a voluntary system accountable to the teachers who choose to attend and the schools that hire them, we will be able to create the kinds of training programs that can nimbly respond to the needs of individual teachers and schools and to help attract more of the gritty teachers we need.
After the release last month of The New Teacher Project's Cincinnati-focused human capital reform report (see Jamie's take here), both district and union leadership seemed genuinely intent on using their upcoming contract negotiations to work together toward improving the district's schools.???? Education-reform-wise, things seemed to be looking up in the Queen City, a place where I've long been optimistic about the potential for improving education, given the city's dynamic school choice market and the fact that the district is one of the few in the Buckeye State to actually shut down persistently failing schools. But now with district-union contract negotiations just around the corner, my optimism is waning.????
The Cincinnati Enquirer's Ben Fischer reports that in the first few months of the school year, the union filed 51 grievances against the district for low-level contract violations and asked the State Employee Relations Board to investigate an unfair labor practice charge related to the superintendent's plan for addressing persistently failing schools. The number of grievances isn't unusually high, but the unfair labor practice charge puts at risk the district's attempt to close and redesign its worst schools. If the district can't do that, and if the new collective bargaining agreement is more of the same-old, same-old and not informed much by TNTP's findings, Cincinnati's education reform efforts might be doomed to suffer the same fate as its beloved Bengals.????????
- Emmy Partin
Topics:
The Fordham/AEI "Penny Saved" conference has been great so far! (A Penny Saved: How Schools and Districts Can Tighten Their Belts While Serving Students Better). You can follow it live on twitter (under educationgadfly and #pennysaved). You can watch our live webcast, which is a the beginning of our last panel: Overcoming Barriers to Change. Panelists are June Kronholz, formerly of the Wall Street Journal; Stacey Childress, Harvard Business School; and Martin West, Harvard Graduate School of Education. Discussants are??Lily Eskelsen, National Education Association; and Dwight D. Jones, Colorado's commissioner of education. You can read all the draft papers from today's conference on the AEI website.