It's here! From Schoolhouse to Courthouse is a new book from Brookings Institution Press and the Thomas B. Fordham Institute. It examines the role of the courts in modern American K-12 education - from race to speech, from religion to school funding, from discipline to special education. It's all in there. Take a look at book materials here, or purchase copies of it here.
Quotable:
"It's unfair to require a public school, regardless what kind, to have to rely only on philanthropy or alternative financing to create a building that is adequate for kids."-Jeanne Allen, president of the Center for Education Reform
AP:??Private sector investing in charter schools
Notable:
22.6%:??Graduation rate of English Language Learners in the 200,000 student Houston school district.
EdWeek:??ELL Graduation Rates Often a Mystery
The worst education idea of the year turns out not to be a new idea at all. "Unschooling" has roots in Rousseau, in Summerhill, in John Holt and Ivan Illich and any number of other progressive/romantic/libertarian nihilists. It takes an acceptable educational alternative--home schooling--and turns it into a parody. I kept being reminded of tales of babies raised by wolves and other wild beasts. While I do not doubt that some few parents have the knowledge and imagination to embed the acquisition of important skills and knowledge in enjoyable activities that don't feel much like school (so do many veteran kindergarten teachers, by the way), for most, I'm pretty sure, "unschooling" resembles the Taliban's idea of education for girls: Keep them home and keep them ignorant. Make sure they don't learn the parts of speech or multiplication tables, the causes of the War of 1812 ??or the election of 1912 or the concept of separation of powers or why Lady Macbeth kept washing her hands. The co-founder of the "Family Unschoolers Network" estimates that ten percent of home-schoolers are really unschoolers. If true, that's close to 200,000 kids who deserve a proper education so as to succeed in the modern world but who almost certainly aren't getting it. Not to mention that it's going to make people even more suspicious of home schooling. As Teri Flemal, director of Quality Education by Design, puts it, "I'm reading e-mail from unschooling parents who think having their kids remodel their house with them is 'school.' I'm sorry, but it's not."
Topics:
As Amy noted, the upcoming White House speech to America's students has caused quite a furor. ????Two of the harder hitting (but still reasonable) criticisms can be found here and here.
Personally, I think the basic arguments of both sides were legitimate. Taken at its word, the administration is merely intending to use the bully pulpit to encourage kids to stay in school and view their education as a responsibility. Critics, however, rightfully pointed out that there is something unsettling about a head of state delivering a speech to a captive audience of the nation's children. These concerns were heightened when the Department of Education crafted lesson plans encouraging children to think of how they can help the president. ????(These plans have since been changed.)
Yesterday, the White House held a conference call to further explain the speech and defuse the building tension. The call was headed up by the WH office of "public engagement" and was supported by the domestic policy council and the "new media" office. After providing the requisite logistical details, they explained that the purpose of the speech is to????stress the importance of staying in school, setting goals, and working hard (I'm all for that).
The call was not about policy; no advocacy for the Race to the Top or NCLB reauthorization. In fact, no ED staffers participated (actively) in the call. Some of the questions from listeners at the end tried to push the WH into making the speech about pet issues (health programs, reading initiatives, etc.), but the WH officials demurred.
So it looks like the administration appreciates the concerns out there. The interesting question, however, is how this appreciation influences the actual text of the speech. Are the WH speechwriters fully attuned to the controversy? Will senior WH officials carefully scrub the speech before it's finalized? Will ED try to add some references to ongoing initiatives?
Don't underestimate the human element here. We have a long weekend ahead of us, and lots of administration folks will be mentally checking out for a while (not a criticism). Accordingly, this speech may not get the attention required. Handled properly, the speech will be sober, encouraging, and completely apolitical; the furor will come to a halt. ????Handled poorly, it will give more ammunition to critics and add to the growing narrative--captured here and here--that the Obama team lacks humility, which leads to overreaching and melting wings.
Intern Janie Scull contributed to this post.
Yesterday's NY Times article points out that 97 percent of??NYC schools had received an A or B on city report cards. Given all the lamenting that goes on about the sorry state of public education in America (and rightly so), news like this is amusing. The article reports that "at more than 50 of the schools that received an A... more than half of the fourth graders were below state standards in reading." Education officials in NYC have already begun planning to raise standards so that next year's report card grades seem more realistic.
Here in Ohio, statewide report card data was released last week. A quote from the superintendent of public instruction raises a similar question about whether students are actually learning, or standards are just too low. "Educators continue to help students achieve at higher levels and, in many cases, surpass the rigorous academic standards that have been laid before them," said Deborah Delisle, referencing the fact that more than 85 percent of Ohio's 612 school districts received an A or a B, an increase from previous years.
Statistics like this obviously mask the 15 percent of Ohio districts who aren't performing well (districts that tend to have disproportionately large student populations) and the fact that there are a whole lot of students in the Buckeye State who do not reside in an A or B district (to be precise, 202,229 in the eight largest urban districts alone). For those of you non-Ohioans, it's important to note that part of the elevation happening in many districts' rankings can be explained by the inclusion of value-added metrics on the report card.
Still, it's hard not to feel like there's a schism in viewpoints about whether students are doing better or not. Just last week, Checker pointed out much more depressing national measures of student progress (SAT, ACT, NAEP). According to NAEP, fewer than half of Ohio's fourth and eighth graders are proficient in reading or math (contrast that with Delisle's proclamation that we are surpassing rigorous standards). In short, though many students in Ohio and nationally are failing miserably, our report cards are stickered with lots and lots of As and Bs.
This might be an over-simplification of the discussion (see Terry's more nuanced description of the problems with Ohio ratings, and a later editorial calling on the state to dump its current ranking system), but I guess the point I'm making is that the level of spin placed on student achievement data has gotten to be headache-inducing. It reminds me of an ed policy class assignment I had once, for which I had to pretend to be the lead PR person in a large, under-performing district like Cleveland. The task was to simply rearrange the report card data in myriad ways, and create a narrative that could get our parents, community members, and teachers clapping for us.
Admittedly, more people probably spot the data shuffling and the overall politicking than are unreservedly celebrating student achievement in NYC or Ohio.?? But it's still bothersome to watch perverse incentives (inherent to accountability systems) warp our conversation about student achievement.
Amy wrote yesterday of the hubbub surrounding President Obama's back-to-school speech on September 8. Out of all the ways Obama could use his bully pulpit, telling kids to stay in school and work hard is one of the best. But the lesson planning materials that were sent out to accompany the speech are another matter. This is not about Obama. This is about the kids. Obama would do well to not let his inflated ego get the best of him. I'll demure to the??Wall Street Journal ed board, which wrote an excellent, level-headed, and articulate editorial on the subject this morning, to explain:
President Obama's plan to speak to America's schoolchildren next Tuesday has some Republicans in an uproar. "As the father of four children, I am absolutely appalled that taxpayer dollars are being used to spread President Obama's socialist ideology," thunders Jim Greer, chairman of Florida's Republican Party, in a press release. "President Obama has turned to American's children to spread his liberal lies, indoctrinating American's [sic] youngest children before they have a chance to decide for themselves." Columnists who spy a conspiracy behind every Democrat are also spreading alarm.
This is overwrought, to say the least. According to the Education Department's Web site, Mr. Obama "will challenge students to work hard, set educational goals, and take responsibility for their learning"--hardly the stuff of the Communist Manifesto or even the Democratic Party platform. America's children are not so vulnerable that we need to slap an NC-17 rating on Presidential speeches. Given how many minority children struggle in school, a pep talk from the first African-American President could even do some good.
On the other hand, the Department of Education goes a little too far in its lesson plans for teachers to use in conjunction with the speech--especially the one for grades 7 through 12. Before the speech, teachers are urged to use "notable quotes excerpted (and posted in large print on board) from President Obama's speeches about education" and to "brainstorm" with students about the question "How will he inspire us?" Suggested topics for postspeech discussion include "What resonated with you from President Obama's speech?" and "What is President Obama inspiring you to do?"
This seems to cross the line between respecting the office and aggrandizing the man who currently holds it. As the President and his speechwriters prepare for school on Tuesday, we hope they will be more circumspect than the education bureaucracy.
Couldn't have said it better myself. (Really!)
On Monday, when the full Obama back-to-school speech is posted in advance on whitehouse.gov. I think this whole discussion has gotten out of control, but hey it's Friday so here's one more conspiracy theory to stir this already-boiling pot: Releasing the speech on a holiday? Not a coincidence... (HT: Ed Week)
Quotable:
"The thing that concerned me most about it was it seemed like a direct channel from the president of the United States into the classroom, to my child...I don't want our schools turned over to some socialist movement."-??Brett Curtiss, parent
NYT:??Some Parents Oppose Obama School Speech
Notable:
$30,000,000:??Cost of a new Chicago plan to prevent shooting deaths by providing special programming for the 1200 students who, according to an algorithm, are the likely to become gunshot victims.
Education Week features an insightful new study that finds excellent teachers tend to raise the performance of their peers.
We've known for a long time that great teachers matter hugely to student performance but showing a ???spillover effect' of teachers on other teachers has the potential to influence attitudes and practices in several important policy areas; primarily teacher merit pay and mentoring programs.
C. Kirabo Jackson, one of the study's authors noted:
If it's true that teachers are learning from their peers, and the effects are not small, then we want to make sure that any incentive system we put in place is going to be fostering that and not preventing it. If you give the reward at the individual level, all of a sudden my peers are no longer my colleagues-they're my competitors. If you give it at the school level, then you're going to foster feelings of team membership, and that increases the incentive to work together and help each other out.
A team-based performance incentive system is an intriguing idea that critics of individual merit-based pay might see as middle ground.
The results of this study can also be applied to teacher mentoring programs. Recent studies have shown that highly structured teacher mentoring programs have marginal effectiveness. But in seeing evidence that top-notch teachers affect peers, might it be possible that more informal mentoring programs would produce better results?
Having experienced a highly structured mentoring program in an urban school district myself, I can attest to informal mentors being more effective. Informal conversations with my peers were far more informative and time conscious than weekly two-hour group mentoring sessions. While the structured program was well intentioned, it consisted of large meetings that were not content area specific and dealt in generalizations. If I needed a practical tip on a particular issue, I sought out one of my more experienced colleagues. Our conversations were usually very short (often in passing) but they were always useful. Not to say that there isn't a place for some structure in mentoring programs, but hopefully the results of this study will help to ???personalize' these programs further. Many education policy researchers seem to be advocating for increased personalization in teaching practice, why not use the same principle when inducting teachers?
With the influence of excellent teachers empirically brought to the light, I hope that it can affect some sensible change on a larger scale.
Though Flypaper is my beloved blogging home and gets all of my music-related musings, I write about the education components of the stimulus over at AEI's blog.
Along those lines, though it's the end of August there has still been some noteworthy ARRA action recently. In case you've been vacationing or otherwise disposed, here are some thoughts on the NEA's RTT comments, the draft regs for????$3.5 billion in School Improvement Grants, and some discouraging survey results from the????American Association of School Administrators.