With so much rhetoric (some of it misleading, and much of it espoused by the state’s teacher unions) surrounding Ohio’s charter school program, it’s easy to overlook key elements of both the program and the 300+ schools that comprise it. Not to mention the profound and positive impact many are having on the reform efforts of traditional school districts, particularly those in urban areas. Editorials in both the Dayton Daily News (see here) and Columbus Dispatch (see here) have justly noted the latter--as well as the expanded opportunities parents have to select schools and programs that best fit the needs of their children. But to help parents, lawmakers and taxpayers further separate fact from fiction about charter schools, we’ve put together “Essential Facts about Ohio’s Charter School Program.” This brief, informative presentation gets to the bottom of Ohio’s charter school program--and, unlike much that is being said about charters, not by scraping it.
This latest piece of the New York Times' series on middle schools finds this: There's no clear-cut formula for discerning who can handle the hormone-crazed kids in America's middle schools. But one Bronx principal has the right idea. Middle school teachers, he said, must "have a huge sense of humor and a small ego." That sums it up pretty well. But, of course, the usual suspects disagree. They think middle school teachers need--what else?--more ed school coursework and special "credentialing." Here's a better idea: Find those who naturally relate well to pre-teens; give these future teachers a solid, core academic education; and see what happens. It seems to work for Corinne Kaufman. The 45-year-old math teacher knows her material, and how to handle juvenile prankishness. When a student called her "fat lady," for example, she "calmly turned around ... [and retorted], ‘voluptuous.'" She then gave her students a vocabulary lesson they won't forget. We'd just as soon forget the whole middle school concept but until that day comes, hire more Corinnes, and let 'em do their thing.
"For Teachers, Middle School Is Test of Wills," by Elissa Gootman, New York Times, March 17, 2007
Mayoral control in New York City is hitting some bumps in the road. Mayor Michael Bloomberg and Chancellor Joel Klein regularly trumpet their "historic gains" in test scores. They say that since the mayor gained control, scores have gone up by 12 percent in reading and 19 percent in math. It turns out, however, that the New York City Department of Education has vastly inflated its gains by adding in the year that preceded implementation of the mayor's reforms in September 2003. A review of the New York State Department of Education website reveals that, in fact, there have been no historic gains.
Over three years of testing since the mayor's reforms were installed, reading scores for 4th grade students are up by 6.4 percent, or 2.1 percent per year (meaning that an additional 2.1 percent of students in that grade are meeting state standards each year). In math, instead of a gain of 19 percent, as the mayor's office claims, the actual gain over three years is only 4.2 percent (or 1.3 percent a year).
Normally, school leaders would be happy to have steady gains, but these are not "historic gains." The big gains of 2002-2003 (6 percent in reading and nearly 15 percent in math) were the culmination of improvements launched by Chancellor Rudy Crew (now in Miami) and Deputy Chancellor Judith Rizzo (now at the Hunt Institute in North Carolina), and sustained by Chancellor Harold O. Levy (now at Kaplan Learning). Mayor Bloomberg and Chancellor Klein had nothing to do with the test scores posted in May 2003 and October 2003. The stories in the press at that time make clear that they reacted not with jubilation but with a certain disdain, knowing that a very high benchmark had been set for them to meet or exceed. It is now clear that they simply absorbed that high benchmark as part of their own portfolio.
This week, the New York City Department of Education is busy negotiating with the New York State Department of Education about graduation rates. For some time, Mayor Bloomberg has boasted that the city's graduation rate has risen to 58 percent for the class of 2005. Meanwhile, the State Education Department reports that the same cohort has a graduation rate of 43.5 percent. The two agencies are now trying to arrive at a common formula for calculating and reporting the rate.
More trouble surfaced on March 14-15 when a survey was released by the highly respected Quinnipiac University Polling Institute that had good news for Mayor Bloomberg and bad news for Chancellor Klein. The poll showed that 73 percent of New York City voters approve of Mayor Bloomberg. It also showed that only 33 percent approve of Chancellor Klein and 43 percent expressed their disapproval of him.
By a 58 to 31 percent margin, said the survey, voters want the schools to be controlled by an independent board of education, not the mayor. Only 19 percent of voters citywide are satisfied with the public schools; 64 percent are dissatisfied.
Chancellor Klein gets a resounding vote of no-confidence in this survey. The strongest disapproval rating--52 percent--is registered by parents of public school students.
Nearly five years into mayoral control, the public is not satisfied with its public schools. They don't trust the Department of Education. They want an independent Board of Education. This is an unfolding story, but it will surely dampen the editorial boards' unbridled embrace of mayoral control.
You, too, can check out the New York State website to see the data for yourself. Remember that mayoral control began in mid-2002, the mayor's reform agenda was announced in January 2003, and the literacy program (balanced literacy and the Lucy Calkins "workshop model") was installed in September 2003; the math program (Everyday Math) was phased in over two years, starting in September 2003.
Grade 4 English; Grade 8 English; Grade 4 mathematics; Grade 8 mathematics
Eleven-year-old Alex Sorto, a student at Eastern Middle School in Silver Spring, Maryland, believes that eating broccoli will help boost test scores at his school. For now, however, Eastern's administrators are eschewing vegetables in favor of peppermints. Before students took the Maryland School Assessments, Principal Charlotte Boucher ordered 3,600 peppermint candies, which she believes help youngsters remain calm and focused. Lots of websites and some scientific studies support her conclusions, too, and athletes who have a sniff of peppermint before competition apparently have been known to perform better than those who don't. But we have doubts. Exhibit A: Peppermint Patty. The tomboyish friend of Charlie Brown certainly wouldn't have performed well on Maryland's standardized test--she habitually received D-minus grades and thought that Snoopy, despite his obvious canine attributes, was a funny-looking human. Quite frankly, Alex Sorto's broccoli suggestion, which would pump kids full of brain-boosting vitamins B and C and K, is a better, if less palate-pleasing, plan.
"The Power of Peppermint Is Put to the Test," by Lori Aratani, Washington Post, March 20, 2007
We've had the standards-and-accountability movement, the school choice movement, and even the small schools movement. Are we finally witnessing the rise of an autonomy movement? So one might infer from Education Week, which spots at least five districts and three states that are experimenting with giving schools a lot more operational autonomy in return for strict accountability for results. Used to be that only high-performing schools, those that had already proved their mettle, were given autonomy. But Massachusetts is offering charter school-type freedoms--the ability to decide curricula, staffing, budgets, etc.--to four of its lowest-performing schools. That autonomy will be coupled with strict accountability, too. Such plans assume that failing schools will have more luck improving when they have something invested in the restructuring process. Similar autonomy ideas are taking hold in Nevada and Connecticut, and in New York City and Chicago, too. Sounds promising to us; bring on the All Regulations Left Behind era!
"Easing Rules Over Schools Gains Favor," by Catherine Gewertz, Education Week, March 16, 2007
In last week's editorial ("How to end the reading wars?") Michael J. Petrilli argued that Reading First has been a "massive failure in terms of sustaining, much less widening, the reading-education consensus." Not true. This program has done more in four years to strengthen said consensus than all the reading scientists and state education agencies have done in the last forty. Advances include:
1) Adoption of Reading First's tenets by many state education departments and districts
2) Progress in several states to get teacher-training programs to make their reading courses more evidence-based
3) Increased demand for effective curricular products, and publishers' increased efforts to provide them
4) Unprecedented collaboration among state education departments on how to improve instruction for struggling readers
These gains notwithstanding, directors say the tipping point against backsliding in their states is still years away and that Reading First needs to stick to its prescription for at least another cycle. Backing off now would be like Lincoln calling for an armistice after Gettysburg. To the idea that the feds might be adamant about results and agnostic about methods, one wonders: Could a government timid enough to stay mum about 50 years of research possibly be bold enough to take money away from states thus liberated to misspend it? Is not the least grim political alternative to impose restrictions before making grants rather than after, when the money is already gone and new vested interests have been created to do the wrong thing?
The mandate for strong federal leadership remains strong; the program is popular among its 6,000 district grantees. More on Reading First's accomplishments here.
Shepard Barbash
Freelance journalist and Reading First volunteer
Performance pay for k-12 teachers is stalling in Florida, mostly because teachers hate the proposed plan. A few states to the left, however, some Arkansas schoolteachers are warming to the merit pay idea. It all started at Meadowcliff Elementary in Little Rock, where principal Karen Carter teamed up with publishing giant Walter Hussman, Jr., to implement a tiered system of performance bonuses for the school's employees. Unlike Florida's plan, where bonuses are limited to a certain percentage of teachers and are small (the top prize is $2,100), the Meadowcliff program rewarded all employees of outstanding schools, from administrators to janitors, with an average bonus of $6,800. Teachers rightly received the most cash, and the best teachers received the fattest checks. The program has since spread to neighboring schools, and Hussman has successfully lobbied the district and other donors to keep it going. The Sunshine State could learn something from the Natural State's example. Whether done at the state level or local level, merit pay on its own isn't worth praising; if you're going to do it, the details matter.
"Bring on the bonus checks," by Ron Matus, St. Petersburg Times, March 18, 2007
Two of the worst federal education policy ideas in memory have made their way up Capitol Hill in recent days, one in a fuel-efficient hybrid occupied primarily by Democrats, the other in a gas-guzzling pickup full of Republicans.
The Democrats' bad idea (though plenty of GOP members of the House Education and Labor Committee voted for it last week) is to kill Head Start's "National Reporting System." Misleadingly depicted in the press as a "test for pre-schoolers," in fact this administration initiative--primarily the work of assistant Health and Human Services secretary Wade Horn in fulfillment of a 1998 Congressional mandate to evaluate Head Start programs with special attention to whether kids coming out of them possess key pre-reading skills--is more like a fifteen-minute oral interview of kindergarten-eligible four- and five-year-olds by their teacher to determine which of these skills they have. Two excellent background explanations can be found here and here.
The National Head Start Association and the rest of the Head Start establishment (believe me, it's as large, set in its ways, truculent, and defensive as the k-12 establishment) hate this. They have a forty-year-old iconic "child development" program that they absolutely, positively do not want to see turned into a pre-school program with heavy emphasis on cognitive skills, pre-literacy, pre-numeracy, and the rest. (It also needs to be noted that many of their members--Head Start "workers" as they were long known--never went to college and may not be up to the challenge of imparting such skills to young children.) The heck with whether the low-income kids who go through Head Start are any better off in kindergarten and first grade than those who didn't, most of whom aren't very well off at all.
This tug of war over the direction of Head Start has been going on for years. It's the main reason the 109th Congress failed to reauthorize the program. Now the establishment is winning and the 110th Congress will be able to say that it actually did something, albeit something dumb. The cognizant House committee voted last week to kill the National Reporting System, substituting happy talk about "strengthening school readiness by re-evaluating and updating current standards and assessments based on the best science...and improving professional development related to supporting children's cognitive, social and emotional development." There is every reason to expect the full House and Senate to follow suit.
Sorry, kids. The grownups are winning again. They have lobbyists and friends in Congress. You don't. Maybe you can teach yourself the alphabet.
Read more here and here and here.
The GOP-inspired craziness is to be found in Senate and House "A-Plus" bills that would gut the No Child Left Behind act by allowing states, in effect, to take their federal dollars and run, with no real accountability for what they do with the money or, more important, for what educational results, if any, their schools produce.
Backward reels the mind to an era before NCLB, before IASA, before Goals 2000, before Charlottesville, before America 2000, indeed before A Nation at Risk, when the Republican view of federal education policy was less is more. Leave states alone. (Not many years earlier, that position was known as "states' rights" and was mainly associated with Southern Democrats seeking to spare their constituents from the inconvenience of racial desegregation.)
To be fair, Senators DeMint and Cornyn and Congressman Hoekstra and their allies are possessed by half of a good idea. The good idea is to give states that want it tons more freedom to spend their federal dollars and operate their schools as they see fit in return for demonstrated student gains on comparable national exams keyed to national achievement standards. Those might be new standards and exams (see here); they might be NAEP's; they might be something else. But improved academic results have to be produced--for poor and minority kids--in return for operational and fiscal flexibility.
The A-Plus bill omits the second half of that deal. Instead, it keeps one of NCLB's worst features--asking states to devise their own standards and tests--and then converts the rest of the law into the functional equivalent of a block grant.
The White House is apoplectic about this GOP defection, and a bit too defensive of its own proposed NCLB reforms, which are praiseworthy in some areas (e.g., school choice, unaccountably absent from A-Plus) and lame in others (standards and testing, especially).
The Congressional majority is understandably contemptuous of what they regard as an irresponsible block-grant scheme that pays no attention to poor kids, learning gaps, or any of the other basic rationales for Title I even to exist. David Broder has it right when he says "the abandonment of the first serious national effort to raise standards in the schools would be disastrous." (Unfortunately, his column can also be read as implying that I favor the DeMint-Hoekstra bill. Wrong.)
Sorry, children. State and local school systems have lobbyists. You don't. Those systems that served you so badly in the past want the freedom to do likewise in the future.
The Democrats' bad Head Start idea will probably become law. (Of course, the President could veto it.) The Republicans' bad NCLB idea almost surely won't.
What we want to know is: where are the good ideas?
More information about the "A-plus" bills can be found here, here, and here. A thoughtful Washington Post editorial about them can be found here.
I just read your piece about the "Reading Wars." I think part of the problem rests with the heavy-handed deliberation process that the National Reading Panel undertook to try to end the reading wars in the first place.
Have you ever read Joanne Yatvin's account of her experience on the NRP? It is featured in the book Silent No More--Voices of Courage in American Schools, edited by Gloria Pipkin and ReLeah Cossett. Joanne's chapter is entitled "Science Means What We Say it Means, or, My Adventures in Wonderland." In this chapter, Joanne recounts how she had to fight to have her minority report included in the final NRP report. It was eventually tacked on at the end on unnumbered pages, but it was not part of the summary booklet, nor was it mentioned in the press materials.
In my opinion, if the National Reading Panel's conclusions were so inevitable and incontrovertible, the NRP leaders wouldn't have had to coerce consensus by trying to silence or hide the minority views of Joanne Yatvin. I didn't realize bullying was part of the scientific method.
Sue Allison
Director, Marylanders Against High Stakes Testing
Institute for Research on Education Policy and Practice
2007
This whopper of a collection of studies--weighing in at 1,200 pages--"was not designed to recommend specific policies. Rather it aims to provide a common ground of understanding about the current state of California school finance and governance" to inform conversations about education reform in the Golden State. Fair enough. But it's hard to get super-excited when after $3 million, 18 months, and 22 studies, the main takeaways are things that most serious people already knew (albeit documented here in excruciating detail): California's system of school financing is broken, indiscriminately pouring money into schools won't help (resources must be used more effectively), teacher education is disconnected from classroom needs, etc. The project's introductory webpage calls it, "an unprecedented attempt to synthesize what we know as a basis for convening the necessary public conversations about what we should do." Well, maybe it will do some good anyway; Weighted Student Funding could get a boost from descriptions of California's education funding mess. There are lots of unserious people in the Golden State (many of them in the legislature). Perhaps they'll grow more serious about solving California's myriad education problems when (and if) they slog through all of this high-quality but often mind-numbing scholarship. You can find the reports here.