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Using public engagement to enhance the validity of education
adequacy policy
In recent years, state legislatures, state education departments,
and advocacy groups in over 30 states have sponsored education
adequacy studies, which aim to determine objectively the amount of
funding needed to provide all students with a meaningful opportunity
for an adequate education. Not surprisingly, because of their
growing influence on funding decisions, these studies have now
become the subject of critical commentary and judicial scrutiny, and
serious questions have arisen about the validity of the
methodologies used in some of the studies. According to this article
by Michael Rebell for TC Record, the validity and the reliability of
the methodologies of contemporary adequacy cost studies can be
improved. According to Rebell, more extensive public engagement and
continuing judicial oversight will be necessary to ensure the
credibility and the legitimacy of the ultimate judgments that result
from these studies.
Restoring our 'teaching infrastructure'
Professor Linda Darling-Hammond of Stanford University wants to know
why people don't demand excellent teachers in every classroom. In a
recent interview with The Des Moines Register, Darling-Hammond
states that Americans "have behaved for a very long time as if that
is not something to be expected, in contrast to high-achieving
nations that have put in place an infrastructure for producing
high-quality teaching." She feels the last attempt to strengthen
this "teaching infrastructure" was in the 1960s and '70s, but we've
now gotten used to variable teaching quality. Every reform, she
feels, depends on quality teachers, and a key issue is the lack of
collaborative planning in the profession. In most high-achieving
countries, teachers have 15 to 25 hours a week where they plan
collaboratively with colleagues, "so they are not just making up
lessons at the kitchen table on a Sunday night by themselves." What
Darling-Hammond prescribes is American teachers working together,
observing each other, and problem-solving together. They also need
access to expertise about teaching strategies in specific content
areas, for particular groups of students. This, she says, "is not
what most professional development looks like in the United States."
Of free markets and public education
School choice advocates have long predicted that increased
competition from charter schools would spur substantial improvement
in nearby traditional public schools, but this has not been the
case, according to a new report from Education Sector. For example,
in Washington, D.C., despite the fact that over 20 percent of the
public schools in the neighborhoods surrounding the much-touted
Knowledge Is Power Program (KIPP) are charter schools, traditional
public schools in the area still post some of the lowest
student-achievement results in the city. Using the analogy of Giant
Supermarkets, which came into a poor D.C. neighborhood alongside a
bank and other amenities by way of federal subsidies, the report
explains that many habits in the neighborhood were ingrained, and
residents still used high-priced corner stores with little selection
or fresh food, and usurious check-cashing services. In other words,
"government programs that bring in private sector firms like Giant
or nonprofits like KIPP can increase the supply of market options in
low-income communities. But such subsidies will not, in and of
themselves, ensure that all of those options will be high-quality.
Nor will they guarantee that consumers will make good choices and
utilize the newer, better options that come along."
Read more:
http://www.educationsector.org/usr_doc/Food_for_Thought.pdf
Educators' candor is welcome
Candor and straight talk are rare in education, and euphemisms
abound. The use of education jargon serves as a defense mechanism to
keep parents at bay and to establish from the onset who is the
expert and who is the amateur. According to The Atlanta
Journal-Constitution, the use of jargon becomes a way to silence
questions and squelch opposition. Parents of children with special
needs report the most chilling experiences with edu-speak wielded as
weaponry. When parents show up for the mandated IEP --
individualized education plan -- meetings, they are typically met by
incomprehensible bombast fired from a small army of school
professionals. Many parents describe these IEP meetings more as
ambushes than collaborations. In one sense it's understandable. As
members of a beleaguered and often scapegoated profession, educators
want to wrap themselves in a protective lingo and avoid
acknowledgement of real problems. If principals admit to unhappy
parents that a new teacher is not proving effective, for example,
they may also have to tell those parents that they're stuck with the
teacher anyway, since it's not an easy task to replace staff
midyear. Resorting to happy talk or edu-babble only contributes to
parental mistrust.
District boundaries: integration's final frontier
Considering the high-profile school selections of both the Obamas
and the Duncans, it's the public school in the suburbs (the Duncans)
rather than the private school of the First Family that holds
greater public policy significance, writes Dana Goldstein in The
American Prospect. "The Duncans chose not to enroll their kids in
school alongside the children of [the] 'underclass,'" she says, but
-- contrary to those who equate urban public education with child
abuse -- data show educational outcomes for middle-class kids
attending "bad," socioeconomically integrated schools are similar to
those of middle-class kids attending "good," mostly white schools
with little poverty. At the same time, economically diverse schools
help "poor children immeasurably by allowing them to share in the
benefits of having active, highly educated parents advocating on
their behalf." Goldstein feels that in the calculus of "school
choice," one choice is consistently denied: that of poor, urban
parents to send their children to suburban schools. Charter schools
can yield benefits, but still hew to district, and therefore
socioeconomic, boundaries. "This doesn't mean we should reopen the
busing wars," Goldstein writes. "Rather, we should foster regional
partnerships between urban and suburban districts."
Student outcomes and the 'money myth'
In an opinion piece in The San Francisco Examiner, W. Norton Grubb
writes that "Since the 19th century, we've been told that money
alone will improve school outcomes, and that to reform schools, all
we need is more money." This is "plain wrong." Grubb's research
points to a number of inefficiencies in California's system in
particular -- all money wasters that undermine education quality.
These include frequent policy reversals; counterproductive practices
like traditional vocational education; little support for teacher
innovation; and ignoring the crucial role of school climate.
Moreover, "almost no one pays much attention to diagnosing, and then
correcting, the specifically racial and ethnic dimensions of
achievement gaps among white, Asian-American, African-American, and
Latino students." For resources to be effective, he writes, they
must be used with "vision, leadership, and cooperation from everyone
in a school and have district support." Understanding what resources
matter, and which ones are "relatively costless (yet priceless),"
means that despite historically low levels of funding, significant
improvement in public education is truly possible.
For
at-risk youth, a crisis deepens
In a policy brief prepared for the new Obama administration and
Congress, MDRC requests better programs for disaffected youth. "Too
many young people are disconnected from the worlds of school and
work," it states, "putting them at serious risk for getting into
trouble today and not succeeding in the future." The brief reports
that 30 percent of high school freshmen nationally do not graduate
in four years; in the 50 largest U.S. cities, the dropout rate is
closer to 50 percent. Also nationwide, nearly 14 percent of 18- and
19-year-olds have not graduated from high school, are not attending
school, and are not working. For African-Americans in this cohort,
the rate is closer to 23 percent. Teenage employment has sunk to its
lowest level in 60 years, and employment for those 18 to 29 has
spiraled downward. Among 18- to 29-year-olds not in school, nearly
one in four is currently not working, and one in six did not work in
the previous year. What to do? "The first policy option should be to
prevent young people from dropping out of school." But once youth
are disconnected, states and localities need assistance from the
federal government via funding, compilation of best practices, and
research. Evidence-building in the youth field is critical because
self-selection issues are severe: Only the most motivated
voluntarily participate in "second chance" programs, the same young
people more likely to succeed on their own.
A modest proposal for a post-NCLB era
Writing about Richard Rothstein's "Grading Education: Getting
Accountability Right" on his blog in The Washington Post, columnist
Jay Mathews calls the book a "must-read for anyone who wonders, as I
often have, how we might replace or augment standardized testing
with measures of what is happening in the classroom." Rothstein, a
research associate of the Economic Policy Institute and a former
education columnist for The New York Times, has spent much of his
career analyzing school district spending. According to Mathews,
Rothstein argues that with expanded national tests, more money for
economically disadvantaged states, and a corps of 50,000
state-supervised school inspectors, the work of public schools could
finally be judged in ways that would widely satisfy critics and
identify the most effective reforms. Rothstein and his co-authors
want to reduce the federal role in assessing schools, and to enlarge
the number of student characteristics assessed. They cite as a good
example the British inspectorate, the independent Office for
Standards in Education, which until recently contracted with firms
to provide 6,000 inspectors, usually retired school principals or
teachers, to observe classroom teaching, interview students about
their understanding of what they had learned, and examine random
samples of student work.
NYC's Absent Teacher Reserve explained
New York City's Absent Teacher Reserve (ATR) is under new scrutiny
now as a moratorium on hiring outside this teacher pool has gone
into effect. It is, writes Seyward Darby in The New Republic, "one
model of what not to do" about union seniority as states seek
education stimulus money. The ATR was designed to free New York City
from the decades-long "stranglehold" of the United Federation of
Teachers on teacher hiring, which favored seniority and lifelong job
security over teacher quality. Created in 2005, it compels displaced
teachers to compete for jobs, often against novices. But as Darby
tells it, the union, "spurred by traditionalists sticking to a
deeply rooted belief that teachers should be guaranteed jobs,"
fought back. The resulting agreement ensured that teachers who
didn't find new positions would get paid regardless. Darby feels NYC
and other cities should adopt Chicago's model of "mutual consent,"
which allows teachers to remain in reserve for ten months, after
which time they are removed from the public payroll. Some experts
also advocate putting reserve teachers on unpaid leave after a
specified amount of time; if they find new jobs, they can return at
their old salary levels.
California tracking of charters may point to larger issue
In its annual report on California's nearly 700 charter schools, the
University of California's Center on Educational Governance finds
that lax financial reporting makes it difficult to assess their
fiscal health. Although the schools are required to file quarterly
financial reports with local districts, which in turn file them with
the state, USC researchers found that data were spotty in some
counties, including Los Angeles, where figures were available for
only 30 of 163 schools. "This is so critical," said education
professor Priscilla Wohlstetter, who heads the research project,
"because the president and the secretary of education have said we
are going to double the number of charter schools around the
country; however, we want to make sure we have good state
accountability systems that track progress... If there's this much
missing data, how is California going to be able to access the
federal money that's available?" The report did conclude, however,
that the limited information suggests many charters are efficiently
using public funds. It also found they continue to outperform
traditional public schools in English instruction, but seem to do
worse in bringing nonnative English speakers to fluency. Overall,
math performance in California charters has slipped, lagging behind
traditional public schools.
See the report:
http://www.usc.edu/dept/education/cegov/focus/charter_schools/pdf/CSI_09_FINAL.pdf
BRIEFLY NOTED
Sotomayor on education
Erik Robelen breaks down the SCOTUS nominee's decisions on education.
No Milk without permission
The ACLU plans to sue Ramona, Calif., school officials after they told a sixth-grader she couldn't present a report on Harvey Milk unless parents of fellow students signed permission slips.
L.A.U.S.D. makes STEM inroads with computer science
A pilot program has increased the number of some minorities taking the subject's AP test, a success that answers the president's call for an emphasis on math and science education.
Lemonade from lemons?
The "Traders to Teachers" program at Montclair State University in N.J. will retrain laid-off financiers to become math teachers.
A 'wonderful, wonderful surprise' for foster kids in Missouri
Missouri may provide college tuition for teens in the state's foster care system.
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