|
Some accommodations in final RttT regs
The final rules for $4.35 billion in Race to the Top (RttT) funds
include modifications that should sit well with teacher unions,
according to Bloomberg.com. The Obama administration has vocally
sought to tie teacher evaluations and pay to student performance --
a move opposed by unions -- but has now stipulated that student
gains should only be a "significant factor," with educator
evaluations also using teacher and principal involvement. Among the
other criteria for RttT grants are a commitment to developing
common, nationwide academic standards; creating more "high-quality"
charter schools; and turning around schools that perform lowest.
With respect to charters, the Education Department clarified that it
doesn't view them as the "chief remedy" for turning around schools
that are failing: "While the department believes that charter
schools can be strong partners in school turnaround work, it does
not believe that charter schools are the only or preferred solution
to turning around struggling schools." The National Education
Association, the biggest U.S. teachers union, had earlier protested
that the preliminary RttT proposal appeared to promote charter
schools as a "silver bullet, despite the fact that charters have
often produced lower achievement gains than district-run public
schools."
Related:
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/12/education/12educ.html?_r=2&ref=education
Lacking incentive, why try?
Why should states that get cut out of Race to the Top (RttT) money
keep reforming once incentives have expired? asks Chadwick Matlin of
Slate.com. Changes that the administration would like to see
implemented will be costly. Longer school days, more testing, and
extra performance assessments will be hard to carry out without
supplementary federal funding. The winner-loser paradigm that RttT
sets up will divide states into two classes: those that have
reformed according to the administration's ideals and those that
haven't, or haven't enough. Yet rather than give flagging states
"catch-up money," the Department of Education plans to reward those
that have already done well. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan has
implied that the administration hopes this catch-22 will resolve
itself. "We want to reward those states and those districts that
have the courage and the political will to do that, and we think
other states will follow," he has said. Matlin sees two problems:
"First, how are they going to follow if they don't have the money to
do so? Second, what's the incentive for them to follow through on
reform without a big, Race-to-the-Top-type reward?" In Matlin's
assessment, the behavioral economics don't pan out.
A look at remaining deseg programs
A new report from the Teacher College at Columbia University is the
first to comprehensively study the nation's eight remaining
inter-district school desegregation programs, which were expressly
created to enable disadvantaged black and Latino students to cross
school district boundary lines and attend affluent, predominantly
white suburban public schools. The report finds that these programs
help close black-white and Latino-white achievement gaps, improve
racial attitudes, and lead to long-term mobility and further
education for the students of color who participate. One striking
finding is that suburban residents, educators, school officials, and
students grow to appreciate these programs the longer they continue.
In fact, many former opponents are now defending these programs
against threats of curtailment, even when continuation would mean
reduced funding. Despite these successes, education policies
addressing segregation and inequality have generally been limited to
within-district solutions, and reform focus has shifted to the use
of standards, tests, and accountability systems to improve student
achievement, along with school choice policies that allow
alternative, private providers to compete for students and their
public school funds. The authors suggest that these newer strategies
have not delivered, and inequality has grown in many states.
See the report:
http://www.tc.columbia.edu/news/article.htm?id=7232
Empirically assessing HCZ
A recent study from the National Bureau of Economic Research looks
at the Harlem Children's Zone (HCZ), a program run by Geoffrey
Canada in New York City that combines community investments with
reform-minded charter schools. Calling it "one of the most ambitious
social experiments to alleviate poverty of our time," the report
provides the first empirical test of the causal impact of HCZ on
educational outcomes, with an eye toward the long-standing debate
over whether schools alone can eliminate the racial achievement gap
or if the issues that poor children bring to school are too much for
educators to overcome. Both lottery and instrumental variable
identification strategies in the research lead the authors to
conclude that the Harlem Children's Zone is effective at increasing
achievement of the poorest minority children. Taken at face value,
the program's effects in middle school are enough to close the
black-white achievement gap in mathematics, and reduce it by nearly
half in English Language Arts. The effects in elementary school
close the racial achievement gap in both subjects. The authors end
by presenting four pieces of evidence that show high-quality schools
or high-quality schools coupled with community investments generate
lasting achievement gains, and that community investments by
themselves cannot explain these results.
The unflashy work of bringing reform to scale
Rebutting an editorial in The Wall Street Journal that characterizes
its latest initiative as "another $100 million for education, down
the drain," Ford Foundation President Luis Ubiñas lays out the
initiative's intent. Rather than underwrite high-profile reforms
that have narrower impact, such as select, high-achieving charter
schools (which, as The Journal itself points out, are already
receiving funding elsewhere), the initiative aims to bring the
latest generation of reforms to scale. Most of Ford's grants over
the next seven years will go to education entrepreneurs, parent and
community organizations, and policy groups working to transform
schools from the ground up, not school districts or unions, as The
Journal contends. Regardless, Ubiñas takes exception to The
Journal's "vilification of teachers," which he says is
counter-productive if true reform is to take root. "Most of the
Journal's readers probably grew up at a time when public schools
provided a very strong basis for success in life," Ubiñas writes.
"We believe they can again. The solutions we embrace must work for
the majority of students across the country, however, not only a
lucky minority."
See the editorial:
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704402404574527641778464958.html
New
signs of common ground
Americans have long lamented the state of public education, writes
Andrew Delbanco in The New York Review of Books, giving as example a
complaint from Horace Mann in 1845 that students under his direction
wrote "absurd answers... errors in grammar, in punctuation and in
spelling." Whether American schools are in decline, however, is a
complex question, as are any proposed answers. Delbanco looks at two
of many books now offering partial or full solutions to the problems
of American schools. Both authors under review, Mike Rose and E.D.
Hirsch, "feel besieged, but from different directions," Delbanco
says. In "Why School? Reclaiming Education for All of Us," Rose
feels education is under assault from "number-crunchers who want to
measure everything by tests and thereby reduce education to a
'knowledge-delivery system.'" Hirsch, a leading figure in the Core
Knowledge movement, in "The Making of Americans: Democracy and Our
Schools" fears "the 'anti-curriculum' crowd, people he regards as
deluded by the romantic idea that children somehow possess innate
knowledge that can be released through play or self-paced learning."
Despite differences, what is heartening to Delbanco is that from
opposing ends of an ideological spectrum, both are disposed toward
common ground and moderation, surely needed if public education is
to continue as an engine for democracy in this country. "Otherwise,"
Delbanco writes, "we will remain caught between the usual warring
parties."
Low cost, high payoff
A free program outside of Santa Barbara, Calif. that encourages
Spanish-speaking families to develop reading routines and improve
reading skills has just wrapped up its second year, reports The San
Luis Obispo Tribune. The program, which cost the San Luis Coastal
Unified School District just $3,500 to implement, helps Latino
parents develop an educational environment at home and promote
skills that will help their children get to college. "I read to my
son now about four times per week for about 30 minutes each time,"
said Lorenzo Torres, a 40-year-old Los Osos construction worker and
father of five-year-old Eric. "I really want to prepare him as well
as I can for college." Torres, who has taken both sessions of the
program, said he wanted to enroll in the class partly to improve his
own English, which his teachers now say is quite proficient. The
students read one book a week and discuss themes of responsibility,
overcoming hardships, and family values. Each book features a story
printed in English on one page and in Spanish on the other, to
encourage a bilingual experience between parents and children.
Torres is also the father of 16-year-old twin boys, and says he
wishes he could have provided better educational support to them
when they were young.
Eyes are on 'Wild West' of charters as Ariz. ponders renewals
Arizona's flourishing charter school movement shows the popular
appeal of school choice and education entrepreneurialism, reports
The Washington Post. But the state also is a cautionary lesson, as
President Obama pushes to dismantle barriers to charter schools
elsewhere. Following a 1994 state law that strongly favors charter
schools, 500 operate in Arizona, educating more than 100,000
students. This is a quarter of the state's public schools and a
tenth of its public school enrollment, a larger proportion than in
any other state. A Stanford University report in June found that
Arizona charter students did not show as much academic progress as
their peers in traditional public schools, and Arizona has revoked
four charters since 2007, one for academic problems and the rest for
management issues. Twenty-four other charters were surrendered for
various reasons, some academic. Now the State Board for Charter
Schools is preparing for its first round of charter renewals, which
will last 20 years. "There are some excellent, excellent charter
schools in Arizona," said Margaret Raymond of the Center for
Research on Education Outcomes at Stanford. "There are a whole bunch
that are mucking around [in the middle], and a big cluster that are
not doing well."
Money spent early saves in the long run
In the coming months, Montana's Early Childhood Coalition plans to
open a one-stop shop for preschool-aged children to receive services
in Great Falls, according to The Great Falls Tribune. Their goal is
to offer everything from mental health screenings to Well Baby
exams, preschool, and therapy programs. Though it will be housed in
a public school, the Early Learning Family Center will be a
partnership among several private and public entities. Right now,
the only preschool programs the school district offers are to the
low-income and special-needs population already designated as such.
With the infusion of federal stimulus money and a state Early
Reading First grant, the district will be able to hire more
preschool teachers and accept more low-income and special-needs
students into the program. "We don't know yet how many students it
could impact," said Sally Mathers, federal and literacy programs
director for the Great Falls Public Schools. "The intent is to reach
out to families who have nothing available to them. We have some
children whose families can't afford preschool." If children start
early with school, it saves public money in the long run, Mathers
added, since intervention at an older age is more costly.
In defense of political vibrancy
Fierce town hall meetings are hardly new, writes Lee Hamilton,
director of the Center on Congress and a former member of the House
of Representatives for Indiana. The challenge, he says, is not to
avoid controversy, but to make the discourse ultimately productive.
Regardless of tone, town hall meetings are crucial for elected
officials to "gauge the intensity of public feeling, hear from
ordinary citizens, and give people a chance to get to know their
representative." All should be heard, because even extreme opinions,
when aired, tend to lose power after exposure to a moderating
reception. Hamilton relates that during his 34 years in Congress, he
came away from most town hall meetings with a feeling that he had
engaged in "a small part of democracy's dialogue." As often as he
encountered extreme opinions, he encountered opinions that
reinforced his confidence in the fairness, decency, and judgment of
Americans. "So as we look ahead to the next round of heated town
hall meetings, let's remember that they, too, help ensure that our
representative democracy remains vibrant."
A fuzzy picture of students with disabilities
Under the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB), 100 percent of students
with disabilities are expected to perform at the "proficient" level
on state tests by 2014, the same goal set for students overall. NCLB
also calls on schools and districts to close achievement gaps
between students with disabilities and their non-disabled peers, and
to include disabled students in regular state testing programs to
the greatest extent possible. A new report from the Center on
Education Policy looks at current progress in raising achievement
for students with disabilities, and details the factors that make it
difficult to clearly discern achievement trends for this subgroup.
Since states administer two or three types of assessments to
students with disabilities, including the regular state test (with
or without test accommodations) and one or two types of alternate
assessments, the variability in the alternate tests and in what is
deemed proficient make for "fuzzy" data, resulting in a vague
picture of achievement for students with disabilities. The report
does find that the subgroup has made progress in grade four at all
three achievement levels: basic-and-above, proficient-and-above, and
advanced. Still, differences in performance between students with
disabilities and non-disabled students remains quite large, often
exceeding 30 or even 40 percentage points in reading and math.
BRIEFLY NOTED
Teacher shortage turns into glut
Across the country, droves of new teachers are unable to find
teaching jobs because the economy has forced districts to slash
positions.
'Learning for the Xbox generation'
NYC Schools' "School of One" sixth-grade math computer program makes
the TIME "50 Best Inventions of 2009" list.
KIPP gets $10m shot in the arm
Houston's Knowledge is Power Program charter school chain got a got
a boost when the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation announced plans to
help finance its expansion.
Dairy industry, and three fifth graders, fight back
Opponents of the chocolate-milk ban don't take it lying down.
Students sue Tenn. over First Amendment violations
Schools reportedly distributed Bibles, held sectarian prayers at
all-school events, and allowed at least one teacher to keep a cross
on her wall.
Nev. throws in the towel
State will not pursue RttT funding.
|
