“It's not about giving up on public schools but it is about acknowledging that right now, when you step back, [only] 8 percent of low-income kids can expect to get a bachelor degree by the time they're 24....[and] when you have a system that produces 8 percent of the low-income kids getting out of college by the time they're 24, something is wrong.”
—Educational consultant Andrew Rotherham. [complete interview here]
Fresh Air: The Debate Over School Reform
On today’s Fresh Air, the debate over school reform and what strategies really work.
Guests: Diane Ravitch, former Assistant Secretary of Education. She had been an advocate of school vouchers, charter schools, testing and No Child Left Behind… and after seeing some of the results… changed her mind.
Also…we talk to education consultant and policy analyst Andrew Rotherham. He supports redesigning American public education with the help of charter schools, public sector choice, and accountability.
Do charter schools work? A new study of Boston schools says yes. - Slate Magazine
slate.com
Whether charter schools have actually lived up to their initial promise is a hotly contested topic in the education reform debate. An entire field of education research aims to assess whether students are better off at charter schools than in the public system. The latest findings, based on six well-regarded charter schools in Boston, released Wednesday by the Boston Foundation and MIT’sSchool Effectiveness and Inequality Initiative , adds to the accumulating evidence that at least a subset of high-performing charters are measuring up to the movement’s early aspirations of giving disadvantaged kids a shot at a better life. The study shows that the Boston schools’ students did better on SAT and Advanced Placement tests and are vastly more likely to enroll at four year colleges—and to do so on scholarship—than otherwise identical students in the Boston public school system.
What makes a charter school different from other public schools? While they’re funded with public money, they generally operate outside of collective bargaining agreements (only about one-tenth of charter schools are unionized ) and other constraints that often prevent principals in public schools from innovating for the good of their students (so the argument goes). In exchange for this freedom, they generally get less funding than public schools (though they’re free to look for private donations, and many do) and have to prove that they are making good on the promises set out in their charters, which often means showing that they improve their students’ performance on statewide standardized tests.
It’s an idea that’s resonated with a surprisingly wide swath of American society, from free-marketeers who like the idea of reducing government involvement in education to anti-poverty activists frustrated by the slow rate of social progress.(Many charter schools focus on serving minority or low-income communities.) Carlson authorized eight charter schools in Minnesota; there are now nearly 6,000 nationwide.
Others are less sanguine about the charter approach. School unions, for example, have been cautious in their support, often seeing charters as drawing funds away from resource-starved public school districts and diverting the discussion from how to fix public schools, which continue to serve the vast majority of American students.
Common Core Thoughts and More
I’ve been reading many tweets on Twitter about the Common Core. Some pro-Common Core, others decidedly opposed to the Common Core. I’ve read about some who agree that we need more accountability in schools while others think that we have enough. There is one thing for sure and that is that education is not nor will it ever be a “one size fits all” proposition.
Some of the greatest minds of the twentieth and twenty-first century have been people who didn’t really shine in the classroom. To name a few they include Albert Einstein, Bill Gates, Sergey Brin, and Steve Jobs. No one could possibly say that any of those individuals lack or lacked intellect. Quite the contrary. However, the genius that they possessed went largely untapped in school. Most of today’s education, like its forbears in an earlier time is based around the notion that you can somehow prepare children for success by teaching them a prescribed set of courses determined by a state or national board of experts. In the abstract that assumption may have some validity but in reality it almost always fails the test. It fails not because we don’t have good teachers, or even better students and parents. It fails because human beings are infinitely variable and so are the communities from which they come. Skills and knowledge which might be appropriate in Los Angeles, Miami, Chicago or New York are not the same as those needed in Dixville Notch, Duke Center, and elsewhere.
Measurement is important and any one who has ever taught loves to know that what they are teaching is actually being retained and applied by their students. However, incessant testing and evaluation produces incredible stress which actually undermines the educational process. Mahatma Gandhi once said, that “poverty is the worst form of violence.” I propose that incessant testing is yet another form of violence.
In an age of dramatic societal upheaval today’s children need a place of sanctuary. Often times the only place of sanctuary is the school building and of course the classroom. Compulsory public education in the United States ought to be about imbuing students with the skills necessary to live and work in a free and democratic society. We need more emphasis on social and emotional learning and skills associated with that focus.
Preparing today’s students for careers ought to focus on social and emotional learning skills along with reading, self-expression and basic computation. Today’s students will face a much different world than their parents and we cannot know for sure exactly what skill sets will be required except those skills encompassed in getting along in society. For those of you who think this is an overly utopian notion I beg you to spend some time on the front lines of education. Look at the damage being done to students and teachers by this pro-test agenda. Never have I seen the level of dissatisfaction nor stress in my 34 years of experience. Never have I seen a greater need for empathy and compassion all around.
We need to promote community which nurtures students, parents, teachers, administrators, and the world at large. One of my favorite concepts comes from South Africa and it is called Ubuntu. Desmond Tutu offered this definition in his 1999 book.
“A person with Ubuntu is open and available to others, affirming of others, does not feel threatened that others are able and good, based from a proper self-assurance that comes from knowing that he or she belongs in a greater whole and is diminished when others are humiliated or diminished, when others are tortured or oppressed.”
I hope that we can create openness and availability among our school communities. Such affirming communities can guide us into the future with success. Continuous testing and evaluation while noble in its purpose and theory is actually leading us in the opposite direction. Namaste!
Fresh Air with Terry Gross
Diane Ravitch on NPR's Fresh AirAudio for Terry’s interviews with Diane Ravitch and Andy Rotherham is now available.
Fixing a Broken System
In today’s society, it looks like any genius can come in to “save the world” from total destruction. We’ve heard this in our government, the media, internet; everywhere we go, someone is a savior. Unfortunately, when it is time to “put up or shut up,” nobody wants to take a shot at truly saving anything. Does anybody else think that we need less talking and promising, and more action to get things done??
This great article by Brad McCarty really made me think about the above:
http://thenextweb.com/entrepreneur/2012/01/16/stop-teaching-our-kids-to-be-employees-start-educating-entrepreneurs/
Thanks Brad!
Let Kids Rule The School
By SUSAN ENGEL
Op-Ed Contributor
Published: March 14, 2011
New Marlborough, MA
IN a speech last week, President Obama said it was unacceptable that “as many as a quarter of American students are not finishing high school.” But our current educational approach doesn’t just fail to prepare teenagers for graduation or for college academics; it fails to prepare them, in a profound way, for adult life.
We want young people to become independent and capable, yet we structure their days to the minute and give them few opportunities to do anything but answer multiple-choice questions, follow instructions and memorize information. We cast social interaction as an impediment to learning, yet all evidence points to the huge role it plays in their psychological development.
That’s why we need to rethink the very nature of high school itself.
I recently followed a group of eight public high school students, aged 15 to 17, in western Massachusetts as they designed and ran their own school within a school. They represented the usual range: two were close to dropping out before they started the project, while others were honors students. They named their school the Independent Project.
Their guidance counselor was their adviser, consulting with them when the group flagged in energy or encountered an obstacle. Though they sought advice from English, math and science teachers, they were responsible for monitoring one another’s work and giving one another feedback. There were no grades, but at the end of the semester, the students wrote evaluations of their classmates.
The students also designed their own curriculum, deciding to split their September-to-January term into two halves.
During the first half, they formulated and then answered questions about the natural and social world, including “Are the plant cells at the bottom of a nearby mountain different than those at the top of the mountain?” and “Why we do we cry?” They not only critiqued one another’s queries, but also the answers they came up with. Along the way, they acquired essential tools of inquiry, like how to devise good methods for gathering various kinds of data.
During the second half, the group practiced what they called “the literary and mathematical arts.” They chose eight novels — including works by Kurt Vonnegut, William Faulkner and Oscar Wilde — to read in eight weeks. That is more than the school’s A.P. English class reads in an entire year.
Meanwhile, each of them focused on specific mathematical topics, from quadratic equations to the numbers behind poker. They sought the help of full-time math teachers, consulted books and online sources and, whenever possible, taught one another.
They also each undertook an “individual endeavor,” learning to play the piano or to cook, writing a novel or making a podcast about domestic violence. At the end of the term, they performed these new skills in front of the entire student body and faculty.
Finally, they embarked on a collective endeavor, which they agreed had to have social significance. Because they felt the whole experience had been so life-changing, they ended up making a film showing how other students could start and run their own schools.
The results of their experiment have been transformative. An Independence Project student who had once considered dropping out of school found he couldn’t bear to stop focusing on his current history question but didn’t want to miss out on exploring a new one. When he asked the group if it would be O.K. to pursue both, another student answered, “Yeah, I think that’s what they call learning.”
One student who had failed all of his previous math courses spent three weeks teaching the others about probability. Another said: “I did well before. But I had forgotten what I actually like doing.” They have all returned to the conventional curriculum and are doing well. Two of the seniors are applying to highly selective liberal arts colleges.
The students in the Independent Project are remarkable but not because they are exceptionally motivated or unusually talented. They are remarkable because they demonstrate the kinds of learning and personal growth that are possible when teenagers feel ownership of their high school experience, when they learn things that matter to them and when they learn together. In such a setting, school capitalizes on rather than thwarts the intensity and engagement that teenagers usually reserve for sports, protest or friendship.
Schools everywhere could initiate an Independent Project. All it takes are serious, committed students and a supportive faculty. These projects might not be exactly alike: students might apportion their time differently, or add another discipline to the mix. But if the Independent Project students are any indication, participants will end up more accomplished, more engaged and more knowledgeable than they would have been taking regular courses.
We have tried making the school day longer and blanketing students with standardized tests. But perhaps children don’t need another reform imposed on them. Instead, they need to be the authors of their own education.
Susan Engel is the author of “Red Flags or Red Herrings: Predicting Who Your Child Will Become.”
A version of this op-ed appeared in print on March 15, 2011, on page A35 of the New York edition.
Is it Time to 'Occupy Teach For America'? - Education - GOOD
good.isInfluential New York City educatorGary Rubinsteinhas long been critical of Teach for America, the organization that brought him into the classroom 21 years ago. In a blog post last fall, hearguedthat people should no longer sign up to join the organization. Now, he’s asking TFA teachers and alumni to take action against what he calls “the corporate reform movement for which TFA is the poster child.”
“Now you’ve experienced how difficult teaching is. You’ve seen, also, how complex the achievement gap is too,”Rubinstein writes. He goes on to ask some tough questions that challenge key tenets of the TFA philosophy: “So do you really believe that the issue is ‘bad teachers’ who need to be motivated through fear of being fired or through cash bonuses? Is that really what you determined after working in a school alongside people who elected to become career teachers? Those of you who worked in charter schools, do you really believe that they are providing an excellent education to all students?”
Rubinstein is inviting corps members and alumni to write openly about what they believe TFA must change, either on their own blogs or as guest posters on his blog. High on his own list is reworking TFA’s five-week long summer training institute, where new corps members learn the nuts and bolts of being a teacher.
Rubinstein is far from alone in his belief that TFA needs to change the way it trains corps members. Last February, after the organization’s 20th anniversary summit, an alum created a Change.org petition asking that corps member “receive at least a full year of high-quality, school-based preparation before they assume responsibility for their own classroom.”
(Click the link above to continue reading)
I am not a fan of TFA, and do not believe it is set up the way the program’s philosophy originally intended. That doesn’t mean I think TFA-ers themselves are bad. I just think a lot of them go into it very naively. I feel like teachers who choose to go into the field, who choose to teach in hard to staff schools, and who stay for longer than two years should receive tuition or loan credits. I don’t think that someone with less training, making the same amount of pay, and only making a 2 year commitment trumps that.
I think TFA makes teaching sound like summer camp to those outside the field.
I think it is a small band-aid to a much larger problem, and the lack of training and two year commitment create problems of their own.
I wish the money, time, brain power, and creativity were being used to serve schools in a better way.
I also think it is super shady that they turn down applicants who have already worked towards a teaching degree.
“Would-be school 'reformers' would be wise to build relationships with the people whose interests they are seeking to serve; if they did so, they would be much better able to make hard and when necessary unpopular choices, because they would be building on a longer-term platform of shared trust and legitimacy.”
—Jal MehtaWhy Not Empower #Parents With The Dollars to #Reform #Education ?
If they have the means, I find that most parents where I live in New York City send their children to private schools. There are also some who have figured out how to navigate the system to send their children to elite public schools filled with mostly wealthy white and Asian peers. I know few well-to-do parents who send their children to the traditional neighborhood public school. Even our politicians and chancellors who make school policy, rarely send their own children to traditional public school.
What is frustrating though is that this is often only available to those with the funds or wherewithal to make it happen. Shouldn’t everyone have access to the education opportunities they feel are best for their children?
Here is a solution that could provide more choice to more families.
What if instead of giving money to schools, funds were attached to the child and those funds went directly to the education provider? For parents who were homeschooling or unschooling this would be in the form of parents providing receipts that could be deducted from their taxes. For public schools, students would enroll and the funds would follow them. This would require some schools to grow, others to stay the same and others to shrink, redesign (likely with input from families) or close.
If parents wanted to put together learning co-ops they could pool their money to do that. If someone wanted to open an alternative school, it would be easier because the funds would be tied to the students so they wouldn’t have to worry about only kids who could afford this option being able to come up with tuition. If the schools cost more than the per student fee, the additional fee would be determined by tax bracket with those in the higher brackets paying more and the lower less, but still giving everyone a greater chance to attend a school of choice and subsidizing based on income.
Parents and their children, rather than the government, would determine what was best for each family. For some it might look like traditional school with standardized tests. For others it might look more like an apprenticeship model where children who are ready, begin learning in a field of interest, perhaps partnered with a business where they may later work. For some this might look like a school that follows the Schoolwide Enrichment Model, Montessori or Reggio Emilia approach. Some may choose a Democracy school or unschool setting. Ultimately, parents would be empowered to select an educational method in which they felt their children would best succeed and even take a large role in helping to form such schools.
There would be no high stakes testing. There could be some opt-in tests with samples as they do in countries like Finland. There would likely be authentic portfolio development that is created as a support to the student first and foremost.
Some schools would have waiting lists, as they do today, and if so, it would make sense to open up another similar school in the area. The parents who want that could help make that happen. Some schools would shrink as they do now and would either change what they do to attract more students and stabilize, or if they didn’t offer what seemed best for children, they would continue to lose the ability to have high enough enrollment to make it worth staying open.
This idea would be taking control from the government and giving it to the people, empowering them to do what they know and believe is best for their children.
So, why can’t we do this?
When an adult took standardized tests forced on kids - The Answer Sheet - The Washington Post
washingtonpost.comInteresting article about the serious problems with high stakes testing. Here’s an excerpt:
sions of his state’s high-stakes standardized math and reading tests for 10th graders, and said he’d make his scores public.
By any reasonable measure, my friend is a success. His now-grown kids are well-educated. He has a big house in a good part of town. Paid-for condo in the Caribbean. Influential friends. Lots of frequent flyer miles. Enough time of his own to give serious attention to his school board responsibilities. The margins of his electoral wins and his good relationships with administrators and teachers testify to his openness to dialogue and willingness to listen.
He called me the morning he took the test to say he was sure he hadn’t done well, but had to wait for the results. A couple of days ago, realizing that local school board members don’t seem to be playing much of a role in the current “reform” brouhaha, I asked him what he now thought about the tests he’d taken.
“I won’t beat around the bush,” he wrote in an email. “The math section had 60 questions. I knew the answers to none of them, but managed to guess ten out of the 60 correctly. On the reading test, I got 62% . In our system, that’s a “D”, and would get me a mandatory assignment to a double block of reading instruction.
He continued, “It seems to me something is seriously wrong. I have a bachelor of science degree, two masters degrees, and 15 credit hours toward a doctorate.
“I help oversee an organization with 22,000 employees and a $3 billion operations and capital budget, and am able to make sense of complex data related to those responsibilities.
“I have a wide circle of friends in various professions. Since taking the test, I’ve detailed its contents as best I can to many of them, particularly the math section, which does more than its share of shoving students in our system out of school and on to the street. Not a single one of them said that the math I described was necessary in their profession.
“It might be argued that I’ve been out of school too long, that if I’d actually been in the 10th grade prior to taking the test, the material would have been fresh. But doesn’t that miss the point? A test that can determine a student’s future life chances should surely relate in some practical way to the requirements of life. I can’t see how that could possibly be true of the test I took.”
Here’s the clincher in what he wrote:
“If I’d been required to take those two tests when I was a 10th grader, my life would almost certainly have been very different. I’d have been told I wasn’t ‘college material,’ would probably have believed it, and looked for work appropriate for the level of ability that the test said I had.
“It makes no sense to me that a test with the potential for shaping a student’s entire future has so little apparent relevance to adult, real-world functioning. Who decided the kind of questions and their level of difficulty? Using what criteria? To whom did they have to defend their decisions? As subject-matter specialists, how qualified were they to make general judgments about the needs of this state’s children in a future they can’t possibly predict? Who set the pass-fail “cut score”? How?”
“I can’t escape the conclusion that decisions about the [state test] in particular and standardized tests in general are being made by individuals who lack perspective and aren’t really accountable.”
“Today a new form of redlining is emerging. If passed, the long-awaited Senate bill to reauthorize the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) would build a bigger highway between low-performing schools serving high-need students—the so-called “bottom 5 percent”—and all other schools. Tragically, the proposed plan would weaken schools in the most vulnerable communities and further entrench the problems—concentrated poverty, segregation and lack of human and fiscal resources—that underlie their failure. Although the current draft of the law scales back some of the worst overreaches of No Child Left Behind, the sanctions for failing to make “adequate yearly progress” that have threatened all schools under NCLB are now focused solely on the 5 percent of schools designated as lowest-performing by the states. As we have learned in warm-up exercises offered by the Obama administration’s Race to the Top initiative, these schools will nearly always be the ones serving the poorest students and the greatest numbers of new immigrants. In many states they will represent a growing number of apartheid schools populated almost entirely by low-income African-American and Latino students in our increasingly race- and class-segregated system. In the new vision for ESEA, these schools, once identified, will be subjected to school “turnaround” models that require the schools to be closed, turned into charters, reconstituted (by firing nearly half the staff) or “transformed,” according to a complicated set of requirements that include everything from instructional reforms to test-based teacher evaluation. The proposed array of punitive sanctions, coupled with unproven reforms, will increasingly destabilize schools and neighborhoods, making them even less desirable places to work and live and stimulating the flight of teachers and families who have options. ”
—Why Is Congress Redlining Our Schools? | The Nation
This is from a somewhat long article but I think it’s worth a read in its entirety. It seems as though policy makers often make changes without always understanding the ramifications for how schools and communities are connected. Like everyone, I want every school to be at its best because the children need it to be. But I often wonder, why aren’t the stakeholders taking a more active role? Is there no one to do that? Or are they being ignored? Maybe its both. Either way, closing schools, firing all the teachers, requiring ever higher test scores… It’s not the road to reform as much as a slippery slope.
Southern California Parents Prepare Push for School Reform
mercurynews.comParents in the California city of Adelanto are getting ready to use that state’s “trigger” law to implement change at a school where 65 percent of the students failed English proficiency tests and 54 percent failed math.
