- Posted by David on August 26, 2010
by Evan Thomas and Pat WingertJune 13, 2010
Some 15 of NEWSWEEK’s top 100 public high schools are charter schools. Since charter schools amount to only about 4 percent of all public schools, that would seem to suggest that charter schools are a runaway success story, right?
Well, sort of. For the past two decades, charter schools have been touted as a way of improving public schools—a nonbureaucratic, innovative alternative designed to test new ideas that all schools could benefit from. Charter schools are generally (though not always) nonunion schools, freer to hire and fire teachers. The experimentation they’ve fostered has produced some of the best schools in the country.
So it came as a bit of a shock to the community of educational reformers last year when a study by Stanford University’s Center for Research on Educational Outcomes (CREDO) found that 37 percent of charter schools produce academic results that are worse than public schools, while only 17 percent perform significantly better. Earlier studies sponsored by the American Federation of Teachers, the second-largest teachers’ union, had produced similar results, but they were suspect, since unions stood to lose from the charter-school movement. CREDO, on the other hand, is part of the Hoover Institution, known for favoring free-market solutions. “The perception that charters are per se better than other public schools has been belied by the facts,” says Randi Weingarten, president of the AFT.
What happened? In a nutshell, educators have been better at starting charter schools than at shutting bad ones. In theory, charter schools are laboratories where educational ideas are tested. If a charter school is failing after three to five years, it is supposed to be closed down, freeing up a slot for another educational entrepreneur. Too often, however, it hasn’t worked out that way. The parents at charter schools are often unaware that the school’s performance lags behind. Some schools stress strengthening a child’s self-esteem or cultural identity and don’t worry about those pesky test scores. “I’ve seen parents fight tooth and nail to keep a failing school open because they thought it was safer than other options,” says Andrew Rotherham of Bellwether Education Partners, a national reform group. “To them, it’s a rational choice.” Public officials forced to vote on closing schools in front of a room full of crying children and mothers are tempted to say, “Let’s give them more time,” particularly if there are no good alternatives.
Generally speaking, in states and cities where the bar is set high for both entry and performance (Boston, New York, D.C., Chicago), charter schools do well. In states that started with the loosest oversight (Arizona, Florida, California, Ohio, and Texas), there’s much more of a mixed bag. President Obama’s education secretary, Arne Duncan, has made a priority of opening new charters in the $4 billion Race to the Top competition for federal funding. States get points if they remove caps on the number of charter schools. Getting a lot less attention is the fact that states get credit for improving charter quality and shutting down bad schools. Maybe they should get extra credit.
- Posted by David on August 25, 2010
By Michael Rothfeld
It’s that time of year again for high school students around the country — with all the excitement and apprehension of the first day back to the classroom, the fresh smell of new notebooks, the fees to play football and march in the band.
Wait a minute — fees to march in the band? It’s been a long time since high school and we never marched in the band, but we can’t ever remember getting an invoice from the Track & Field team.
But according to this report in the San Diego Union-Tribune, several school districts in California are taking heat from the American Civil Liberties Union over policies — which the group says are illegal under state law — that charge fees for extracurricular activities. At Poway High School for instance, there are fees of $50 to $500 to register for marching band, concert band, color guard, etc. Football players have to pay a $30 “coaching fee.” At Mt. Carmel High, students reportedly have to fork over $1691 for cheerleading.
The practice is sometimes known as “Pay to Play,” and there is more background on the California Watch blog here, along with links to additional coverage.
In a letter to the Poway school district, linked by the Union-Tribune here, ACLU official David Blair-Loy made a public records request for information about the fees, which he said were “in potential violation of the free school guarantee in the California Constitution.” The letter continued:
Article IX, section 5 of the California Constitution guarantees all children access to a free public education, and has been interpreted to include extracurricular activities offered by public schools.
John Collins, the superintendent in Poway, told the Union-Tribune that he’d spoken with principals last week “about illegal fees” and would make sure no district materials make paying to play a requirement. He said that rather than fees, the programs need “donations”:
“There is a language issue that maybe we need to be careful about,” Collins said. “It’s more about what people are saying to students. We have to make sure that everyone is on the same page.”
But without the donations, he said, the activities would “go away.”
http://blogs.wsj.com/law/2010/08/24/civil-libertarians-take-on-pay-to-play-as-in-high-school-football?mod=djemlawblog_t
- Posted by David on July 26, 2010
Education reformers were feeling optimistic. With President Obama’s Race to the Top competition, which offers financial rewards to states willing to hold teachers accountable for their students’ performance, they’ve made real progress in weeding out poor teachers.
But now the reformers have spotted a dark cloud on the horizon. State budgets, particularly in badly managed big states like California, New York, and New Jersey, are out of control. Although Congress managed to avoid massive teacher layoffs last year with federal aid, the stimulus money is running out, and congressmen do not appear to be in the mood for more deficit spending. That means teacher layoffs are coming—perhaps more than 100,000 nationwide. In most states, union contracts or state law requires they be done by seniority, so the newest teachers are pink-slipped, no matter how good they are. “ ‘Last in, first out’ virtually guarantees that all our great, young teachers will be out of a job, and some of the least effective will stay in the classroom,” says Tim Knowles, director of the Urban Education Institute at the University of Chicago.
Such layoffs disproportionately hurt students attending the lowest-performing schools, because they tend to have the highest proportion of new teachers. In some Los Angeles schools last year, such cuts wiped out 50 to 70 percent of the faculty.
One surprising solution may come from Knowles’s home city of Chicago. The state of Illinois is one of the worst-run in the country, rivaling even California for its unwillingness to take the steps necessary to stanch the flow of red ink. As a result, Chicago is facing pressure to cut 900 teacher jobs. Under the usual union contract, the last hired were to be the first fired, competent or not.
But the Chicago School Board, handpicked by the Windy City’s tough-minded Mayor Richard M. Daley, has interpreted a new state law as giving it the power to fire the city’s 200 most incompetent teachers first.
While this might seem like common sense, it’s heresy to Karen Lewis, the newly elected head of the Chicago teachers’ union, who is considering going to court to fight the attack on seniority. “I admit, this is a great PR tool. Why not lay off the bad teachers first?” she conceded in an interview with NEWSWEEK. But on closer inspection, she says, there is no way of doing it fairly. In Chicago’s troubled urban school district, 99 percent of the 23,000 or so teachers are rated “excellent” or “superior,” while less than 0.1 percent are rated “unsatisfactory.” Employing some creative logic, Lewis asks: “Why are the worst evaluations believable, but the best are not?”
Reformers scoff at the union boss’s arguments. “While principals may not be consistently evaluating their teachers to the extent that they should, they certainly know who the worst teachers are in their buildings and have been using all sorts of tricks of the trade over the years to get these teachers to move to other schools,” says Kate Walsh of the National Council on Teacher Quality, a reform advocacy group.
Largely because of the carrots dangled by Race to the Top, a growing number of states, including Colorado, Tennessee, Delaware, and Oklahoma, have changed their laws to make teacher performance a factor in tenure and firing decisions, but very few can use it to make layoff decisions. The District of Columbia’s public-school system is one place that can. Arizona has gone the furthest, making it illegal to consider seniority in layoff, tenure, and even rehiring decisions. But defying the unions is hard going. In New York, Mayor Michael Bloomberg had to back away from layoffs based on performance and shoot for an across-the-board pay freeze.
Analysts say that states’ money troubles will continue to shrink budgets over the next year, and school districts that have already cut to the bone will have to find new ways to make less go further. Weeding out the weakest teachers and keeping the most effective “is the only policy that makes sense for districts to implement in tough times,” says Walsh. After all, when student needs bump up against adult needs, is there any question whose should come first?
http://www.newsweek.com/2010/07/17/chicago-s-lesson-in-layoffs.print.html
- Posted by David on July 14, 2010
http://www.educationnews.org/ed_reports/edu_assoc_articles/95465.html
Center on Reinventing Public Education on 13/07/2010 22:01:00
“Improvement in productivity in other [labor-intensive service] economic
sectors may hold important lessons for understanding how the education system
can become more efficient and effective,” state Professors Paul Hill and
Marguerite Roza, at the UW’s Center on Reinventing Public Education.
In their new white paper, Curing Baumol’s Disease: In Search of Productivity
Gains in K–12 Schooling, Hill and Roza site the successes of other
labor-intensive service organizations that have raised productivity in the face
of competition for workers and rising costs.[1]
Public schools in most areas of the United States are caught in the vise of
declining funding—as states and school districts must deal with depressed
revenues—and rising costs: contractual pay increases for teachers and staff,
and in some places pressures to reduce class sizes.
Hill and Roza discuss several areas in which labor-intensive businesses have
improved productivity: information technology, deregulation, redefinition of the
product, increased efficiency in the supply chain, investments by key
beneficiaries, production process innovations, carefully defined workforce
policies, and organizational change.
Observing that public education largely has been resistant to improving
productivity and that reform efforts have focused upon improving student
performance with little attention paid to costs, Hill and Roza offer a five-step
agenda for finding the cure for Baumol’s disease-afflicted public schools:
*Systematically consider strategies employed by other labor-intensive industries for their relevance to education.
*Zero in on learning systems outside schools to surface alternative production processes that may yield greater productivity.
*Understand the key cost drivers in the current schooling model, and examine the impact on each of proposed alternatives.
*Prototype test new models.
*Create a policy agenda for identifying and reproducing the most promising ways to increase productivity.
To those who might object that such a research and development project seems
frivolous in this time of tight budgets, Hill and Roza say, “If depressed
revenues are instead used as a rallying cry for innovation, the current fiscal
crisis could ultimately strengthen public education by opening the door to
improved processes that have the potential to do more with less.”
Curing Baumol's Disease: In Search of Productivity Gains in K-12 Schooling can
be downloaded at www.crpe.org.
Paul Hill is the John and Marguerite Corbally Professor at the University of
Washington Bothell and the director of the Center on Reinventing Public
Education. Hill is a distinguished visiting fellow at the Hoover Institution and
a member of the Koret Task Force on K–12 Education.
Marguerite Roza is currently on leave from her positions as senior scholar at
the Center on Reinventing Public Education and research associate professor at
the University of Washington’s College of Education.
The Center on Reinventing Public Education at the University of Washington
engages in independent research and policy analysis on a range of K-12 public
education reform issues, including choice & charters, finance & productivity,
teachers, urban district reform, leadership, and state & federal reform.
- Posted by David on July 6, 2010
If I had my preference, this is the way that schools should be organized, as much as is possible at least.
Some schools grouping students by skill, not grade level
7.6.10 - KANSAS CITY, Mo. (AP) — Forget about students spending one year in each grade, with the entire class learning the same skills at the same time. Districts from Alaska to Maine are taking a different route. Instead of simply moving kids from one grade to the next as they get older, schools are grouping students by ability. Once they master a subject, they move up a level. This practice has been around for decades, but was generally used on a smaller scale, in individual grades, subjects or schools.
Now, in the latest effort to transform the bedraggled Kansas City, Mo. schools, the district is about to become what reform experts say is the largest one to try the approach. Starting this fall officials will begin switching 17,000 students to the new system to turnaround trailing schools and increase abysmal tests scores.
"The current system of public education in this country is not working" said Superintendent John Covington. "It's an outdated, industrial, agrarian kind of model that lends itself to still allowing students to progress through school based on the amount of time they sit in a chair rather than whether or not they have truly mastered the competencies and skills."
Here's how the reform works:
Students — often of varying ages — work at their own pace, meeting with teachers to decide what part of the curriculum to tackle. Teachers still instruct students as a group if it's needed, but often students are working individually or in small groups on projects that are tailored to their skill level.
For instance, in a classroom learning about currency, one group could draw pictures of pennies and nickels. A student who has mastered that skill might use pretend money to practice making change.
Students who progress quickly can finish high school material early and move forward with college coursework. Alternatively, in some districts, high-schoolers who need extra time can stick around for another year.
Advocates say the approach cuts down on discipline problems because advanced students aren't bored and struggling students aren't frustrated.
But backers acknowledge implementation is tricky, and the change is so drastic it can take time to explain to parents, teachers and students. If the community isn't sold on the effort, it will bomb, said Richard DeLorenzo, co-founder of the Re-Inventing Schools Coalition, which coaches schools on implementing the reform.
Kansas City officials hope the new system will help the district that's been beset with failure. A $2 billion desegregation case failed to boost test scores or stem the exodus of students to the suburbs and private and charter schools. The district has lost half its students and will close about 40% of its schools by the fall to avoid bankruptcy.
Covington wants to start the system in five elementary schools in hopes of spreading it through the upper grades once the bugs are worked out.
"This system precludes us from labeling children failures," Covington said. "It's not that you've failed, it's just that at this point you haven't mastered the competencies yet and when you do, you will move to the next level."
As it plans for the change, Kansas City teachers and administrators have visited and sought advice from a Denver area school district that uses the reform.
Adams County School District 50 has about 10,000 students this past school year its elementary and middle students made the shift. The reform will be phased into the high schools starting in the fall.
Count 11-year-old Alex Rodriguez as a convert to the new approach. He used to get bored after plowing through his assignments. He had to bring books from home or the library if he wanted a challenge because the ones at his old school were one or two grade levels too easy.
http://www.usatoday.com/news/education/2010-07-05-grade-held-back_N.htm