- Posted by David on May 29, 2009
Hope and Despair in the American City
Why There Are No Bad Schools in Raleigh
Gerald Grant
DESCRIPTION
In 1972, the U.S. Supreme Court handed down a 5–4 verdict in the case of Milliken v. Bradley, thereby blocking the state of Michigan from merging the Detroit public school system with those of the surrounding suburbs. This decision effectively walled off underprivileged students in many American cities, condemning them to a system of racial and class segregation and destroying their chances of obtaining a decent education.
In Hope and Despair, Gerald Grant compares two cities—his hometown of Syracuse, New York, and Raleigh, North Carolina—in order to examine the consequences of the nation’s ongoing educational inequities. The school system in Syracuse is a slough of despair, the one in Raleigh a beacon of hope. Grant argues that the chief reason for Raleigh’s educational success is the integration by social class that occurred when the city voluntarily merged with the surrounding suburbs in 1976 to create the Wake County Public School System. By contrast, the primary cause of Syracuse’s decline has been the growing class and racial segregation of its metropolitan schools, which has left the city mired in poverty.
Hope and Despair is a compelling study of urban social policy that combines field research and historical narrative in lucid and engaging prose. The result is an ambitious portrait—sometimes disturbing, often inspiring—of two cities that exemplify our nation’s greatest educational challenges, as well as a passionate exploration of the potential for school reform that exists for our urban schools today.
REVIEW: Reviewed by Phil Brand
Mr. Suburbanite, tear down this wall! That's the message Gerald Grant heralds in his book "Hope and Despair in the American City." Mr. Grant is referring to the "invisible wall" that severs city from suburb - the policy of separate school districts. It's a policy that concentrates poor and minority students in city schools, with tragic results for students and ultimately for the inner cities in which they live.
The challenge of fixing failed urban schools has frustrated parents, educators and politicians for decades. When schools aren't safe and children don't learn, the problems of neighborhoods are exacerbated - broken homes, unemployment, a culture of low expectations - and produce more educational dysfunction. It's a vicious cycle. However, in studying the school policies implemented in Wake County, N.C. (Raleigh), Mr. Grant, a professor of education and sociology at Syracuse University, thinks he sees a way out.
Raleigh buses high-achieving students from wealthier families to schools with low-performing students from poorer families, and vice-versa. The goal is that "individual schools reflect a free and reduced lunch ratio no greater than 40 percent of its student population and an achievement level of less than 25 percent of students below grade level." In other words, Raleigh uses busing to achieve socioeconomic integration in its schools, mixing high- and low-achieving students.
Busing in Raleigh began in belated response to the Supreme Court's 1954 desegregation mandate in Brown v. Board of Education. Raleigh bused black children to white schools and white children to black schools. In hindsight, it's easy to see how that policy backfired. Forced busing spurred white flight, and it hindered rather than helped the cause of integration. Think of the protests that roiled Boston schools for years. Busing was a tried-and-failed policy when it focused on race. Why then, when the policy is focused on class, does Mr. Grant consider it the hope for revitalizing inner cities and their schools?
Despite past bungles, Mr. Grant argues that busing is not inherently flawed. Rather, the flaw is in allowing parents to buy "quasi-private schooling" for their children by moving to the suburbs. Raleigh pre-empted that concern by merging the city school district with suburban ones to become one unified, countywide district.
The logic behind busing derives from an influential 1966 study of the determinants of student achievement called the Coleman Report, and Mr. Grant draws heavily on it. The report found that a child's classmates influence achievement more than any other school factor. Mr. Grant writes, "The norms of a good school are shaped more by the children who come through the door than the dollars spent on books, buildings, laboratories, teacher salaries, or other traditional measures of school quality."
Students from middle-class families bring with them a set of expectations, support networks and attitudes - what Mr. Grant calls "social capital" - that is conducive to learning. "Social capital is the yeast that makes a good school rise."
Wake County is using busing policy to redistribute students by socioeconomic class. As a result, it is achieving what Mr. Grant variously terms "the right balance," a "healthy balance" and a "workable balance" of race and class in each school. The equitable redistribution of children, Mr. Grant asserts, means there are "no bad schools in Raleigh."
He says this is a win-win proposition, but his discussions with the district's teachers tell a different story. "A major redistribution of teaching resources to better serve low-performing students," Mr. Grant writes, caused most teachers to make "significant changes in how they taught." One teacher is quoted as saying he spent more time "teaching strategies that are going to work for these lower-level kids" and asked questions in a way that "works lower-level students into it." In effect, by shifting their limited time and resources from one priority to another, Raleigh teachers create their own winners and losers, a reality Mr. Grant glosses over.
More important, forced busing leaves parents feeling powerless. Rapid increases in the number of poor students means nearly a third of Raleigh schools exceed the cap on poor children in a given school. As the district uses busing to redress the demographic imbalances, many parents have concluded that their children are used as pawns in a grand egalitarian chess match. They are forming protest groups with names like Take Wake Schools Back and Wake Schools Community Alliance.
"Hope and Despair" is refreshingly free of professorial jargon. The author blends his personal experiences with wide-ranging interviews and a dash of research to provide a largely sound analysis of the state of urban education. His investigation of the benefits of a community that transcends our individual differences may elicit nods of agreement even as readers recognize that we form communities through interests and ideas that we hold in common. Mr. Grant's brief for redistribution will not find favor with many unpersuaded readers.
Phil Brand is director of Education Watch at the Capital Research Center.
- Posted by David on May 18, 2009
By LIBBY QUAID, The Associated Press
WASHINGTON -
America's moms and dads are getting a good scolding: Your kids are lagging behind students all around the world.
The White House says so, with concern bordering on alarm. So do institutions such as the Gates Foundation, citing performance tests, graduation rates and other benchmarks.
But don't measure for dunce caps just yet.
While they're not in first place, U.S. students generally hold their own on international tests. They spend more time in school than the Obama administration would have you believe. And their college graduation rates stack up better than reported.
That is not to say the critics are totally wet, that the U.S. can't do better.
Only about one-third of U.S. students could read and do math at current grade levels on national tests in 2007, the most recent figures available. That means millions of kids are a long way from reaching the ambitious goal of former President George W. Bush's No Child Left Behind law - that every student read and do math on grade level by 2014.
And the high school dropout rate is dismal - 1 in 4 kids.
But it's all made to look worse than it is by international comparisons, which at best tend to be misleading and at worst are deeply flawed.
The United States has a much bigger and faster-growing population than the other countries that participate in global assessments; China and India do not take part at all. Unlike many global competitors, the U.S. is growing ever more diverse, with a large share of children who are learning English.
Educational trash talk is not new. It is typical at both ends of the political spectrum. Liberals use poor performance to justify school spending. Conservatives use it to make the case for private-school vouchers and tax credits.
Already, Obama is responsible for the biggest increase in federal education spending because of his economic stimulus law.
Here is a look at recent statements about the standing of the U.S. educational system and how they square with the facts.
---
TEST SCORES
Obama says the rest of the developed world is passing America by. "Our schools continue to trail other developed countries and, in some cases, developing countries," he told the National Academy of Sciences on April 27. "Our students are outperformed in math and science by their peers in Singapore, Japan, England, the Netherlands, Hong Kong and Korea, among others."
That is not the whole story.
The U.S. does trail the most high-achieving countries, mostly developed nations in Asia such as Singapore, Taiwan and Japan.
But the U.S. holds its own in the group that comes next, a group of developed countries that, depending on the test, includes England, Germany and Russia.
In fact, the U.S. has gained on some of its toughest competitors since 1995, making bigger strides in math than Singapore and Japan, and in science than Japan.
That is according to the most recent international tests, the Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study, or TIMSS, the study Obama was citing. A lead TIMSS researcher took issue with the idea the U.S. is trailing.
"Certainly, our results do not show the United States trailing the developed world by any stretch of the imagination," said Ina V.S. Mullis, a Boston College research professor and co-director of the study.
"The Asian countries are way ahead of the rest of developed countries, but mostly the developed countries are relatively similar," Mullis said. "And the United States might be one of the leaders of that group, depending on whether you're talking about math or science in the fourth- or the eighth-grade."
---
MORE TEST SCORES
Obama also delivered this dismal news: "Another assessment shows American 15-year-olds ranked 25th in math and 21st in science when compared to nations around the world."
Bill Gates Sr., co-chairman and trustee of his son's Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, used similar figures in a National Public Radio interview last month when he said, "The condition of our public education is very, very poor."
At issue is the Program for International Student Assessment, or PISA, which is given to 15-year-olds in 30 developed countries.
Obama's numbers are correct, but perhaps misleading. PISA is not designed to measure what children have learned in school. Instead, it measures how well kids apply math to real-world problems, which could be learned in school, but also at home or elsewhere.
In contrast, the other test Obama cited, TIMSS, is designed to measure how much math children have learned in school.
Because of that difference - a big one in the world of educational research - experts including the Brookings Institution's Tom Loveless have cautioned against lumping PISA results together with other test scores. Loveless serves on the U.S. advisory board for PISA and is a representative to the group that administers TIMSS.
---
SCHOOL TIME
Obama's education secretary, Arne Duncan, says American kids don't spend enough time in school.
"Our children are competing for jobs against children in India and China today, and those children are going to school 25, 30 percent more than us," Duncan said at Brookings this past week.
Obama himself said in March: "Our children spend over a month less in school than children in South Korea every year. If they can do that in South Korea, we can do it right here in the United States of America."
The president is in luck: The U.S. already is doing it.
South Koreans do have a longer school year, measured in days. But Americans actually spend more time in school. The average U.S. eighth-grader has 1,146 instructional hours a year, compared with 923 hours a year in South Korea.
In fact, the U.S. has more instructional hours than many better-performing countries, though that raises a separate question about how well American schools spend classroom time.
A longer school year would shorten summer vacation and perhaps minimize the summer learning loss that hurts struggling students. Duncan is urging school districts to consider a longer year.
The school-time data come from the Education Department, which relied on information from the group that administers TIMSS.
As for Duncan's comparison, the department says there isn't reliable data on how much time Chinese or Indian children spend in school.
---
GRADUATION RATES
Helping more students finish college is a priority among the many philanthropies that work on education issues. In a December speech at George Washington University in Washington, D.C., the younger Gates said the U.S. problem is acute.
"In the case of college education, we were No. 1 in the world 20 years ago in the percentage of young adults with a postsecondary credential. Now we're number 10 and dropping," Gates said.
Obama said this in March: "In just a single generation, America has fallen from second place to 11th place in the portion of students completing college. That is unfortunate, but it's by no means irreversible."
The college figures come from various tables provided by the Paris-based Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, which runs the PISA test of 15-year-olds.
But those figures are misleading for several reasons, said Cliff Adelman, a former Education Department researcher now at the Institute for Higher Education Policy.
-They are based on entire populations, not on what actually happens to students who enter college in a given year. Graduation rates in a large, growing country such as the U.S. will not look as good as those of a smaller country whose population is declining.
-Countries have different definitions for who is counted; for example, some exclude noncitizens, while the U.S. includes them.
-Since 2000, many European countries have switched to three-year degrees from four-to-six year degrees, making their rates look better than before.
What about high school? There again, international comparisons present similar problems. Other countries have more complex systems with many different types of high schools and can limit who is admitted.
No one disputes that the U.S. high school dropout rate, 1 in 4 kids and worse among minorities, is awful.
But as with other international comparisons, measuring the U.S. against the rest of the world is like comparing apples and oranges.
Copyright 2008 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.
- Posted by David on May 12, 2009
By Robin Mamlet and Christine VanDeVelde, Special for USA TODAY
"Senioritis" — skipping class, missing tests, attending parties instead of athletic practice, and generally slacking off at the end of the last year of high school — is practically a rite of spring. But this year there may be serious consequences — including having college acceptance withdrawn — for those who don't finish with a strong academic record.
In the past, when students received the fat envelope, the suspense of the college application process was largely over. That's not necessarily so this year. Because in the 2009 college admission season — with the largest high school graduating classes in history, record numbers of applications and dwindling economic resources — colleges simply don't know how many students are going to be able to accept their offers.
To cope with that uncertainty, many colleges are admitting more students than in the past. If they find they have over-enrolled their incoming class, they may be more likely to revoke an offer of admission to those who haven't maintained top grades or fallen short in some other way. (Final grades were cited by 69% of colleges that revoked admission offers in 2007; disciplinary problems accounted for 25%, says the National Association for College Admission Counseling.) Other colleges are admitting fewer students and counting on pulling heavily from their wait-list. In deciding who should come off that list, a primary consideration will be a strong senior year. Those who slack off will find themselves last in line.
Economic exacerbation
"The stakes have compounded exponentially this year because of the uncertainty we're facing," says Doug Christiansen, dean of admission at Vanderbilt University in Nashville.
Though colleges have always reviewed the final academic records of incoming classes, this year they will scrutinize them more thoroughly, officials say. Admission departments will double-check for drops in grades, absenteeism and situations in which, for example, a student's application said he was taking three advanced placement classes, but he later dropped two. They also will watch for red flags that arise from lapses in judgment or integrity, such as cheating, plagiarism, drinking or drug use.
How many students may have admission withdrawn this year? With their predictive models not working in this admission cycle, colleges just don't know yet. The University of California projects that about 50 admission offers may be withdrawn at each of nine campuses, says Sue Wilbur, director of undergraduate admissions. But some campuses could issue more. "All campuses are very carefully managing their numbers to come in on their enrollment targets," she says. When officials say in their admission letter that enrollment is contingent on maintaining senior-year grades, they mean it.
Being proactive can help
When admission is rescinded, the news probably will come at a difficult time. Though students commit to a school on May 1 and release other offers, colleges don't see final transcripts until after graduation and are at the mercy of high schools on when records arrive. Students may learn as late as August they have no place to go in the fall.
But there is something students can do — if they act before the letter revoking admission arrives. If there is a problem, a student should inform the college where he has been accepted or wait-listed. It is incumbent on the student — not the parent — to take the initiative, call the admission department, explain the problem as candidly as possible and describe what is being done to remedy it. A school often will look more kindly on such news when informed well before viewing the final transcript.
"Universities will find out," Christiansen says.
Colleges do consider extenuating circumstances such as family emergencies or illness, and, when appropriate, may suggest summer school or deferring enrollment for a year. "Colleges are in the business of education, not punishment," says Susan Dean, director of college counseling at Castilleja School in Palo Alto, Calif., an elite secondary school for girls. "Anything they can do to assist a student, they are going to try to do."
If a student doesn't self-report and has admission rescinded, there is usually little he can do. Schools are loath to remake such decisions. Almost all schools include language in acceptance letters that makes admission contingent on performance through the end of the senior year.
That conditional language constitutes a fair warning — and officials advise high school seniors to take it seriously, particularly this year.
Robin Mamlet is former dean of admissions at Stanford University, Swarthmore College and Sarah Lawrence College. She is now with Witt/Kieffer, an executive search firm for the non-profit/education sector. Christine VanDeVelde is a journalist who writes frequently on the college application process. They are writing a book on admission.
- Posted by David on May 1, 2009
From the school treasurer, Jeff McCuen, on 5/1/09:
There have been different figures presented to the community as average teacher salary. I feel it is important to put the figures in context by defining the methods used in the calculations. The average teacher salary provided by me to Mr. Ottolenghi and Board of Education Vice President Julie Keegan was computed by taking the total teacher contract salaries and dividing by the total number of teachers employed. The other method being used in the community uses the total teacher contract salaries and divides by full-time equivalent teachers. This method provides the weighted average teacher salary. The weighted average teacher salary is higher than the average salary because it discounts part-time teachers. While the two methods result in different amounts, when put in context, both are accurate.