The New York Sun (Feb 13) reported that I resigned from the editorial board of Education Next because that magazine has just published an article implicitly endorsing Mayor Michael Bloomberg for President. That is not entirely right. I was not thrilled about the endorsement, inasmuch as the editorial board had not been consulted. But my reason for resigning was that the article was a puff piece for reforms that thus far are not working.
NYC is hardly a paragon of education reform. Annual spending has increased from $12.5 billion to nearly $20 billion under Mayor Bloomberg. Yet NAEP scores showed no gains in 4th grade reading, 8th grade reading, or 8th grade mathematics.
The school system devotes inordinate resources to testing and preparing for tests, to constant measurement and evaluation, while paying negligible attention to curriculum and instruction. This strategy has not worked, has not even produced impressive test score gains. Saddest of all, even if it did produce large test score gains, the students would still not be getting a good education.
Update: You read it here first, but Diane Ravitch has more to say in an op-ed in this morning’s (Feb 15) NY Sun –rp.
Perhaps Woody Allen was right when he said the 90% of success is just showing up. Nearly every one of the 600+ teachers in the Burnsville-Eagan-Savage school district earned a $2,000 bonus under Minnesota’s “Q Comp” program, meant to reward quality teaching. The Minneapolis Star-Tribune reports in the 2006-07 year, 603 teachers “exceeded standards,” and six “met standards.”
Not a single one fell below standards.
Asked about the six who merely met standards must feel, state Sen. Chris Gerlach, R-Apple Valley, laughed. “Those must be the ones under indictment or something,” he told the paper. A merit-pay system that isn’t more selective, he said, is simply a pay increase.
Caught Being Good
Mike Huckabee
No matter what you think of his politics, the candidate refuses to dumb down his use of allusions in his stump speeches. Not sure what he meant? Look it up!
NYC Students Blog
The first ever student-run blog about the NYC education system. The future is in good hands.
Names on the Blackboard
Charles Darwin
Will Florida’s new science standards be scuttled by the inclusion of evolution?
Zero
Fifty is the new zero. Warning: Slippery slope ahead!
Name on the Blackboard…with Checkmarks
Miami-Dade County School Board
Superintendent Rudy Crew and his staff are exploring the possibility of allowing captive-audience advertising in schools as a possible stream of revenue for the cash-strapped district.
Great instruction and a strong curriculum is the best test prep, right? And research shows “drill and kill” doesn’t work? But look inside a struggling school and you see, well, lots of test prep. “Schools Turn Focus to the Big Picture,” an article from the Baton Rouge Advocate, looks uncritically at Roseland Elementary, which includes “some of Tangipahoa Parish’s poorest students and is one of its lowest performing schools on state accountability measures.” Note that no attempt is made to downplay or hide the big test prep push that’s going on. Indeed, the piece seems to assume that this is what schools are supposed to do. Perhaps school officials do too, since the “big picture” of the title refers to the school’s strenuous test prep effort—the announced “40 Days of Focus,” described as “an intense time of preparation for the Louisiana Educational Assessment Program tests for fourth- and eighth-graders and other tests given in March.”
George Cunningham throws down a gauntlet at the feet of state policy makers in an interview with Michael F. Shaughnessy of ednews.org, noting that ed schools are effectively thwarting standards-based education and accountability.
A former professor in the Department of Educational and Counseling Psychology at the University of Louisville, Cunningham, recently issued a paper critical of teacher training at education schools in North Carolina and nationwide. While the public and policy-makers demand greater accountability, ed schools “do not think that academic achievement is an important purpose for schools,” he says. “They are committed to the achievement of a set of non-academic goals such as diversity, technology, critical thinking skills, and social justice.”
In plain but powerful terms Cunningham describes the disconnect between the accountability message being preached by the public and policy-makers and what new teachers are bringing to their jobs. “Newly minted teachers come out of education schools either with no awareness of the importance of academic achievement tests or with an acquired hostility towards them,” he notes, calling the situation “unsustainable.”
Continue reading ‘Ed Schools: Undermining Accountability?’
Back in the day, the key to being a successful principal was to be a successful politician. Now, says Nelson Coulter, principal of Hendrickson High School in Pflugerville, Texas they’re like coaches. “You have to win,” he says.
The insightful quote is from a Austin American-Statesman piece on principal turnover. School districts nationwide are finding it harder to hold on to principals as standards get tougher and the list of demands from the state and federal governments gets longer. In Texas, the paper reports, “about 61 percent of high school principals leave their schools or the field within three years; by the fifth year, that figure increases to 76 percent.”
“We know that school reform takes time — much more than one year’s time,” says Ed Fuller, associate director of the University Council for Educational Administration at the University of Texas. “If a principal leaves within three to five years, the principal’s vision for reform is left incomplete. Over time, teachers become jaded and simply ignore the reform effort….Teachers believe the principal will leave and all of their efforts will be wasted.”
Plus, while principals put pressure on teachers to deliver accountability outcomes, teachers rarely lose their jobs over low accountability ratings, Fuller notes. “Principals do.”
Patrick Welsh, a 30-year veteran English teacher, goes to work every morning at one off the most expensive school buildings ever constructed. Opened last September, the $98 million T.C. Williams High School in Alexandria, Virginia has “a cafeteria that looks like something out of an upscale mall” and its classrooms are packed with every technological gadget a teacher could imagine.
“So you’d think T.C. teachers would be ecstatic,” writes Welsh in the Washington Post. “But it’s just the opposite — faculty morale is the lowest and cynicism the highest I’ve seen in years. The problem? What a former Alexandria school superintendent calls ‘technolust’ — a disorder affecting publicity-obsessed school administrators nationwide that manifests itself in an insatiable need to acquire the latest, fastest, most exotic computer gadgets, whether teachers and students need them or want them. Technolust is in its advanced stages at T.C., where our administrators have made such a fetish of technology that some of my colleagues are referring to us as “Gizmo High.”
Welsh wonders whether all the gadgetry is actually getting in the way. “The big question isn’t whether teachers like spending their time learning one new gizmo after another,” he writes, “but whether a parade of new technologies will help kids learn. From what I can see, that’s not the case.”
What’s Paul Vallas up to these days? The former CEO of the Chicago school system is now superintendent of the Recovery School District of New Orleans, and retaining his habit of sticking his thumb in the eyes of the educational establishment.
“Vallas hasn’t lost his penchant for speaking truth to power,” notes the Chicago Daily Herald, “or at least public school power, as he demonstrated during a recent speech in DeKalb sponsored by Northern Illinois University’s College of Education.” In his speech, Vallas talked up charter schools, KIPP, alternative teacher certification and Teach for America.
Teach for America recruits “come in with content mastery, energy and work ethic,” Vallas said. “I’m not saying old teachers don’t have that, but we want new teachers coming in with an optimism about their ability to help educate inner-city kids.”
The Ridgeview Classical School in Fort Collins has been rated among the top three schools in Colorado since it was founded in 2001. Its success stands as a sharp rebuke to the dominant anti-intellectual pedagogy of most American schools. The secret of its success? The Core Knowledge curriculum in Kindergarten through 8th grade, and a traditional, Classical-Liberal curriculum in high school. An article in the Grand Junction Sentinel highlights the school and its remarkable achievements.
“They have phenomenal success,” Denise Mund, senior consultant with Schools of Choice at the Colorado Department of Education. “Their school for years was the No. 1 school in the state. This year, they were third, but repeatedly, they have had phenomenal success. I attended their graduation ceremony last May. I was very impressed.”
Read the article, but also spend some time with the school’s journal, The Conversation. To read these reflections on teaching and learning, is to see what a school can be—or more accurately should be. An essay in the journal by Tara Mertens, a student with learning disabilities who graduated from the school in May contrasts the emptiness of her “high achievement” at her previous school with the rigorous curriculum and legitimately high expectations she found at Ridgeview.
Continue reading ‘A Remarkable School’
Mike Antonucci, blogging at Intercepts points to a January 31 story by UFT staff writer Michael Hirsch, detailing a phone call from Hillary Clinton to the Delegate Assembly of New York City’s United Federation of Teachers right after the New Hampshire primary. The eyebrow raising quote: “‘Education and children are the causes of my life,’ [Clinton] said and promised that ‘we’re going to get rid of No Child Left Behind,’ a promise that brought delegates to their feet roaring approval.”
Antonucci points out that “get rid of No Child Left Behind” doesn’t exactly square with her campaign’s stated position, which promises to “use the pending reauthorization to expand support early childhood education, improve teacher training, lower class size, enhance parental involvement, eliminate environmental hazards in schools, and protect the programs that work for all of New York’s children” among other things.
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