Archive for February, 2009

Linda Darling-Hammond Gives Props to Core Knowledge

Published by Robert Pondiscio on February 20, 2009 in Core Knowledge School and Education News. 2 Comments

Tout le blogs, following Politics K-12’s lead, note that Linda Darling-Hammond will not be joining the Obama administration as many expected, but has instead opted to remain at Stanford.  Another interesting LDH note appeared in the form of a letter to the editor of this morning’s Boston Globe. Titled “Knowledge, skills are not mutually exclusive goals” Darling-Hammond responds to a recent op-ed by Kathleen Madigan of the Pioneer Institute:

We note that many of the Core Knowledge schools of E.D. Hirsch, whom Madigan cites in her attempt to polarize, develop solid knowledge and rigorous thinking skills through a project-based curriculum, defying the silly idea that we can’t develop both knowledge and skills in our schools.

I’m not sure where Professor Darling-Hammond (and DFER’s Joe Williams, who helped author it) got the idea that the Core Knowledge curriculum is “project-based” (it’s up to teachers to use their professional judgement to decide how to teach the material), but her observation that solid knowledge and rigorous thinking skills are not mutually exclusive is certainly welcome–as is her citing the accomplishments of Core Knowledge schools. 

Alas, several reports cite a seriously ill family member as a prime reason for Darling-Hammond staying in California.  We pray it proves to be not serious, and wish her well.

Stealing Education

Published by Robert Pondiscio on February 19, 2009 in Education News. 1 Comment

Yolanda Hill, a mother in Rochester, NY has been jailed on felony larceny charges for lying about where she lived in order to “steal education” for her five children, according to the local paper.

Hill, 33 — known to the Greece Central School District as Yolanda Miranda — was charged earlier this week with two felonies after a months-long investigation by the Greece Central School District into where her children live.  The school investigator determined her children were being dropped off each morning at their grandmother’s house on Harmony Drive solely for the purpose of having them attend Greece schools, then returning each night to Hill’s home on Morrill Street in Rochester. The case was then turned over to Greece police.

Eduwonk suggests Hill is a potential poster child for school choice; DFER’s Joe Williams is already there.

The nerve! People like Hill are ruining public education. Instead of finding good schools for her kids, she should send them to bad Rochester schools and then run for a community education council or something, where over the course of the next 50-years she can fight to improve them in time for her great grandkids.

“It would be interesting if someone asked Gov. David Paterson how he feels about the issue of throwing parents into jail for sending their kids to the wrong public schools,” Williams writes. 

Interesting case.  The legal issues as well as the resource issues for the complaining school district are clear and obvious.  The moral question is stickier.  How many of us in Hill’s shoes wouldn’t do the same for our kids?

Update:  Kevin Carey, writing at The Chronicle of Higher Education’s Brainstorm blog, looks at this through the lens of parental involvement.  “If you’re a single parent who didn’t get a very good education when you were in school…the best way to be parentally involved isn’t to spend three hours a night helping with homework or bake cupcakes for the PTA but to get your children into a good school, a school that has the resources and staff to give your children what you can’t,” he writes, adding he’s ”baffled by how many self-identified “progressives” are indifferent or outright hostile to charter schools, most of which are specifically built to give parents like Yolanda Smith more choices within their districts so they don’t end up with a private investigator hiding in the bushes outside their house. ”

A commenter say Carey doesn’t get it.  “Smith was taking advantage of a public service for which she was paying absolutely no taxes. Maybe if she cared deeply for the quality of Greece’s school system, she could have lived with her mother and chosen an above-board means to enroll her kids in its schools—one that didn’t involve fraud. Maybe the best way to be ‘parentally involved’ in your children’s education is not to teach them that jacking the system and lying is okay.”

“Black History is American History”

Published by Robert Pondiscio on February 19, 2009 in Education News. 1 Comment

Overlooked in Attorney General Eric Holder’s controversial ”nation of cowards” remarks yesterday:

We have to recognize that until black history is included in the standard curriculum in our schools and becomes a regular part of all our lives, it will be viewed as a novelty, relatively unimportant and not as weighty as so called ‘real’ American history.

Er, what standard curriculum, Mr. Attorney General?

Location, Location, Location

Published by Robert Pondiscio on February 19, 2009 in Research and Reports and accountability. 1 Comment

The real estate agent’s mantra — location, location, location — also works for schools.  Just as an identical home can fetch different prices in different places, an identical school can make AYP in some states, but not in others. 

That’s the upshot of a terrific new report by the Fordham Foundation, The Accountability Illusion, which looked at 36 actual schools (18 elementary, 18 middle schools) and determined whether each one would make AYP under the accountability rules of 28 different states.  No, they would not. 

In Massachusetts – a state that ensures students have to score high in order to be considered proficient and one with relatively challenging annual targets and AYP rules – only one of 18 elementary schools was projected to make AYP. In Wisconsin, with lower proficiency standards and more lenient annual targets and rules, 17 schools were projected to do so. Same kids, same schools – different states, different rules.

“In short,” the report concludes, ”how a school is labeled under NCLB depends largely on the state in which it’s located. This can demoralize educators in states with tough AYP rules while letting under-performing schools in lenient states slip under the accountability radar screen. It also creates the illusion of a national accountability system where there isn’t one.”

Here’s the executive summary of Fordham’s report, and here’s a video interview with Checker Finn about it.  And if you are one of those who prefers to laugh rather than weep in the face of outrage, Mathew Ladner of Jay Greene’s blog turns this whole miasma into a parody of the Budweiser “Real Men of Genius” ad campaign.  “Here’s to you, Mr. Wisconsin No Child Left Behind compliance guy!” Hilarious.

Can we now officially say that accountability as currently conceived and practiced is a joke?  A bad school in Massachusetts is a good school in Arizona. Failure in Nevada is magically redefined as success when it moves to Wisconsin.  Our crazy quilt of accountability systems only breeds cynicism about the whole enterprise (why improve schools when you can lower the bar?) and makes it baby simple to evade responsibility and all but impossible to reach informed conclusions about your child’s school. 

One standard, one yardstick, or else don’t bother.  Instead of location, location, location, let’s try transparency, transparency, transparency.

Heresy Watch

Published by Robert Pondiscio on February 18, 2009 in No category. 6 Comments

Things We Dare Not Say Dept.:  A survey of principals across Minnesota shows 97% think it is not possible for the state’s schools to meet the goals of universal proficiency set out under No Child Left Behind. The survey was released Tuesday by the St. Paul-based think tank Minnesota 2020 and the state’s principal associations.

According to the survey, 97 percent of responding principals say that the law’s main goal, to have every student proficient on math and reading tests by 2014, is unattainable. More than 70 percent of the principals say their schools spend more time and resources on test preparation in the law’s wake, and 40 percent say they have taken away class time from arts and other subjects.

Remember the recent comments from Palo Alto schools Superintendent Kevin Skelly who said educators are “deluding themselves” if they think the achievement gap can be completely closed?  The scales have fallen from his eyes. “During the past week I have thought about my comments and had a chance to discuss them with staff and parents,” Skelly said last week. “Their comments have caused me to change my thinking on this.”

When Patty Fisher of the San Jose Mercury News asked him what exactly he had changed his thinking about, Skelly took a pass.  “I want to move beyond my comments in the newspaper,” he said. ”There was a sense that I was giving up on kids and saying kids couldn’t achieve, and I could see why they took it that way.”  So does he really believe that any child — let alone every child — has “limitless” potential, Fisher wanted to know.

“The less I say at this point, the better,” says Skelly.

“The Most Powerful Ed Secretary Ever”

Published by Robert Pondiscio on February 18, 2009 in Education News. 1 Comment

The ed world continues its efforts to simply wrap its collective mind around the just-passed stimulus bill and the gaudy sums it contains for education.  “Public schools will get an unprecedented amount of money,” the AP notes, double the education budget under George W. Bush.  “With those dollars, Obama and Education Secretary Arne Duncan want schools to do better.”  The stimulus bill contains $5 billion to reward states, districts and schools for setting high standards and narrowing the achievement gap.   

With a wave of President Obama’s pen, Arne Duncan becomes the most powerful education secretary in history. The New York Times focuses on the power and unprecedented latitude given to Duncan: 

“There’s going to be this extraordinary influx of resources,” he said in an interview. “So people say, ‘You’re going to be the most powerful secretary ever,’ but I have no interest in that. Power has never motivated me. What I love is opportunity, and this is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to do something special, to drive change, to make our schools better.”

Mr. Duncan intends to reward school districts, charter schools and nonprofit organizations that had demonstrated success at raising student achievement, notes the Times.  “Programs that tie teacher pay to classroom performance will most likely receive money, as will other approaches intended to raise teacher quality, including training efforts that pair novice instructors with veteran mentors, and afterschool and weekend tutoring programs.”

Sara Mead has an analysis of what the bill means to early childhood ed.  Meanwhile the American Library Association has put up this site to help libraries learn more about the stimulus package.

Update:  At EdWeek’s Politics K-12 blog, the dynamic duo, Michele McNeil and Alyson Klein, are compiling a list of Frequently Asked Questions about the stimulus and promising to get answers to all, bless them.  Links to their email addresses are under their pictures on their blog.

Schooling Dan Willingham

Published by Robert Pondiscio on February 17, 2009 in Teaching. 5 Comments

Dan Willingham has an amusing piece about former school teachers who made it big in other fields after leaving the classroom (Gene Simmons??!?), but he leaves out a few good ones.  Let’s make it a challenge.  On the following list, name the rock star who was NOT a teacher:

a. Art Garfunkel
b. Warren Zevon
c. Sting
d. Sheryl Crow

No, I’m not going to tell you the answers.  Use those 21st century information literacy skills!  Other famous former teachers: Clara Barton, Clarence Darrow, and Benito Mussolini.

National Standards Critical to Low-SES Schools

Published by Robert Pondiscio on February 17, 2009 in Education Practice and Educational Policy. 17 Comments

At Eduwonk, Andy Rotherham damns Randi Weingarten’s call for national standards with faint praise, noting he’s not against the idea, but calling it a distraction from the core problem the country faces today:

A system of public education that dramatically and dangerously under-serves low-income students and students of color.  And it doesn’t under-serve them by a matter of degree but substantially.   That’s much more a political problem than a substantive one and while better standards and more fine-grained measurement are important, their absence is not why we are where we are today and we should not lose sight of that. 

I respectfully disagree with Andy.  The lack of a coherent curriculum is one of the principal ways in which underperforming low-income schools fail their students substantially.  Given what we know about the connection between content knowledge and reading comprehension, those who are concerned with low-SES schools should be the ones shouting the loudest for national standards.  Factor in the extraordinarily high mobility rates among low-income students of color and national content standards become an essential prerequisite for closing the achievement gap. 

Standards are not a panacea.  Process standards are notoriously vague and difficult to assess and are little more than aspirational statements (”All students will write in clear, concise, organized language that varies in content and form for different audiences and purposes,” for example, is not the most helpful standard when planning lessons.)  But strong national content standards tied to reading assessments to ensure the content is actually taught would be the quickest way to avoid gaps and repetitions in the critical elementary school years and boost achievement over time.  National curriculum standards would also free novice teachers, who are overrepresented in low-SES schools, an opportunity to focus on how to teach instead of what to teach.

21st Century Sales Pitch

Published by Robert Pondiscio on February 17, 2009 in Education News and Research and Reports. 6 Comments

A study released today shows that using cell phones in math class improves test results. Well, it seems to show improvement.  Skeptics will note the study was financed by cellphone-maker Qualcomm. The New York Times reports it’s an opening salvo in an effort to position cellphones as educational tools.

Some critics already are denouncing the effort as a blatantly self-serving maneuver to break into the big educational market. But proponents of selling cellphones to schools counter that they are simply making the same kind of pitch that the computer industry has been profitably making to educators since the 1980s.

9th and 10th grade math students in four North Carolina schools in low-income neighborhoods were given “smartphones” meant to help them with their algebra studies. “The students used the phones for a variety of tasks, including recording themselves solving problems and posting the videos to a private social networking site, where classmates could watch,” the Times reports.  “The study found that students with the phones performed 25 percent better on the end-of-the-year algebra exam than did students without the devices in similar classes.”

“Texting, ringing, vibrating,” the AFT’s Janet Bass tells the Times. “Cellphones so far haven’t been an educational tool. They’ve been a distraction.” She adds that it’s “almost laughable that the cellphone industry is pushing a study showing that cellphones will make kids smarter.”

The issue of business interests in education is thorny and tough to unwind.  The board of the Partnership for 21st Century Skills, for example, has representatives from Intel, HP, Apple, Dell, Microsoft, Cisco and other tech companies.  While they are wise to be concerned about the capabilities of their future employees, they may also stand to benefit from building their share of the education market.  The ability to weigh the interests of sources of information, and think critically about their value is, of course, a key 21st Century skill.

Randi Weingarten Wants National Standards

Published by Robert Pondiscio on February 16, 2009 in Educational Policy and Opinion. 5 Comments

With support from Arne Duncan, the editorial board of the New York Times and now AFT President Randi Weindgarten, the push for national standards can now be called a movement.  Weingarten has an op-ed in the Washington Post this morning noting “the countries that consistently outperform the United States on international assessments all have national standards, with core curriculum, assessments and time for professional development for teachers based on those standards.”  In the U.S. states like Massachusetts and Minnesota that have set high standards have fared well, but standards for the rest of the country, she writes, are a mixed bag. 

Imagine the outrage if, say, the Pittsburgh Steelers had to move the ball the full 10 yards for a first down during the Super Bowl while the Arizona Cardinals had to go only seven. Imagine if this scenario were sanctioned by the National Football League. Such a system would be unfair and preposterous.  But there is little outrage over the uneven patchwork of academic standards for students in our 50 states and the District of Columbia. And the federal government has tacitly accepted this situation by giving a seal of approval to states that meet the benchmarks for improved achievement established by the federal No Child Left Behind Act — even if their standards are lower than those of other states.

“Education is a local issue, but there is a body of knowledge about what children should know and be able to do that should guide decisions about curriculum and testing,” Weingarten observes.  “I propose that a broad-based group — made up of educators, elected officials, community leaders, and experts in pedagogy and particular content — come together to take the best academic standards and make them available as a national model. Teachers then would need the professional development, and the teaching and learning conditions, to make the standards more than mere words.”