Archive for the 'Education News' Category

Alter’s Ego

Published by Robert Pondiscio on November 5, 2009 in Education News. 3 Comments

A suggestion by Claus Von Zastrow of Public School Insights that pundits like Jonathan Alter who write about education be subject to performance pay attracted the notice of Alter, who has been mixing it up with commenters to the post.  It started when Von Zastrow took issue with Alter’s KIPP cheerleading and broad brush take on reform.

What do we make of Alter’s suggestion that only charter schools and merit pay are “real reform?” Well what about better staff development? Better curriculum? Stronger ties between schools and communities? Much, much better assessments? Are those phony reforms?  All in all, Alter gets an unsatisfactory rating, so no performance bonus this year. In fact, his failure to improve since last summer puts him at risk of termination.

That was apparently too much for the Newsweek pundit, who showed up on the blog’s comments to defend himself and do a little advocacy work.  ”With the president’s support, the pool of reformers is growing,” Alter wrote.  “Come on in, guys. The water’s warm.” 

Alter gets points for showing up and opening himself up for further abuse.  The highlight of the thread so far: One anonymous wit who wickedly applies Alter’s take on merit pay to his own columns:

I’m glad you’ve accepted Claus’ merit pay proposal. The formula is clear. Since your job is to inform the public, we’re going to measure your readers’ knowledge. Then, a year from now, we’re going to measure it again. If they’re smarter, you’ll get a substantial bonus. If not, we’ll put you on a 90-day plan of review, support, and, if your readers don’t get smarter, we’ll have to regretfully let you go. Sorry, but it’s all about the readers, not the writers.

Tough crowd.

Einstein on the Fritz

Published by Robert Pondiscio on November 2, 2009 in Education News and Research and Reports. 0 Comments

Interacting with Baby Einstein DVDs may not make your baby smarter. But interacting with Dan Willingham will make you smarter about the claims marketers make on behalf of educational products.  Dan’s take on the Baby Einstein flap is up at the Washington Post’s Answer Sheet blog.  ”Many parents already believe that visual stimulation and classical music (which the DVDs offer in spades) have been shown to help brain development,” Willingham writes.  “Both beliefs are based on solid research that has been twisted out of shape,” he concludes

Meanwhile, if Dan or someone else is looking to do a little more brain-based debunking, this looks pretty ripe.

The Slumdog Ate My Homework

Published by Robert Pondiscio on October 30, 2009 in Education News. 0 Comments

The two child stars of the Oscar-winning film Slumdog Millionaire are in danger of losing a trust fund set up by the movie’s producers because they’re not regularly attending school.  The parents of 10-year-old Rubina Ali and 11-year-old Azhar Mohammed Ismail blame the absences on deaths in the family and other problems.  But the two are reportedly skipping class to take advantage of endorsement deals and other opportunities to cash in on their celebrity. 

“Our love got a little bit tougher today,” Slumdog producer Christian Colson tells the Associated Press.  “We understand there are opportunities for both kids — and for the parents of both children — to cash in, in the short term, on their celebrity. We don’t have a problem with that. But if they want to benefit from the trust, they have to get those attendance rates up.” 

Colson and Slumdog Millionaire director Danny Boyle arranged to have the kids attend a Mumbai school that helps disadvantaged children after the movie wrapped up.  However Azhar is reportedly showing up at the school only 37 percent of the time; Rubina only 27 percent.

Does Good Teaching Equal Good Test Scores?

Published by Robert Pondiscio on October 24, 2009 in Education News. 13 Comments

In his New York  Times column praising the Obama administration’s “quiet revolution” on education, David Brooks writes ”there is clear evidence that good teachers produce consistently better student test scores.”   I ask this question not rhetorically, but in earnest: what is the “clear evidence” to which Brooks refers?   Is there a study that defines good teaching, identifies good teachers and THEN looks at the impact of those teachers on test scores?

If we define good teaching as the ability to raise tests scores, Brooks’ assertion is merely a tautology.

Two More Black Eyes for 21st Century Skills

Published by Robert Pondiscio on October 23, 2009 in Education News. 4 Comments

“I am trying NOT to write off the 21st century skills movement as a sham, but its leaders don’t make it easy,” writes the Washington Post’s Jay Mathews this morning on his Class Struggle blog. 

Mathew raises a skeptical eyebrow at a new book by Bernie Trilling and Charles Fadel, 21st Century Skills: Learning for Life in Our Times.  The pair are Silicon Valley corporate honchos and members of the board of the Partnership for 21st Century Skills.  He was hoping the book would “prove wrong those of us who could see nothing in this movement but a lot of buzz words and jargon describing principles of teaching and learning that have been with us for many decades.”   Keep hope alive, Uncle Jay.

I sense Trilling and Fadel are smart tech guys who just don’t know much about real schools with real kids who have difficulty learning how to read, write and do math. The perspective of much of the book is from thousands of feet up, as if the authors were on a jetliner flying into San Francisco’s airport. They can’t see the scuffed floors and trash-strewn playground of a public middle school in Oakland, but can use their laptops to write nice sentences about how the six emerging principles of the movement are “vision, coordination, official policy, leadership, learning technology and teacher learning.”

Meanwhile Common Core continues to treat P21 like its personal chew toy.  In his book review, Mathews sees “no sign that the Partnership, based in Tucson and Washington, D.C., is using its revenue to buy beach mansions in Bali.  However, Lynne Munson and James Elias parse a list of 230 organizations that signed on to P21’s National Action Agenda on 21st Century Skills and conclude it’s “a laundry list of vendors who undoubtedly either profit from or would like to profit from P21’s work.”  The list is also significant, they say, for who is not on it.

Just 11 of P21’s 13 member states signed.  The holdouts were New Jersey and Massachusetts, where P21 has encountered very strong resistance.  A number of the mostly for-profit heavyweights that sit on P21’s Strategic Council also were absent, including Ford Motor Company, Lenovo, Nellie Mae, Verizon, Walt Disney, and CPB.

“The closer we look,” Munson and Elias conclude, “the more P21’s unproven educational program appears to be just another mechanism for selling more stuff to schools.”

Hold On, Mr. President

Published by Robert Pondiscio on October 22, 2009 in Education News and Research and Reports. 2 Comments

“From the moment students enter a school, the most important factor in their success is not the color of their skin or the income of their parents. It’s the person standing at the front of the classroom,” said President Obama in a recent speech.  Linda Perlstein, off to a strong start on her new ed blog, talks to researchers who explain why the President is wrong.

Raising the Dropout Age

Published by Robert Pondiscio on October 22, 2009 in Education News and Education Practice. 3 Comments

In an attempt to cut the state’s dropout rate in half, Massachusetts will consider requiring students to stay in school until age 18.  Under current state law students can legally drop out at 16, but students as young as 14 can withdraw for medical reasons or to work. 
Taking  the advice of a state commission, Governor Deval Patrick will introduce legislation to raise the compulsory school age and create “an array of programs aimed at preventing students from dropping out and reaching out to those who have,” the Boston Globe reports. 

Some strategies recommended by the commission include hiring case managers to make the school experience more personal for these students, creating internships so students clearly see the connection between the classroom and potential careers, and using standardized test scores and other data to gauge, as early as elementary school, whether a student runs the risk of not finishing high school.

I have to confess I’ve always been ambivalent about proposals to raise the age for compulsory attendance in school.  It’s important to reduce the number of dropouts, but too often we blur the lines between the credential (a high school diploma) and what it putatively represents (an educated graduate).  Like extending the school day and year-round schooling, doing more of what’s not working is never a good idea.  A focus on raising the numbers of graduates also leads to abused schemes like credit recovery.  I’d rather focus on increasing the quality of the graduates rather than trusting that merely handing a kid a diploma solves all future problems.   Handing out empty diplomas solves one problem only:  the problem of low graduation rates.

Keeping Up With the Joanneses

Published by Robert Pondiscio on October 20, 2009 in Education News. 2 Comments

Most evenings, I read the papers, go through newsletters, scan my various Google Alerts, and set aside a handful of articles that strike me as worth blogging about.  Then one of two things inevitably happen the next morning: 1) work gets in the way, or 2) I find out Joanne Jacobs has already blogged about them.

So here are a couple of blog-worthy stories that…oh, hell…just go to her site and read them.

Required Reading

Published by Robert Pondiscio on October 20, 2009 in Education News. 0 Comments

Linda Perstein, former Washington Post writer and author of the standout ed book, Tested, has launched an ed blog.  The Educated Reporter launched Monday, a year and a half after Perlstein was named public editor for the Education Writers Association.  What to expect?

My job is to help improve coverage of education, through direct coaching of journalists and broader commentary.  So a blog makes all kinds of sense. I find myself taking up issues on EWA’s internal listserve and in our newsletter that I realize people outside the organization might like to hear about. When I have a story idea to suggest, or when an oft-repeated myth needs debunking—no, states do NOT build prisons based on third-grade reading levels—or when a report comes out I know reporters will be calling about, I’ll have a place to share.

Welcome to a real pro.

Do NAEP Scores Have Legs at the Polls?

Published by Robert Pondiscio on October 15, 2009 in Assessment and Testing, Education News and accountability. 1 Comment

In New York, 80 percent of 8th graders met the state’s standards in math this year, up from 59 percent two years ago.  But the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) results released yesterday paint a different picture.  Only 34 percent of the state’s 8th graders are considered proficient, a modest increase from 2007 levels.  NAEP scores for the Empire State’s 4th graders actually declined, while the percent passing the state’s own test went up.  This renewed charges that New York is making itself look good by lowering standards.   Diane Ravitch puts it plainly: ”The fabulous ‘gains’ reported last spring, we now know, were based on dumbed-down tests and dubious scoring of the tests in Albany,” she writes in today’s New York Post.

On the one hand, there is nothing new here, and New York is not alone in this boat.  Disconnects between the results for NAEP and state tests have been well known and much discussed for years.  The open question is whether state tests have now been sufficiently discredited in the minds of voters to make them a political liability.  The even larger question is whether the failure of test-driven accountability to move the needle will feed voter resentment, turning testing into a legitimate campaign issue in state and local races this November and beyond.

“There’s a palpable backlash against testing across much of the great American middle class,” Fordham’s Checker Finn recently observed.  ”We need to face the fact that testing, particularly high-stakes uses of test results for students and teachers alike, are deeply unpopular outside policymaker circles and could well lose rather than gain political traction in coming years.” 

The first test case may come in New York City, where Mayor Michael Bloomberg is up for a third term and campaigning on his education record. The New York Times points out this morning how the NAEP results are ”sharply contradicting the results of state-administered tests that showed record gains.”  NAEP results for the city itself will not be available for several weeks, but Bloomberg’s opponent, Democrat Bill Thompson, is attempting to make political hay nonetheless.  A spokesperson quoted in the New York Times today calls the Bloomberg administration the “Madoff of the American education system” and a “national disgrace.”  Bloomberg has a commanding lead in the polls, but his opponent is clearly trying to turn the Mayor’s record on education, a perceived strength, into a liability.  Will it play?  A Marist poll last Spring showed New York voters approved of the Mayor’s handling of the schools by a 51-to-41 percent margin.  It bears watching to what degree, if any, the testing issue moves those numbers.

No Child Left Behind, it has been widely observed, is a “tainted brand.”  But is “accountability” still a winner at the polls?  What NAEP seems to be telling us is that we’ve had a whole lot of test-driven accountability (and a whole lot of education spending) without a whole lot of results.  That said, it’s not an easy issue for voters to wrap their heads around.  I suspect it will be easier and more efficacious to get voters cranky about their kids education being reduced to a joyless grind.  “Prep and test schooling” does not roll as trippingly off the tongue as “tax and spend liberal” but it probably resonates more with voters than trying to explain cut scores.