A new survey by the conservative Heritage Foundation reveals 44 percent of Senators and 36 percent of Representatives sent their children to private school. In addition, 20 percent of all House and Senate members attended private school themselves. And it’s a bipartisan practice.
Private-school choice is a popular among both congressional Republicans and Democrats. Thirty-eight percent of House Republicans and 34 percent of House Democrats have ever sent their children to private school. In the Senate, 53 percent of Republicans and 37 percent of Democrats have exercised private-school choice for their children. Thirty five percent of Congressional Black Caucus Members have sent a child to private school. Only 6 percent of black students overall attend private school.
In case you’ve forgotten why this matters, the editorial page editors of the Washington Post remind you.
Are conflict and confrontation necessary ingredients in a school turnaround? Washington Post columnist Marc Fisher files a provocative column about a Maryland school that is succeeding without the kind of bare knuckle brawls that are drawing national media attention to Michelle Rhee and the nearby Washington, DC school system.
Fisher goes to Broad Acres Elementary School in Silver Spring where scores were so low eight years ago that a state takeover loomed. Montgomery County Superintendent Jerry Weast and Principal Jody Leleck negotiated with the teachers union to add extra hours to the work week for extra pay. “Teachers would offer no more excuses about poor kids from dysfunctional families; expectations would soar. About a third of the faculty left; Leleck hired 27 veteran teachers that first summer” he reports.
Rhee’s faceoff with the Washington Teachers’ Union creates a dynamic different from the cooperation between Weast and Montgomery County Education Association President Bonnie Cullison. She said she hears Rhee telling teachers, ” ‘You’re not doing the job,’ as opposed to ‘Let’s work together.’ You cannot make it happen in a district where you set up conflict”…Weast won’t criticize his D.C. counterpart, but he will say that narrowing the achievement gap is about expecting all children to work hard and love learning. “You can do it anyplace if you treat people like you want to be treated,” he says.
Today, 81 percent meet reading proficiency standards this year, up from 47 percent in 2003. “Broad Acres did this without Rhee’s reform tactics,” Fisher points out. ”No young recruits from Teach for America, no cash for students who come to class, no linkage of teacher pay to test scores.” And what’s happening inside the classrooms?
Too often, schools desperate to boost test scores become grim factories in which children are force-fed rote skills. But at Broad Acres, teachers coach each other to keep kids engaged in rich material for its own sake. In Andrea Sutton’s fifth-grade class, 16 kids sit on the floor, jumping up to explain to one another the roots of the American colonists’ grievances with the British. The teacher’s voice never rises above a stage whisper as she plies the class with questions that would fit nicely in a high school course. With all the pressure from No Child Left Behind, it’s so easy to cut out history and science,” Bayewitz says. “But these kids are going to need those complex skills in high school and college. And these kids are going to college.”
Claus von Zastrow at Public School Insights observes that Fisher’s piece reminds us “that school improvement does not necessarily require a death-match between high-profile ‘reformers’ and the education ‘establishment.’” Fisher is promising a follow-up column Sunday on ”a D.C. school that matches Broad Acre’s population, put presumably not its methods. Stay tuned.
Teach for America got Page One treatment from the Washington Post on Saturday. Competition for slots in the program is way up, in part because of the economy. Nearly 40,000 applications are expected for about 5,000 teaching slots.
In part because of the dearth of other job prospects in the sagging economy but mostly because the program has captured the imagination of a generation of student leaders bent on doing good, some graduates of the nation’s elite universities are fighting for low-paying teaching positions the way they once sought jobs on Wall Street.
The bad economy angle notwithstanding, the Post story mostly covers familiar territory and reports “research into Teach for America’s effectiveness has been inconclusive, but at least three major studies in the past several years indicate that students taught by its teachers score significantly lower on standardized tests than do their peers.” That’s enough to set Eduwonk’s teeth on edge.
In fact, while there has been a lot of “research” into TFA the methodologically most solid studies have shown that TFA teachers are as good or better than other teachers, including veteran and traditionally trained teachers. Mathematica (pdf) and Urban Institute/CALDER are the two best examples — and those are independent analyses not TFA studies.
One angle not discussed in the Post piece, or anywhere else that I’ve noticed. If the recession is driving more recruits into TFA, might it also mean that a lot of teachers who might have left for greener pastures in flush times are staying put?
It’s been easy to shrug one’s shoulders and say that schools in trouble under NCLB deserve to be in trouble. But when schools in well-regarded districts like Arlington, Virginia’s start finding themsleves in trouble, eyebrows will surely be raised. The Washington Post reports the Hoffman-Boston Elementary School, where black students missed benchmarks this year, has become the first school in Northern Virginia forced to restructure because of lagging tests scores.
What’s challenging is they are under a microscope, but they aren’t terribly different than other schools,” Mark Johnston, assistant superintendent of instruction in Arlington, said of the small school near the Pentagon. “I think there are reasons why schools don’t make targets, and it’s easy when those reasons are clear and evident. It’s not easy when they’re not.”
Expect to see more schools in unexpected places run into trouble. “It’s not just going to be a problem of the inner city. It’s going to be a problem of many school districts,” Jack Jennings, president of the Center on Education Policy, tells the Post. “This will come as a surprise to a number of school officials and to the public.”
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