After Class -- Commentary: November 23, 2010

November 23, 2010

By Scott Stephens

Catalyst Ohio

The Council of the Great City Schools issued a report earlier this month warning that the performance level of black male students in America's schools is a national catastrophe.

Among the report’s sobering findings: Some 50 percent of black male fourth-graders attending urban schools were performing below basic. One out of three black children live in poverty compared to one in 10 white children. Black males were nearly twice as likely as white males to drop out of high schools.

Ohio's not immune to those depressing numbers. But new numbers suggest the Governor's Initiative for Raising the Graduation Rate, a statewide program launched in 2007, is actually having remarkable success in erasing them.

The initiative, created by former Sen. C.J. Prentiss, was designed to lower the dropout rates of high-risk freshmen students in urban and rural high schools with the highest dropout rates. The kids were identified as “at-risk” because they failed two or more classes in core subjects during the eighth grade, were absent 36 or more school days, were suspended from school for five days or more, or were overage for their grade.

The students are given a mentor with whom they have daily contact. They also participate in field trips and other activities – a visit to a college campus, for example – that are beyond their normal realm of experience.

The early results of the program were promising. The promotion rate for black male freshmen at each of the 12 participating high schools in Cleveland rose the first year, in some cases by outstanding percentages. At John F. Kennedy High School, for instance, the promotion rate improved more than 56 percentage points in one year. At East High School, it improved nearly 36 percentage points. At Glenville High School, the improvement was some 23 percentage points.

Now, many of those freshmen who participated in the program are getting ready to graduate. I'm told that at John F. Kennedy, seven of the top-10 graduating seniors next spring are African-American males who participated in the program. In fact, some 77 percent of the kids who started the program in Cleveland are on track to graduate this spring – remarkable because the participants, by definition, were students likely to drop out.

"There's definitely proof positive that the governor and C.J. were right on the money," says Bob Ivory, former linkage coordinator for the program at JFK. 

A 2009 report by Policy Matters Ohio tracked the program's progress and concluded its cost-benefit is considerable. Students who complete their high school education go on to college and jobs. Too many who don't go to prison.

I think the Ohio initiative works because it addresses poverty rather than pedagogy. The Great Society programs of the 1960s that helped reduce the income gap between rich and poor Americans actually helped close the achievement gap in education. In 1975, the percentage of white, black and Latino kids who went to college was equal. That all started to fall apart when those programs were dismantled in the 1980s.

“Had we stayed on track, we would have actually erased the achievement gap,” Stanford University professor Linda Darling-Hammond said recently.

It's not too late to stay on track with Ohio's initiative. Rarely does a program enjoy such dramatic success so quickly.

RACING NOTES
Speculation continues to swirl around the fate of Ohio's $400 million Race to the Top grant.

Federal officials have warned states they risk losing their grants if they stray too far from the plans they submitted. That became a worry in Ohio after governor-elect John Kasich vowed to scrap Gov. Ted Strickland's evidence-based education funding model – the mechanism for achieving the state's Race to the Top goals.

But on Monday, state education officials told the Board of Control they were confident they'd be able to implement Race to the Top regardless of what mechanism the state uses to fund education. However, Assistant State Superintendent Michael Sawyer said the feds want Ohio to put together a “transition plan” that will detail how the state plans to achieve Race to the Top goals under new state leadership.

The board on Monday approved a request to create appropriation authority of the Ohio Department of Education to spend the first $100 million of the grant.

Stay tuned.

QUOTE OF THE WEEK
“Children are the innocent victims of a very bad economy and a tough time.” -- Lorain schools Superintendent Cheryl Atkinson on the defeat of her district's levy. Lorain hasn't had a new operating levy in 20 years. 

http://www.catalyst-ohio.org/news/index.php?item=1073&cat=38

What other countries are really doing in education

By Valerie Strauss

The Answer Sheet blog, Washington Post

November 2, 2010

My guest is Sean Slade, director of Healthy School Communities, part of the Whole Child Initiative at ASCD, an educational leadership organization.

By Sean Slade

Are we moving forward or chasing our own tail?

As the education reform debate continues – and is fueled by educational documentaries, educational forums and manifestos - let’s take a moment to look at what these countries that we are propping up on a pedestal actually do.

For a while now we have been told that the United States is falling behind and that we must catch-up. As Education Secretary Arne Duncan said last Aug. 25:

Today, there are many different approaches to strengthening the teaching profession -- both here in America and in countries that are outperforming us such as Finland and Singapore.

Our competitors in other parts of the world recognize that the roles of teachers are changing. Today, they are expected to prepare knowledge workers, not factory workers, and to help every child succeed, not just the [ones who are] easy to teach.

If this is our goal then – to catch up with the rest of world - how do we get there? A logical step would be to at least look closely at educational underpinnings of the countries most commonly cited - Singapore, Finland and Canada - and replicate. 

Let’s take a quick look at what these countries are actually doing:

SINGAPORE

Prime Minister Lee of Singapore (Aug. 29, 2010): 

"I think we should do more to nurture the whole child, develop their physical robustness, enhance their creativity, shape their personal and cultural and social identity, so that they are fit, they are confident, they are imaginative and they know who they are.

"Every child is different, every child has his own interests, his own academic inclinations and aptitudes and our aim should be to provide him with a good education that suits him, one which enables him to achieve his potential and build on his strengths and talents. Talent means talent in many dimensions, not just academic talent but in arts, in music, in sports, in creative activities, in physical activities.

"We need to pay more attention to PE, to arts and music and get teachers who are qualified to teach PE and art and music. 

"Give each one a tailored and holistic upbringing, so you get academic education, moral education, physical education, art and a sense of belonging and identity. We aim to build a mountain range with many tall peaks but with a high base, not just a single pinnacle where everybody is trying to scramble up one single peak. And we are realizing this vision."

FINLAND

Timo Lankinen, Director-General, Finnish National Board of Education (Sept. 13, 2010):

"We are not actually talking a lot about numeracy or literacy, the agenda for change is more about increase of the arts and physical education into curriculum, and the highlight of 21st century skills or as we call them citizen skills.

 

"We have relatively small class sizes so there is the possibility to individualize that attention for each children (sic) ability to personalize ... but we have questions to ask ourselves, do we enable teachers and students to flourish enough, for example giving them individual aspirations, and engaging students so that there will be more experiential learning.

"Looking at basic education and success in PISA [Program for International Student Assessment] results, we have to bear in mind that children also participate in early childhood education ... which is mainly through play and interaction.

"We will be great when every student and stakeholder says for example ‘I love school’ and ‘I’m doing well in school’ – so it’s not only the subject knowledge we are seeking after."

CANADA

Dalton McGuinty, Premier of Ontario, Canada, Sept. 13, 2010:

"It doesn’t matter how much money you invest, it doesn’t matter how much you want change -- you won’t get results unless you enlist your teachers in the cause of better education.

"We have worked hard to build a positive, working relationship with our teachers. We do not engage in inflammatory rhetoric. We do not use our teachers as a political punching bag. Public bickering undermines public confidence. 

"Policy development and implementation happen in dialogue with our education partners.

"We don’t always agree, but I am reminded of some of the best political advice I ever received. I got it from my mother, on my wedding day, she said: 'Whatever happens, keep talking.'

"So we keep talking to our teachers. I make it clear to them, and all our education partners, that our pursuit of improvement will be relentless. And there is no place to hide."

To summarize:

*More emphasis on the whole child, physical education, the arts, fostering talents and citizen skills.

*Less emphasis on numeracy and literacy or testing

*Greater respect for teachers, the profession and their role as partners in educational reform.

I wonder if these people would be interested in putting together a manifesto?

http://voices.washingtonpost.com/answer-sheet/guest-bloggers/what-other-countries-are-reall.html#more

The strange media coverage of Obama's education policies

by Valerie Strauss
The Answer Sheet blog, Washington Post
September 30, 2010

NBC News president Steve Capus said that his network’s Education Nation summit this week -- a multi-day affair that included interviews with President Obama and Education Secretary Arne Duncan -- would be a fair, serious look at public education today.

It wasn’t even close.

The events, panels and discussions were sharply tilted toward Obama's school reform agenda -- focused in part on closing failing schools, expanding charter schools and using standardized test scores to evaluate teachers. It gave short shrift to the enormous backlash against the plan from educators and parents around the country who say that Obama's education priorities won't improve schools but will narrow curriculum and drive good teachers out of the profession.

NBC seemed to take for granted that Obama’s education policies are sound and will be effective. Seasoned journalists failed to ask hard questions and fell all over their subjects to be sympathetic. It was a forum for people to repeatedly misstate the positions of their opponents.

The one school district that was the subject of a panel was New Orleans, which was remade after Hurricane Katrina with public charter schools. (Never mind that charter schools educate less than five percent of the schoolchildren in the country and can never be a systemic solution to the troubles that ail urban districts.)

A panel on innovation was packed with charter school folks, sending a message that only charter schools are innovative, which they, by and large, are not.

Before Education Nation's televised panels, some participants in New York were treated to a screening of the movie "Waiting for Superman," a documentary that significantly skews the reality of public education. It, for example, blames teachers unions for failing schools, without noting that the problems remain the same in non-unionized states. On a panel that followed, the only person defending teachers was American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten, who could have used some help.

Matt Lauer interviewed Obama; Tom Brokaw interviewed Duncan; Andrea Mitchell interviewed D.C. schools chancellor Michelle Rhee. (“Michelle, you’ve been through so much, and you’ve been so plainspoken,” Mitchell said sympathetically, ignoring the fact that Rhee has, in fact, not been as plainspoken as all that.)

Other journalists interviewed other school reformers with little journalistic pushback. Sometimes credit was given where credit wasn't due. David Gregory said to Duncan:

“President Bush isn’t often given credit for driving accountability because No Child Left Behind became unpopular, and yet, indeed, that accountability is what the Obama administration has built on.”

Actually, No Child Left Behind became unpopular because it didn’t create real accountability and subverted teachers by putting standardized tests at the center of the learning experience.

The Obama administration is taking that obsession with standardized tests to a new level, funding programs that pay teachers by the test scores of their students. It doesn't seem to matter that such merit pay plans have been used off and on since the 1920s with less than stellar results, as education historian Diane Ravitch explained in this piece.

NBC is not the only media outlet to seemingly take for granted that Obama’s education initiative is the answer to fixing failing schools.

The recent project by the Los Angeles Times, in which some 6,000 teachers were evaluated solely on the basis of student test scores, was another example of a news organization promoting a highly controversial way to assess teachers as effective. The largest study to date on the “value-added” method of teacher evaluation, released earlier this month, found that linking test scores to teachers’ pay was not effective. That didn’t stop the Obama administration from handing out hundreds of millions of dollars to states to develop such programs. The study and earlier ones like it were not a big topic at Education Nation.

The New York Times' film critic reviewed “Waiting for Superman” and seemed to take as gospel the tendentious narrative in the film. Meanwhile, CBS anchor Katie Couric wrote about her Waiting for Superman impressions on her Couric & Co. blog:

“I was so inspired by how this documentary shines a light on so many issues -- the heartbreak of kids who don’t get into charter schools, the controversy over teachers’ unions and the failure factories that churn out kids who are unprepared or drop out in terrifying numbers. I admire the revolutionaries who are out there shaking up a broken system. So I became obsessed with covering with this story from multiple angles, and we’ve decided to spend a great deal of time this fall and throughout the school year looking at education.”

Capus and Lisa Gersh, NBC's president of strategic initiatives, told journalists at the National Press Club in Washington D.C. last week that the televised Education Nation Summit was not designed to support Obama's agenda and was intended to be the start of the network's focused look at education. Couric announced that CBS, like NBC, was launching a series of reports on education.

Education, the subject that people have long said was super-important but that never got much coverage, is suddenly huge news. The question is why it is not being examined with the same skeptical view that, say, Obama’s health care proposal was.

Obama-style school reform also became the focus of not one but two episodes of the Oprah Winfrey Show last week, though one would not expect a journalistic objectivity from an entertainment show.

On one episode, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg used the occasion to announce to the world that he was donating $100 million to the ailing Newark, N.J., public school system for Obama-style business-driven reforms.

The money comes with strings, the most important that he, a man with no background in education reform, gets to decide what schools are working, according to this story in New Jersey's Star-Ledger.

Billionaires picking out school districts they want to help: What a great way to fund public education.

All this cheerleading for the administration can’t take away from this: There are excellent reasons, as well as evidence, to show that many of its education policies won’t work, and some may be counterproductive.

The biggest study of charter schools yet shows that only 17 percent of them are more effective than their neighborhood traditional public schools, and that more than double are worse. The tough prescription that Obama and Duncan have written for failing schools has proved to be more punitive than helpful, and has not worked in improving a majority of the schools that have undergone the process.

There will come a time when this current wave of “reform” proves as unsuccessful as past fads -- and journalists may look back on their fawning coverage and be very, very sorry that they gave their objectivity on this subject.

The problem is that the schools will likely be in worse shape then than they are today.

http://voices.washingtonpost.com/answer-sheet/school-turnaroundsreform/the-wrong-way-to-cover-school.html

John Adams and Yes We Can

By: Michael Holzman

 

The latest report on Black male students and public education from the Schott Foundation—Yes We Can—continues the Foundation’s effort to focus national attention on education as a fundamental civil right.  Most of the research involved in the report was highly detailed.  But it is useful to step back and think about our education system in historical and international perspectives.  One of our nation's Founders, John Adams, was adamant that the duty of the state (the state of Massachusetts, in this case) is to ensure that the quality of education does not vary with where a student lives or the position in society of his parents.  Have we achieved that, or do those two factors now define our education system?  I am sorry to conclude from the findings in this latest report that the latter is the case.  The resources available to students, their opportunities to learn, change from block to block, depending on town boundaries and local tax levies.  The resources needed by students vary as much, if not more, depending on the income and education levels of their parents.  The first of these—variations in school resources due to location—is unheard of in most developed countries.  It is not true in Canada; it is not true in Britain; it is not true in Western Europe.  We accept property-tax-based school finance a natural because it is how things are done in much of the US.  John Adams would not.  The second—variations in opportunities to learn based on a family’s “station in society” seems as natural to many.  It would not seem so to John Adams.

John Adams was right.

Civil rights groups hit Race to the Top

by: Tim Wheeler

 

WASHINGTON - President Obama defended his "Race to the Top" education reform program in a July 29 speech to the National Urban League just days after they and five other civil rights organizations criticized his plan in a hard-hitting report .

Race to the Top offers $4.35 billion in competitive grants to states that commit to the Obama education reform program. The president said charges that Race to the Top is not "targeted at those young people most in need" are "absolutely false" and he vowed to veto cuts in the program.

His reaction suggested that he had not read the civil rights groups' 17-page report. It is a balanced critique. It praises measures in the president's program that promote public education, but also provides a list of recommendations including a call for "universal, high quality, early childhood education" and "universal access to highly effective teachers" paid higher wages and with better working conditions.

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