When you get what you pay for

It is often said, in certain circles, that “money doesn’t matter in education.”  But, as that well-known social commentator, Deep Throat, observed, to understand what’s going on, we need to “follow the money.”

 

This chart shows the dramatic per pupil spending differences between some of our nation’s largest school districts, a sample of wealthy public school districts and three of our most prestigious private schools.

The three schools on the far right are well-regarded private schools, the American equivalents of Eton and Harrow.  They are boarding schools, so the typical boarding charges ($12,000 annually) have been deducted from these figures.  The remainder, the per student expenditure, averages $62,000.  Some of this is from tuition, some from the school’s endowment and other sources. 

The middle three columns represent the per student expenditures of school districts in upper-middle-class communities well-known for the quality of their schools. Their per student expenditure averages just under $20,000, less than a third of what the private schools spend.

Chicago, Los Angeles and Baltimore are large urban districts with all the challenges that go with that.  They spend, on average, $12,000 per student, less than one-fifth what private schools spend.

Phillips Exeter, St. Paul’s and Deerfield Academy have classes that average 11 students (remember this when you hear someone say,  “class size doesn’t matter”); student-to-teacher ratios of 5:1, and send their students to Harvard, Columbia, Georgetown, University of Pennsylvania, Yale, Dartmouth, Stanford, Brown, Middlebury, Princeton, Tufts and Amherst.

Presumably, the parents of the children sent to Phillips Exeter, St. Paul’s and Deerfield Academy know that investing in their children’s futures is worth the price. 

So it should be for all children in this increasingly inequitable society.

EdVox Blog: NY 2011 test scores are no time to celebrate

The citywide test scores for New York’s public school students were released this week, and Zakiyah Ansari from the NYC Coalition for Educational Justice voices concern about blowing modest gains out of proportion:


"Without a real commitment to providing the supports parents, students and educators need to get us out of this crisis, a small improvement measured by questionable scores that are already so low is nearly irrelevant."

Read Zakiyah Ansari's entire blog post, published on the EdVox blog, here.

Do away with "test-and-punish" for real opportunity to learn

By Monty Neill, Ed.D.

Executive Director, FairTest

With the teaching profession and public schools under attack as never before, teachers, parents and others rallied in Washington, D.C., at the end of July to “Save Our Schools.” The two most prominent themes at the SOS event were:

1. The nation’s failure to address poverty or to provide every child with a strong opportunity to thrive and learn, and
   
2. The overuse and misuse of standardized tests imposed by No Child Left Behind and made worse by the actions of many states and districts. 

Teachers, students, parents and many others recognize that testing mania has gone way too far. It undermines the limited educational opportunity low-income youth do have.

Under NCLB, the rate of improvement on National Assessment of Educational Progress reading and math scores has slowed or stagnated compared with the prior decade. This is true in both reading and math. It affects low-income and minority group students, English language learners and students with disabilities. (See here for a detailed report on this: http://www.fairtest.org/detailed-fairtest-study-naep-results-shows-nclb-ha.)

Meanwhile, the graduation rate barely reaches 50 percent in many cities. Harsh disciplinary policies combine with the boring drudgery of schooling-reduced-to-test-prep to drive many youth out of school. Far too many end up in the criminal justice systems. (For the links between testing, discipline and the school-to-prison pipeline, see http://www.fairtest.org/position-paper-nclb-and-school-prison-pipeline). 

Lack of funding and unwise testing policies combine to narrow the curriculum. Children lose access to subjects that engage them, missing out on knowledge and skills they will need as adults. Reducing instruction to test prep in reading and math, as is happening in many schools, compounds the problem. Children of color and low-income youth lose the most, in part because their families can’t afford to make up for what they don’t get in school (see http://www.fairtest.org/racial-justice-and-standardized-educational-testin). 

The U.S. must shift the “education reform” paradigm from test-and-punish to helping schools improve. The Forum on Educational Accountability, which I chair, has proposed ways to do that (see http://www.edaccountability.org). The recommendations include:

• reduce the amounts and consequences of testing, while supporting high-quality assessment;
• ensure strong professional growth for teachers;
• fully fund the federal Title I and IDEA Part B programs (respectively, funds for low income youth and students with disabilities); and
• provide high-quality early childhood education.

Other alliances and groups recommend similar changes. FairTest, for example, explains how to overhaul assessment and evaluation (see http://www.fairtest.org/fact-sheet-better-way-evaluate-schools-pdf). 

Unfortunately, the test-and-punish ideology of leading elements in both political parties, backed by some large foundations and major corporations, will be tough to dislodge – but dislodge it we must. That was the purpose of the SOS rally. One event in D.C. is only a step on our way, not the end. Winning the change requires educating, organizing and mobilizing the vast numbers of people who know we cannot defund or test our way to educational improvement. That work is our main task.

Public schools continue to outperform charters

Charter school advocates claim that they produce better results for children, but educational achievement as measured by the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) does not bear this out.

NAEP Grade 8 Reading scores for 2009 showed that students in charter schools were much more likely to score below the Basic level than students in other public schools and less likely to score at the Proficient level.

Both students who are not eligible for National School Lunch Program (a measure of poverty) – that is, students from more prosperous households – and students who are eligible because they come from low-income families do better in non-charter public schools than in charter schools.

White, non-Hispanic students do better in charter than in non-charter public schools, as measured by NAEP Grade 8 Reading scores, while Hispanic students do about the same. Black students do better in non-charter public schools and Asian students do considerably better in non-charter than in charter public schools.

The numbers paint a telling portrait. As a nation, we must commit ourselves to investing in public education – a system that serves the majority of our children.

Charter schools have proven to be a lackluster attempt at education reform. What the data tell us is that public schools continue to serve our children better than charter schools, and it makes sense to invest our taxpayer dollars in public education, where it can have the greatest impact.

VOYCE: The high price of zero-tolerance policies

Today’s guest blogger, Stephanie Mayo, is a student leader with Voices of Youth in Chicago Education, an organizing collaborative for education justice led by students of color from seven communities throughout the city of Chicago. Feeling powerless to make positive changes at her middle school, she joined VOYCE two years ago because she saw the group as a force for including the student voice in local education reform. Through VOYCE, she is working to make sure that students have a say in the education policies that affect their lives.

By Stephanie Mayo

VOYCE Student Leader

Albany Park Neighborhood Council

Every day, we students experience overly harsh school discipline measures in action, and see the effect that this approach – known as zero tolerance – has on us and our school culture. Because zero tolerance relies on multi-day suspensions, expulsions, and arrests for even minor or first-time offenses, it is a barrier to building the trusting relationships with school staff that we students need to succeed.

We are glad that school administrators across the nation are finally realizing that zero tolerance does not work, especially in light of the results of the recent study from Texas that examined the impact zero tolerance policies are having on student success.

With research showing proof that being suspended and/or expelled increases a student’s chance of dropping out and being incarcerated, it’s time to stop using suspensions and expulsions to address inappropriate behavior and instead support more effective ways to prevent and respond to misconduct. We don’t need to be arrested, pushed out onto the street, and watched every day by police cameras. We need college counseling, restorative justice, peer and adult mentorship, and mental health supports.

Truly serious problems with school safety, like bringing a gun to school, happen only when young people fall through the cracks of our education system. Zero tolerance doesn’t close the cracks in the system — it just makes them wider by pushing young people onto the streets and into prisons.

In addition to being ineffective, zero tolerance is also expensive.

For example, in 2011 Chicago Public Schools spent $51.4 million on security guards but only $3.5 million on college coaches. And even while they are claiming to have a $600 million budget shortfall, CPS is also considering signing a $100 million, three-year contract to place police in our schools. Spending more and more money on the school-based police officers, metal detectors, and surveillance cameras needed to enforce zero tolerance only prevents the system from investing money on social services that would actually benefit the mental health and engagement of students in schools.

The impact of this uneven spending is that all the students in my school know the security guards and police officers, but we have no idea if our school even has a social worker.

At my school, there is only one college counselor to serve a class of more than 300 seniors, which prevented me and my friends from getting the individual attention we need. The lack of college counselors also results in a huge number of students not applying to college at all.
If our public schools devoted more funding to improving the relationships students have with their teachers and school staff, our students would do better in school. Safe spaces, challenging coursework, strong relationships, high expectations, and relevance to students’ lives are the keys to creating an encouraging environment that promotes academic excellence.

Voucher programs fail to deliver promised academic gains, national research review finds

The National Opportunity to Learn Campaign applauds the Center on Education Policy for its initiative and diligence in conducting a national review of a decade of research that, among other key findings, concludes that publicly funded voucher programs have failed to produce promised academic gains for thousands of students. 

After all these years of diverting taxpayer funds from public education, the research shows that low-income students who switched schools using a voucher program are not experiencing academic progress that is any more substantial than their public school peers, according to the CEP’s report, “Keeping Informed about School Vouchers: A Review of Major Developments and Research.” 

CEP reviewers found that students receiving vouchers in Milwaukee, Cleveland and Washington, D.C., showed no significance difference in reading and math achievement.

The CEP report confirms what those who oppose vouchers have been saying for a long time: Voucher programs are inherently flawed in that they siphon off precious public school dollars and don’t improve students’ educational experiences.

“Vouchers have never been the answer,” says Tina Dove, National Director for the Opportunity to Learn Campaign. “Instead, our state and federal leaders should be focusing on systemic solutions that invest in public education and work toward ensuring all children are guaranteed a fair and substantive opportunity to learn as a civil right.”

The privatization of public education through vouchers means that public dollars are used to support private schools, which often discriminate against students with physical and learning disabilities and English language learners, some of our most vulnerable students.

Other key findings in the CEP report include:

•  In the absence of evidence that voucher students do any better than their public school peers, advocates have shifted their rhetoric to focus more on the value of parent choice and overall parent satisfaction. 
  
• Initially created to aid low-income students in low-performing urban school districts, some newer voucher programs – such as those in Indiana, Wisconsin and Douglas County, Colo. – are open to middle-income and suburban families.
  
• Greater scrutiny of voucher research is necessary to help ensure that studies are not biased.
  

The National Opportunity to Learn Campaign, which is focused on eliminating the opportunity gap that is fueling a persistent achievement gap, aims to hold state and federal leaders accountable for ensuring that all children, regardless of where they live, have equitable access to an opportunity to learn. Competitive programs that benefit limited numbers of children are not the answer. We must, instead, make sure all children have access to the four building blocks research has proven are needed for academic success: high-quality early childhood education; highly prepared and effective teachers; rigorous college-prep curriculum; and equitable instructional materials and policies.

To read the entire CEP report, download it here: www.otlcampaign.org/resources/keeping-informed-about-school-vouchers-review-major-developments-and-research.

How much a family earns shouldn’t determine how much a child learns

Do Americans today believe it is fair for children from wealthy families to have greater opportunities to learn than children from poorer families?  Few would say so.  Most of us would say, most of us believe, that children at every income level should have an equal opportunity to learn.

But this chart of 8^th grade reading data from the National Assessment of Educational Progress — “The Nation’s Report Card” — shows an enormous gap in student reading proficiency based on family income.

After eight years in school, students from low-income families – those that are eligible to receive free and reduced-priced meals through the National School Lunch Program – have between one-third and a half the likelihood of reading at or above Proficient as those from families with higher incomes.  This holds true for Black, Hispanic, White and Asian students.

Our public education system was founded to create a level playing field,  so that all children would have an equal opportunity to learn, prosper and thrive.  How have we reached the point where the quality of the education a child receives is determined by the quantity of income available to his or her parents?

It is time to return to the vision of the Founders:  a first-class public education system for all children.