A new report by LFA and Grunwald Associates, with support from AT&T, examines how parents perceive the value of mobile devices, how they see their children using mobiles, and what they think of the possibilities for mobile learning.
Empowering Professionals
Blog Entries
I've been out of commission for a couple days with a nasty bug I picked up from my infant daughter (who's now better.) So imagine my surprise when I finally open my computer and find a Newsweek cover article titled "The Problem With Education is Teachers."*
Haven't read the article itself yet, but I just have to say--WOW. What an inflammatory, unfair and thoroughly irresponsible title to add to any article. More later....
The problem with journalism is lousy journalists and editors. Unbelievable.
* Text corrected 3/8/2010 ...
Principal Stephanie Smith of Seaford Middle School has seen the highs and lows of school reform. She has seen her school shake off the stigma it bore as a school "in need of improvement." (Delaware named her its 2008 Principal of the Year for her role in that school's remarkable transformation.) She has seen the school sustain its students' performance despite the fact that many more now live in poverty than did just a few years ago. She has even seen the school begin to stem the tide of its highest-performing students into a neighboring charter school.
But now she worries that the school might not be able to keep clearing the bar that No Child Left Behind sets higher every year. And she faces the prospect of slipping back into "needs improvement" status less than a decade after her school emerged from it.
We recently spoke with Smith, who told us the remarkable story of her school's triumphs and struggles in the era of No Child Left Behind.
Public School Insights: What kind of a school is Seaford Middle School?
Smith: It is a grade six through eight middle school. We are the only middle school in our school system. We have four feeder elementary schools and we feed into one high school. We have about 750 students.
Seaford is a demographically diverse school. We really don’t have a majority population anymore—we run about 40% African-American and Caucasian populations, with a Hispanic population as well. We are 71% free and reduced price lunch. That number has gone up drastically, probably since you last got information on our school. We are about 21% special ed.
Public School Insights: What do you think prompted the rise in free and reduced price lunch numbers?
Smith: I think just the status of the economy. Our community—the city of Seaford and its outlying areas—has been given the title of the poorest community in ...
Every time you create a new set of carrots and sticks, you create a new way for people to game the system. So what's a policy maker to do? Focus on capacity, not just incentives.
We've all heard about the unintended consequences of No Child Left Behind. Schools narrow their curricula. They focus on "bubble kids," students just under the passing bar. And they teach to tests.
Defenders of NCLB have argued that schools should just do the right thing and let everything else fall into place. Some schools do, but I don't think this is a compelling argument.
What, after all, is the point of a law that promotes perverse behavior? If we can count on everyone to do the right thing, no matter the consequences, then why do we need accountability systems at all? Fear is a powerful motivator. It can push good people to violate their own instincts about what's best for children.
The carrots cherished by some policy makers are also troubling. Pay for performance schemes assume that, in Linda Perlstein's words, staff have "reserves of greatness they are withholding from children simply because they don’t ...
North Carolina’s Laurel Hill Elementary School is a model school. Its rural, diverse and high-poverty student population consistently exceeds state targets on standardized test scores, and the school has made AYP each year since 2003. It has also been recognized for its great working conditions.
But getting there wasn’t easy. In the early 2000s, one challenge stood out: The school failed to make AYP because of the performance of its students with disabilities (known in North Carolina as its “exceptional children”). Rather than throw up their hands at the daunting task of educating special education students, staff at Laurel Hill made lemonade out of lemons. They took the opportunity to study their school and its structure, revise its schedule and move to full inclusion. The result? A Blue Ribbon school that can confidently say it is meeting the needs of all its children. Principal Cindy Goodman recently told us about the school and its journey.
Public School Insights: How would you describe Laurel Hill Elementary?
Goodman: Laurel Hill is a pre-K through fifth grade community school. We have about 500 students and are located in an extremely rural community. We have a very nice facility, which is about 11 years old.
We have an outstanding staff that holds our children to very high standards for behavior, for academics…just high standards in general.
Public School Insights: What kind of population does the school serve?
Goodman: Our community, the little town of Laurel Hill, is located in Scotland County, North Carolina. The county currently has, and for a good while has had, the highest unemployment rate in the state. So it is a very poor area. Between ...
Many school reformers have eagerly adopted the language of the business world, and that makes a lot of people nervous. I'm not worried by the business speak per se. I'm more concerned about what happens when we draw the wrong lessons from business.
The School Administrator has a wonderful set of articles this month on a promising reform strategy that first came from the business world: the balanced scorecard. They make for very good reading, because they take us far beyond the standard story about reforms inspired by business. You can pretty much sum up that story in four short sentences: Focus on outcomes. Be innovative. Give people choices. Get the incentives right.
The balanced scorecard goes a good deal farther. It looks at process, a word that gets precious little respect these days. Here's how Atlanta superintendent Beverly Hall describes it in The School Administrator's feature article:
All school systems focus on student achievement — these are the critical outcomes that we track as educators. But to get to those outcomes, you must measure and evaluate everything we do as a district. The balanced scorecard is our way to look across all ...
If you want to see a brief but vivid portrayal of a teacher's day, have a look at the following clip. (The linked image below will take you offsite, to a YouTube video.)
The clip uses a split screen to compare a teacher's morning to that of a real estate broker. The teacher packs in several hectic hours before the broker even emerges from his bedroom.
The clip comes from The Teacher Salary Project, which is putting together a feature-length documentary film on the lives of teachers. We first learned about this film when we interviewed author Dave Eggers, who is one of the film's producers.
(Hat Tip: Sara Bernard.) ...
"Every teacher for himself!" Is that the new rallying cry of school reformers? Well, no. But school reform ideas that are getting the lion's share of press don't necessarily do much to foster a climate of collaboration in our schools. If we're really aiming for dramatic improvement in our schools, that's a big deal.
Here, for example, is an idea that has been gaining ground recently: Sack the bottom 25% of teachers up for tenure each year. How do you identify the bottom 25%? By measuring their students' growth in state test scores, of course. A new study (PDF) suggests that this tactic may raise a district's test scores in the long run. This finding buoyed the spirits of folks at the National Council on Teacher Quality, who urged districts to "hold to their guns" and give the bottom quarter the axe, year after year.
The study's authors are a bit more cautious. They note that the effects of this strategy could be "modest by some standards" and that they might reflect "changes in class or school dynamics outside of a teacher's control." They also limit their analysis to teachers for whom test data are available in the first place--a minority, as it turns out. Still, they feel that student performance on tests should be fair game when it comes time to make decisions about personnel.
Maybe. But I'm more worried by the collatoral damage of draconian firing policies. What will happen to the climate of a school where every new teacher knows he has a one-in-four chance of getting the boot in a couple of years? It's a truism by now that staff in good schools work together and share responsibility for their kids. In the best low-income schools, any given child will have seen any number of ...
A couple of days ago, I wrote that the President's proposed budget gave staff development short shrift. That may have been a premature judgment.
The languge of the budget may in fact contain the seeds of good news. The budget includes a program called "Excellent Instructional Teams," which includes most of the staff development money for 2011. That program, the budget tells us, should "promote collaboration and the development of instructional teams that use data to improve practice." This new language suggests that the feds may have seen the light on what makes for good staff development.
It is too early to celebrate, however. The overall cut in Title II funds will keep some people up at night, and we don't yet know if the change in language will fuel a change in practice.
At the very least, though, champions of strong professional development will have something to hang their hats on. ...
Read President Obama's budget, and you'll get the distinct sense that alternative certification works and staff development doesn't. The first of these gets a big shot in the arm, and the second (Title II) suffers a pretty big blow. Get the right people into the schools, the thinking seems to go, and the rest will sort itself out. But reality is more complicated than that. All roads will take us back to staff development.
Critics argue that federal staff development dollars haven't done much good, so why keep them flowing? Much better to funnel them into alternatives. The critics have a point, or maybe half a point. We haven't gotten enough bang for our federal buck, so it's tough to justify calls for more Title II money unless we can show that we will spend the money well. Of course, alt cert programs haven't yet proven their worth either, but they're newer, some are promising, and none carry the taint of "status quo."
But it would be very wrong to turn our backs on staff development because it has so often been botched in practice. Stephanie Hirsh of the National Staff ...
We're hearing a lot about Chicago's efforts to turn around struggling schools. Read the papers, and you'll get the impression that a handful of charter schools are the only bright stars in a dark firmament. But that impression is wrong.
At least one other set of schools has been posting big gains. Eight schools working with a Chicago non-profit called Strategic Learning Initiatives (SLI) have made large strides in student performance in the past few years. And their model is quite different from the turnaround models that get the most press.
They do not fire teachers. Their principals don't get the axe. But they do use concrete strategies to change what happens in their classrooms. Researchers from AIR reviewed SLI's results and called on policy makers to take note:
Well before decisions are made to reconstitute schools under the mandates of NCLB, school districts would be wise to consider far less drastic, but clearly powerful, interventions such as [SLI's] Focused Instruction Process.
As school closings and charter takeovers capture the popular imagination, we are apt to ignore other options. SLI President John Simmons recently told us about the success of his approach in Chicago.
Public School Insights: There is a lot of talk right now about turning around struggling schools. The model that is most mentioned, and has been enshrined in federal policy, is reconstitution, which involves firing the principal and replacing at the least half the teachers at a school. The thinking is that this process is required to create the conditions needed for success. Does your experience bear that out?
Simmons: We think that there's a better way. Reconstitution can work. You can get results. But our experience, which includes not only the last almost four years with our most recent network of schools but also the last 15 years using a similar model in schools in the lowest income neighborhoods in Chicago, shows that our model is getting better results than the reconstitution model. And it is lower cost and faster.
Public School Insights: What kinds of results have you been getting?
Simmons: [Part of our process is weekly assessments of student achievement.] By the way, we call it a “process” and not a “program” because teachers and principals have an opportunity to modify and improve it on a regular basis.
We are seeing that schools are able to improve their weekly assessments pretty quickly after starting our process, typically after the first six weeks. Children ...
SIGN UP
Sign up for our e-newsletter on public school success.
A VISION FOR GREAT SCHOOLS
On this website, educators, parents and policymakers from coast to coast are sharing what's already working in public schools--and sparking a national conversation about how to make it work for children in every school. Join the conversation!
