Chief Academic Officer Terry Edwards talks about how Everett Public Schools has dramatically improved graduation rates over the past seven years.
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Editor's note: Rebecca Mazonson is a junior at Brown University. She interned at the Learning First Alliance during the summer of 2010.
As a graduate of a single-sex high school, I can attest to the premise that the single-sex educational experience can be a liberating one, free of many of the distractions and frustrations of coeducation. My classmates and I felt little pressure to wear makeup or be “coy” in the classroom. We readily embraced (consciously or not) the school’s motto of “women learning, women leading,” pushing ourselves to explore academic and career realms that suited our interests, rather than subscribing to gender stereotypes or traditional roles.
I don’t know that this is true for all students who attend or attended single-sex schools. But I contest the assumption that a separation of genders in school necessarily reinforces gender stereotypes. Indeed, I am constantly aware of the ways many of my female classmates at my co-educational university constrain themselves in the classroom or lecture hall, and usually without being aware of it. I have discussed with professors the perennial problem I witness of male students being readier to ask questions or make presentations than female students. (I am talking in the aggregate here. There are clearly exceptions, and I like to think that I am one of them). Having attended an ...
Editor's note: Samantha Abrams is a rising senior at Dartmouth College. She interned at the Learning First Alliance during the spring of 2010.
The recent phenomenon of single-sex public schools prompts the question of whether these schools are better than co-ed schools at preparing students academically and socially for the future.
There are a variety of academic arguments that proponents of single-sex schools make in favor of all-boys and all-girls schools. One of these arguments is that students are able to concentrate better in class when they are not being distracted by members of the opposite sex. This argument, of course, assumes that members of the opposite sex are more distracting to students than members of their own sex. As a student who was recently in the K-12 school system, I can say that this statement is not inherently true; while members of the two sexes have different ways of distracting each other, they don’t necessarily distract each other more or less than the other sex.
Proponents of single-sex schools also make social arguments for these schools. They say: there is less peer pressure; students feel more comfortable; students become more confident; students develop stronger same-sex relationships; and classroom behavior is better. I counter these arguments, saying: the social pressures from people of the same sex are not fewer, just ...
Seven years ago, Washington’s Everett School District awoke to a harsh reality. A change in how the state calculated graduation rates revealed that only 53% of the district’s students graduated on-time. Officials were shocked and embarrassed. They sprang into action.
Today, Everett’s on-time graduation rate is just under 84%. Its extended graduation rate is just over 90%. And the improvement has occurred across the board, in all ethnic groups and special populations.
To what do they credit their success? Getting a group of committed adults focused on the problem and meeting regularly to try to solve it. And they also moved from numbers to names—getting personal about who is not on track to graduate and what they can do about it. Everett’s Chief Academic Officer Terry Edwards recently told us more.
Public School Insights: Your district has recently gotten some press because of its improved graduation rates. Could you tell me a bit about the success you have had?
Edwards: It is something that I call “An overnight wonder that took seven years to get here.”
About seven years ago, in 2003-2004, the state of Washington changed how it calculated graduation rates. It moved from looking at the number of graduates in the senior class plus those who dropped out over the past four years to a cohort model, the on-time model that the federal government has adopted. This model looks at the number of kids who enter in ninth grade and the number who graduate four years later.
When we converted to that model, our district’s graduation rate was 53%. That was very hard for Everett to accept, because we had always believed that we were a very good school district and doing a good job. 53% was shocking and embarrassing. And it did not seem to follow what we perceived as reality. We did not see hundreds of children standing around on street corners in ...
It is fast becoming a received truth that teachers, teachers, teachers make all the difference in a child's academic performance. But what if analysis of students' scores on state tests threw that belief into question? It may have in L.A.
That's not the impression you'll get from the recent L.A. Times story on teacher quality. The Times used student test data to estimate 6,000 L.A. teachers' relative effectiveness. The story suggests that it's all about the teachers:
Year after year, one fifth-grade class learns far more than the other down the hall. The difference has almost nothing to do with the size of the class, the students, or their parents.
It's their teachers.
But blogger Corey Bunje Bower had a look at the report behind the Times analysis, and he drew another conclusion. The Times notes that the best teachers aren't all crammed into the "best" schools. Bower weighs the implications of that finding:
Teacher quality varies widely within schools--just as with test scores, there's far more variation within schools than across schools. ("Teachers are slightly more effective in high- than in low-API schools, but the gap is small, and the variance across schools is large"). Which means that the highest performing schools don't have all the best teachers and the lowest performing schools don't have all the worst teachers. Which means that something other than teacher quality is causing schools to be low and high performing. Which means we should probably focus our attention on more than just teacher quality.
Of course teachers are very important. Why would anyone teach if teachers didn't matter? But should we put ALL our eggs in the teacher basket?
Other bloggers have raised strong objections to the L.A. Times piece. Can we trust the tests? Can we trust "value-added" analysis of test scores? Is it right to publish names and even pictures ...
An article in yesterday's New York Times reminds us that the common definition of "achievement gap" is quite limited. We usually define it in terms of proficiency on state tests. (In other words, how many kids passed?) We seldom define it in terms of absolute performance on those tests. (How well did kids do?) You can raise the cut score on the state test and watch your gaps widen overnight, but your absolute achievement gap won't have changed a bit. That's what happened in New York State.
It's an object lesson for every state in the country and a reminder that we always need to keep both definitions well in mind. ...
Earlier this week the California Department of Education awarded (though only temporarily) $315 million in School Improvement Grants to over 100 schools in 31 districts. These grants are designed to reform persistently low-achieving schools, so this is great news, right? Over 100 low-performing schools have a better chance to improve.
The problem is that California identified 188 persistently low-achieving schools back in March, which means that not all the schools that need this money got it.
Now, this was a competitive grant program. Districts containing schools identified as persistently low-achieving applied for the funds to reform them, knowing that the state would decide whom to fund. So we knew going in there would be winners and losers.
The kicker is how they chose the winners:
[S]tate officials gave priority to those [districts] that requested grants to help turn around all campuses on the list. Districts that didn’t request money for each of their lowest-achieving schools were placed behind others for funding, even if the other districts didn’t score as highly ...
The big education story these days is the chilling effect of higher cut scores on New York State tests. The miracle in New York City seemed a bit less miraculous after after the state raised the bar. Most of the sniping among pundits and wonks has focused on the extent to which the new standard undermines the claims of New York City's school reformers. But I think the story raises even bigger questions. For example:
Where Have the Media Been for so Long?
Cut scores have by all accounts been low since 2006, but, as late as 2009, only a few newspapers had addressed that fact. Critics like Diane Ravitch had raised the issue for years. In August of 2009, teacher Diana Senechal showed that students could guess their way to a passing score. Only in September did the New York Times cover that story--and their story didn't mention Senechal.
By the time the Times ran the story, state board Chancellor Merryl Tisch was already on the case. She had the real courage to declare the cut scores bogus and call for a higher standard.
But in this case, the fourth estate lagged behind. Given how heated and political the school reform debate has become, and how ready parties on all sides are to make grand claims about success or failure, that's bad news.
Why Do We Have Such a High Tolerance for Data that Obscure as Much as they Reveal?
The answer to that question is easy: politics. When so much of the debate is driven by ideology, PR and even fear, you can't expect truth-tellers to get rewarded. Those whose jobs depend on the scores point out problems at their own peril. Those who stake their political ...
Lieutenant General Benjamin C. Freakley is the commanding general of the United States Army Accessions Command (USAAC) and oversees recruiting for the U.S. Army's officer, warrant officer and enlisted forces. USAAC has joined forces with the National Association of State Boards of Education (NASBE) to support young people and boost graduation rates. (We wrote about this partnership in a blog posting several months ago. NASBE is a member of LFA.)
LTG Freakley recently spoke with us about the promise of greater collaboration between the military and schools.
Education: A National Security Issue
Public School Insights: Why do you think the military is getting involved in K-12 education?
LTG Freakley: I believe that the preparedness of our youth through education, health and conduct is a national security issue. Right now our young people, regardless of the tact they take for postsecondary, are limiting themselves. They are limiting themselves because they are not getting a good foundational education in K-12. They are not as healthy as they should be, with childhood obesity becoming an epidemic. And they get off track in their conduct, limiting what might be brilliant careers because they chose to get involved with gang violence, drugs, teenage pregnancy, etc.
It is disheartening to see all of this potential being limited. We believe that we have got to help our youth to achieve success through supporting our educators who, I believe, are undervalued in America—not recognized like they should be or supported like they should be. We ought to be as close to education as we can so we can sustain our all volunteer force and also so we can have an economically ...
Should we turn a blind eye to the excesses of PR campaigns that advance a cause we support? Should we tolerate overstatements and hype, as long as they are in the service of something we believe in? Not if the dubious means undermine the noble ends. I worry that some recent PR campaigns launched by combatants in today's school reform wars may allow the means to swamp the ends.
A recent commentator on school reform took a different view. He praised aggressive campaigns and likened the school reform movements they support to past movements for civil rights.
Movements, whether Martin Luther King's exposure of segregation as morally illegitimate, or Gandhi's exposure of the immorality of 'British Rule," are actually the proper political culmination of good ideas, brought about by the impatience with the slow movement of the chattering class.
I'm not sure the analogy really works. Laws enforcing segregation were wrong, full stop. The moral thing to do was clear: Strike them down. School reform, by contrast, doesn't often present such clear choices. So we should be careful not to draw parallels that lump critics of one school reform or another together with those who opposed the movement to end segregation.
History also reminds us that not all movements are created equal. Some movements that are fueled by true outrage and conviction can run off the rails and pervert their original aims when the need to advance The Cause overpowers all tolerance for nuance or doubt. Such movements can begin with a noble vision, but they often end by merely replacing one ...
If there's a test, then there's a way to game it. It's crazy to think that we should therefore abandon standardized tests. But it also makes no sense to rely on test scores without looking for supporting or conflicting evidence elsewhere. Yesterday's New York Times piece on the City's gifted and talented Kindergartens drives this point home.
Two years ago, the score on a standard city-wide test became the sole basis for admission to those programs. Since then, the share of black and Hispanic children in those programs has plummeted. It appears that wealthy parents are buying pricey test-prep books and services for their children. Poor children are, of course, priced out of that market.
I don't know how healthy it is for wealthy four year olds to "turn to jelly on test day" because they've absorbed their parents' fears that a low score will blow their chances at Harvard. But I'm at least as worried about the fate of poor kids when the testing system gives rise to a market whose very premise is that money buys advantage.
As usual, the intentions behind the testing program were noble. Schools chancellor Joel Klein wanted an objective measure that put all children on an equal footing.
But I'm not sure the unintended outcome should really surprise us. We need look no further than the college admissions industry to see what can happen. Wealthy parents buy test prep services, and some even hire college consultants to help them craft the perfect ...
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