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A private school in New Jersey is running ads that subtly point to the effects of budget cuts on public schools. People in the public school system are, of course, getting a bit hot under the collar.
I can understand why. Recent budget cuts and ten years of school reform rhetoric have made it all the easier for private schools to portray themselves as the anti-public schools. "Public" is hardly a selling point for many wealthy parents.
The story from New Jersey describes only one school, but it gives us a whiff of something larger. If we're not careful, we'll portray public schools as the schools of desperate measures. I've seen it happen in the communities where I've lived.
Even before the budget cuts, public schools suffered from the perception that they were test prep factories. All the talk of shrinking curricula, endangered recess and constant tests of basic skills has hardly drawn in more wealthy parents.
NCLB boosters and detractors may have been complicit in harming the public school brand. The more alarm bells you sound about schools--or what's being done to them--the less appealing they can become. It can seem like a Catch 22.
The budget cuts may also drag down the brand. News of growing class sizes ...
Do you want to write a news story about school reform? Here's how you do it.
Choose two neighboring schools: a successful charter school and a struggling traditional public school. Then choose one student from each school. Profile both students' humble or even tragic beginnings, but then compare the charter school student's great efflorescence with the continued struggles of the other student.
Use the two students to contrast the promise of charters in general with the problems many urban public schools face. Toss in a sentence somewhere about the uneven quality of charter schools, but don't belabor that point.
That has become a tried-and-true formula for quite a few national journalists lately. The Wall Street Journal ran the most recent variation on the theme last Sunday. It's not a bad article on its own merits. The two students' stories are gripping, and the piece drives home the vital message that a school can change the odds for low-income students.
But can you imagine a national news outlet carrying the reverse story? Can you imagine a tale of two schools in which the traditional public school outshines the charter school down the street? Such stories surely exist, but there is apparently no need to write them in the current political climate. The media are, by and large, turning a blind eye to non-charter public schools that are succeeding against ...
[Editor's note: This is the second in a series of three posts on school-based health centers. Yesterday we briefly reviewed evidence supporting the use of these clinics. Today, Linda Gann talks about how her district founded two such centers. Soon Jennifer Danielson will take us through a day in the life of a nurse practitioner and tell us how her school-based health center has impacted kids.]
School-based health clinics have shown a great deal of promise in improving health outcomes for students, decreasing Medicaid costs at a time when every penny counts and even in potentially raising academic outcomes for low-income students. But yet there are only about 2,000 school-based health clinics (SBHCs) in the United States. Why don’t more districts take this approach? Does it seem too expensive? Too risky? Too separate from the district’s academic mission?
We recently spoke to Linda Gann, Communications and Special Project Coordinator in Colorado’s Montrose County School District RE-1J, to learn more about how her district came to embrace SBHCs. She also told us about her experience planning and implementing the district’s first school-based health clinic three years ago and its second a few months ago. Some keys to their success? The clinics get all their funding outside the general fund. They keep the community engaged in and informed about these efforts. And they consider not only the physical but also the mental health needs of students.
SBHCs alone will not close the achievement gap. But in Montrose, they are part of a broad strategy to address the needs of its growing Hispanic community. And that strategy appears to be working—for example, the district has a 20% higher graduation rate for Hispanic students than the state does.
Here's the story as Gann told it to us in a recent phone conversation.
About Montrose County School District RE-1J
I think from a researcher’s standpoint our district is almost a perfect universe, as far as data analysis goes. We are located in west central Colorado. We are five hours away from Denver. We are about 1,100 square miles, with two distinct communities. Montrose is about 30,000 people. Olathe is probably about 8,000 people. So we are not very large. And we are separated from our neighboring districts by open space, so it is really easy to tell where our school district stops and another one starts.
In our district, we have 6,500 students. District-wide, 54% receive a free or reduced price lunch. But on the south end of our district, which is close to the ski resort of Telluride, the houses are larger, and there are more families considered upper middle class. The free and reduced price lunch population at the elementary school in that area is about 11%. On the north end of our district, the free and reduced price lunch population is 80%. ...
It has long been suggested that health disparities between low-income kids and their peers contribute to the academic achievement gap. If you are looking for evidence to support that theory, a recent research review by Charles E. Basch—Healthier Students are Better Learners: A Missing Link in School Reforms to Close the Achievement Gap—offers it.
Long story short (and it is a long report), Basch describes the evidence showing how groups of children differ in the incidence of (and access to care for) each of seven “educationally relevant health disparities”: vision, asthma, teen pregnancy, aggression and violence, physical activity, breakfast, and inattention and hyperactivity. He also reviews evidence on the “causal pathways affecting educational outcomes” (I think that means he shows that not only are there disparities, but that these disparities actually do affect achievement).
One brief, and extremely simplified, example: Children with asthma sleep less. Children who sleep less tend to have worse academic performance than those who sleep more, because sleep influences cognitive function. Low-income children, for a variety of reasons, have asthma at higher rates than middle- and upper-income children. So even assuming ...
I'm of two minds about Joan Kronholz's recent piece on the value of competition. You need look no farther than the resurgence of "academic bees and bowls," Kronholz writes in Education Next, to see that competition is making a comeback. That could be good news, but we have to learn how to spread the academic wealth beyond the winner's circle.
There's much to like in Kronholz's article. It exalts nerdy things like spelling bees and celebrates the grit of students who rise to the top by studying very, very hard. It makes clear that those students aren't idiots savants who relate better to dictionaries than to people. And it reminds us that some knowledge is valuable or even fun for its own sake.
But Kronholz doesn't really acknowledge just how limited the reach of these competitions really can be. Sure, some ten million children across the country participate in the Scripps spelling bee, but that's still a fraction of eligible children in schools. And I'm fairly sure that too few children from our neediest schools are advancing to the finals.
Is it possible to bring the spirit of the Scripps spelling bee or the Intel Science Search to more schools and communities? Some years ago, a friend of ...
A couple of days ago, I wrote that I was uneasy with the growing criticism of our push to get many more US students into college. I worry that, without such a push, we'll give in to a system where family income remains the major gatekeeper for higher ed.
Several people pushed back in the comments section. They shared my unease with our current inequities, but they felt the college for all approach might make things worse for kids of all income levels. I still can't back away from my support for the college push, but thought I should share their very thoughtful and spirited comments. Here are a few excerpts:
First, from Keishla Caesar-Jones:
I don't think the answer is to make education a revolving door. Because we think everyone SHOULD go to college instead of everyone should have the chance to CHOOSE to go to college.
We have created a one-size fits all approach to education that puts everyone on the same track...come hell or high water. I live in Texas, and for the past few decades, all vocational programs were eliminated from public schools. The only ones to remain were mostly automotive in some places and cosmetology. What is wrong with being an auto ...
Back in 2005, Idaho’s Sacajawea Elementary School was struggling. The school had had four principals in four years, had never made Adequate Yearly Progress and lacked direction. But that changed with the arrival of Greg Alexander.
Now in his fourth full year as principal, Alexander presides over an award-winning school. After making AYP the last two years and seeing tremendous growth in its Limited English Proficient students' reading scores in particular, Sacajawea was named one of only three Distinguished Schools in Idaho for 2009. What are the keys to its success? A focus on recruiting and retaining excellent teachers, a consistent discipline strategy, a strong reading program and a host of other efforts designed to meet students’ individual needs. Principal Alexander recently told us more.
Public School Insights: How would you describe Sacajawea Elementary?
Alexander: Sacajawea Elementary is located in Caldwell, Idaho, a suburb of the capital city of Boise, just a good 20 minutes away. I actually live in Boise and commute to this community. We have a neat facility. We are up on a hill, overlooking what is called the Treasure Valley. There is a story about a young boy sitting on the edge of a cliff off beyond our school, looking over the valley as the wagon trains came through. The sagebrush was so high that you could only see their canopies. And we look up at the Cascade Mountains. It is just a really beautiful campus.
On this beautiful campus we serve 500 students from pre-K through fifth grade. We are 60% Hispanic and 23% ELL, or LEP [Limited English Proficient], students. We are about 36% Caucasian students, and then just a few percentage of a variety of other students. We have 7% that have special education needs, and we are 90% free and ...
Finally, a balanced and thoughtful review of the charter school movement!
The New York Times ran a long and fairly detailed story on charters over the weekend. Nothing in the story should surprise followers of the movement. There are some terrific charters, there are some lousy charters, some states' charters are better than others states' charters, and the best charters may be tough to replicate on a very large scale. But major media outlets have been slow to review both the promise and the struggles of the movement. In some cases, enthusiasm has swamped judgment. That's why the Times story stands out.
The Times takes a closer look at this enthusiasm. It describes a recent meeting of charter supporters as "the equivalent of the cool kids’ table in the cafeteria." Charter schools have become a cause célèbre for philanthropists, hedge fund managers, movie stars, rock stars, and politicians from the left and right.
You really can't begrudge the top charters their success with funders and the media. But it would be nice if traditional public schools that beat the odds ...
I continue to be amazed by the fact that it has become taboo in some school reform circles to talk about strategies for clearing away non-academic barriers to student learning. Calls to address problems like hunger or poor health are often seen as excuses for poor schooling rather than as concrete strategies to improve the lot of children. This tendency strikes me as very counterproductive.
It's not the job of schools to ensure medical care and proper nutrition, we're told. It's not the job of schools to do what parents should be doing. Those are lovely sentiments. Many teachers and other school staff would probably agree that the job they thought they signed up for didn't involve finding health care for children, getting them warm clothing in the winter, or offering them breakfast when they're hungry.
But such expectations don't mean a whole lot when a child in your classroom can't concentrate because she has a tooth ache, can't see the board because she needs eye glasses, or is hungry because she went without breakfast. High-sounding talk about what a school's "mission" should or shouldn't be must ...
Here's a message that rings out loud and clear in the current debate on school reform: If we can learn anything from struggling schools, it's what not to do. Those schools teach lessons about indifference, fecklessness and bull-headed resistance to change. It's best to wipe the slate very, very clean.
That is a counter-productive view of things. Struggling schools may be doing some things quite well, things that could anchor or enhance future turnaround strategies. More successful schools may be doing some things quite badly, and we can learn from their shortcomings. But our ideologies compel us to draw a thick, dark line between success and failure, which blinds us to the richer lessons we could be drawing from our experience.
Can "Bad" Schools Do Good Things?
We see ample evidence of this in current debates over school reform. When officials prepared to purge Central Falls High School in Rhode Island of its staff, they cited the school's very low math scores. Others noted swift gains in reading and writing scores. Even if the school needs a major overhaul, it seems unwise ...
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