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Equity
Blog Entries
Arizona's new immigration law has caused quite a stir. It allows police to question anyone if they "reasonably suspect" that person is in the country illegally. (Does that mean that people who have dark hair or speak with an accent will have to produce papers on demand?)
This law could have a big impact on schools. The Arizona School Boards Association worries that it could have a "chilling effect that will make some parents hesitant to send their children to school, even if those children are eligible to attend Arizona public schools." Schools often find themselves on the front lines of new immigration policies. Their mission to ...
Paying anyone--students or teachers--for test scores might be a bad idea. That's one of the big lessons I draw from Roland Fryer's now famous study of programs that pay students for good behavior, hard work or test results.
In fact, I think the implications of Fryer's study reach farther than that. The study offers a glimpse of how dangerous it could be to attach any big consequences--good or bad--to test scores alone. Here are some of the things I took away from Fryer's report:
We ignore inputs at our peril. It has become received wisdom that outcomes--and that usually means test scores--are all that really matter in school reform. But Fryer's study suggests that people in schools who call for more attention to inputs and the processes of arriving at outcomes aren't just whiners after all. The study found that cash rewards for certain behaviors--like reading more books--were more effective than cash for test scores. In fact, cash for scores seemed to have no effect on student achievement. Why? Incentives to do the right things, the things that promote learning, might well work better than incentives to do well on a test.
Getting kids too focused on their test scores may do them little good--and may even harm them--in the long run. Fryer's team noted that students getting cash for scores naturally grasped at test-taking strategies rather than, say, better study skills or deeper engagement in class materials:
Students [who were asked what they could do to earn more money on the next test] stated [sic.] thinking about test-taking strategies rather than salient inputs into the education production function or ...
The US economy is improving overall, but our schools will be among the last to share in the wealth. Deep and persistent economic troubles can be a deadweight on vital reforms.
A new survey of superintendents released by AASA reveals the depth of the problem. School leaders report that things were bad last year and worse this year. And they're likely to be even worse next year.
A full 80 percent expect cuts in state and local revenues before next year, and many expect those cuts to be more severe than they were last year.
The AASA report's title is as clever as it is grim: "A Cliff Hanger: How America’s Public Schools Continue to Feel the Impact of the Economic Downturn." The cliff, of course, is the abrupt drop in funding districts will face when stimulus funds run dry. And lest people think district cups have been running over with stimulus dollars, almost nine in ten superintendents "reported that [those] dollars did not represent a funding increase."
This is an important point, because it challenges the notion that districts had gobs of new money to support new reforms. System leaders were clearly grateful for ...
Yesterday, the Learning First Alliance, which sponsors this site, released the following statement on competitive grant programs:
The Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) has been a critical instrument in the federal government’s efforts to promote equity in education. The Learning First Alliance (LFA) believes equity must remain a non-negotiable goal of ESEA reauthorization. We applaud the Obama Administration’s proposal to increase federal resources for public schools in 2011. But we urge Congress to avoid provisions that could undermine, rather than support, equity.
For this reason, ESEA should not divert substantial federal resources into competitive grant programs. This strategy threatens to penalize low-income children in school districts that lack the capacity to prepare effective grant proposals. It risks deepening the disparities between rich and poor districts, effectively denying resources to the students who need them most.
Those who propose the competitive grants have good intentions, but too much focus on such grants might make the rich richer and the poor poorer. Small, rural districts can't generally afford grant writers. Foundations might be able to help ...
I want to write for the Wall Street Journal's opinion page. It would be lovely to have a job with so little accountability. It would be soothing to believe in things like faeries and the alchemy of the unfettered free market.
The Journal's recent hatchet job on common standards shows the lure of magical thinking. Don't do the hard work of figuring out what all students should really know and be able to do. Let the market's invisible hand shape the standards! "Higher standards will be the fruit of such reforms, not the driver." Sure.
The Journal points to Texas as a reminder that common standards will be politically difficult. And that's supposed to make us feel better about the alternative? Don't arguments for the glories of unregulated choice assume that the choosers will make rational decisions?
The Journal also tells us, without any sense of irony, that "National standards won't magically boost learning in the U.S." Well, yeah. A building won't magically rise ...
The "persistently low achieving" label can be a mixed blessing for schools. The stigma it brings can be just one more burden on a school already laboring under so many others. But it can also supply a bracing dose of reality to a school that sorely needs it. Leaders and policy makers will have to play their cards right if they want the label to have the best possible effect.
That's the main lesson I drew from an op-ed by Patrick Welsh in yesterday's Washington Post. Welsh, an English teacher at TC Williams High School in Alexandria, Virginia, makes an uneasy peace with the dreaded "low-achieving" label after the feds apply it to his school:
Labels can be unfair. They never tell the whole story. But though we never wanted to achieve our new label, I have no doubt that it will help us get back to achieving our best.
Welsh writes that the label forced him to face facts. The school sends its top students to colleges like MIT and Yale, but too many of its low-income students don't even master basic skills. Welsh wasn't prepared for the challenges he would face as the school's demographics changed. "I just never thought that I would need to teach reading in the 12th grade." Williams is a good school, he suggests, but only for some of its students.
But the label can also do harm. Students can feel the sting, too. Welsh quotes a 10th-grader: "There are a lot of smart, hard-working kids here who are ...
People in our business commonly talk about the challenges of teaching students who are still learning English. Not so Ted Appel of Luther Burbank High School in California. He sees these students as an asset.
More than half of his school's students are English language learners. About nine in ten come from low-income families. Though some schools might see such students as a drag on their test scores, Luther Burbank High welcomes them from neighborhoods far from its own. For Appel, such students enrich the school in ways standard school rating systems cannot begin to capture.
Appel recently told us about his school--and about the state and federal policies that can at times impede its vital work.
Public School Insights: Tell me a little bit about Luther Burbank High School.
Appel: It is a comprehensive high school with about 2100 students. About 90% are on free or reduced lunch. About 35% are Southeast Asian, mostly Hmong. We are about 25% Latino, about 20% African-American, and whatever percentage is left is from everywhere else in the world.
Public School Insights: So you must have a lot of different languages spoken in the school.
Appel: Yes. The predominant languages are Hmong and Spanish. For about 55% of our student population, English is not the primary language spoken at home. They are English learners.
Public School Insights: I would assume this population has a pretty big impact on your school and the teaching strategies you to use. Is that true?
Appel: Absolutely. One of the advantages of having such a large number of English learners is that we in a way do not have an English learner program. We try to foster a sense that all teachers are likely to be teaching English learners, so there is not a sense that English learners are the kids that somebody else ...
Newsweek excels at self-parody. It has long produced lop-sided and simplistic reporting on school reform. But this week's lead story takes the cake: "The Problem with Education is Teachers."
I had a hissy fit when I first read that inflammatory and irresponsible headline. And the lede pushed me over the edge: "Getting rid of bad teachers is the solution to turning around failing urban schools." Any journalist who writes about "the solution" to anything should get a pay cut. Another subtitle for the article just added insult to injury: "In no other profession are workers so insulated from accountability." Well, what about journalism?
It's too bad Newsweek ran such a poor piece. They could have learned a thing or two about schools and journalism if they had read Elizabeth Green's wonderful piece in last weeks' New York Times Magazine. Newsweek's authors interviewed only the usual reform suspects, ignored viewpoints that clashed with their angle, ignored the role of factors like staff development and curriculum, and went for the sensational headline. Green's story is a world apart from all that.
For one, Green asks logical questions about what has become received wisdom in some school reform circles. Can TFA really supply the needs of all our troubled urban and rural schools? If we fired "bad teachers" at the bottom and hired "great" ones at the top, would we really solve our education problems? What about the ...
We now know which sixteen states made the cut in the first round of Race to the Top applications. It seems many should be grateful that the Gates Foundation lent a hand.
I made some hasty calculations: If a state received help from Gates in putting together an application, it had a 56% chance of making the cut. If a state received no help from Gates, it had an 8% chance of making the cut.
So here are some questions to think about as we consider a future in which the feds shift much more money into competitive grants. Will wealthy foundations become the arbiters of who gets that money? Will they help preordain the winners and the losers? And is that necessarily a bad thing?
Remember that many poor and small districts can't easily pay for grant writers. They'll have to wait for the deus ex machina.
[Hat tip to @politicsk12 on Twitter. Any mistakes in my hasty calculations are all my own.] ...
We hear a lot about the need to ensure that all children succeed. But I'm beginning to think that the rhetoric of "all" has got too many reformers promising things they cannot possibly deliver. It's time to be more honest about the limitations of any single reform strategy.
In fact, many reforms getting the lion's share of attention these days might actually undermine the goal to serve all children. For example:
Competition for Federal Dollars. At first blush, this idea seems hard to reconcile with the aim to help "all kids." The feds want the states and districts to compete for federal money--and may the best, most innovative ones win. Doling the dollars out by formula, some claim, merely props up the status quo.
But shouldn't we be at least a tad concerned that the rich will get richer and the poor, poorer? Districts that can afford grant writers will have an edge. Those that cannot? It's too bad for them. "Unto him that hath, much shall be given, and from him that hath not...." (You know the rest.)
And if the feds aren't careful, they'll look like vengeful gods who visit the sins of the fathers upon the children. After all, it's children who stand to lose the most ...
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