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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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 ...
Last night, I got some forty spam comments from essay mills. This sort of thing happens pretty often, but it's beginning to get under my skin. Do many college or high school students actually submit essays from these mills as their own work? How big is this problem?
I have no love for comment spammers in general, but these spammers strike me as especially dastardly. Take, for example, college-paper.org, which has flooded this blog with comments. The site's tag line is "Intelligence Made Easy," which pretty much sums things up.
The site makes no pretense of helping students with their writing, as some essay sites do. "Are you missing out on the things you want to do because you are working on your research paper?" the site asks visitors. Get someone else to do your work, because, golly, thinking for yourself is hard. So is acting with integrity. (And do college students really need to cut down on the hours they spend studying?)
And here's the kicker: All those spam comments? Plagiarized from other sources. ...
Kalamazoo Central High School in Kalamazoo, Michigan made news when it beat out thousands of other schools for the honor of hosting President Obama as its commencement speaker. The President will speak before the school's 2010 graduates today.
His audience will include scores of students whose lives have been transformed by a stunning promise: free tuition at any public university in the state. At a time when many towns in Michigan are losing people, the "Kalamazoo Promise" has drawn a flood of new families into the city and the school system.
We recently spoke with Von Washington, the principal of the high school, about the President's visit and what it means for the school. Buoyed by the Promise, students have been streaming into AP classes and graduating in higher numbers.
Their passion, academic focus and hope for the future come through loud and clear in a video they created to make their case to the President. It clearly hit home.
Public School Insights: Kalamazoo Central High School recently received a big honor. You won the Race to the Commencement. As a result, President Obama is going to give your commencement address. What do you think set Kalamazoo Central apart from all of the other schools that tried to get the same honor?
Washington: It is really tough to tell. We are not entirely sure. But there are a couple of things that are distinct about us. One is that in the video presentation we really believe the students, through their words and their passion, gave a good idea to those viewing the video of what it means to go to school at Kalamazoo Central High School and what it means to be serious about your education.
Second, we are not a school that, by any means, has arrived. But we are a school, and a school district, definitely on an incline. We are reaching towards the sky, and we are moving towards our goals. And because it can appear that education is kind of in the doldrums financially and/or in achievement, I think that people recognize that if you are ...
Mike Town is a man with a mission. This Washington state environmental science teacher has spent the past 25 years educating students on environmental issues. His students do real-world projects designed to show the relevance of science, get them thinking about the environmental impact of their actions, and introduce them to the emerging green job sector.
One such project is the Cool School Challenge, a model he helped develop that engages students and teachers in reducing their school's greenhouse gas emissions. Now available for free on the web, this approach has saved over 1.6 million pounds of CO2 nationwide (and saved Redmond High School more than $100,000 over the past three years). And he and his students are scaling up the concept in their community, joining forces with the local government for the “Eco-Office Challenge.” ...
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 ...
We sorely need to define what we mean when we say "turnaround." That's becoming more and more apparent as the media start finding romance and drama in turnaround stories. Here's the problem: One person can see a budding turnaround story where another sees a school mired in failure. In this climate, ideology can trump evidence.
We also need to decide what the milestones on the road to excellence look like. That's not at all easy. Take, for example, the case of Central Falls High School in Rhode Island. President Obama points to its rock-bottom math scores as a reason for starting over. Teachers point to rising reading and writing scores as a reason for staying the course. Similar debates are swirling around other troubled schools in the state.
As the press hungers for stories about triumph and failure, the tendency to find conflicting meanings in the same numbers will only grow. And that will create the perfect climate for spin doctors. (Just look at Chicago. The "results" of the city's school reforms have been spun in so many ways by boosters and critics alike that I'm getting dizzy.) You would think you'd just know a turnaround story when you ...
Who cuts a more forlorn figure than a poor kid who graduates from college facing crippling loan payments during the Great Recession of 2010?
Unlike too many of her peers, that student was prepared for college when she came out of high school. She made it through college despite the financial pressures that kept her friends from finishing or even starting a degree. Now, saddled with crushing debts, she seems as far as ever from the better life we all promised her.
You'd think more people would be willing to give her a hand. Instead, we have a system that encourages debt without doing much to raise the real value of grants to low-income students. What's worse, a growing number of people in the policy world seem to be concluding that college just isn't worth it for poor kids like her.
So What's The Problem with Student Lending? Here's how Arne Duncan describes the current state of student lending:
Every year, taxpayers subsidize student loans to the tune of $9 billion. Banks service these loans, collect the debt, keep the interest, and turn a profit. When borrowers default on their loans, taxpayers foot the bill, and banks still reap the interest.
Duncan and President Obama want to end the subsidies and issue loans directly through the Education Department. The move would save billions of dollars ...
An old idea is making a strong comeback in several states: Let 10th graders graduate from high school and enroll in community college if they're ready to do so. The idea of early graduation has a lot of merit, because it lets students choose a course that best suits their specific talents and aspirations.
But what about the opposite idea? What about late graduation?
No natural law dictates that high school should take four years. Some students can do it more quickly if they're ready to move on. But others, like recent immigrants who are still learning English, may need more than four years.
A high school principal once told me that she did what she could to keep some recent immigrants in her school as long as possible, even though her school's on-time graduation numbers suffered as a result. Some students arrive at her school at age 15 with no English and little or no formal schooling under their belts.
The larger point of any flexible graduation scheme is that the number of hours you spend warming a seat in your school should be less important than what you learn while you're there. As we weigh the benefits of early graduation, we shouldn't forget the needs of those students who need a little more time. ...
According to Joel Shatzky, this is how your garden-variety public school 9th-grader wrote in the 1950s and 60s:
Color is rampant and the woodlands and countryside are ablaze with every hue of the spectrum; lemon yellow, bright saffron, tawny orange, lively russet, flaming scarlet, brilliant magenta, deep crimson, and rich purple…. With such a prelude it is no wonder that the contrast of the weird subterranean world of the Caverns strikes one with tremendous impact.... Instead of the sparkling sunlight there is a Stygian darkness pierced by colored lights.” -- Ninth grader, Crestonian, Creston JHS,1957 (SP class)
That's a far cry from the digital grunts we get from today's students, Shatzky tells us.
I'm sorry, but I'm just not buying it. Not even for a minute. How many high school freshmen actually wrote that way as a matter of course? And what happened to all those splendid writers after they graduated from high school? I worry that this talk of a golden age can actually do damage.
It sure is alluring, though, and has been for a long, long time. In the 1950s, the Council for Basic Education published a book of essays on the sorry state of U.S. schools. (The authors clearly did not share Shatzky's admiration for the writing students were doing 60 years ago.) One essay writer claimed that his public ...
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