National Journal’s new Education Experts Blog asks the experts: What’s the best use of stimulus money?
Monthly Archive for June, 2009
The Carnival of Homeschooling is in full swing at Norfolk Homeschooling Examiner.
Submit here for the Carnival of Education.
Peer review – teachers working with struggling colleagues — is helping to improve or weed out ineffective teachers in Montgomery County, Maryland, reports the Washington Post. The union is cooperating.
. . . Of 66 Montgomery teachers in peer review in the 2008-09 school year, 10 are being dismissed and 21 have resigned or retired. Five will remain in review for a second year. The remaining 30 will successfully exit.
“We’ve changed the whole culture from ‘gotcha’ to support,” said Montgomery Superintendent Jerry D. Weast.
If teachers don’t improve after a year of mentoring, a panel of 16 teachers and principals “decides whether to recommend termination or a second year of monitoring,” reports the Post. “No one gets more than two years.”
Toledo Federation of Teachers pioneered peer review 28 years ago, but few districts have followed suit. It requires a high degree of trust between the superintendent and the union.
In Montgomery County, a poor job evaluation triggers peer review.
Each year, the program weeds out 2 to 3 percent of the county’s probationary teachers, along with a smaller number of tenured faculty. (Of 66 teachers in peer review this year, 27 had tenure.) In nine academic years, peer review has pared 403 teachers from the system.
Mentors make unannounced classroom visits and exchange dozens of phone calls and e-mails to help teachers improve.
Peer review doesn’t work without more rigorous standards, use of data and managerial discretion, writes Eduwonk.
Baltimore’s highest scoring middle school, KIPP Ujima Village, will have to cut its hours and drop Saturday classes to meet union demands for time-and-a-half pay for teachers, reports Jay Mathews in the Washington Post. With a nine-hour school day and Saturday classes, the all-black school has been the best in the city three years running; reading and math scores beat the state average in sixth, seventh and eighth grades.
Brad Nornhold, 31, a math teacher at Ujima Village, told Mathews the union never contacted the teachers before making the pay demand.
“This is a school of choice for teachers, too. I knew what I was getting into.” Ujima Village teachers were already the highest-paid in Baltimore for their experience level, and the union’s demands seem to overlook the appeal of what Nornhold called “the freedom to teach the way I want to teach.” The union ignores the lure of a school that supports teachers and structures their day so they can raise student achievement to levels rarely seen in their city. “To teach in a school that works, that’s nice,” Nornhold said.
A union leader responds. “Effective teachers can get the same results in a seven-hour-and-five-minute day.”
KIPP has been paying teachers an extra 18 percent to work longer hours. The Baltimore union said that wasn’t enough. In New York City, Mathews points out, the American Federation of Teachers contract with Green Dot accepts 14 percent more for a longer school day and year.
Frustrated by the teachers’ union, worried about losing federal funds and enticed by a study showing charter school performance gains, Boston Mayor Tom Menino wants to convert 51 failing schools to charter schools. That’s a turnaround for the Democratic mayor, Jon Keller writes in Wall Street Journal.
“I believe that the increased flexibility that charters provide can . . . help us close the achievement gap,” (Menino) declared.
Education Secretary Arne Duncan has threaten to withhold federal education funds from cities and states that refuse to reform, including allowing charter schools.
“That’s $5 billion, b-i-l-l-i-o-n, up for grabs,” moaned Mr. Menino in an interview with me. “I’ve gotta sit here sucking my thumb because I can’t get reforms?”
Boston has “pilot” schools with “limited managerial flexibility in making personnel and budget decisions,” Keller writes. The mayor wants to create in-district charter schools that would differ from pilots in one critical respect: No union contract.
“The straw that broke the camel’s back,” Mr. Menino told me, came when a principal of one of the struggling school accepted a grant from ExxonMobil to give teachers small bonuses when their students excelled. The unions “took us to arbitration,” Mr. Menino said, essentially killing the bonuses. So for good measure the mayor included a call for merit pay in his blockbuster school-reform speech. “Every time we try to do a reform they stop it.”
If the unions block his plan for district-run charter schools Menino “vows to lobby for lifting the state’s restrictive cap on the number of “pure” charter schools.”
A recent Boston Foundation study found charter students outperforming similar students in regular public schools and pilot schools.
Menino’s children are considering Boston charter schools for two of his grandchildren next fall.
How many learning disabilities are school made, caused by teaching methods or curricula? Vicky S asks the question on Kitchen Table Math.
Catherine Johnson comes up with one estimate: 70 percent of significant reading problems, which often lead to a learning disability diagnosis, could be eliminated by early identification and intervention.
In 2008, I visited two charter schools that specialized in integrating special ed and mainstream students, including gifted students. At both schools, the principal said entering kindergarteners were screened for developmental issues — movement, coordination, vision, hearing, etc. — that often lead to school problems and a disability diagnosis. Those who needed help got it immediately. Very few went on to need special education. The principal at one school said he thought few learning disabled students had a genuine, unpreventable disability. I can’t remember the percentage he came up with. Ten percent? Twenty percent? It’s part of the Hopes, Fears & Reality 2008 report by the Center on Reinventing Public Education.
To become a citizen, immigrants must answer six of 10 basic civics questions, such as: Who wrote the Declaration of Independence? What do we call the first 10 amendments to the Constitution? Who was the first president of the United States? When the Goldwater Institute asked Arizona public high school students 10 random questions from the citizenship list, only 3.5 percent got six or more questions right, writes Matthew Ladner in a preview on Jay Greene’s blog. Half the students got only one question right.
Fifty-eight percent knew the Atlantic Ocean is off the east coast and half identified the two major political parties. However, only 29.5 percent identified the Constitution as the supreme law of the land, 25 percent identified the Bill of Rights as the first 10 amendments to the Constitution and 23 percent knew Congress was made up of the House and Senate. Only 9.4 percent said the Supreme Court has nine justices. Thomas Jefferson was named as the writer of the Declaration of Independence by a quarter of students; 14.5 percent answered that Senators are elected for six-year terms and 26 percent knew the president runs the executive branch.
Finally, only 26.5% of students correctly identified George Washington was the first President. Other guesses included John F. Kennedy, Ronald Reagan, George Bush and Barack Obama.
Seniors did no better than freshmen. Ethnicity made little difference.
Profound ignorance is quite equally distributed in large measure across students in the public school system.
Arizona eighth graders are supposed to be taught everything needed to ace the civics test, Ladner writes. Charter students passed at twice the rate of students in district schools; private school students were four times more likely to pass. “Still pathetic,” he writes.
Here’s part one of Freedom From Responsibility.
Congress is working on a $2.4 billion lliteracy bill that would double federal funding for reading, but spend only 35 percent on K-3 programs. Ten percent would go to pre-K, 50 percent to grades 4-12 and 5 percent to state administrators. The bill also puts more stress on teaching writing.
Reading First, now zeroed out, once spent $1 billion per year on K-3 programs.
Russell Gersten, the executive director of the Instructional Research Group, an educational research institute in Los Alamitos, Calif., said he, too, likes the bill’s emphasis on adolescent literacy, because “that’s where the heavy lifting needs to be, and there has not been much attention until recently.”
At the same time, he said he’s concerned that “the knowledge base is so thin in most of these areas, and we are scaling it up based on hopes, wishes, and theories.”
It would be nice to have a strong enough assessment component to be able to tell what’s working and what’s not making any difference.
A majority of college graduates 25 and under are working in jobs that don’t require a college degree — if they’re working at all — concludes a survey by the Center for Labor Market Studies at Northeastern University. From McClatchy News:
”I’ve never seen it this low and we’ve been analyzing this stuff for over 20 years,” said center director Andrew Sum.
Only about a third of Asian female graduates and black and Hispanic male graduates are in jobs that require a degree. Except for Asian males, who have the highest college-level employment rate, women are more likely to be in college-level jobs than men. (I have no clue why the spread is so wide between Asian males and females. More technical degrees for the guys?)
It’s not going to get any better any time soon.
Employers expect to hire 22 percent fewer graduating seniors for entry-level positions this year than in 2008, according to a recent survey by the National Association of Colleges and Employers.
The story includes a young man with a political science degree from Western Michigan who’s applied for the same bank teller job he had before college and a young woman with a Penn State journalism degree, an unpaid internship and hopes of paid employment. And if that doesn’t work, she can try the buggy-whip industry.
In depressed Dayton, the high-paying factory jobs have vanished, reports the New York Times. “Recession’s children,” high school grads who want steady jobs, are considering college or the military.
Going to community college to learn vocational skills is a good bet for young people who lack academic interests. The 20-year-old with the medical technology certificate is going to trump the 22-year-old with the degree in journalism or political science — and a pile of loans to pay off.
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