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Beyond math and reading tests

June 26, 2009 By

The Broader, Bolder folks want to test a broad range of subjects, not just math and reading, through  an expanded National Assessment of Educational Progress, which would evaluate a representative sample of students.

In addition, the report urges letting states design their accountability systems “provided these systems include qualitative evaluation of school quality and do not rely primarily on standardized test scores to judge the success of schools.”

·        The federal government should collect state-level data – mostly from an expanded National Assessment of Education Progress (NAEP) – on how students of different backgrounds perform in a broad range of academic subjects, as well as in the arts, physical health and fitness, citizenship habits, and other necessary knowledge and skills;
·        State accountability systems should supplement higher quality standardized tests with qualitative evaluation of districts and schools to ensure the presence of a supportive school climate, high-quality classroom instruction and other resources and practices needed for student success.

“Eminently sensible,” writes a Mike Petrilli on Education Gadfly.

That’s a big surprise, for in the past this coalition has appeared eager to refight old battles about whether schools can be expected to help poor kids reach high standards. Now, however, it’s arguing for a broader look at school success — what might be termed “test scores-plus.” They would keep test-based accountability, tweaked in various ways (with progress-over-time measures, better assessments, a more robust NAEP, etc.) and supplement it with school inspectors. These inspectors would guard against lousy practices, such as “an undue emphasis on test preparation,” and catch schools engaged in good ones, like “a collegial professional culture in which teachers and administrators use all available data in a collaborative fashion to continuously improve the work of the school.”

Charter school advocates might support that, he writes, since most believe “it will show their schools to have more supportive learning environments than what is found in a typical public school.”

Robert Pondiscio is skeptical that school inspectors will see schools as they really are.

Spend time in a struggling school in the weeks before a “quality review” and you’ll see an extraordinary amount of teaching and learning time going to cleaning classrooms, updating portfolios, making sure bulletin boards have up-to-date student work, etc.  Having lived through a few such inspections, its tempting to suggest judging a school from a formal walk-around is like judging a household from a Thanksgiving dinner.  Remember the grief your mom used to give you to clean up and mind your manners before company came?  Now imagine mom’s livelihood depends on it.  That’s a school in the weeks before quality review.

Instead of test prep, teachers will focus on inspection prep.

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Louisiana creates 'career option' diploma

June 26, 2009 By

Louisiana students will be able to leave the college-prep track at age 15  with their parents’ permission.

Graduates who took the new curriculum would get a career-option diploma that would not qualify them for a four-year college or university. Instead, they could attend two-year technical schools or community colleges.

Critics, including the state superintendent, say career students risk graduating with inadequate reading and math skills. But proponents want to cut the dropout rate by giving students an option that matches their interests and abilities.

The bill was modified to require students who do poorly on an eighth-grade test to take remedial classes in summer school before moving on to ninth grade. Currently, students who fail the test have to repeat eighth grade.

Lowering expectations is a mistake, editorializes The Advocate.

Filed Under: Careers, Education Tagged With: , , , ,

Advil strip violated girl's rights

June 25, 2009 By

Strip searching a 13-year-old girl suspected of carrying ibuprofen (the drug in Advil)  violated her privacy rights, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled 8 to 1. However, the majority shielded school officials from personal liability.

The officials in Safford, Ariz., would have been justified in 2003 had they limited their search to the backpack and outer clothing of Savana Redding, who was in the eighth grade at the time, the court ruled. But in searching her undergarments, they went too far and violated her Fourth Amendment privacy rights, the justices said.

Had Savana been suspected of having illegal drugs that could have posed a far greater danger to herself and other students, the strip search, too, might have been justified, the majority said, in an opinion by Justice David H. Souter.

“In sum, what was missing from the suspected facts that pointed to Savana was any indication of danger to the students from the power of the drugs or their quantity, and any reason to suppose that Savana was carrying pills in her underwear,” the court said. “We think that the combination of these deficiencies was fatal to finding the search reasonable.”

No pills were found on the girl, then an eighth-grade honor student. She transferred to another school and then dropped out of high school, but is now attending college.

During oral arguments, the male justices seemed to think it was no big deal to force a girl to expose her breasts and pelvic area to a school nurse. However only Justice Clarence Thomas dissented.

If a strip search is necessary — let’s say it’s heroin rather than Advil — then call the police, writes Volokh’s David Bernstein. They know how to do these things.

Filed Under: Zero Tolerance Tagged With: , , , , ,

School of the Future flounders

June 25, 2009 By

Philadelphia’s high-tech School of the Future (SOF), designed with help from Microsoft, was supposed to revolutionize education, writes Meris Stansbury on eSchool News. So far, we’ve seen the future and it doesn’t work very well. (I had doubts when the school opened in 2006.)

It would teach at-risk students critical 21st-century skills needed for college and the work force by emphasizing project-based learning, technology, and community involvement.

. . . From alternative school hours to laptops for every student, from a customizable school portal to campus-wide wireless access, and from a panel to design 21st-century curriculum to a new teacher hiring model, the SOF was thought to be a sure winner.

The school went through four principals in three years. Union contracts made it hard to hire teachers who were a good fit for the school.

Teachers received little training on how to use the technology to foster learning. Students had trouble using the laptops and worried they’d be stolen if they brought them home.

Although the technology itself was not supposed to trump basic classroom practices, Microsoft and the school’s planners had decided not to allow the use of textbooks or printed materials; instead, all resources were located online through a portal designed by Microsoft.

Yet educators frequently encountered problems accessing the internet, because the school’s wireless connection often would not work.

Just like Windows Vista, writes Lorri Giovinco-Harte at NY Education Examiner.

In a panel hosted by the American Enterprise Institute, Drew University Professor Patrick McGuinn found problems at every level.

“There is no clear definition of what project-based learning exactly is and how that can be step-by-step implemented in the classroom. Student remediation also didn’t fit with the project-based collaboration model.”

He added: “These teachers and administrators had to fly a plane while they were building it.”

Over time, the School of the Future adopted the district’s curriculum and assessments; it began to look a lot like schools of the present. However, school leaders are trying to learn from the early mistakes — they hired a tech support person! — and clarify the mission. We’ll have to see what the future holds for the School of the Future.

Update: Thirty-five years ago, Philadelphia’s school of the future was William Penn High, a “showpiece packed with amenities, including a television studio, an Olympic-size swimming pool, and a dance studio,” reports the Inquirer.  Now a wreck operating at less than 20 percent of capacity, the low-scoring school will be closed for two years for rebuilding. And, one hopes, rethinking.

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Special-ed parents win in court

June 25, 2009 By

Parents of disabled students can seek reimbursement for private school tuition, even if their child didn’t receive special education services in public school, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled this week. The case involved an Oregon high school students in the Forest Grove district who was diagnosed as learning disabled only after he enrolled in private school.

If the public school can’t provide an appropriate education to a disabled students, parents have the right to seek a private placement at public expense. “Nationally, about 90,000 special-education students are in private schools, most of them referred by their public schools,” reports the New York Times.

Justice John Paul Stevens wrote the opinion for the 6-3 majority.

“It would be strange for the act to provide a remedy, as all agree it does, where a school district offers a child inadequate special-education services but to leave parents without relief in the more egregious situation in which the school district unreasonably denies a child access to such services altogether,” he wrote.

Why not extend choice to all parents, asks Jay P. Greene. “Why should any child, disabled or not, be made to wait for an appropriate education?”

Filed Under: Education Tagged With: , , , , ,

Obama Elementary

June 24, 2009 By

Barack Obama Elementary? A new school in Prince George’s County, Maryland may be named after the president. It’s a trend, reports the Washington Post.

The Hempstead Union Free School District in New York voted to rename Ludlum Elementary School for him in November shortly after his victory in the presidential election. Since then, several other school boards nationwide have taken steps to name new schools or rename old ones after the president.

“Antigua has plans to name its largest mountain and a national park” after Obama.

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Signs of hope at Green Dot's Locke

June 24, 2009 By

Today is graduation day at Locke High School in Los Angeles. There are subtle signs of a turnaround since the Green Dot takeover a year ago, reports the Los Angeles Times.


For years, Locke, on the edge of Watts, has had among the state’s lowest test scores and highest dropout rates. In 2004, 1,451 students enrolled as freshmen; just 261 graduated four years later. Of them, only 85 had completed the courses required to apply to a University of California or California State University school.

A year ago, Green Dot Public Schools, which runs 12 charters serving the city’s urban poor, took over the school. The effort to transform Locke has been a nationally watched test of whether such a large, deeply impoverished urban high school could be transformed by a charter operator.

Locke has plenty of problems, but more students are earning diplomas and more graduates are eligible for state universities, notes Alexander Russo, who’s been following the school’s transformation.

Students tell the LA Times the campus is “safer and calmer.”

The teachers, although mostly young and inexperienced, receive praise for being devoted and effective. There are signs of academic progress. Students repeat one point over and over: Instruction is better and nearly all teachers work hard and expect them to achieve.

A young teacher who started 12th grade English teaching the difference between a noun and a verb ends the year by asking students about Macbeth.

“What kind of person does Lady Macbeth want her husband to be?” she asked her class a few days after the test.

“A murderer,” said Deon, appearing more focused that day.

“What does Lady Macbeth want her husband to seem to be?” Bridger continued.

“A hero, a leader,” said Daniel, who was awake that day. He works 35 hours a week at Subway, for $8.25 an hour, to support his girlfriend and their two children.

Ninth graders attend separate academies that try to teach students good habits and behaviors and get them caught up on reading and math skills. Green Dot also is working with feeder middle schools to strengthen students’ preparation for academics.

Here’s the LA Times’ photo gallery.

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Carnival of Education

June 24, 2009 By

It’s the high-touch, down-and-dirty Carnival of Education at Steve Spangler’s Blog.

Dropping out of school may be the best thing for some students, writes Siobhan Curious. There should be more than one path to adulthood.

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Charters risk flexibility, freedom

June 24, 2009 By

Charter schools aren’t the future of public education, writes Andrew Coulson on Cato@Liberty.  Bureaucratic, union-dominated public schools are the future of charters.

The pattern in publicly funded education, both domestically and internationally, has always been one of increasing regulation over time, and of the triumph of producer interests over the interests of parents and children. Public schools in the late 1800s had considerably more autonomy than do most modern charter schools. Over time, public schools have come under the sway of centralized bureaucracies dominated by employee unions.

The American Federation of Teachers has signed collective bargaining agreements for charter school teachers in New York City and Chicago, Coulson notes. If more charters unionize, they’ll lose their flexibility.

Meanwhile, federal education secretary Arne Duncan has been calling for more government “accountability” (read: “regulation”) for charters, singing from the union’s hymnal.

. . . If you want to know what charter schools will look like in a generation or so, just look at the public school status quo.

Let parents decide, writes John Stossel, co-anchor of ABC’s 20/20 on his new blog.

Education secretary Arne Duncan told the New York Times that he will tell the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools “to become more active in weeding out bad apples.”

This is foolish top-down government-think.    National Alliance bureaucrats weeding out bad schools will fail as government bureaucrats failed.  Real accountability comes from customers.  If we attached the money to the kids (government spend big: $10,000 per student is the American average–$200,000 per classroom), and let them take it to ANY school, we’d have a real market.  That would bring us better schools just as its brought us better cars, computers, movies, phones, etc.

Sure, some charter schools are lousy. But failure is part of innovation.  Parents will quickly figure out if their kids’ school is lousy, and if they are allowed other choices, they’ll pull their kids out.  The weak schools will die from lack of customers.  The best  schools will grow, and help more kids.

By contrast, weak PUBLIC schools NEVER die.  They wreck children’s lives decade after decade.

I think re-regulation is a risk, but not a certainty.  The charter movement is trying to support the growth of high-quality charter schools and strengthen accountability for performance.

Filed Under: Education Tagged With: , , , , ,

Technology, politics and change

June 23, 2009 By

Cyberschools, online classes and virtual tutoring may force change in public education argue Terry Moe and John Chubb in Liberating Learning.  The book looks at how technology shifts political power, writes James K. Glassman in a Wall Street Journal review:

Teachers unions, of course, are appalled. They know that “the new computer-based approaches to learning simply require far fewer teachers per student — perhaps half as many, and possibly fewer than that,” Messrs. Moe and Chubb write. Online charter schools employ two or three teachers per 100 students; the average public school employs 6.8 per 100. Technology also disperses teachers geographically (making them elusive for union organizers); lets in private-sector players who aren’t members of the guild; and enables outsourcing to foreign countries. For unions, technology is poison.

Moe and Chubb believe parents will demand access to online education.  School districts, hit by rising labor costs, will “turn to technology as a way to get more for less.” Glassman fears politics will trump productivity as office-holders consider “the election-time productivity of unions that help politicians get into office and stay there.”

Frontline’s Digital Nation is hosting a discussion tomorrow on education in the digital age.

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