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Cherchez LA funds: English Learners get stuck

November 30, 2009 By

Los Angeles Unified profits by keeping kids in English Learner status long after they’ve met state and local standards for fluency, argues Lance Izumi of the Pacific Research Institute in the LA Daily News.  The district gets more money and higher test scores.

A Bureau of State Audits report found 62 percent of LA’s English Learners met criteria for fluency but weren’t reclassified.

The state Legislative Analyst’s Office has found that districts have a financial incentive for keeping students classified as English learners because federal and state programs distribute funds based on the number of students eligible for those programs.

. . . NCLB requires subgroups such as English learners to make annual progress toward grade-level proficiency in math and English language arts. Keeping English-fluent students in the English-learner category increases the chances that schools will meet federal goals.

Less than 40 percent of English Learners are reclassified as fluent after 10 years in California schools, estimates the state Education Department.

In addition to changing the perverse incentives, Izumi suggests giving parents a “voucher that would allow them and their children to exit immediately from public schools in Los Angeles and elsewhere that fail to transition students to English fluency quickly.”

Via Learning the Language.

Filed Under: Education Tagged With: ,

Out of the network

November 30, 2009 By

Teaching the transcendentalists and inspired by an essay called “The End of Solitude,” Lightly Seasoned asked AP juniors  to give up social media and TV for one day last weekend.

The journals were fascinating: some kids did it fairly easily and were happily surprised by how productive they were. One kid ended up playing Scrabble with his family instead of going to a concert (because he missed the call): he acted all miffed at me, but he enjoyed the day. Some made no real attempt because they didn’t see any point in defining themselves separately from their social circle … no, they actually said that! This group mostly consisted of the kiddos I know are heavy into the party circuit. I admire how outgoing they are — they’ll know how to network, etc. when they hit the business world, but I wonder how much they know about themselves.

A final group “didn’t want to spend time with their thoughts — they were all about avoiding some painful situations.”

Filed Under: Education Tagged With: ,

Keep the good school promise

November 30, 2009 By

Those who want to dump standards and testing are abandoning the good school promise, writes Tom Vander Ark, ex-Gatesman, on his blog.

The primary reason we have a federal law like NCLB is that school boards (and state boards) allowed generations of chronic failure. They cut bad employment deals and asked for more money when things didn’t go well. Teachers that could went to the suburbs. Most low income and minority kids were getting left behind. Anyone committed to equity could see things had to change.

NCLB reflected a consensus that 1) measurement and transparency would help us understand the problem, 2) that a basic template for school accountability would ensure that things would get better for underserved students, and 3) the federal government should play a bigger role in ensuring equity and excellence.

There were a bunch of technical problems with the bill in 2001 and they never got fixed. But the biggest problem is that 8 years later states and school boards have continued to allow chronic failure—they basically ignored the federal demands to intervene.

If we throw out NCLB, we’re giving up on equity, Vander Ark writes.

Filed Under: Education Tagged With: ,

Who pays for college?

November 29, 2009 By

University of California students protesting a 32 percent fee hike are pampered brats, writes Ruben Navarrette Jr.

UC-Irvine freshman Suzanne Kordi told the regents in public comment: “This isn’t Wall Street, and the UC students are not here to bail you out. We’re here to get an education. If these fee increases are approved, I will not be able to afford my education.” And Victor Sanchez, president of the UC Student Association, chimed in: “These proposals are egregious, to say the very least. The dreams of so many are being shattered as we speak.”

These kids obviously can’t take a punch. Life is full of disappointments, challenges and setbacks. They had better get used to it.

Michael O’Hare tells students that college isn’t free. Someone — taxpayers or parents or loan-burdened graduate — is going to pay.

One of the less useful tropes of the current California uproar is that “Education should be free!” . . . It is either a silly plea that facts be turned upside down by magic, like “Brussels sprouts should taste good!” or a proposition that it should be offered at a price of zero. Carry all the signs you wish, but education consumes real economic resources, hence has a real cost no matter what its price. So we’re talking about who should pay for whose, and how.

If we were starting from scratch, we might ask students to pay the full cost of their education, “discounted by some estimate of the external benefits the educated provide to all of us,” O’Hare writes. However, the current generation of California adults “receives a big endowment of personal, social, and physical capital” from  previous generations; some of that is supposed to be passed on to the next generation. It’s not.

. . . what’s going on in California now is a vast looting of a trust fund, a violation of fiduciary and parental responsibility.

By abruptly raising tuition, California broke a social contract, writes Megan McArdle.  Many students and parents “planned their lives around a reasonable expectation of what in-state tuition would be.” Now they face a higher bill with less hope that graduates will be able to get jobs that will enable them to pay off their student loans.

Update: John Fensterwald, father of a non-protesting UC student and my former colleague, thinks the university’s 20 percent budget cuts are worse than the tuition hike. He suggests weekend teach-ins to inform students of how their elders have screwed up the state budget.

They’d learn that their parents elected legislators and governors who let state prisons grow exponentially, at the expense of colleges. They’d learn about another intergenerational gift that will saddle them soon as taxpayers: dangerous levels of state debt and pension liabilities.

His advice: Don’t trust anyone over 30.

Filed Under: College Tagged With: , ,

How charters will spend Gates’ $60 million

November 29, 2009 By

Educated Guess describes how a consortium of California charter schools will spend $60 million in Gates Foundation teacher effectiveness grants.

* A one-year residency program for aspiring teachers;

* A data warehouse of assessments to measure individual students’ growth;

* A performance-based pay system that teacher help design.

Alliance for College-Ready Public Schools, ICEF Public Schools, Green Dot Public Schools and PUC Schools, all based in Los Angeles, and Aspire Public Schools, based in Oakland, will raise another $26 million to match the seven-year grant. The consortium serves more than 28,000 students.

The stipend for promising teaching will allow teachers to observe good teachers and gain confidence in the classroom before having to plunge into their first full-time job.

Three school districts – Hillsborough County Public Schools in Florida, Memphis City Schools in Tennessee and the Pittsburgh Public Schools in Pennsylvania – also received money.

Filed Under: Education Tagged With: , ,

Poor schools or poor kids?

November 28, 2009 By

In Poor Schools or Poor Kids? on Education Next,  Joe Williams of Democrats for Education Reform speaks for the Education Equality Project (accountability, pay reform, choice) while Pedro Noguera gives the Broader, Bolder perspective (preschool, health care, nutrition, parent training) on improving K–12 schooling.

Noguera:  There are schools across the country—some are charter, some are private, and many are traditional public—that have shown us that it is possible for poor children to achieve at high levels when we respond to their needs and create conditions that are conducive to learning. . . . Many, though not all, schools that succeed with poor children devise strategies to mitigate the effects of poverty with site-based social services and extended learning opportunities. . . .

Williams: While we are very sympathetic to the obstacles that impoverished children face to their physical, emotional, and educational development, and support policies to address these deficiencies, we believe that when conditions outside of the classroom are less than stellar, it is even more important that we get the schooling piece right.

I side with Williams on this argument. Schools facing huge challenges need to keep their eyes (and resources) on the ball, which is academic achievement.

Noguera calls for creating education inspectors to evaluate schools based on qualitative measures as well as test scores; inspectors would provide detailed recommendations for improvement.

Curriculum is mentioned only once in the discussion, notes Core Knowledge Blog, which headlines its post, Blather, Rinse, Repeat.

Filed Under: Education Tagged With: ,

Why arts education isn't a luxury

November 27, 2009 By

On The Answer Sheet, cognitive scientist Dan Willingham argues that arts education is more than a luxury, citing a speech by Jerry Kagan, a developmental psychology researcher.

First, he estimated that something like 95% of children are capable of doing the work necessary to obtain a high school diploma, yet the dropout rate hovers around 25%. Too many of these students quit because they decide (usually in about the fourth grade) that school is not the place for them. This decision is based largely on their perception of their performance in reading and mathematics. The arts, Kagan argues, offers such students another chance to feel successful, and to feel that they belong at school.

Second, Kagan argues that children today have very little sense of agency — that is, the sense that they undertake activities that have an impact on the world, however small. Kagan notes that as a child he had the autonomy to explore his town on his own, something that most parents today would not allow. When not exploring, his activities were necessarily of his own design, whereas children today would typically watch television or roam the internet, activities that are frequently passive and which encourage conformity. The arts, Kagan argues, offer that sense of agency, of creation.

And there’s more.

Filed Under: Education Tagged With:

Roll your own college education

November 27, 2009 By

Many students attend two, three, four or more colleges en route to a degree, writes Chad Alderman on The Quick and the Ed. With AP and online courses, plus low-cost community college options, even more will be rolling their own education. So why not let course-givers provide credits, instead of going through institutions?

StraighterLine offers college courses for $99 a month (read more about how this works here), but then partners with accredited colleges and universities, like Fort Hays State, to accept the credits and provide a stamp of legitimacy in the form of its regional accreditation.

Alderman envisions a student who takes “MIT’s math courses, StraighterLine’s Economics I, Introductory Spanish at the local community college, and a rhetoric course at a state university.”

All the courses must be certified as high quality and completely transferable, which could be possible with common learning standards and summative evaluations.

Ensuring quality is the challenge. The exam backing common learning standards couldn’t be set at the MIT level. What level would be considered reasonable?

Filed Under: College Tagged With:

Women in science

November 27, 2009 By

The Science on Women and Science, is a collection of essays by researchers who disagree on why women lag behind men in science careers. Is it gender bias? Differences in ability or interest? Sean Cavanagh summarizes on Curriculum Matters:

Some of the essayists, like Spelke and Ellison, argue that research shows that men and women have the same intrinsic cognitive abilities and motivation for math and science careers. . . . The evidence shows that gender stereotypes are having an impact on leading women away from math and science fields, the authors explain.

But others, like authors Jerre Levy and Doreen Kimura, have a different take. . . . They say research has shown a connection between genetic and hormonal differences between males and females, which affect behavior and choice of occupation.

There are more men at the very top and the very bottom of the bell curve.  “In consequence, there would still be more males than females who meet even minimum standards to be academic engineers, physical scientists, or mathematicians, and many more men than women with exceptionally high levels of talent,” Levy and Kimura write.

Filed Under: Education Tagged With: ,

Pittsburgh leads in 'Roethlisberger' spelling

November 26, 2009 By

Pittsburgh students are the best in the nation — and the world — in ability to spell “‘Roethlisberger,” reports The Onion.  During the Steeler quarterback’s rookie season in 2004, only 43 percent of students could spell Roethlisberger, said Pittsburgh mayor Luke Ravenstahl.

“In just five years, we have increased that number to 92 percent. That’s 54 percent better than students in California, 35 percent better than those in Oklahoma, and 96 percent better than those in the Cleveland area, who tend to spell Roethlisberger by adding the letters ‘u,’ ‘c,’ and ‘k’ after the letter ‘s.’”

In 2005, the Pittsburgh school board eliminated art,  American history and Advanced Placement calculus to implement a rigorous Roethlisberger curriculum.

Instead of taking world history, seventh-graders were enrolled in Spelling Roethlisberger I. Geometry and trigonometry were replaced by Advanced Roethlisberger-Memorizing. And rather than “waste time,” as Ravenstahl said, in AP chemistry and English, juniors and seniors were required to take an intensive Roethlisberger colloquia, in which they would spend a three-hour class period not only discussing the spelling of Roethlisberger, but the spelling of the names of other Steelers players, such as strong safety Troy Polamalu and left guard Chris Kemoeatu.

That prepares students for the final, a 17-question exam.

“The first three questions are pretty easy,” said high school senior Brent Gerson, referring to the portion of the test in which students are asked to give the first letter of the quarterback’s first name, then the second, the third, and so on. “The last 14 questions about the last name are pretty hard. There is no letter bank or anything, and it’s graded on full completion. But if you remember what you worked on for the last six years, and the student sitting in front of you remembers to wear his Roethlisberger jersey, you should be fine.”

Educators say the lessons will prepare graduates for success in the Pittsburgh job market.

Filed Under: Culture Tagged With:
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