Archive for the 'Education' Category

Teachers’ union-run school struggles

Published on March 19, 2010 in Education. 0 Comments Tags: , . By Joanne

Results are mixed, at best, for a New York City charter school started four years ago by the United Federation of Teachers.  The Charter Schools Institute of SUNY recommended a short-term renewal (three years instead of five) for the elementary and middle school because it hasn’t met its academic goals in reading and social studies.

James Merriman of the New York City Charter School Center ”cannot help but focus on the hypocrisy the report uncovers.”

  • The report draws attention (rightly) to the fact that the school enrolls fewer special education, fewer English Language Learners and fewer free lunch students than the CSD in which it is located, obviating for once and for all the union’s inferences that differences in those numbers are the resultof cheating and manipulation—and showing that those differences are structural and not amenable to statutory fixes that the union has trumpeted (the real purpose of which are simply to limit charter school growth).
  • It also notes that the school’s board of trustees, of which Randi Weingarten is chair, violated the Open Meetings Law: another reason not to take lessons in transparency from the union.
  • Finally, I was amazed to learn that the budget the UFT supplied as part of its renewal showed substantial increases in per pupil revenue despite the UFT having lobbied for a funding freeze this year and acquiesced to one for next year.  Does the UFT know something we don’t or are they just willing to subsidize their own school while letting other charter schools, even those unionized, suffer unfair, double cuts?  If so, there goes solidarity.

    • SUNY thinks UFT now has the leadership in place to improve the school. Will the union cut a break for other charter schools that stumble in the first years? Don’t count on it, writes Merriman.

    Flypaper also wants an admission that running a school is difficult.

    What does ‘career-ready’ mean?

    Published on March 18, 2010 in Education. 4 Comments Tags: , . By Joanne

    The call for career-ready and college-ready standards is raising questions, writes Catherine Gewertz on Curriculum Matters. What does the career part really mean?

    Some experts aren’t convinced that the common standards have what it takes to prepare kids for 21st-century employment. Others are skeptical of the whole argument that any one set of skills can cover the diversity of skills needed in the economy’s wide range of jobs.

    Apprenticeships  and “workforce-oriented high school training” aren’t as common in the U.S. as in Europe, notes USA Today.  

     One reason is that such programs sound dangerously similar to tracking — sorting students by ability level, a practice repeatedly rejected in U.S. culture, in which the dominant philosophy is that all students should have opportunity to meet their full potential.

    My definition of “career ready” is the set of skills needed to qualify for a union apprenticeship or to have a good shot at earning a vocational certificate at a community college. These probably are not the same skills needed to earn a four-year college degree. We’re not serving young people well if we don’t give them a choice: Take courses that will prepare you to earn a four-year degree — not just enroll, take remedial classes and quit — or take classes that will prepare you to learn a skilled job.

    Girls read better, men lose jobs

    Published on March 18, 2010 in Education. 10 Comments Tags: , , , . By Joanne

    Girls score well above boys in reading and about the same in math, concludes a report by the Center on Education Policy.

    In the adult world, women now earn about 59 percent of college degrees — and are less likely to lose their jobs in a recession or “mancession,” writes Mark Perry.

    Close the school, save a dime or two

    Published on March 17, 2010 in Education. 10 Comments Tags: , . By Kate Coe

    A well-regarded public school in a town of 800 people will be closed as a cost-cutting measure, according to the LA Times.  The Eastern Sierra Academy (ESA) doesn’t have sports or extra-curriculars,  and has only 22 students, but evidently the cost is too great for Eastern Sierra Unified School District Supt. Don Clark to allow it to keep going.  The 15 year old school is also a target for locals who consider it “elitist”.

    “Many see the academy as serving rich and spoiled people who have always gotten what they want — that’s why they are crying now,” said Laura Pemburton, a district cook with two children in neighboring schools. “They have made it seem as though kids who like sports are lesser beings.”

    Of course, parents of students have some cost-cutting plans of their own:

    Over at the academy, parents have demanded that the district fire Clark or trim his benefits, including an annual salary of $131,000, a tax-free $80,000 home loan and use of a district sport utility vehicle.

    According to Wikipedia, ESA was ranked 19th in the nation in Newsweek’s Challenge index ranking of 27,000 public high schools in 2005.

    The standards are irrelevant…

    Published on March 17, 2010 in Education. 7 Comments By Michael E. Lopez

    Neal McCluskey thinks that national standards are, if I may put words in his mouth, so much lipstick on a pig.  My favourite part:

    Finally, no matter how brilliant the draft standards, there is no reason to believe that they will drive meaningful educational improvement. Government schools will still be government schools, and the people employed by them will still have very little incentive to push kids to excellence, and every incentive to game the system to make the standards toothless.

    He makes some very interesting points, and most of his ire seems to be aimed at national standards in particular.  But to the extent that he argues against national standards on the basis that all students learn differently, it seems like he might be making an implicit (and possibly inadvertent) argument against fixed standards at any level of education — federal, state, district, or even school standards.  I take it this isn’t what he wants to do… but it is an interesting thought nonetheless.

    I mean, really… what if the idea of putting students in large groups to learn together is itself deeply mistaken?  I don’t think it is, but I’ve been wrong about things before.

    Saving Cleveland

    Published on March 17, 2010 in Education. 0 Comments Tags: , . By Joanne

    In a Reason series on saving Cleveland, Drew Carey focuses on fixing the schools.

    Sorry for yesterday’s site crash, faithful readers. I think the problem is fixed.

    Tight and loose

    Published on March 15, 2010 in Education. 1 Comment Tags: , . By Joanne

    Arne Duncan’s rewrite of No Child Left Behind wins praise from MikePetrilli of Fordham, who says Duncan has kept his promise to be “tight” about results expected while “loose” on means.

    The ESEA blueprint released by the Obama Administration yesterday would represent, as Andy wrote, a dramatic change in the federal role in education – one that would be more targeted, less prescriptive, and use a lighter touch on the vast majority of America’s schools.

    Adequate Yearly Progress is out along with the requirement to get 100 percent of students to proficiency by 2014. ”No more getting labelled a ‘failing school’  because some of your special ed students or English language learners failed the state test,” Petrilli writes.

    Except for the very worst schools in the country–which would be subject to serious turnaround efforts–the rest would be freed from federally-mandated accountability. (The fastest-improving schools would actually get cash rewards and extra flexibility.) It does call for 100 percent of students to graduate from high school “college and career ready” by 2020, but that’s purely an aspirational goal; there are no consequences attached whatsoever. (The transparancy of annual testing and reporting would continue.)

    The New York Times, Washington Post, USA Today, and Wall Street Journal  are focusing on one part to love or hate, the blind men and the elephant, Petrilli writes.

    The unions are complaining that the blueprint, in Randi Weingarten’s words, “places 100 percent of the responsibility on teachers and gives them zero percent of the authority.” John Kline, the ranking Republican on the House education committee, warns that the proposal doesn’t square with Obama’s promise of more flexibity for the states.

    Petrilli sees it as a “huge victory” for the unions in getting most schools out of the threat of federal intervention. For suburban schools and their often Republican representatives, it’s also a good thing.

    It’s a big setback for special ed and ELL advocates, because the failure of their clients would no longer send schools into a buzz saw of sanctions. The civil rights types, who earnestly believe Washington can fix all equity issues from on high, should be apoplectic.

    Petrilli is happy about the plan’s reform realism: Common standards, lots more flexibility and ad admission that No Child’s sanctions “were a bust.”

    Since I’m still on vacation — having witnessed Ladies’ Steer Undecorating at the wine country rodeo, we’re on our way to the Great Barrier Reef — I haven’t given the plan a close look. But I worry about the kids who weren’t doing well before No Child Left Behind.  They don’t all go to worst-of-the-worst schools.

    The Top Ten Myths of Higher Education?

    Published on March 14, 2010 in Education. 12 Comments By Michael E. Lopez

    I find this list, by Jay Schalin at the John William Pope Center, to be somewhat suspect.  Let’s look at the very first thing we read (which, in all fairness, might not be written by Schalin):

    Here’s a list of ten commonly-held beliefs in academia that don’t square with what the rest of the country thinks.

    Immediately we realize that this isn’t about whether these “myths” are wrong — just that they aren’t what the “rest of the country thinks”.  We are thus warned to proceed with caution.  Here’s the list itself — though you should go read the article to find out why some of these are thought to be myths:

    1. There is no liberal bias in academia.

    2. Everybody should go to college.

    3. Academia is more noble than the business community.

    4. Diversity makes everything better.

    5. All faculty research is necessary and/or important.

    6.  Academic freedom means anything goes.

    7. Higher Education drives the economy.

    8.  Natural aptitude doesn’t matter.

    9. Morality is relative.

    10. All cultures are equally good.

    Numbers 2, 6, 8, and 9 aren’t really things that “academics think” — so to the extent that they aren’t true, they’re just myths, not “Myths of the Ivory Tower.”  Number 2 in particular is something that most professors, I think, seriously disagree with.

    Frankly, while some academics may think number 1 is true, I’m not sure it’s anything close to a majority.  I think most people recognize the liberal bias, enjoy it, and see it as something weighing in liberalism’s favor.

    I doubt that number 10 is something that anyone thinks, academic or not.

    Number 5 is trivially false, in the sense that Newton’s work on Alchemy wasn’t “necessary and/or important”.  So I guess it can be called a “Myth”.  But that’s a pretty facile interpretation of the idea.  To the extent that something resembling  “All faculty research is necessary and/or important” is actually thought by academics, I think it’s true.  All research is important — because it’s part of a larger project.  Obviously one could look back at a theory that has been debunked (say… that Knowledge=justified true belief, or Newton’s aforementioned Alchemy) and say “Well, that wasn’t necessary.”  But we don’t know that until someone debunks it.  Schalin likens academic writing to “an infinite number of monkeys typing randomly”.   He means to be pejorative, but (1) that’s sort of how scientific discovery works, and (2) the monkeys that we as a society choose to fund at our typewriters tend to be very, very smart people.  So we’ve got some decidedly above-average monkeys.

    Sometimes articles need to be pointed out because they are good articles that raise important points.  Sometimes an article needs to be pointed out because it is really a substandard, slapdash attempt at scoring cheap rhetorical points.  Unfortunately, I think this is one of the latter.

    The Grouchy Old Man is Right

    Published on March 14, 2010 in Education. 3 Comments By Michael E. Lopez

    “Get off my lawn!”

    “Kids these days…”

    “Nobody makes them like they used to…”

    Sometimes, and probably more often than we think, the grouchy old man is right.  Stephen Zelnick examines one of the problems facing young men these days:

    As a boy, I revered George Washington and was not baffled by the fact of his slave-owning or his land dealings along the Potomac, as if that was all to be known about him. I hoped I would tell the truth about despoiled cherry trees; I hoped, like Benjamin Franklin walking down Philadelphia’s Market Street as a young man on his own, that I would see the world before me as an open field of possibilities; I believed I would, like Lincoln, chase after the poor woman who forgot her three pennies because it was the right thing to do. How does a boy become a man without these inspirations?

    The social and cultural atmosphere has been so polluted one wonders how young people can form life-projects that demand decency and tenacious effort. Everything seems to be for sale, and no one is ashamed by it. The fix is in on the Left and the Right in Washington. Turpitude in the coal and oil industry, with their locust hosts of lobbyists to protect them from those who would protect the environment, is an old story. The new stories are about agri-business and healthcare and education, and now even the green NGOs that take big bucks to moderate their advocacy.

    As bloggers oft proclaim: Read. The. Whole. Thing.

    One place I might take issue with him is when he says:

    Unlike their female counterparts, young men tend not to complain about unpleasant grades and do not chase every stray GPA point in petty obsession to excel.

    This has not been my experience at all. But I am not teaching English, and I have been at this for far, far, far shorter a time than Dr. Zelnick, so I’m inclined to either defer to his greater experience or chalk it up to the difference either in discipline or in region.

    H/T  to Jane Shaw at Phi Beta Cons.

    Pure Spite

    Published on March 14, 2010 in Education. 13 Comments By Michael E. Lopez

    Some of you may have heard of the high school that canceled its prom rather than allow a lesbian couple to attend.

    But in case you haven’t been following it… the lawsuit has begun!

    The lawsuit seeks a court order for the school to hold the prom. It also asks that McMillen be allowed to escort her girlfriend, who is a fellow student, and wear a tuxedo, which the school said also violated policy.

    The school’s decision was a shameful example of pure spite.  They didn’t have the courage of their convictions to simply tell the girl she couldn’t go (and there’s no way they would have gotten away with that legally, anyway).  So instead, they cancel the prom.  Cowards.

    Look, I tend to think that most proms could use some canceling.   But this was just an educational institution lashing out in a very nasty way at a young girl, and I hope that they get their derriere handed to them by the ACLU.