Thinking and Linking by Joanne Jacobs
Very low completion rates at Chicago City Colleges — 13 percent after six years — will improve or college presidents will lose their jobs. Accountability is part of Chancellor Cheryl Hyman’s “reinvention” campaign.
A Massachusetts community college has received a $2 million donation to open a civic learning center to encourage community service.
I argue against requiring college students to perform community service on National Journal.
Chicago’s city colleges will partner with industry to make a community college diploma a “ticket to the workforce,” pledges Mayor Rahm Emanuel. ““We’re going to convert the community college system to a skills-based education, taking the six most promising growth fields for the city of Chicago and train for that.”
Job training isn’t community colleges’ only mission, responds Walt Gardner.
Preschool teachers are introducing math concepts, reports the Wall Street Journal. The Early Mathematics Education Project at Erikson Institute is training preschool and kindergarten teachers at high-poverty Chicago schools.
At Lovett Elementary School, where the preschool teacher adopted the new methods, math instruction is omnipresent, if not always apparent. It’s there where 4-year-old Jasmine Wilson arranges four Popsicle sticks into a zigzag pattern under the number “4.” It shows up when Cedric Carter mimics the teacher’s syncopated clapping pattern. And it appears when students join a growing line of characters from “The Gingerbread Man” to chase Anasia Simmons around the room.
The children don’t realize it, but they are learning fundamental math concepts such as connecting numerals to quantity, building patterns, and the idea that adding something, or someone, creates a larger number.
Students of Erikson-trained teachers average three to five months more progress in math than students whose teachers were on the waiting list to get into the program, the institute reports. Children who started far behind in math made the most progress.
Jie-Qi Chen, an Erikson professor who helped develop the project, said proper math instruction helps students develop reasoning and logical thinking skills—cognitive building blocks that prepare them to learn any subject. But she said early math gains in preschool can “wash out” if teachers in elementary grades don’t know how to teach it. And unlike reading, she said, which requires little explicit instruction after a certain level, “math cannot be fully grasped without assistance from a well-trained teacher.”
On any given day, 21 percent of Chicago preschool and kindergarten teachers teach math, while 96 percent teach language arts, a 2007 Erikson study found.
Many early-education teachers are “math phobic,” said Jeanine Brownell, assistant director of programming for Early Mathematics.
Brookings’ interactive Education Choice and Competition Index rates the nation’s 25 largest school districts. The index will be expanded to the largest 100 districts in the future.
New York City earns the highest choice score with Chicago in second place, notes Grover (Russ) Whitehurst. Both received a B grade. The low scorer was Orange County, Florida, which received a grade of D.
New York performed particularly well in its assignment mechanism, its provision of relevant performance data, and its policies and practices for restructuring or closing unpopular schools. Chicago, in contrast to New York, has more alternative schools, a greater proportion of school funding that is student-based, and superior web-based information and displays to support school choice. If the best characteristics of Chicago were transferred to New York and vice versa, both would receive letter grades of A.
Orange County students must attend their local school — unless they opt for the Florida Virtual School, which is open to all students in the state.
Some of the nation’s biggest choice districts, such as Milwaukee and New Orleans, aren’t included because of size, but will be in the expanded index.
The index doesn’t distinguish between vouchers, charters and magnet schools, complains RiShawn Biddle.
Because magnets have largely been geared towards desegregation instead of offering families high-quality school options, those forms of choice have done little to improve student achievement. Given that magnet offerings often end up skewing in favor of wealthier households (who can use their political clout within districts in their favor) at the expense of poor and minority families (who cannot), magnets aren’t exactly a high-quality form of choice.
Adding a Parent Power category such as ability of families to overhaul an existing school in their community would also make sense; this could be done simply by looking at which states and cities have Parent Trigger laws already in place.
But the Brookings does reveal the “sobering” reality, Biddle writes. “Far too many families and their children have far too few choices of any kind, much less those of high quality.”
Elementary teachers rated well by observers also were rated as high-performing by a value-added analysis of their students’ progress, concludes a Consortium for Chicago School Research report on Chicago’s teacher evaluation pilot. Low observation ratings also matched poor value-added data.
A similar correlation was found in several studies on Cincinnati’s teacher-evaluation system, notes Teacher Beat.
Both principals and external evaluators observed and assessed teachers’ classroom performance.
• Principals and observers gave similar numbers of lower scores, but principals gave the top rating more often than the other observers did, across all 10 of the evaluations standards. Interestingly, much of this variation disappeared when researchers controlled for the teachers’ prior evaluation scores, suggesting that principals may be drawing on background knowledge in assigning scores. While this doesn’t exactly fit the narrative of vindictive principals, it does show that who you get as an observer potentially matters.
• Most of the principals were close to the external observers in terms of how strictly they applied the evaluation standards, but there were a few outliers on both ends. Eleven percent of principals regularly rated teachers lower than the observers while 17 percent tended to rate them higher. Another reason to consider more than one observer in a teacher-evaluation system.
Teachers and principals said observations lead to more meaningful discussions of how to improve teaching, but principals said they needed more training on how to help teachers analyze their evaluation.
After 16 years of school reform, Chicago’s “racial gaps in achievement have steadily increased,” according to a study by the University of Chicago Consortium on School Research. White and Asian students are making more progress than Latinos; blacks are “falling behind all other groups.”
Some initiatives, such as closing underperforming schools, may have hurt students, Jean-Claude Brizard, the new superintendent, told the Chicago Tribune.
If school closings destabilized certain neighborhoods, other efforts were ineffective — millions of dollars pumped into countless after-school initiatives and tutoring and mentoring programs geared toward African-American students, only to see math and reading scores languish and many students fall further behind.
The percentage of black students meeting benchmarks on the Illinois Standards Achievement Test has grown at a faster rate than whites’ progress. But the consortium looked at average scores on the National Assessment of Educational Progress. “NAEP scores don’t just look at a percentage of students that pass a certain cut of points. It talks about the average scores, so it’s a much better way to look at trends over time,” (researcher Marisa) de la Torre said.
Over the last 20 years, graduation rates in Chicago have improved dramatically, the study found. Math scores improved slightly in elementary and middle schools while reading scores “have remained fairly flat for two decades.”
NCLB stands for No Chance for Latinos and Blacks, writes Coach G, who began teacher inner-city Chicago students in 1993. Even in the pre-reform era, two years before Mayor Richard Daley took control of the city’s schools, there was pressure to raise reading and math scores, Coach G recalls.
No Child Left Behind increased pressure to replace “rich curriculum with test prep,” he writes. Schools cut back on teaching writing: In many schools, the three Rs were reduced to two. Other responses:
Years ago, a testing guru told me the most effective way to raise students test scores is to teach writing. It even works for math scores, he said. Filling in bubbles? A waste of time after the first five minutes, he said.
Community colleges that receive federal job-training grants are required to share any learning materials developed. But software publishers are lobbying for a new law banning “open educational resources” developed with federal funding.
Also on Community College Spotlight: IBM will help Chicago design new six-year high schools that will combine technical training and college classes leading to an associate degree and an IT job.
Early education paid off in the long run for low-income children who spent two to six years in Chicago’s Child-Parent Center Education Program (CPC). In a study published in Science, University of Missouri and University of Minnesota researchers found 9 percent higher high school graduation rates, 22 percent fewer felony arrests, less substance abuse and higher earnings by age 28 for CPC graduates compared to a control group.
The Chicago Child-Parent Center program begins in preschool and provides up to six years of service in the Chicago public schools.
Chicago Public Schools plans to add 90 minutes to the school day and two weeks to the year. Chicago Teachers Union President Karen Lewis said she won’t serve on the advisory committee. “This news has nothing do with helping our children and everything to do with politicizing a real serious problem,” she said in a written statement.
Schools chief Jean-Claude Brizard offered a 2 percent raise for elementary teachers, if the union agrees to longer K-8 school days in the coming school year. The union had agreed to accept a 2 percent raise. This proposal amounts to a 28 percent pay cut, teachers complain.
Chicago’s school day now runs from 9 am to 2:45 pm, one of the shortest in the country. Rahm Emanuel, the city’s new mayor, made extending the school day a campaign pledge.
Don’t mess with Texas’ schools. Education Secretary Arne Duncan claimed Texas schools have “really struggled” under Gov. Rick Perry, now a GOP candidate for president. “Far too few of their high school graduates are actually prepared to go on to college,” Duncan said in a TV interview, adding he feels “very, very badly for the children there.”
Texas’ fourth- and eighth-graders “substantially outperformed” students in Chicago, the district Duncan ran before going to Washington, notes Andrew Rotherham in Time. The Texas high school graduation rate of 73 percent is slightly below the national average, but way above Chicago’s 56 percent graduation rate.
Overall, Texas scores are “right around the national averages” in reading and math on NAEP, despite educating many immigrant students with poorly educated, non-English-speaking parents. ACT reports Texas high school graduates only narrowly trail national averages for college readiness.
Duncan’s response to Rotherham:
“Texas has challenges. The record speaks for itself. Lots of other states have challenges too. But there is a lot of hard work that needs to be done in Texas and a lot of children who need a chance to get a great education.”
Duncan’s claim of “massive increases in class size in Texas” is untrue, responds the Dallas Morning News. Primary classes, capped at 22 students, have remained stable. Secondary classes in core subjects are getting smaller.
. . . secondary math classes averaged 20.3 students in 2000-01 and dropped to 18.5 by last year. Average size of secondary English/language arts classes fell from 20.2 students in 2000-01 to 17.8 by last year.
In an e-mail to Duncan, TEA Commissioner Robert Scott added:
– Texas is ranked 13th in Ed Week’s Quality Counts report. Quality Counts gave Texas an “A” in “Standards, Assessment and Accountability,” and an “A” in “Transitions and Alignment” of the Texas system with college and career readiness. . .
– The Texas class of 2011 posted a record-high math score on the ACT college entrance exam. The Texas average math score was 21.5 and was higher than the national average of 21.1. ACT scores from 2007 to 2011 showed increases in all four subjects.
Texas fourth- and eighth-graders aced the 2009 NAEP science exam, Scott wrote. In eighth grade, black Texans were first in the nation compared to other blacks, white Texans tied with whites in high-scoring Massachusetts and Hispanics ranked eighth.
Perry has resisted Race To the Top, so perhaps Duncan’s antipathy is all about education policy. But it looks as though the education secretary is playing presidential politics. That’s not the way to build bipartisan consensus.
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