Thinking and Linking by Joanne Jacobs
Stressing character traits such as “perseverance, self-monitoring, and flexibility” over cognition is a mistake, writes Mike Rose, a UCLA professor. Many so-called “non-cognitive” traits require thinking skills.
Some colleges and universities are trying to measure non-cognitive traits to find “diamonds in the rough,” but so far high school grades, backed by test scores, are the most accurate predictors of college success.
Dan Willingham writes on the challenge of measuring non-cognitive skills.
Rachel Spector quit teaching in low-performing, all-minority East Palo Alto (California) after four years, “squashed” by pressure to teach in a prescribed way to raise test scores. ”I didn’t feel respected.”
After a year teaching in San Francisco, which was even worse, she returned to teach seventh-grade English and social studies at Costaño School in East Palo Alto’s Ravenswood district. Principal Gina Sudaria promised, “As long as you’re teaching the standards and you’re teaching at a rigorous level, you can teach however you want to.”
“More and more, I’m the instructional leader of my classroom,” Spector says.
Long plagued by high teacher turnover, Ravenswood is trying to keep good teachers by giving them more flexibility and input, reports the Peninsula Press.
Ravenswood teachers cope with big challenges — 77 percent of students aren’t proficient in English — for less pay than teachers in nearby affluent districts. Teachers start at $42,460, almost 20 percent lower than neighboring Menlo Park and Palo Alto.
At Costaño, a K-8 school, Principal Sudaria uses peer coaches to help teachers learn from each other. She also stresses collaborative decision-making.
“Teachers are the ones who are doing the groundwork every single day, so their input and their knowledge needs to be highly valued,” she said.
The staff is divided into five committees that meet weekly on topics involving curriculum, safety and parent outreach. Sudaria said that allowing them to be involved beyond their teaching or support role gets everyone more invested in the school.
Turnover is down and the school’s Academic Performance Index score has increased from 612 to 783 in the past four years, nearing the state’s goal of 800.
“Flexibility is education’s new buzzword” – except for special education, writes Miriam Freedman, author of Fixing Special Education, in EdSource Today.
. . . more than 6 million students with disabilities, their parents, 13,809 school districts, 98,706 public schools, and 5,453 charter schools all have to meet the same rigid legal and regulatory requirements, regardless of the local situation or unique needs of the child or community. In 2002, studies found some 814 federal monitoring requirements for compliance by state and local agencies for programs for students with disabilities.
Parents should be able to “opt out of requirements that they don’t need or want, especially when children are doing well,” argues Freedman, who blogs at School Law Pro.
Despite promises of flexibility on No Child Left Behind, the Education Department is micromanaging waivers, writes Mike Petrilli on Flypaper.
He cites Education Department letters to the states reported by AP, which show federal nitpicking. Even “Massachusetts —the first-place finisher in the Race to the Top, the state with the highest achievement in the land, the one that has seen dramatic gains across all subgroups of students, a strong supporter (for better or worse) of the Common Core standards” gets no respect from the feds.
Petrilli predicts most of the 11 waiver-seeking states will be approved.
Upon closer inspection, observers will notice that the amount of flexibility granted on accountability is tiny. Approved plans will amount to minor changes away from the AYP system we’ve got today.
The number of states planning to apply for waivers by February 21 will drop precipitously, as they realize that it’s just not worth the effort.
This will raise congressional enthusiasm for rewriting No Child Left Behind, but “nothing will come of it this year.”
President Obama will waive the key requirements of No Child Left Behind, he said today. States won’t have to show students are achieving proficiency in reading and math by 2014.
States will set their own achievement goals and “design their own interventions for failing schools,” reports Ed Week.
In exchange for this flexibility, the administration will require states to adopt college- and career-ready standards, focus on 15 percent of their most-troubled schools, and create guidelines for teacher evaluations based in part on student performance.
In the 2012-13 school year, rules requiring low-performing schools to offer free tutoring and school choice will be waived.
In addition to intervening to change the lowest 5 percent of schools, state will be required “to identify another 10 percent of schools that struggle with particularly low graduation rates, low performance for specific subgroups of students (such as those with disabilities), or high achievement gaps.”
Schools that aren’t in the bottom 15 percent don’t need to make changes.
The plan is a “responsible framework” that gives states the flexibility, they’ve requested, notes Education Trust. States claimed they could do it better. Now “it’s time for them to stand and deliver.”
States would have more say in school reform under a No Child Left Behind rewrite proposed by key Republican senators, led by Tennessee Sen. Lamar Alexander, a former U.S. secretary of education. The GOP leaders are introducing five bills to reauthorize NCLB, also known as the Elementary and Secondary Education Act.
It’s a “stunning retreat on two decades of education reform,” blasted Democrats for Education Reform.
Senate Republicans to poor and minority children: Fuggedaboutit, headlines Dropout Nation.
Don’t “roll back hard-won progress in student achievement,” responded Education Trust. “When left to their own devices, states have a long, well-documented history of aiming far too low and shortchanging the schools that serve our most vulnerable children.”
It’s a rollback of NCLB’s excesses that preserves education reform, writes Mike Petrilli on Flypaper.
The reform package . . . would eliminate “adequate yearly progress,” hand “accountability” back to the states, and undo the law’s “highly qualified teachers” mandate. But it doesn’t abdicate Uncle Sam’s interest in reform, or in the country’s neediest students. States would still be required to take dramatic action to turn around their very worst schools. Title I funding would continue to flow to the highest-need schools and districts. Students would continue to be tested in grades 3-8 and once in high school, and the results would continue to be reported widely and by subgroup. The approach is tight-loose, incentives over mandates, transparency over accountability. It’s “reform realism” through and through.
The bills require states to adopt college-and-career standards, but don’t push Common Core Standards.
One bill is modeled on the pro-charter school bill that passed the House this week.
Republicans are winning the education debate, writes Joan Richardson in Phi Delta Kappan. In the PDK/Gallup Poll numbers, “Americans favor charter schools (70%), favor allowing parents to choose a child’s school (74%), believe unionization is bad for public school education (47%), and that natural talent is more important than college training (70%). Any way you slice it, those ideas have been part of the Republican reform agenda.”
California’s very belated budget gives less money to schools but more flexibility in how to spend the money, reports the Sacramento Bee.
Summer school. Art and music. Classes for gifted children.
Buying textbooks. Training math and English teachers. Tutoring students for the high school exit exam.
. . . In the budget deal crafted last week, the Legislature and Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger combined many of the pots of money known as “categoricals.” The result is that for the next five years, principals and district administrators will have more spending flexibility than they’ve had in recent history.
One third of state education funding has been restricted by the Legislature, which feared school boards would sacrifice special programs to boost teacher salaries.
Money for buying new technology couldn’t be used to buy books for a library. Money for checking kids’ teeth couldn’t be spent on counseling. Money for training principals couldn’t be used to train a teacher.
Reformers have called for combining the categoricals for 20 years now. It took a crisis to make it happen. And, due to heavy pressure by the teachers’ union, class-size reduction wasn’t included. A principal can’t choose to save the reading intervention program by increasing second-grade and third-grade classes to 25 students.
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