Thinking and Linking by Joanne Jacobs
A Houston community college is linking low-level remedial students to career paths, while a South Dakota technical college sets different requirements for each job training program, virtually eliminating remedial education.
Need a job? Welding is hot.
Signs of cheating, such as test scores that go up sharply one year and crash the next, can be found in nearly 200 large school districts nationwide, according to an Atlanta Journal-Constitution analysis.
As Atlanta learned after cheating was uncovered in half its elementary and middle schools last year, falsified test results deny struggling students access to extra help to which they are entitled, and erode confidence in a vital public institution.
. . . In nine districts, scores careened so unpredictably that the odds of such dramatic shifts occurring without an intervention such as tampering were worse than one in 10 billion.In Houston, for instance, test results for entire grades of students jumped two, three or more times the amount expected in one year, the analysis shows. When children moved to a new grade the next year, their scores plummeted — a finding that suggests the gains were not due to learning.
In 33 districts, the odds the tests results were valid were worse than one in a million.
Here’s a map showing districts in which more than 10 percent of schools reported suspicious results.
Intensive tutoring — two kids to one adult — raised math achievement dramatically in Houston’s Apollo turnaround schools, while computer tutoring helped only modestly, writes Mike Goldstein of MATCH on Larry Cuban’s blog. MATCH helped hire and train the tutors.
Math tutoring for sixth and ninth graders raised achievement by the equivalent of five to nine months of extra schooling, concluded economist Roland Fryer in a study of Apollo’s results after one year.
In other grades, students who were behind took double math or reading, depending on the subject in which they needed help the most. Their classes used Carnegie Math’s software featuring differentiated instruction based on previous student performance.
Computers are great for helping people learn what they want to learn. They’re not particularly good at getting someone to learn something they do not want to learn. For that, you need very skilled people (teachers and tutors) who can build relationships, use that to generate order and effort from kids, and then turn that effort into learning. A computer needs to start on “third base” — take effort and flip that into learning.
While the schools adopted a “no excuses” model, it was the intensive math tutoring that made the difference, writes Matt Di Carlo of the National Education Policy Center.
Math scores rose significantly in the first year of Houston’s Apollo experiment, but reading scores did not. Emulating high-performing charter schools, the low-performing Apollo schools feature a longer school day and year, data analysis, “trying to hire the best teachers and principals and cultivating a ‘no excuses’ attitude,” reports the Houston Chronicle.
Students in sixth and ninth grades got daily tutoring in math from specially hired tutors, one of the program’s most expensive elements. Struggling upperclassmen took an extra computer-based class in reading or math.
(Harvard economist Roland) Fryer’s research found that the tutoring was extremely effective but that the double courses generally were not.
A “back-of-the-envelope calculation,” according to Fryer, showed that the Apollo program produced a 20 percent return on investment – which is higher than other educational reforms such as lowering class sizes and preschool.
Five of the nine schools improved enough to escape the “unacceptable” rating.
Fryer summarizes the first-year results in a National Bureau of Economic Research paper. The Houston results are “strikingly similar to reported impacts of attending the Harlem Children’s Zone and Knowledge is Power Program schools,” both no-excuses adherents, Fryer notes.
Houston’s Apollo 20 experiment is trying to improve low-performing schools by using successful charter schools’ tactics, reports the New York Times.
Five policies are common to successful charters, says Roland Fryer, an economist and head of Harvard’s EdLabs, who advised Houston.
. . . longer days and years; more rigorous and selective hiring of principals and teachers; frequent quizzes whose results determine what needs to be retaught; what he calls “high-dosage tutoring”; and a “no excuses” culture.
The Apollo schools have a longer school day and year, though not as long as KIPP schools.
Lee High School hired 50 full-time math tutors, who are paid $20,000 a year — under $14 an hour — plus benefits and possible bonuses if their students do well.
Lee High’s new principal, Xochitl Rodríguez-Dávila, described a torrent of challenges, including the exhaustive review of transcripts and test results to organize class schedules and tutoring for 1,600 students; persuading parents to sign KIPP-style contracts pledging that they will help raise achievement; and replacing about a third of Lee’s 100 teachers.
“Teachers by far have been the biggest struggle,” said Ms. Rodriguez-Davila, 39, who previously had been a middle school principal.
In faculty meetings, she said, some people insisted that Lee’s immigrant students would never master biology or physics. Other veterans, though, told the complainers to stop belly-aching and get on with the turnaround.
Lee High’s gains pushed the school into the “acceptable” category after years in “unacceptable.” Overall, five of the nine Apollo schools moved up.
Ninety-two percent of Houston teachers earned performance bonuses this year. Superintendent Terry Grier said he’ll take a “hard look” at the $42 million program, reports the Houston Chronicle.
On average, classroom teachers received more than $3,000. The largest teacher bonus, $11,330, went to Andres Balp, who’s taught fourth grade for 17 years. Principals averaged $5,000. Jose Espinoza, a middle-school principal, received the top award, $15,530, in his category. Top administrators averaged $10,000. Grier received $18,000.
The bonuses are based on a value-added analysis of students’ scores on a state and national exam compared to their past performance.
Among teachers, those in the core academic subject areas — such as English and math — qualify for the most money.
Other school employees, teachers in non-tested subjects and those at younger grade levels earn money based on campus-wide student performance. The teachers whose students improve the most get the most money.
The formula is too complicated to understand, said Jennifer Blessington, an English teacher who pocketed a $7,800 bonus. “It truly feels like you’re winning the lottery,” she said.
With the state in financial trouble, the grant that funds the bonuses may be cut. Even if the money is there, Grier wants to be more selective about who gets it.
High schools are boosting graduation rates by adopting online “credit recovery” programs, reports the Texas Tribune and the Hechinger Report in the New York Times. It’s not clear whether recovering students have learned as much as students who passed the original class.
Brett Rusnock can follow his students’ every move on his laptop: how much time they spend on computers each day at Waltrip High School in Houston, their scores on quizzes and when they stop working. He even gets e-mail alerts when they toil at home into the wee hours. “I can play Big Brother a little bit with this,” Mr. Rusnock said.
Students at Austin High work on their courses in a school computer lab that is run by two teachers and two assistants.
Mr. Rusnock is not a teacher. He is a grad coach, one of 27 in Houston monitoring thousands of students who take so called credit-recovery courses online. Like many other districts across the state, particularly those with high dropout rates, the Houston Independent School District offers these self-paced make-ups to any student who fails a class. In the spring and summer terms, 6,127 Houston I.S.D. students earned 9,774 credits in such courses, which are generally taken in conjunction with a full load of regular classes. About 2,500 more students are enrolled this fall.
Apex Learning provides Houston’s online curriculum; Apex also provides pencil-and-paper tests.
Texas also has raised the maximum age for high school students to 25 and authorized “dropout recovery” .
T. Jack Blackmon, who heads up the Dallas I.S.D. credit-recovery program, said the old model would continue to crumble.
“It’s the vision for the future as far as I’m concerned: kids going at their own pace,” Mr. Blackmon said. “The traditional school is only good for about a third of the kids, the ones who want football or choir or social activities — kids who have the school bug. For the rest of them, it’s just standing in line, waiting for the factory model to give them an education. A lot of kids don’t want to wait in line.”
While Houston’s grad coaches decide whether students have learned the material and are ready to move on, many districts do not provide that level of support or supervision. In some places, students take computer-generated multiple-choice tests online but don’t have to do any writing to “recover” a class.
At a low-performing Houston middle school, the new principal is trying something very different: Classes of 75 students taught by five or more teachers. Often, one teacher starts with a lesson, then the class breaks up into small groups based on level or learning style.
(Instructional specialist Raymond) Cain said he first thought the change was too ambitious, but after a month of visiting classes, he rattles off positives: Teachers switch off taking charge based on who is best at explaining the topic of the day. One might have a trick for fractions while another excels at integers. Teachers can learn from each other. And if a student misbehaves, instruction doesn’t have to halt.
“When you don’t have to spend so much time on managing a class, you can deliver a more rigorous lesson,” said Principal Lannie Milton, Jr.
On a recent morning, about 70 seventh-graders filed into the old band room for math class. One of the seven teachers, Corey Gonsoulin, launched the lesson on dividing numbers with decimals. Writing on the dry-erase board, he showed the students how to move the decimal point.
“Do the opposite of Beyoncé Knowles,” he said. “Instead of going to the left, to the left” – as she says in one of her songs – “we go to the right, to the right.”
Gonsoulin then handed the marker to his colleague, Andre Roper, who wrote out four practice problems. Clifford Thomas, another math teacher, used a board on the side wall to explain to a group of confused students how to show their work process. Teacher Tereva Wright stopped at the desk of a boy not doing anything.
“In the beginning,” Wright said of Milon’s plan, “we felt like he was invading our privacy. We’re used to having our own area. It’s gotten better and better everyday.”
Class sizes averaged 35 students before the chance. It’s not clear to me how the principal could double class size and quintuple the number of teachers in the room.
While the debate rages about value-added analysis of Los Angeles’ teachers, NPR looks at how value-added data is used in North Carolina’s Winston-Salem/Forsyth County School District. The district began using the data three years ago, notes Robert Siegel, the host. The information is not made public, explains Superintendent Donald Martin
Dr. MARTIN: . . . if you’re red, your students are performing two standard errors below your — sort of comparable counterparts. If you’re yellow, you’re right in the average performance. And if you’re green, you’re two standard errors above.
And if a teacher has one red, you know, their first year, then we literally just have a – it’s like a growth conference with them. They have a personal, you know, individual plan. We talk to them about what are they going to do differently next year.
Then in the second year, if there’s two reds in a row, the teacher has consecutive reds, then we have a trigger for what we call a plan of assistance. And that plan of assistance may involve going to training. It may involve sending in some central office folks to work with that person and to really work on, you know, a very formal plan that’s now, you know – could trigger dismissal at the end of the year if it is unsuccessful.
Principals rarely are surprised by which teachers are red or green, Martin says. But, without data, teacher evaluations suffer from “a Lake Wobegon issue. Everybody is above average.” Administrators are to blame for failing to be honest about teacher effectiveness.
Value-added data is available only for a fraction of teachers, writes Sara Mead on Policy Notebook. She’s concerned about the validity of classroom observations.
There is currently no value-added data for kindergarten and early elementary teachers, teachers in non-core subjects, or high school teachers in most places. My brother-in-law, who teaches middle school band and drama, and sister, who teaches high school composition and literature, do not have value-added data.
When available, value-added data should be used to “inform teacher evaluations,” Mead writes, but the larger issue is developing ways to evaluate all teachers. For example, the Classroom Assessment Scoring System (CLASS) measures the extent to which teachers are teaching in ways linked to improved student outcomes. Mead is concerned “that the observational rubrics many districts and states will put into place under their proposed evaluation systems have not yet been validated.”
While an Economic Policy Institute report urges caution in relying on value-added data, others say the alternative ways to assess teachers, such as classroom observations, are much less reliable than value-added, notes Teacher Beat. “I think people are right to point out the potential flaws of [value-added modeling], but it should be compared against what we have, not some nirvana that doesn’t exist,” said Daniel Goldhaber, a professor at the University of Washington in Bothell.
In response to teacher feedback, Houston Superintendent Terry Grier has told principals to collaborate with teachers on an individual plan setting out each teacher’s goals for the year and how the principal will help the teacher meet them. The Houston Federation of Teachers sees this as a nefarious plot to make teachers look bad, writes Rick Hess. HFT is telling teachers not to admit to any performance weaknesses or allow test scores to be used to judge their success. There’s a lot of fear out there.
Update: Here’s the New York Times’ value-added story.
Houston will pay fifth graders and their parents at 25 schools to see if incentives, worh up to $1,020 per family, can boost low math scores. The Dallas-based Liemandt Foundation is providing $1.5 million for the experiment.
The pilot program — thought to be the first that offers joint incentives for parents and students — will allow fifth-graders to earn up to $440 for passing short math tests that show they have mastered key concepts, according to the draft proposal. Parents will get slightly less money for their children doing the work, and they can earn an extra $180 for attending nine conferences with teachers to review the youngsters’ progress.
Teachers can earn up to $40 per student for holding the parent conferences. The district already rewards teachers and school staff for boosting students’ scores on standardized tests.
In HISD, the students and their parents will get $2 for each math objective the child masters. Students will get practice math assignments on a total of 200 concepts and then will take a five-question test. They will get the money for correctly answering at least four questions on each, according to the draft proposal.
Parents will get their money in the form of debit-like cards. The district plans to encourage the students to get their money directly deposited into a savings account that HISD will help set up. Workshops on savings and financial management are included in the project.
Previous pay-for-performance experiments have shown mixed results.
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