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Florida vouchers draw lowest achievers

February 3, 2012 By 7 Comments

Voucher schools don’t “cherry pick” the best students, writes Jon East on redefinED.  Students who use the Florida Tax Credit Scholarship are among the lowest performers at the low-performing public schools they leave behind, according to a new study (pdf) by Cassandra Hart, a UC-Davis education professor.

Compared to other low-income students at their public schools, voucher students are poorer and earn lower test scores. They’re more likely to be black. They’ve left schools with low scores and high rates of violence. In addition, voucher-using students tend to have few public school choices nearby, but a variety of accessible private schools.

Parents have to go to effort and some expense to qualify for a Florida Tax Credit Scholarship, so these are the children of committed parents. However, that commitment hasn’t translated into academic success, Hart finds.

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Obama shifts higher ed policy

February 1, 2012 By 1 Comment

President Obama’s new higher education plan shifts priority from low-income students to the middle class.

Community colleges risk becoming separate and unequal.

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Repayment study left out blacks

January 26, 2012 By

A U.S. Education Department analysis on the relationship between race and repayment of student loans left out black students, skewing results used to justify the gainful employment rule imposed on for-profit colleges.

Should Pell Grants be targeted at low-income students — or expanded to middle-class families? 

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Milwaukee, Fresno fail reading for low-income kids

December 12, 2011 By

If you plan to be reincarnated as a low-income student and you’d like to be literate, pick Tampa, New York City or Miami, writes Matthew Ladner, who’s been looking at the urban NAEP results. Avoid Milwaukee and Fresno, where very few low-income students reach proficiency in reading.

 

Washington, D.C. “has improved but is still horrible,” he adds, writing on Jay Greene’s blog. ”Everyone in Wisconsin ought to be horrified by the abomination that is the Milwaukee Public Schools.”

 

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The rich get smarter

November 19, 2011 By

A widening achievement gap separates children from high-income (90th percentile) and very low-income (10th percentile) families, concludes a report by Sean Reardon, a Stanford education professor.

The income achievement gap, which appears to have been increasing for the last 50 years,  is now nearly twice as large as the black-white achievement gap. It starts in kindergarten and stays about the same as children move through school.

Poor children are doing a bit better academically than in the past, but falling farther behind children from affluent families. Parents who can afford it are investing in their children’s “cognitive development.”

Wealthy parents’ children are improving their academic edge, Reardon told EdSource.

When you look at poor 4th graders today they are doing better than poor 4th graders 30 years ago. But rich 4th graders are doing much, much better than rich 4th graders (over the same time period).  Most of the growth has been because  kids at the high end of the family income distribution level have pulled away from middle income kids, not because kids at the low end have fallen away from middle income kids.

Race isn’t a factor. “The achievement gap between rich and poor whites has gotten bigger over time,” he said.

The income gap between the richest and poorest families has grown over the past 40 years, Reardon says.

Income inequality has led to more residential segregation by income level rather than race, which in turns means that high income children have access to higher quality schools and other resources.

The Widening Achievement Gap Between the Rich and the Poor was published in September 2011 in Whither Opportunity? Rising Inequality, Schools, and Children’s Life Chances.

Stuart Buck suggests an experiment to see if family income leads to achievement via better teachers.  Assign 250 rich kids to schools with horrible teachers and another 250 to their regular schools. He foresees implementation problems, however.

Filed Under: Education, Parenting Tagged With: , , , , , , ,

A good school leaves a few behind

November 1, 2011 By

Despite years of high scores without really trying, Oyster River Middle School is trying test prep to meet No Child Left Behind targets, writes Michael Winerip in the New York Times. The school in a prosperous New Hampshire town “needs improvement” because some special ed students aren’t proficient on the state exam, he writes.

In September the school announced a new motto, “Fill the Box.” Students have been told that their best chance for a high score on the state English test is to use all the blank space allotted for the essay. “You have to write as much as you can,” says Jay Richard, the principal. “People have studied these things.”

Actually, writing well works too.

The school also makes sure students get a good night’s sleep and eat “brain food” before the state tests.

In hopes of raising reading scores, Principal Richard, a former special education teacher, has decided to pull special ed students from mainstream classes at times for individual instruction.

Will this be better or just different?

“I believe we can do better,” Mr. Richard said. “We have to. This is the law.”

OK, the principal thinks it’s better. Surely, that’s a good thing.

Under Arne Duncan’s waivers, schools wouldn’t need to focus as much on low-achieving subgroups, Winerip writes. Isn’t that a bad thing? Apparently not.

Winerip’s story shows why No Child Left Behind was necessary, responds Eduwonk. It’s easy to ignore special ed students (the school’s low-income students may be lagging too),  if nobody’s looking.  “What about the poor students or special education students there? Don’t they matter?”

 

Filed Under: Education, Testing Tagged With: , , , , , , ,

Student loan forgiveness helps the privileged

October 14, 2011 By

Occupy Wall Streeters want forgiveness for college loans. That would help the privileged at the expense of average taxpayers, say economists.

Also on Community College Spotlight: Low-income college students are borrowing to pay living expenses and “maximizing their debt,” say Michigan college officials. That’s a high-risk strategy for high-risk students.

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Cash incentives boost AP pass rate

October 4, 2011 By

More students take Advanced Placement classes and pass the exam when teachers and students are offered cash incentives, reports the New York Times.

At South High Community School, a mostly low-income school in Worcester, Massachusetts, eight times as many students take Joe Nystrom’s AP Statistics classes. The pass rate has climbed from 50 percent to 70 percent.

South High students said Mr. Nystrom and his colleagues had transformed the culture of a tough urban school, making it cool for boys with low-slung jeans who idolize rappers like Lil Wayne to take the hardest classes.

They were helped by the National Math and Science Initiative, a nonprofit network that provided laboratory equipment and special training for teachers and organized afternoon tutoring and Saturday sessions. It also paid $100 each to students who scored a 3 or above on the A.P. exam — and to their teachers, who can also earn additional rewards. Because 43 of his students passed the exam this year, far above his target, Mr. Nystrom will add a $7,300 check to his $72,000 salary.

Kristopher Santana, son of a customer service rep, earned a perfect 5 on the AP Statistics exam after atttending 18 hours of Saturday classes organized by the initiative, and Nystrom’s twice-weekly, after-school tutoring sessions. The $100 was “a great extra,” he says.

This year, 308 schools in six states are participating in the program.

 Brian Leonard, who teaches AP calculus and statistics at Lake Hamilton High School in Arkansas, earned a$12,500 bonus for 65 students who passed exams. Three years ago, the high school had only nine AP math students, all the children of educated professionals.  Now students from a range of backgrounds are taking AP math — and passing the exam.

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Permanent record: 1920′s report cards

September 23, 2011 By

After finding 1920s report cards and employment records from the Manhattan Trade School for Girls, Paul Lukas traced the former students to see how their lives turned out. The series on Slate includes a gallery of photos with links to reports.

Girls attended Manhattan Trade in lieu of high school, usually beginning when they were 14 or 15, and were expected to finish by the time they turned 17. The school . . . offered one- and two-year programs in a variety of disciplines, primarily in the “needle trades” (dressmaking, sewing machine operation, millinery) and, to a lesser extent, the “brush and glue trades” (sample catalog mounting, novelty box making, lampshade making). The curriculum also stressed thrift, home economics, personal presentation, and other life skills that would help the students survive in the labor marketplace.

Manhattan Trade, started by “wealthy progressives”  (“reformie” types!) in 1902, placed students in jobs for years after they left the school.

. . . the majority of the students had been born to immigrant parents—Italians, mostly, but also lots of Eastern European Jews, some Russians, and a smattering of others. Many of their families appeared to have been desperately poor, with lots of bad luck to boot. Here was a girl whose mother had ended up in an insane asylum and whose father was “paralyzed and a drunkard.” Here was one who needed dental work but couldn’t afford the dentist’s $3 fee, so the school’s secretary gave her $1.50 to have the work started. Here was one who said she had received $3.50 for three days’ work and had then been forced to leave the job because the work site was so cold “your hands almost freeze off of you.”

But there were also tales of success, triumph, and joy—stories of striving and pride, of the American Dream taking shape.

One graduate started a business making stuffed animals and toys that’s still around.

Today, girls from low-income immigrant families are urged to go to college with little guidance on what they might do there to reach their real goal, a decent job. Most will start in remedial classes, give up on a degree and work low-skilled, low-paying jobs forever.

Filed Under: Careers, Education Tagged With: , , , , ,

Are poor kids failing our schools?

September 22, 2011 By

“Are poor kids (especially poor black and Latino kids) failing our schools, or are schools failing our poor, minority kids?” asks Whitney Tilson in the Huffington Post. It’s hard for schools to make a difference for children from troubled communities with poorly educated parents, he concedes.

In fact, if I could fix either all of the parents (broadly defined, meaning ending childhood poverty, making sure every child had plenty of books and both parents in the home, etc.) or all of the schools in America, I’d choose the former in a heartbeat. But I’m not sure it’s possible to fix the parents — and I know it’s possible to fix the schools.

Disadvantaged children will do as poorly as their parents if they attend “mediocre (or worse) schools,” Tilson writes. But “a high-quality school with excellent teachers” can improve life outcomes for many.  He’s “visited over 100 schools that are generating extraordinary academic success with the most disadvantaged children” and serves on KIPP‘s New York City board.

How do KIPP and a handful of other (mostly charter) schools succeed with the same students who are failing in regular public schools?

  1. They identify and train top-notch school leaders who are empowered and held accountable for building outstanding schools.
  2. The school leaders focus on recruiting, training, motivating and retaining top teachers.
  3. There is an extended school day and school year (KIPP students get 60% more class time than they would in regular public schools).
  4. There is an intense focus on character (as discussed in this recent NYT Magazine article). One study showed that grit and determination were twice as powerful as IQ in predicting life success. At KIPP, work hard, be nice, there are no shortcuts, we’re climbing the mountain to college, etc. aren’t just slogans.

It’s very hard to change the life prospects of disadvantaged children, Tilson writes. But it can be done.

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