Thinking and Linking by Joanne Jacobs
President Obama wants community colleges to train 2 million “21st-century workers” for skilled technical jobs in the next three years — but most community college students don’t have the math and reading skills these jobs require.
California’s high-minority community colleges have low transfer rates. Graduates of low-performing high schools who enroll in community college have little chance of completing a bachelor’s degree.
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.
Most high-performing schools are leaving low-income and minority students behind, concludes Stuck Schools Revisited: Beneath the Averages, a new Education Trust report that analyzes data from Maryland and Indiana.
In Maryland, the achievement gap in reading narrowed from 2005 to 2009, but African-American and Latino students often lag behind.
“In Indiana, gaps between low-income students and their more affluent peers have remained both wide and stagnant,” Ed Trust reports.
“What the hell am I doing in AP?” asked Veronica, a Haitian immigrant who’d earned a D in the regular 11th-grade English class.
To boost the number of minority students in AP, Boston’s English High assigned unwilling and unprepared students to AP classes based on their “potential,” not their demonstrated abilities, writes Junia Yearwood, a retired English teacher, in the Boston Globe.
Veronica and many of her classmates asked for transfers to easier classes. They were denied.
Consequently, I was forced to continue teaching my 12th grade AP students material they should have learned long before: the eight parts of speech, basic sentence structure, and the correct conjugation of regular and irregular verbs. When Maureen’s essay on an AP sample test included ’’have tooken’’ for ’’have taken,’’ and when Grace interrupted my explanation of a periodic sentence with the question, ’’What is a clause?’’ and when all the other students admitted they were just as puzzled as Grace, my crash course in English grammar became necessary and urgent.
“Underperforming” English High could boast that its AP enrollment was second only to the city’s exam schools. But many of her AP English students ended up in remedial reading and writing classes in college.
Minority and special-ed students made significant gains once states and then No Child Left Behind began holding schools accountable for their performance, argues Bush adviser Sandy Kress in a New York Daily News op-ed. Kress accuses President Obama of going “wobbly” on accountability.
Under the framework being proposed for the reform of the law, the administration would require that, unless a school is among the very worst in the nation, it would no longer be required to improve even if it continues to fail its black, Hispanic and other disadvantaged kids. Further, in the case of schools that do not improve, special tutoring and public school choice would no longer be required.
In Fact-checking Sandy Kress, Fordham’s Mike Petrilli argues that nearly all the improvement occurred by 2004, less than two years after NCLB was implemented.
For instance, according to the NAEP, the average reading score for Black 9-year olds rose from 186 in 1999 to 204 in 2008–an increase of 18 points. (At 10 points per grade level that comes close enough to the “two grade levels” of progress Kress claims.) Hispanic 9-year olds increased their average reading scores from 213 in 1999 to 234 in 2008–an increase of 21 points. Fourth-grade students with disabilities increased their reading scores from 167 in 2000 to 189 in 2009.
. . . For Black 9-year-olds, 78 percent of the improvement took place in the five years between 1999 and 2004, compared to 22 percent in the four years between 2004 and 2008. For Hispanic students, 81 percent of the gains occurred between 1999 and 2004, compared to 19 percent between 2004 and 2008. For fourth-grade students with disabilities, 91 percent of the gains occurred in just two years: between 2000 and 2002.
While there’s “plausible evidence to credit accountability-based reforms,” writes Petrilli, NCLB can’t claim much credit since it didn’t start till fall of 2002.
Petrilli thinks the states’ accountability measures boosted student achievement in the late 1990s to early 2000s. NCLB jumped on a moving bandwagon. “To me, the evidence shows that NCLB and test-based accountability had their day in the sun, and made a big difference, but now it’s time to try something else if we want to see progress continue.”
Kress responds in an e-mail with more NAEP data:
Let’s deal with the easy part – gains on the Long Term Trend for students with disabilities (SWDs) and English Language Learners (ELLs) from 2004-2008. This is squarely within NCLB time.
9 year old SWDs improved a half grade level (5 points) in reading.
9 year olds ELLs improved almost a grade level (8 points) in reading.
9 year old SWDs improved over a half grade level (6 points) in math.
9 year old ELLs improved 3 points in math.
13 year old SWDs improved 3 points in math.
13 year old ELLs improved over a half grade level (7 points) in math.
13 year old SWDs improved almost a full grade level (9 points) in reading.
13 year old ELLs improved 2 points in reading.
Now, since Mike is enamored of the Main NDE, let’s look at that data:
For 4th grade math, it is true that SWDs had an incredible jump from 2000 to 2003, from 200 to 216. I don’t want to argue this was due to NCLB, but, since there’s almost a full academic year since the summer of 2002 in this data, I would suggest that this bridge period probably shouldn’t be used for a pre and post analysis.
In any event, 4th grade SWDs have gone up 7 points since 2003, which is a gain of over a half a grade level. 4th grade ELLs had that nice pop in 2003, too, but also have grown an additional half grade level since.
It is incontestable that something unusual happened in NAEP testing between the late 1990s and 2002 and 2003, first a drop and then an unusual increase. I can’t explain it, and I suspect Mike can’t either. I invite thoughts from any and all of you on that topic.
Nevertheless, it is heartening to see that 4th grade ELLs have improved over a half grade level in reading since 2002, and SWDs have improved almost a half grade level as well.
The same pattern of a pop in 2003 occurs in 8th grade math with further gains for SWDs and ELLs after 2003. Reading at the 8th grade level is stagnant.
“Consequential accountability, which began in many states in the mid-1990s and was extended and deepened by NCLB, works!” Kress writes. “Any weakening of its pillars threatens the progress we’ve made.”
Educators criticized — and defended — the use of “disparate impact” in school discipline cases in a hearing before the U.S. Civil Rights Commission, reports Ed Week.
Obama administration officials announced last spring that they’ll question discipline policies disproportionately affect blacks, Hispanics or some other subgroups, even if there’s no intent to discriminate. However, discipline policies would be “out of compliance only if an equally sound policy would have less of a disparate impact.”
At the Feb. 11 briefing, Ricardo Soto, the deputy assistant secretary for the Education Department’s office for civil rights, said, “there is no universal, one-size-fits-all approach to discipline that will be right for every school or all students.” However, the department will release new federal guidance on school discipline this year.
Commissioner Todd F. Gaziano told Soto the new approach puts “an extremely heavy burden on the school to justify any disparity.” Educators might avoid imposing warranted discipline to avoid overrepresentation, Gaziano said.
Allen Zollman, a teacher of English as a second language at an urban middle school in Pennsylvania that he did not name, said he . . . is opposed to having to give “a thought to disparate impact” if he needs to remove a disruptive student from class, saying he views it as a constraint on effective discipline.
Should his school require such a policy, Mr. Zollman said, he would respond in one of three ways: disregard it and continue to refer whatever students he sees fit for disciplinary action, do nothing and tolerate chaos in his classroom, or take an early retirement from teaching.
Jamie Frank, who said she has been a teacher for 11 years in the suburban Washington area, said she worked in a district that stopped failing students who cut class because the policy was disproportionately affecting some groups of students. Teachers were required to reteach and retest students who’d missed class and give them time to make up work, she said.
Some district administrators supported the administration’s new policy.
For example, Hertica Y. Martin, the executive director of elementary and secondary education for Minnesota’s Rochester public schools, reported that from the 2007-08 to 2009-10 school years, the district reduced an overrepresentation of expelled African-American males. She credited a disciplinary approach gaining traction in schools nationwide, called Positive Behavioral Interventions and Support, with helping to support fairer disciplinary action. She also emphasized the importance of classes about racial and ethnic diversity that the school district has provided to teachers, with titles such as The Role of Whiteness and The Culturally Relevant Classroom.
It’s possible expulsions fell because the discipline model worked well. Or teachers got the message to go easy on black male students.
Stop Limiting Poor and Minority Kids with Low Expectations, writes RiShawn Biddle on Dropout Nation. The Harvard Ed report advocating multiple pathways — career tech as well as college prep — dooms low-income and minority students to dumbed-down curricula, instruction and expectations, Biddle believes.
He criticizes my call for “realistic pathways” for struggling students.
What she fails to consider is that the reason why they are struggling in the first place: Low-quality instruction and abysmal curricula throughout their times in school, especially in the early grades.
The reading, math and science skills needed to earn a bachelor’s degree are the same skills needed to succeed at a community college or technical school, Biddle argues. Everybody needs a high-quality education whether they’re heading for Harvard or trade school. They’ll only get that on the college-prep track.
Expectations matter. If teachers and administrators think that poor and minority kids aren’t capable of college prep education, then they won’t actually put any work into even the most basic instruction and curricula. They won’t develop intense reading remediation for kids in the early grades.
. . . “Realistic pathways” in schools means ability tracking and denying poor kids entree into the college prep courses that teachers and guidance counselors often reserve for kids they think can learn. It means magnet schools that don’t actually reflect any sort of diversity. It means the lack of school choice in any form.
Biddle has a valid point. (And I appreciate the thoughtful way he makes it.) If expectations are low in elementary and middle school — if nobody intervenes to help the kid who’s not learning to read or multiply — then students will start high school so far behind that it will be very difficult for them to succeed in college-prep courses. It will be hard for them to succeed in vocational courses.
I see the risk of creating a separate, less demanding track for other people’s kids. But the “forgotten half” of students aren’t getting high-quality college-prep. They take classes with college-prep titles and dumbed-down content, because the teachers aren’t allowed to fail most of their students. They go to community college and four-year colleges and fall into the black hole of remedial education, never to emerge with any credential.
Nearly all high school seniors plan to go to college; 89 percent think they’ll earn a four-year degree. Expectations are high. Achievement is low. In a Florida study, 20 percent of high school seniors with C averages or below went on to earn a college credential of any kind, including a short-term certificate.
We need to do a much better job educating children in K-8 so they’ll have real choices in high school. But I think more students would succeed if they had the option of a high-quality career track or a high-quality college-prep track. Making sure those options offer strong academics will be a challenge. But it’s one we should tackle.
The federal role in charter education is a “haphazard collection of laws, rules, funding preferences and rhetoric that lacks coherence at the policy or action level,” concludes the Brown Center on Education Policy at Brookings. Its experts recommend:
a) collecting and using more and better data on the performance of charter schools for purposes of authorizing, research, and informed parental choice; b) requiring states to provide equitable funding for charter schools relative to traditional public schools—including support for facilities; c) supporting higher standards for authorizing; d) revising rules and definitions that unintentionally disadvantage charter schools; e) promoting the growth as well as quality control of virtual charter schools; and f) finally and most importantly articulating and following through on a coherent policy with respect to charter schools.
Some 1.6 million children attend 4,900 charter schools in 39 states, the study notes. The best-known chains “create highly structured routines with uniforms, strict rules, and numerous drills.”
But charters take many other forms, including single sex schools, schools for the performing arts, schools for science and technology, bilingual schools, schools for the disabled, schools for drop-outs, and virtual schools where learning takes place online.
Charters attract a disproportionate number of low-income and minority students, especially blacks. “Initial test scores of students at charter schools are usually well below those of the average public school student in the state in which the charter school is located,” the report finds.
Of five randomized studies, four found charter schools improved student achievement while one found no impact, Brookings concludes. The four positive studies involved urban schools serving minority students. The no-impact study found “students from poor, minority, urban backgrounds did better in charter schools in contrast to students from middle-class, suburban backgrounds, who did worse.”
Thus all the randomized trials are consistent in pointing to the success of charter schools in large urban areas.
In addition to looking at reading and math scores, a study of charter high schools in Chicago and Florida found positive effects on both high school completion and college attendance.
Milwaukee’s charter students do as well in reading and may do slightly better in math compared to students in district-run public schools after one year, concludes a preliminary study by John F. Witte of the University of Wisconsin and Patrick J. Wolf of the University of Arkansas.
Students in independent charter schools that were converted from private schools outperformed Milwaukee Public Schools student in both math and reading after controlling for factors such as student characteristics and school switching.
Charters are schools of choice often located in minority neighborhoods, writes Nelson Smith. That’s not segregation.
On Community College Spotlight: Minding the minority education gap.
On Community College Spotlight; Community colleges partner with universities to start minority students on K-12 teaching careers.
Recent Comments