Posts Tagged ‘English Language Learners’

Conundrum for Public Schools

Wednesday, October 6th, 2010

Low-performing schools, whether by federal No Child Left Behind (NCLB) standards or a state’s benchmarks, are the hardest cases.  No matter that parents and students love the school, the national education field wants academic student success at those schools and it’s wanted now.

a "good" elementary school

a "good" elementary school

At public June Jordan High School in San Francisco, front page on September 20, 2010, in the San Francisco Chronicle’s “Conundrum of June Jordan School” by Jill Tucker, the scores are ’so low they look like up’, no matter that it has begun to transform, separating into four small academic communities and pushing students to go to college, providing counselors and services to help students and families.  Education experts each have their reasons for its failure to achieve academically from ‘the fault of the teacher’s union’ to not ‘getting back to basics’.

Such certainty about solutions for these high schools affects all schools that have used the ’small academic community’ approach to begin to solve its problems.  Look at Roybal Learning Center (public high school) in downtown Los Angeles and the famous Green Dot charter high schools in Los Angeles, both unionized and both providing plenty of basics for its students in small learning communities.

The big problem is working with students who have been low-performing all their school lives and who have a large attrition rate once they hit high school, if they manage to enter the door.

The chatter does not allow the time needed for change to happen.  Five or more years to this blogger’s thinking, if nothing gets in the way.  And something is sure to get in the way.  Right now in California as well as many other states, it’s the budget.  And if you watched the News Hour, Monday, October 4, the segment reported on all the homeless students that have difficulty staying in one school, even with federal money for each district that needs it.  How about the Special Education students in low-performing schools and the increasing number of English Language Learners (ELL) for whom public schools must intervene?  Does any expert think those issues can be resolved with a magic wand?

Besides small learning communities, what are some changes that can be tried?  President Obama, last Tuesday, September 28, mentioned a longer school year.  The September 27 New Yorker article “Schoolwork” by Nicholas Lemann suggested curriculum models that have a “strong sustained record of field-tested success in improving the education of low-performing students.”  Some Education Week articles affirm that technological equipment, furniture, and even decent restrooms make a difference to the education of low-performing children.

The film “Waiting for Superman” has brought out the latest arguments, trumping charter schools over all other possible transformations.  However, to someone who has taught in many different locations the immediate view is that none of the charter schools depicted in the film look any better than the large quantity of good public schools already turning out successful students in this country.  The use of a lottery to decide who gets to attend a school should never be touted as the way to go.

Even congratulating the students who won a lottery seat, anyone who watched that film was crying for those children who did not.  Does anyone think a homeless child’s parent even knows about the lottery?  Field studies have shown special education and ELL numbers in charter schools are woeful.

What is needed is more good schools.  It is well-known, however, among the education elite that with approximately 140,000 (National Center for Education Statistics) public schools in this country, charter-including for-profit, private, parochial, and home school will never be the only source of “good” schools.

So the experts who think that everything is broken need to buck up and support the research available to reach the most difficult schools so that the education of the most downtrodden succeeds.

(Need to talk to your school community about turning around the low-performing students at your site?  See the ‘how to talk’ website Takecareschools.com.)

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Getting Ready

Wednesday, November 4th, 2009

Rumbles about teacher preparation keep surfacing in the newspapers, on TV, on teacher internet websites, in union magazines.

The concern engulfing the education world is not just teacher quality, but how to improve schools of education, whether undergraduate or graduate programs.

Impressive statistics describe the dilemma.  Of 3.2 million teachers in 95,000 schools in the United States, half are Baby Boomers who will soon retire.  The data estimates that within four years schools will lose 1/3 of those veteran teachers.  By 2014 almost 1 million new teachers will be needed, roughly 200,000 new teachers a year.

Those numbers stood out when Arne Duncan, U. S. Secretary of the Department of Education, in an October speech at Teacher’s College, Columbia University, New York, addressed mediocre-his words-teacher preparation in the United States.

Veteran teachers may shake their heads.  A long line of famous educators, Horace Mann, William James, John Dewey among them, have despaired of weak teacher preparation.

My favorite quote is from Jacques Barzun, a revered philosopher and educator from Columbia University, who disparaged teacher education as having “a strong anti-intellectual bias, enhanced by a total lack of imagination.”

The good news from the second half of Duncan’s speech is that over the past ten years a few “rigorous practice-spaced initiatives to adapt to the reality of preparing instructors, to teach to diverse students in our information age” have developed.

Sounds like good news for young men and women in schools of education, until those that oversee teacher education look at the kinds of students for which their programs must prepare new teachers.

English Language Learners, isolated rural children, high poverty-high need urban students, kids who need excellent math and science teachers, diverse ethnic groups that would do well to see a diverse teacher population.

What to do about these disparate needs?

A number of options for schools of education have surfaced.  One essay by Susan Engel, “Teach Your Teachers Well,” New York Times, November 2, 2009, suggested more time student teaching, not just sitting at lectures about class management or the latest reading research.  Next, she suggests videotaping and analyzing the lessons taught, similar to training for therapists who analyze good points and difficult moments in therapy sessions.

Also, she suggests more study about watching children learn, not merely memorizing Piaget’s theories, for example, but in-depth study.  Last and best, is Engel’s suggestion to provide financial incentives to public schools to hire several teachers from a similar training program.  With this strategy, called a teacher residency, participants will have backup and camaraderie that may be a boost during difficult moments which any veteran teacher knows will occur.

PACT, Performance Assessment for California Teachers, has been pioneered by a wide-ranging consortium of teacher education programs in California.  It offers some of Engel’s strategies for the aspiring teacher.  Fourteen states are piloting similar performance assessments based on PACT.

One caveat: in California, as well as many other states, the current fiscal budget deficit and the solution of pillaging money from education places a pall over success.  However, there are those who will never say die.  Veteran teachers count on that determination.

Get ready!

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Posted in Arne Duncan, PACT, public schools, schools of education, teacher preparation |
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Learning Math in the USA

Wednesday, October 21st, 2009

How can we be doing so badly?  The richest country in the world and our kids can’t get a decent math test score on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP).

hands-on math in textbook

hands-on math in textbook

That, at least, is the judgment based on data from the 2009 Nation’s Report Card released Wednesday, October 14, 2009, and noted in many national newspapers.  The San Francisco Chronicle, “State’s math scores near bottom” by Jill Tucker, says, “California consistently has ranked among the lowest-scoring states”–third from the bottom after this year’s testing sample, only Alabama and Mississippi with lower scores.

On the other hand, except for once every two years when the Nation’s Report Card test scores hit the newspaper, only a few people in the education world know the test was given.  When teaching, I never knew a school or teacher who had given the test.  I’d never seen an example of the test.

It’s a bet that only math gurus at the State Department of Education know fourth grade math proficiency has grown from a scale score 208 in 1992 when the test was first given in California to 232 this year, compared to USA national average 239.  The bad news is two years ago fourth graders had almost the same paltry score-230–out of a possible 500 scale score (a statistical tool to compare data from all 50 states).

The final insult is only 35% of California fourth graders learned enough of the federal math standards to achieve scale scores considered proficient or advanced.

How can that be when the level of proficiency or better on the California Standards Test (CST) used as a growth benchmark for the California Academic Performance Index (API) and the national Annual Yearly Progress (AYP) report has shown considerable improvement?

How? Why?

After much clicking through data on the National Center for Education Statistics’ unfriendly website, the following was disgorged about California NAEP math scores:

1) 7400 of 6 million California students were tested

2) 310 schools agreed to give the test in Fresno School District, San Diego Unified, and Los Angeles Unified

3) where the largest groups of English Language Learners (ELL) in the state reside.

No wonder the scores are weak (ELL average scale score 211).  Every California school district already knows that the achievement gap in the state is most disparate for students who speak little English.

Seems like, as teachers say all the time, too many exams.  Teachers in-the-know are busy looking at in-school assessments, using on-site data to make teaching decisions for improvement in state standards math instruction.

Nevertheless, newspaper articles and various reports about NAEP student failure point to four problems.

1) Every state has different math standards, some too easy, some too broadly defined, none matching the federal standards.

2) State assessments are too easy or don’t assess the most important math standards.

3) State proficiency benchmarks are too low.

4) Teacher preparation, credentialing, and professional development aren’t good enough, often blamed on teacher’s union policies.

What to do?

Most teachers will say, get on with it, create common standards, assessments, and benchmarks between states for math education.  Another well-kept secret, 48 states have agreed to do so.  An example is the New England Common Assessment Program.

Most important by far, states need to step up and fork over the money to “turn around” low performing schools which all those achievement gap ELL students attend.  Various studies have documented a small number of excellent schools for “turn around” models.*

Once attendance is secured, high standards made clear, parents involved, teachers well-supported, the curriculum may begin to stress critical thinking skills, the way to pass any test with flying colors, no matter who gives the exam.

*The school community wants to talk about this dilemma?  Take Care!, showing ways for the school community’s adults to resolve problems successfully,  may help.  See the website for this blog.

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Posted in Academic Performance Index, Annual Yearly Progress, Nation's Report Card, low-performing schools, public schools, school community |
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