Posts Tagged ‘low performing’

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Same school issues, fierce opinions

Wednesday, March 23rd, 2011

In the media this past week, education news, opinion, and letters to the editor ranged from pieces on kids, parents, and teachers to budgets and unions. Same issues, fierce opinions.

Kids and parents…

On Monday, March 21, KQED, the local San Francisco NPR station, commented on the revised school assignment system from the district’s assignment center. After years of complaints, it now appears that parents are not requesting the neighborhood school as first choice, but the school with the preferred program–especially language immersion; schools with high-achieving scores on state tests; and new K-8 schools. Variety in school programs is wonderful for a diverse population. One hopes money doesn’t disappear as schools open next year.

Close schools or convert…

The Detroit school board, facing governance, academic, and above all, financial problems, is preparing to vote to convert 41 of the 141 public schools to charter schools. The financial manager brought in to straighten out the financial woes for the district feels the numerous low-performing schools must have a strong overhaul to begin to address the academic needs of students. The 73,000 students in the large urban district will attend new charters in September 2011 or find their neighborhood schools closed. District finances are that dire. The pros and cons can be read in 3/21/11 Edweek on-line.

How students do better…

Good health is an effect of good education. One year after the Affordable Care Act of 2010, economist William H. Dow, U.C. Berkeley, asserted the relationship between well-educated Americans and health.  The idea is that adults without a college degree, much less a high school diploma, have poor health habits and can’t get jobs to pay for health insurance. The circle of distress goes round and round.  The conclusion is that the California legislature and U.S. Congress should not be niggling over the cost of education because in the long term health costs will be saved. Sound plausible? See the March 20, 2011, San Francisco Chronicle “Insight” article.

Women on the children’s side…

Friday, March 18, 2011, Gloria Taylor, co-president of the California American Association of University Women, wrote a letter to the editor for the state’s 1,000 women members. The association, on behalf of women and children, supports the tax revenue extension proposition on the June 2011 ballot to bring the California budget into balance. Who will a balanced budget help? Students for sure.

Unions and the judge…

On Friday, March 18, 2011, efforts in Wisconsin to wipe out public sector collective bargaining rights were stalled when Judge Maryann Sumi of the Dane County Circuit Court in Madison, Wisconsin, ordered a temporary restraining order to block the law from taking effect. After a month of raucous marching and devious legislative maneuvering, both sides of the conflict are waiting for legal moves. Public sector employees hope for the best. Teachers know that collective bargaining is one tool for revising fraught evaluation procedures, the huge and necessary need for teacher stability.

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Posted in California budget crisis, health care reform, low-performing schools, school finance reform, school reform |
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Eliminate tenure-Ensure teacher quality

Wednesday, February 2nd, 2011

In the State of the Union speech earlier this month, President Obama spoke of moving education for the nation’s children up front. The time to exert ourselves is now. We can make improvements that will help the country grow long term.

Great! But the road to student success brings to mind a plethora of factors: tests, budgets, vouchers, evaluation, curriculum, core standards, classroom management, teacher preparation. The list goes on and on.

But wait! A number of state governors are making loud noises about teacher tenure. They are positive that eliminating just this single hundred year old fixture of teacher protection from arbitrary dismissal will solve the problem of low-performing schools.

Every teacher knows the stories of weak colleagues with high salaries and poor classroom management who couldn’t be dismissed without lengthy hearings and attempts to help them improve. And every teacher knows the stories of teachers who were harassed by administrators because they stood up for their rights until they left the profession.

Simply tossing teacher tenure from the state’s education legislation may be the easy thing to do, but would hardly be the solution to teacher quality or achievement for students.

Other measures are being debated.

For instance, Memphis city school system is trying to settle its budget woes by merging the city schools with the suburban schools of Shelby County, Tennessee. Such a merger has set off a conflict of rich and poor, urban vs. suburban needs, shifting costs. Still, those disputes are attempts to improve the achievement of students-the goal of education.

Maybe vouchers are the end all and be all. The Florida legislature has written another bill to make money available for students in failing schools to move to private schools. It could be one way to dismantle low-performing schools, but how to judge whether the particular private school is going to help the new students?

In New York City Schools, Learning Leaders is a volunteer organization that provides tutors and parent education to promote literacy for a school’s low-performing children. The results indicate higher scores on standardized tests, improved attendance, enhanced social skills and behavior. The model is an intense focus on factors to improve achievement for students.

How about three models espoused by organizations to improve teacher quality? William J. Slotnick of Community Assistance and Training Center has helped Denver Public Schools and Charlotte-Mecklenburg schools in North Carolina. They focus on models where teachers and principals set goals and select measures for yearly student achievement. Teacher evaluation is based on success in completing the goals.

A report on establishing teacher quality, written by Education Resource Strategies in Watertown, Massachusetts, suggests guidelines for schools, districts, and states. All suggestions are based on a bottom up strategy which should ensure teacher and union participation.

Here are the five suggestions: create teams to plan for change; empower the teams; build better steps to recruit highly qualified personnel to carry out the plan; help teachers achieve potential; reward personnel contributions to student achievement.

A third model offered by the National Comprehensive Center for Teacher Quality describes similar steps for improving student achievement and teacher quality. The NCCTQ report specifically takes up the ‘third rail’ of teacher tenure when addressing teacher evaluation issues.

In California all of the problems noted above are hitting the schools: budget woes and merging districts; education experts advocating vouchers; unions offering accountability models for teacher evaluation; models showing ways to improve student achievement in failing schools. It is highly unlikely that the California legislature will cut teacher tenure from the education code. It will, however, be part of a revised teacher evaluation system.

It will be a hard row to hoe. But the ask is to move forward, make change for the good of the country.

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Posted in California budget crisis, low-performing schools, public schools, school reform, teacher tenure |
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New CA Governor, Old School Budget Problems

Wednesday, December 22nd, 2010

Teachers in California are gloomy.  No wonder after the December 14 meeting at UCLA called by the governor-elect with school folks from all over the state.

In the past months, newspapers and magazines have shared district examples from all over the country of those doing well at the transformation from failing schools.  It has also been sharing a few examples of poor choices.  Until last week in California, there was still hope for reform.  The main conundrum was how to scale up successful school models: professional development, new teacher training, mentoring, collaboration, change testing and evaluation, etc.

Now, teachers have little hope.  The governor-elect was adamant that all parts of the state programs will be affected–his office included–to cut the state budget down to size and eliminate the deficit.  Various state school officials, including the California Teachers Association president, Dave Sanchez, asked for leniency, claiming that school districts have taken the brunt of the cuts in the past several years.

Sounds like the federal fiscal commission report.  No one, of course, believes it will happen given the hocus-pocus that has held things together for the last years.

Look, however, at San Diego as Doug Porta of the OB Rag December 15, 2010, has suggested.  Up to 1500 pink slips could be handed out and affect everyone.  You name it, those jobs will disappear.  Sports and special programs will all be fought over and will vanish.  Schools will be closed and, of course, teacher pay and benefits will be slashed.

Think about where you live.  Some variation on these cuts will occur because jobs are the last part of a recession to recover and this state depends on tax revenues which come with jobs.  Most of the federal stimulus money is gone.  You can cross your fingers that the latest federal legislation will provide money, but California has 120 days to come up with a solution for the $6 billion deficit we currently have, not counting the deficit projected for next year if programs are kept as they are.

Who will not be helped?  It was recalled by Michael Gerson of the Washington Post on NPR’s “Talk of the Nation,” December 20, 2010, that to get ahead in this country one needs to finish high school and preferably attend some college, get married before children are born, and work steadily.  This is hard enough for many students, but most difficult for those in California for the next 18 months, the outlook before employment rates change.

Remember what Californians voted for last May in the special election.  The short version was don’t cut any state programs but don’t raise taxes either.  May be your wishes, but it won’t be possible.  Voters, many of whom are California teachers, will have to look at the facts.  Deep cuts in all programs.  Adjust tax revenues.

How will schools turn around?

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Posted in California Teachers Association, public schools, school reform |
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Recent History of the Yearly Test

Wednesday, October 20th, 2010

It is difficult for people to move forward.  They prefer to stand still, jogging from one foot to the other, step back and finally turn forward again.

In schools, a million excuses are made.  Whether accountability, reform, transform, high-achiever vs. low-performer, second language learner, charter, private, parochial, public, and etc., the list attached contains all the reasons to stick with that justification, telling why it is wrong or why it will solve all educational problems.

This week the word is “test.”  How well a student performs on a test has been a criterion for success K-12 since Sputnik soared into the heavens.  You may laugh because you know someone who didn’t do well on tests, but who has done very well in the market place.  You may smirk because someone did well on tests, but not in the work place.  And everything in between.  And you were surprised as a high school high-achieving senior when the counselor said “don’t worry about it.”

Nowadays, however, no matter what kind of school, the students, teachers, administrators worry about success and the test is how the public knows.  It sounded good in 2002 when No Child Left Behind (NCLB), a revision of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA), was instituted, even though teacher’s unions were warning against testing requirements and benchmarks even then.

The education world was in the middle of facing the research that showed a number of schools in each large district were stumbling, not graduating students with ambition to go to college, in fact not graduating enough students overall, leaving African-American and Hispanic students in the dust and making them repeat a grade or subject if they didn’t drop out in disgust.

Testing became the way to assess how schools were doing.  Anyone in charge of supervising the testing knew that it didn’t matter how relentless you were in helping students improve.  In several years the benchmarks were going to overtake the schools, even if most groups attained the minimum proficiency except one, eg. special education.  Most educators would say it is because the NCLB legislation treated students as robots, all were going to do well and improve as long as the “test” was given.  And if they didn’t it was the teacher’s fault.

Opposition from two well-respected organizations, National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE) and the International Reading Association (IRA), as well as other groups at the state level have shown that transformation doesn’t occur by looking at scores on standardized tests, not even on criterion-referenced tests as is touted in California.  In addition, major publishers of school texts make money from interim tests that are supposed to show the teacher how well students have learned so far.  No studies have been made to show that those tests help, not even as practice for the kinds of questions asked on yearly exams.

Adults love tests.  Good students don’t mind taking them, confident that they will pass well.  Some high school students cavalierly fill in bubbles, no longer impressed by tests.  Students who don’t read English, and are still required to take the exams, fill in the bubbles and close the booklet.

Tests need to be revised now that Common Core Standards have been instituted.  Let’s hope the tests are short, ask competent questions, and are used only as one source of information to guide a school and district to transform a low-performing into a high-achieving school, to make sure those students graduate with the skills to attend a college or other post-secondary school.

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Posted in ESEA, Elementary and Secondary Education Act, NCLB, No Child Left Behind Act, low-performing schools, public schools |
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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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Posted in low-performing schools, public schools |
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