Posts Tagged ‘Race To The Top’

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Back to the Old Name for NCLB

Wednesday, February 17th, 2010

When the U. S. Department of Education began to address the revisions to No Child Left Behind legislation (up to now put off several times), the first thing changed was the name.  NCLB (often pronounced Nickel B) has become toxic to most educators, governors, and state education departments.

We’re back to Elementary and Secondary Education Act aka ESEA, the original title of the legislation, in an effort to abandon the stigma attached to the NCLB revisions in 2001.

Heading the list of disliked provisions was distaste for “top down” mandates.  Seen as an especially noxious feature of NCLB legislation were mandates required by Congress with no money attached.  Even now, as word gets out about negotiations on ESEA revisions, the fear is for more top down requirements with no $$ attached.  As most states are currently in the middle of terrible fiscal times, all eyes are on m-o-n-e-y.

Looking at current deficits, states can’t bear to rewrite state tests, put new evaluation procedures in place, provide colleges adequate funds to train teachers, much less support school districts to turn around failing schools-even though, in the long term, all those revisions must occur to close the achievement gap among student groups, the top of the top priorities for ESEA revision.

On the other hand, states might as well face the facts.  The Obama administration has insisted on accountability, but no longer with a NCLB type of yearly test geared to state standards that are set to increase levels of proficiency to 100% by 2014.

As before, each state will set its own standards and choose its own test, but everyone in the education world knows how that worked under NCLB.  Lowered standards and simplified tests made the state look like it was making its benchmarks.

The overview of the ESEA legislation revisions have stressed the U. S. Department of Education’s insistence on data to show student growth and school progress over time with the plan to reward gains in closing the achievement gap among the students left behind in the ordinary school setting.

So now the focus is on the National Governor’s Association and Council of Chief State School Officers to design common standards that become the core of each state’s plan for accountability.  This blog’s bet is that researchers at, for example, Education Trust will be comparing each state’s standards and tests so that low-performing schools are not left to fail.

As most school districts are just trying to get by for another year, such a big change in thought and structure for school reform requires investment.  Like flowers from a magician’s hat, the Race to the Top competition energized 48 states to think about change for high schools, and Title I School Improvement Grant competition sets those states to structure elementary education reform.

Get over it.  Whether a group of charter schools or a public high school district or a tiny rural public school district, someone is at the top.  Here’s the question: is the figure at the top looking ahead or keeping his/her head lowered?  Those are the stakes for legislative reform in the Elementary and Secondary Education Act.

Where do you stand?  Paralyzed?  Or willing to grab this formidable bull of reform by the horns and wrestle it down?

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Posted in ESEA, Education Trust, Elementary and Secondary Education Act, NCLB, Race to Top, public schools, school accountability, school reform |
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Another Day, Another Look at Charter Schools

Wednesday, January 27th, 2010

Now that California, one of many states, has raised the cap on the number of charter schools allowed to apply for licenses each year, it’s time to look again at the realities of the charter school controversy.

California elementary charter school

California elementary charter school

Why do some praise charter schools as the savior of education in the United States?

Why are others cautious, if not outright antagonistic?

The charter school movement came to life in 1988 in Minnesota with the idea to design schools with “renewable licenses to innovate, free of most school district rules.” (John Merrow, “When Roads Diverge…”edweek.org) In 1992 the first charter school opened in Minnesota, followed soon by California after passage of the Charter School Act of 1992 and which now is #2 in the list of schools chartered.

Still charter schools have not, so far, swept over the country.  Let’s look at more numbers.  There are 4000 charter schools in 40 states and DC with 1.3 million students.  Minnesota has the most schools and California in 2009 has 700 charter schools out of 10,000 public schools with 4% of the 6.3 million students.

Even so, Michelle Rhee, superintendent of Washington DC schools, Antonio Villaraigosa, mayor of Los Angeles, and Michael Bloomberg, mayor of New York, all are doing their best to restructure their school districts by closing low-performing schools and reopening with smaller charter schools, often in the same building.

Why so?

Money.  State regulations for licensing charter schools have been revised in pursuit of federal Race to the Top funds geared mostly toward low-performing high schools, a desperate problem in large urban areas.  Limited data available does show that charter high schools outperform similar traditional high schools.  In addition, in California at least, charter high schools attract more disadvantaged Hispanic students, one of the groups the state must target for academic help.

Strong teachers and administrators who want to get away from the system of traditional public schools with union contracts that were needed for a long while, but now restrict change, love the idea of starting over with a new school.

In addition, high-performing charters are small schools (average 350 students) with longer school days and year, more time devoted to English language study, a clear academic mission, a moderate discipline policy.  Those schools do well on the assessments to ensure a license renewal.

Top charters really have tried to innovate.

K-5 Conservatory Lab Charter School in the Boston area led by Diana Lam, long time administrator, uses a curricular model called Learning Through Music to support students who must improve their academic achievement.  Teacher contract innovation also is a goal.  A management team is designing the pay formula based on 5 levels of teacher performance, each level geared to identify a teacher as s/he becomes more experienced.  In addition, the teachers collaborate, using the Cycle of Inquiry model to assess, analyze, and modify teaching strategies.

City Arts and Technology High School set in a working class San Francisco neighborhood is one of Envision Schools, a non-profit group of model charter high schools.  The curriculum is rigorous, students collaborate on learning projects, and support is available to ensure all 365 students do well on state exams.

What’s wrong?

Nothing, except those exceptional schools are having difficulty being replicated across the country and time is of the essence.  For instance, in California, elementary charter schools are less likely to serve minorities, English Language Learners, and low-income students.  The schools are small, not reaching enough children.  Studies of outcome data for many charter schools have not shown better results than traditional public schools.

Often said, the parent buyer must beware.  Disinformation has been generated about charter schools, emphasizing their good qualities, denigrating perfectly good public schools, and hiding the fact that 14% of charter schools lose their licenses, just like traditional public schools fall into the low-performance abyss.

Finally, a number of professionals associated with the education field see charter schools as a way to privatize education, paid for with public money.  Others who praise charter schools do so because they hope to drag down teachers’ unions that are accused of holding onto a fixed pay structure which offers no incentives to excel.

Looking again?

Teacher’s pay structure is being re-evaluated, but the public must support the thousands of public schools looking for a model to help students achieve, instead of antagonizing the very highly-qualified teachers needed to close the achievement gap.

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Posted in Race to Top, cycle of inquiry, highly qualified teachers, low-performing schools, public schools |
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What’s the Answer?

Wednesday, January 13th, 2010
a California high school

a California high school

Amazing in itself, two bills (SBX5 1 and SBX5 4) passed January 7, 2010, in the California legislature and were signed by Governor Schwarzenegger, aiming to get $700 million from the federal Race To The Top (RTTT) funds.

What will that money be used for?  Most of the California education world only expects it to shore up the fiscal crisis, allowing legislators to say “See, we didn’t take any more money from schools.”

Such manipulation does nothing to address the real crisis in California, the governor and his party’s refusal to consider taxes, the Democratic majority’s inability to pass legislation anyway because of the supermajority (2/3) needed by the legislature and/or from the voters in an election for any tax or finance legislation.

Meantime, the onslaught against teachers continues, pay cuts, furlough days, increases in student/teacher ratio, all of which really are to the detriment of students for whom RTTT funds are supposed to benefit.

Round and round we go, where we stop…

Actually, anyone who studies school reform knows where to stop.  At schools in deep failure, low-performing on exams; poor, poor, poor facilities; unsupported teachers; distracted parents consumed by pay and food for their children.  Whether tax haters like it or not, systemic failure needs money to reverse itself.  This blog has reported suggestions to reorganize without cost, but in the end, it’s dollar bills, used effectively and efficiently.

The legislation is geared to help the lowest-performing schools turn around, but two big issues dominate the legislation.

First, a bill component allows the linkage of school data to teacher evaluation, an ongoing concern with many competing ideas to put such a system in place. Randi Weingarten, AFT president, on Tuesday, January 12, 2010, offered a model in which teachers and other school personnel are part of the team designing the plan.  In the California legislation, collective bargaining is part of the process.

Second, the bill establishes a commission to update the state’s student content standards, not revised since the mid-1990’s.  No plan for teacher evaluation or changes to state testing would occur until the standards are revised.

Another aspect of the legislation has received strong support and strong condemnation. The provision allows parents to petition and state officials to force a school district to overhaul bad schools.

It’s true already that California State officials take over school districts, from community college to urban K-12.  Sometimes parents develop a charter school, so that’s already happening.  What will likely cause the uproar is allowing students to choose any school in the state to attend.

“Open enrollment” offers that possibility.  RTTT suggests that open enrollment policies to allow students to transfer out of schools that fail to raise state test scores high enough, quickly enough, will help.  Bruce Fuller, education and public policy professor UC Berkeley, says it’s just shifting chairs around on the sinking Titanic. (SFChronicle, January6, 2010)

Sounds good for the student, but what about the transportation costs, the cost to the receiving and sending school districts.  Who puts up the money to make it happen?

While teacher’s unions have been wading in to advocate for a number of these provisions, after making sure their objections have been heard, the California Teachers Association (CTA) is adamantly opposed to the “open enrollment” part of the legislation.

It’s not hard to imagine the unintended consequences of the proposal.  It will bring chaos to many school districts, like schools with high transient rates and low test performance, without offering any model for improvement.

Is that the answer to fix failing schools?

(Image by SHM)

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Posted in American Federation of Teachers, California Teachers Association, Race to Top, community colleges, low-performing schools, program improvement, public schools, school reform |
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Whose Fault???

Wednesday, December 23rd, 2009

Having been a teacher, blame placed on teacher’s unions “that view reforms more for how they affect pay and job security than whether they improve student learning” is unfair and inflammatory.

The accusation by David Davenport in the article “Value-added education in the race to the top” San Francisco Chronicle, November 29, 2009, is based on the country-wide dispute about using data to help students learn, rather than to evaluate teachers.

This is not to go along with every position NEA, for example, has taken in the past, but the constant denigration of teacher’s unions about their position on evaluation and student testing performance is misleading about a complex reform.

Davenport, a research fellow at Stanford’s Hoover Institution, well-known for its conservative views, advocates the “value-added” model, originally a manufacturer’s economic theory, to address the problem of teacher evaluation with data, collectible from the vast pool of scores since NCLB began.

Actually, the teacher and student evaluation reform issue is touchy, easy to manipulate with statistics, and difficult to resolve because of the multitude of variables.

It’s easy for the media to grab onto student test scores and conclude the results are attributable to the skill, or not, of the teacher.  It doesn’t matter that a superintendent, a principal, or a teacher defends the year’s testing outcomes, if scores have not soared higher than a kite, those educators are said to be making excuses.

The term “value-added” education, partly referring to the student’s gain in reading and math proficiency over a year, has been around for nine years, at least, in California.  Every school knows its exact place in relation to other schools in the state.  Those in need of program improvement are deep into the change process.

Several reports can be found (Mass Insight Education & Research Institute and the California Governor’s Advisory Committee on Education Excellence are two) elaborating on conditions for bringing change to schools so that students actually learn more and more each year.

In addition, “value-added” refers to the other attributes in the school and classroom that can be assessed, such as the instruction received.

None of the “turn around” measures advocate evaluating a single teacher solely on the improvement in scores of his/her students.  As I’ve read it, unions are against that particular type of evaluation (which is the magic bullet whirling around in the media air), but NEA and AFT have offered suggestions to use the test as one part, along with other tools, to assess the teacher’s skill in the classroom.

As part of Race To The Top grant preparation, California’s Governor Schwarzeneggar has signed two bills to support data availability for teacher and school evaluation.

Next problem.

While reading that the “value-added” proposal can provide a foundation on which to build accountability, to be practical, how can time be spent to develop these evaluation tools when there is so little money?

And what will be done when the evaluation procedures are developed?  Will there be money to set in motion the practices needed to truly and fairly move unsatisfactory teachers from a school district?

Besides, does Mr. Davenport surmise that just getting rid of weak teachers is going to fix a school?  The article notes Eric Hanushek’s comment that replacing 6-10% of the nation’s poorest teachers with average teachers will make a difference in the quality of American education.

How will that happen?  A bit of research into Mr. Hanushek’s theories may provide some insight.  See next post.

Having supervised teachers in a program improvement school, the advice is every Race To The Top dollar should be spent for program evaluation, professional development for highly-qualified teachers, facility improvement, parent education so they know how to keep track of their children’s work and expect achievement, and school community celebration of effort and success.

While each teacher must be accountable, the overall success of those “good” school characteristics is the key.  That’s how the program improves.

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Posted in American Federation of Teachers, Mass Insight Education & Research Institute, NCLB, National Education Association, Race to Top, highly qualified teachers, public schools, school community, school reform |
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Am I Highly-Qualified?

Wednesday, September 23rd, 2009

Sometimes I wonder what the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) legislation means when it requires all teachers to be highly-qualified.  It’s still the law.  No changes yet.  No matter how often my union (CTA) brings it up in its magazine.

3rd grader reads at home

3rd grader reads at home

In the latest issue of California Educator, September 2009, the problem is seen in the Race to the Top requirements: “paying teachers based on a single test score will increase the likelihood of teaching to the test and make it harder to recruit and retain teachers.” (p. 30)

I read those words and think how does my training make me want to be paid only for teaching to make sure students pass a test?  Is that what a highly-qualified teacher does?

I spent two years taking classes in the latest research before I was credentialed.  None of it was about teaching to a test.  In reading/language arts, the curriculum focused on the best practices known to show students how to figure out unknown vocabulary and to read for meaning so that no matter what text, fiction or non-fiction, is found in the test booklet, they will be able to show what they have learned.

For mathematics, we were trained to use the most up-to-date strategies to teach students beginning set theory for little kids through pre-algebra for upper elementary students.  In my current class, the students are very strong in mathematical understanding, so I spend my time assembling enrichment materials.

In California, the same as many other states, I wrote my own research papers, using the students in my student-teaching classes as subjects to test the strategies I was studying.  I took the CBEST, the exam that new teachers must pass before being credentialed.  I observed and student-taught at three different grade levels.  I was evaluated on my lesson plans and classroom management skills for those weeks.  Even in my second year, I’m still observed and evaluated, being a probationary teacher.  I get good remarks for my work.

Doesn’t it sound like I’m highly-qualified?  I know, however, that I’m fortunate to teach students that are highly motivated and who have parents who encourage them and spend a great deal of time giving them after-school opportunities.

What if, like some teacher friends from my credentialing program, I was hired in a low-income neighborhood where the students don’t have the advantages my students enjoy?  What if the students were struggling with another language?  Enough food?  Illness?  Parents who worked all the time and still didn’t have enough money for trips to museums or the beach or the sights of San Francisco, much less a home library?

And what if, no matter all the best practices of the teachers and enthusiasm of the students, the yearly test scores improve, but only little by little, and it takes relentless struggle to reach the benchmarks set by the state each year.  Some years, the benchmarks aren’t met.

Do those teachers not deserve recognition just like the teachers in schools where most students surpass the benchmarks every year?

So how is this ‘pay based on test scores’ evaluation plan supposed to fairly identify highly-qualified teachers?

Will this be another mandate with no guidelines and no money behind it?  Please say no.  In fact, put forward other well-documented ways to help students succeed, not pay-for-test-score-performance at all.

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Posted in California Teachers Association, NCLB, No Child Left Behind Act, Race to Top, highly qualified teachers, public schools, teacher preparation |
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