Most teachers are as excited as their students about the end of the school year. After 36 weeks of school and an average of 53 hours per week , teachers are ready for a break. But I can’t help but think that the escape that summer vacation provides might be working against schools, and the students and teachers who might otherwise rally for what needs to be changed.
Jay Mathews makes this point by describing a decade-old example of an unconventional approach to change. Basically, the story is a teacher training students to call en masse (albeit politely) to complain to an adminstrator and ultimately affect change. Mathews seems convinced that sometimes teachers and students just need to let their anger show.
Normally, I would focus on the outcome of this effort, both in terms of the administration's response and on the civil disobediance lesson imparted to the students. But right now this strategy resonates with me, mostly because of an email I received earlier in the week from a friend who teaches 3rd grade in Detroit. She’s “elated” that the year is almost done and she can “escape” from her school and the district’s “insane policies”. I understand her need for a break. She teaches in one of those schools that no one really wants to teach in, and she’s been there longer than most (just finishing up her 5th year). She loves teaching, she reminds me, but “by the end of March, I just surrender because I know I can hang on for ten more weeks…Then I can start fresh in the fall.”
There are a lot of teachers and students organizing for change, but I'm curious to know if these efforts diminish as we near June each year. Or if some cries for change just flicker out as teachers and students realize that school's out in just 10, 5, or 2 weeks. I don't believe it is the teachers' responsibility to change schools, but I know they play an undeniably important role and may make the difference. What would change if the school year were restructured, continuing year-round with smaller breaks along the way, avoiding the “surrender” that seems to occur toward the end of the year? Of course, it's possible that teachers might burn out and quit altogether, but perhaps they might be motivated to keep up a consistent stream of teaching and learning, and to push the leadership to make fundamentally important changes.
Right now, there are more than 3 million teachers who are finishing up and preparing for summer school and for some much-needed time off. Come fall, they will be rested and ready for a new year. Unfortunately, they will face many of the same problems.
Friday, June 09, 2006
Thursday, June 08, 2006
Teaching Inequality
Since the early 1970s, many states have been convulsed with high-profile crises and lawsuits focused on school funding. School districts and advocates have gone to the barricades on behalf of low-income students, fighting for their fair share of society's educational resources.
But no one every learned anything (or at least, anything worth knowing) from a stack of money. Dollars are a means to an end in education; good teachers are the end. Without them, disadvantaged students face long odds of catching up with their peers and succeeding in a world where the penalty for a poor education grows by the day.
That's why the distribution of good teachers to disadvantaged students is one of the most important education policy and civil rights challenges of our time. And why a new report from the Education Trust, titled: Teaching Inequality How Poor and Minority Students are Shortchanged on Teacher Quality and written by Heather Peske, is so welcome. (Disclosure: I helped with some of the research that led to this report while employed at the Education Trust).
Filled with a wealth of brand-new data from Wisconsin, Illinois, and Ohio, the report shows how schools with the highest numbers of low-income, minority, and low-performing students consistently employ the fewest number of teachers with characteristics associated with classroom effectiveness, such as experience, certification, and knowledge of the subject being taught.
It's true that these are only proxy measures which don't always correspond with the best classroom instruction. But as the report notes:
Illinois, for example, rolled a range of teacher characteristics into a single composite index, and compared those figures to school poverty levels. It found that 84 percent of the highest-poverty schools in the state—the top 10 percent—fell in the bottom quartile of teacher quality. That's compared to 5 percent of the lowest-poverty schools. As Illinois Senator Barack Obama said about the report:
It's also why teacher maldistribution could be--and should be--the next frontier in the struggle for fairness on behalf of disadvantaged schoolchildren. There are millions of schoolchildren out there who are just a few good teachers away from the life they need and deserve. Changing these numbers on their behalf is an obligation we all share.
But no one every learned anything (or at least, anything worth knowing) from a stack of money. Dollars are a means to an end in education; good teachers are the end. Without them, disadvantaged students face long odds of catching up with their peers and succeeding in a world where the penalty for a poor education grows by the day.
That's why the distribution of good teachers to disadvantaged students is one of the most important education policy and civil rights challenges of our time. And why a new report from the Education Trust, titled: Teaching Inequality How Poor and Minority Students are Shortchanged on Teacher Quality and written by Heather Peske, is so welcome. (Disclosure: I helped with some of the research that led to this report while employed at the Education Trust).
Filled with a wealth of brand-new data from Wisconsin, Illinois, and Ohio, the report shows how schools with the highest numbers of low-income, minority, and low-performing students consistently employ the fewest number of teachers with characteristics associated with classroom effectiveness, such as experience, certification, and knowledge of the subject being taught.
It's true that these are only proxy measures which don't always correspond with the best classroom instruction. But as the report notes:
"When all of the proxies tilt one way—away from low-income and minority students—what we have is a system of distributing teachers that produces exactly the opposite of what fairness would dictate and what we need to close
achievement gaps."
Illinois, for example, rolled a range of teacher characteristics into a single composite index, and compared those figures to school poverty levels. It found that 84 percent of the highest-poverty schools in the state—the top 10 percent—fell in the bottom quartile of teacher quality. That's compared to 5 percent of the lowest-poverty schools. As Illinois Senator Barack Obama said about the report:
"..if we do nothing about this problem, we will face a future that is both morally unacceptable for our children, and economically untenable as we face a globalized world."
It's also why teacher maldistribution could be--and should be--the next frontier in the struggle for fairness on behalf of disadvantaged schoolchildren. There are millions of schoolchildren out there who are just a few good teachers away from the life they need and deserve. Changing these numbers on their behalf is an obligation we all share.
Proposition 82 Failed
On Tuesday, Californians voted against Proposition 82, the "Preschool for All" Act that would have established publicly-funded, universal preschool for all four-year-olds in the state. This is a major blow to universal preschool advocates, both in California and nationally, who had been putting a great deal of stock in the proposal.
Most observers blame Prop 82's loss on the controversies around Rob Reiner and the state's First 5 Commission, from which Reiner was forced to step down earlier this year due to conflicts of interest between his leadership of both the state-funded Commission and the campaign to promote Prop 82. That's certainly part of it.
But Prop 82's opponents were incredibly effective at seizing on (and driving into the ground) weak spots in the proposal that caused voters to have concerns about it. Some of the opponents' points were, of course, misinformation or deliberate misrepresentation of the policy here. But the opponents were able to seize ground, at least in part, because there were real policy shortcomings in how Prop. 82 would have implemented universal preschool that didn't sit well with voters.
Ironically, I think this may actually have been the best possible outcome for preschool advocates. Proposition 82's passage would have focused national attention on the implementation and impacts of universal preschool in California. If the program had failed to deliver the results preschool advocates promised--or if implementation had been a fiasco--that would have had a strong chilling effect on the preschool movement nationally. And there was a real risk of this, because some of the flaws Prop 82 opponents kept harping on really would have undermined the program's chances of success and popularity.
There's a broader lesson here for the preschool movement--over the past decade, preschool supporters (including major national foundation)--have focused there efforts primarily in three areas: building public support for universal preschool, building the research base on preschool quality, and cost-benefit analysis showing that preschool investments pay off for the public. These have all been important contributions. But if we've learned anything from the past 40 years of K-12 school reform, it's that regulating inputs and processes isn't enough to guarantee good educational results. Structures and systems--things like governance, incentives, culture--are also critical.
But the preschool movement has spent shockingly little time thinking about how publicly-funded preschool systems should be structured, in terms of governance, monitoring, oversight, parent choices, and how preschool providers should be selected (and who should be allowed to be one), among other factors. In fact, the preschool movement has been deliberately agnostic on such questions. There's a good case to be made that the structure of universal preschool will need to be different in different states to match unique local conditions. The two states that currently have universal Pre-K--Oklahoma and Georgia--demonstrate that very different structures can both be effective. But some structural characteristics are more likely to produce and support high-quality preschool than others. And without more clarity about what these conditions are from the preschool movement, state policymakers are likely to simply adopt the most politically expedient program design. That's basically what happened with Prop 82, and as a result there were clear flaws that undermined public support for it politically and would have undermined its chances of success if enacted. It's time for the preschool movement to start thinking about these questions.
Most observers blame Prop 82's loss on the controversies around Rob Reiner and the state's First 5 Commission, from which Reiner was forced to step down earlier this year due to conflicts of interest between his leadership of both the state-funded Commission and the campaign to promote Prop 82. That's certainly part of it.
But Prop 82's opponents were incredibly effective at seizing on (and driving into the ground) weak spots in the proposal that caused voters to have concerns about it. Some of the opponents' points were, of course, misinformation or deliberate misrepresentation of the policy here. But the opponents were able to seize ground, at least in part, because there were real policy shortcomings in how Prop. 82 would have implemented universal preschool that didn't sit well with voters.
Ironically, I think this may actually have been the best possible outcome for preschool advocates. Proposition 82's passage would have focused national attention on the implementation and impacts of universal preschool in California. If the program had failed to deliver the results preschool advocates promised--or if implementation had been a fiasco--that would have had a strong chilling effect on the preschool movement nationally. And there was a real risk of this, because some of the flaws Prop 82 opponents kept harping on really would have undermined the program's chances of success and popularity.
There's a broader lesson here for the preschool movement--over the past decade, preschool supporters (including major national foundation)--have focused there efforts primarily in three areas: building public support for universal preschool, building the research base on preschool quality, and cost-benefit analysis showing that preschool investments pay off for the public. These have all been important contributions. But if we've learned anything from the past 40 years of K-12 school reform, it's that regulating inputs and processes isn't enough to guarantee good educational results. Structures and systems--things like governance, incentives, culture--are also critical.
But the preschool movement has spent shockingly little time thinking about how publicly-funded preschool systems should be structured, in terms of governance, monitoring, oversight, parent choices, and how preschool providers should be selected (and who should be allowed to be one), among other factors. In fact, the preschool movement has been deliberately agnostic on such questions. There's a good case to be made that the structure of universal preschool will need to be different in different states to match unique local conditions. The two states that currently have universal Pre-K--Oklahoma and Georgia--demonstrate that very different structures can both be effective. But some structural characteristics are more likely to produce and support high-quality preschool than others. And without more clarity about what these conditions are from the preschool movement, state policymakers are likely to simply adopt the most politically expedient program design. That's basically what happened with Prop 82, and as a result there were clear flaws that undermined public support for it politically and would have undermined its chances of success if enacted. It's time for the preschool movement to start thinking about these questions.
Tuesday, June 06, 2006
Shooting the Wounded
Before he began writing his influental On Education column for the New York Times, Fred Hechinger was an editorial writer at the paper. He used a military metaphor to describe his work, and he did so only partly tongue-in-cheek. While the battle between opposing intellectual forces waged in the valley below, he would say, he took in the scene from the safety of the hillsides above. Only when the firing had ended and the smoke had cleared did he come down and fire away at the wounded.
I can't help but think that Hechinger, who died in 1995, would have done exactly that in the wake of the latest fight between education researchers over the nation's high school graduation rates.
As happens again and again in the education policy world, researchers identified with the two great galaxies in the education universe--those who support public education and those who attack it--have published competing findings, this time about the the nation's graduation rates or, more to the point, the percentages of students who fail to graduate.
On one side is political scientist Jay Greene, who argued recently that public school dropout ratese are higher than widely believed, 30 percent of the entire high school population.
Not so, says Larry Michel, president of the Economic Policy Institute, a Washington, DC, think tank. The national dropout rate is about 20 percent, Michel and colleagues contend.
The ensuring fight between the two researchers and their enemies and allies is a perfect illustration of why many policymakers can't comprehend much of the conversation about education research, and why, when they can understand it, they don't trust it.
Like so many others in education, the Greene-Michel debate quickly devolved into a jargon-filled intellectual food fight.
Michel's organization takes money from teacher unions with a vested interest in casting public schools in a positive light, Greene's supporters charged. Greene is a voucher advocate with an anti-public education ax to grind, countered Michel's defenders. Greene runs a new, $20-million research center at the University of Arkansas-Fayettesville funded by the private school voucher-advocating Walton Family Foundation and another Arkansas foundation endowed largely by Wal Mart stock, they pointed out.
In truth, who's right in the Greene-Michel debate is largely irrelevant. Both Michel and Greene report that very high percentages of African American and Hispanic students fail to earn regular high school diplomas (Greene pegs the numbers at 50 percent for Hispanic and black students in high poverty urban school systems; Michel says the average dropout rate for blacks is 25 percent and 26 percent for Hispanics). Regardless of whether one buys Greene's numbers or Michel's, the nation has a serious problem that needs to be addressed.
But rather than focusing on this larger picture, the national conversation is mired in an unproductive, highly politicized debate over methodology. Where's Fred Hechinger when we need him.
I can't help but think that Hechinger, who died in 1995, would have done exactly that in the wake of the latest fight between education researchers over the nation's high school graduation rates.
As happens again and again in the education policy world, researchers identified with the two great galaxies in the education universe--those who support public education and those who attack it--have published competing findings, this time about the the nation's graduation rates or, more to the point, the percentages of students who fail to graduate.
On one side is political scientist Jay Greene, who argued recently that public school dropout ratese are higher than widely believed, 30 percent of the entire high school population.
Not so, says Larry Michel, president of the Economic Policy Institute, a Washington, DC, think tank. The national dropout rate is about 20 percent, Michel and colleagues contend.
The ensuring fight between the two researchers and their enemies and allies is a perfect illustration of why many policymakers can't comprehend much of the conversation about education research, and why, when they can understand it, they don't trust it.
Like so many others in education, the Greene-Michel debate quickly devolved into a jargon-filled intellectual food fight.
Michel's organization takes money from teacher unions with a vested interest in casting public schools in a positive light, Greene's supporters charged. Greene is a voucher advocate with an anti-public education ax to grind, countered Michel's defenders. Greene runs a new, $20-million research center at the University of Arkansas-Fayettesville funded by the private school voucher-advocating Walton Family Foundation and another Arkansas foundation endowed largely by Wal Mart stock, they pointed out.
In truth, who's right in the Greene-Michel debate is largely irrelevant. Both Michel and Greene report that very high percentages of African American and Hispanic students fail to earn regular high school diplomas (Greene pegs the numbers at 50 percent for Hispanic and black students in high poverty urban school systems; Michel says the average dropout rate for blacks is 25 percent and 26 percent for Hispanics). Regardless of whether one buys Greene's numbers or Michel's, the nation has a serious problem that needs to be addressed.
But rather than focusing on this larger picture, the national conversation is mired in an unproductive, highly politicized debate over methodology. Where's Fred Hechinger when we need him.
62 percent
In addition to being the day of the Devil, today's also (some would say fittingly) the California primary, with voters choosing Democratic and Republican nominees for a variety of state offices, a replacement for disgraced Rep. Duke Cunningham, and also voting on Prop 82, the "Preschool for All Act." Since I've been writing a lot about this issue lately, I'm a little excited today (or possibly tomorrow) is the last time I'm going to be writing on it.
But before the door closes on Prop. 82 commentary, there's one thing I have to get off my chest. A lot of articles about the initaitive say something like this: "The nonpartisan Legislative Analyst's Office calculates that about 62 percent of the state's 4-year-olds already attend some kind of preschool or day care, and reports from other states indicate a free program would attract about 70 percent of 4-year-olds." A lot of people are then saying "Gee, the $2.4 billion annually Prop. 82 is projected to cost is a lot to raise the share of kids in preschool just eight percentage points*." Seems reasonable enough to me.
Except the whole analysis is based on a faulty notion. The number from the Legislative Analyst's Office is four-year-olds in preschool OR center-based child-care. Repeat after me: Child care is not preschool, child care is not preschool, child care is not preschool. It constantly amazes me that these two things continue to be conflated in public and policy debates. For those who don't understand the difference: Childcare is any setting in which a child is cared for by someone other than a parent, typically while parents are at work. Preschool programs specifically focus on preparing children for school. To do this, preschool programs use curricula focused on developing children’s early reading, math, social, and emotional skills and are taught by qualified teachers. Center-based childcare is simply childcare that takes place in a child-care center, rather than the home of the child or the care-giver. To be sure, some child care providers do provide high-quality, stimulating care that does support children's cognitive and emotional growth and prepare them for school. But there is tremendous variation among childcare providers, and many providers are of very low quality--essentially warehousing children. It's simply inaccurate to include children in these settings in a count of children in "preschool" just because they're not being cared for in a home.** A lot of those 62 percent of kids aren't in anything remotely like preschool, let alone high-quality preschool.
Unfortunately, a lot of analysis tends to take the stats on kids in "center-based care" (which does include preschool) as a proxy for the number in preschools, because "center-based care" happens to be what the government collects data on. As an analyst working on early childhood education, this is a huge frustration to me. But as until we stop conflating the two and define a minimum benchmark for preschool, good data here is going to be hard to come by.
*Actually, most of these people are saying, "Gee, the $2.4 billion annually Prop. 82 is projected to cost is a lot to raise the number of kids in preschool just eight percent," which is WRONG, since and increase from 62 percent to 70 percent is actually a 13 percent increase, but I don't have time to get into the difference between percent increases and percentage point increases here.
**It's also troubling, to me, that all home-based care is generally lumped together in policy discussions as being of low quality. On average, center-based care is higher quality than other types of childcare, but some family-care providers probably are very good, and many families prefer them.
But before the door closes on Prop. 82 commentary, there's one thing I have to get off my chest. A lot of articles about the initaitive say something like this: "The nonpartisan Legislative Analyst's Office calculates that about 62 percent of the state's 4-year-olds already attend some kind of preschool or day care, and reports from other states indicate a free program would attract about 70 percent of 4-year-olds." A lot of people are then saying "Gee, the $2.4 billion annually Prop. 82 is projected to cost is a lot to raise the share of kids in preschool just eight percentage points*." Seems reasonable enough to me.
Except the whole analysis is based on a faulty notion. The number from the Legislative Analyst's Office is four-year-olds in preschool OR center-based child-care. Repeat after me: Child care is not preschool, child care is not preschool, child care is not preschool. It constantly amazes me that these two things continue to be conflated in public and policy debates. For those who don't understand the difference: Childcare is any setting in which a child is cared for by someone other than a parent, typically while parents are at work. Preschool programs specifically focus on preparing children for school. To do this, preschool programs use curricula focused on developing children’s early reading, math, social, and emotional skills and are taught by qualified teachers. Center-based childcare is simply childcare that takes place in a child-care center, rather than the home of the child or the care-giver. To be sure, some child care providers do provide high-quality, stimulating care that does support children's cognitive and emotional growth and prepare them for school. But there is tremendous variation among childcare providers, and many providers are of very low quality--essentially warehousing children. It's simply inaccurate to include children in these settings in a count of children in "preschool" just because they're not being cared for in a home.** A lot of those 62 percent of kids aren't in anything remotely like preschool, let alone high-quality preschool.
Unfortunately, a lot of analysis tends to take the stats on kids in "center-based care" (which does include preschool) as a proxy for the number in preschools, because "center-based care" happens to be what the government collects data on. As an analyst working on early childhood education, this is a huge frustration to me. But as until we stop conflating the two and define a minimum benchmark for preschool, good data here is going to be hard to come by.
*Actually, most of these people are saying, "Gee, the $2.4 billion annually Prop. 82 is projected to cost is a lot to raise the number of kids in preschool just eight percent," which is WRONG, since and increase from 62 percent to 70 percent is actually a 13 percent increase, but I don't have time to get into the difference between percent increases and percentage point increases here.
**It's also troubling, to me, that all home-based care is generally lumped together in policy discussions as being of low quality. On average, center-based care is higher quality than other types of childcare, but some family-care providers probably are very good, and many families prefer them.
Monday, June 05, 2006
Quotes versus Facts
NCLBlog's John praises AJC blogger Patti Ghezzi, but I'm not sure the post he links to backs up his case. Ghezzi describes her conversation with Andrea Spreter, a young high school science teacher in New Orleans who works at "Math and Science High," which Ghezzi reports was a selective magnet program prior to Katrina (this gets a little confusing--at times Ghezzi makes it sound as if the school is still selective, and John clearly read it that way, but, as is almost always the case for charters, the school is not selective). And here's where I start getting irritated: It's a tiny quibble, but the name of the school isn't actually Math and Science High; it's New Orleans Charter Science and Math High School--like I said, tiny quibble, but if she's going to write a post on it, you'd think she could at least bother to get the name right. Further, even before Katrina, the school wasn't "selective" in the typical sense of the word. A quick glance on its website turns up the following:
I'm not trying to pick on Ghezzi here. Several of the posts on her blog provide interesting perspectives and/or thoughtful analysis. And I think it's important to bring the voices and experiences of individual educators into the public debate--as what they are. But this post illustrates a common and, to me, very troubling, phenomenon in education coverage.
It's simply incredibly common to read a news article about charter schools, or NCLB, or a host of other educational topics, in which someone quoted--either directly or indirectly--says something that is inaccurate, misleading, just plain wrong, or something that their personal experiences and knowledge really don't give them the authority to say. But no information is offered to prevent the reader from thinking it's the absolute truth. The attitude seems to be "if someone said it, and it's attributed to them, then it's ok to write it, and it's not the reporter's job to figure out or explain what the reality actually is." To be fair, this isn't a trend restricted to education coverage; it's an approach that's come to dominate coverage of political and policy debates to, I think the detriment of both. (If you're interested, this Jonathan Chait piece is well worth reading.)
In a related note, John and Patti are both upset that Ms. Spreter doesn't have health or retirement benefits. I'll be the first to acknowledge that, in our screwed up healthcare and social insurance system, that's an incredibly crappy position to be in. But it's important to note that Ms. Spreter is NOT in this position simply because she works in a charter school. In fact, Louisiana law requires charter schools to participate in the state retirement system. But, as Ghezzi notes, Ms. Spreter is not a full-time employee of the school. It's possible the school deliberately avoided making Spreter's job a full-time position because it didn't want to pay benefits--something a lot of private businesses do all the time--and I would also find that wrong. But it's equally possible current enrollment didn't justify a full-time physical science teacher. The point is it's impossible to judge based on the information Ghezzi presents.
For over 12 years, the New Orleans Center for Science & Math has operated as a district school providing an open door to any New Orleans high school student with an interest in pursuing the study of science, mathematics and technology. There were no barriers in the form of test, grade point requirements, or student fees for admission. This positioned the school as one of only two specialty science and math schools in the country with an open admissions policy and with a majority of African American students.Sure, an ostensibly non-selective school can manipulate the system to choose its students, but this suggests Ghezzi didn't check out what her source told her at all. Again, I'm being pretty nitpicky, but I'm pointing these things out because Ghezzi then goes on to draw broad conclusions about the problems with charter schools--which make up most of the public schools open in New Orleans since Katrina:
So she [Spreter] is leaving Math and Science and speaking out about problems she sees with charter schools, such as lack of consistent policies, lack of oversight, absence of veteran teachers. She also craves the kind of professional development a school district can offer.These things may very well be true--in fact, given the larger context in New Orleans and the problems any school has getting off the ground in its first year, I'd be shocked if they aren't. But to draw all this from the comments of one individual--who can really only speak for her experience and the individual school in which she works--is irresponsible.
I'm not trying to pick on Ghezzi here. Several of the posts on her blog provide interesting perspectives and/or thoughtful analysis. And I think it's important to bring the voices and experiences of individual educators into the public debate--as what they are. But this post illustrates a common and, to me, very troubling, phenomenon in education coverage.
It's simply incredibly common to read a news article about charter schools, or NCLB, or a host of other educational topics, in which someone quoted--either directly or indirectly--says something that is inaccurate, misleading, just plain wrong, or something that their personal experiences and knowledge really don't give them the authority to say. But no information is offered to prevent the reader from thinking it's the absolute truth. The attitude seems to be "if someone said it, and it's attributed to them, then it's ok to write it, and it's not the reporter's job to figure out or explain what the reality actually is." To be fair, this isn't a trend restricted to education coverage; it's an approach that's come to dominate coverage of political and policy debates to, I think the detriment of both. (If you're interested, this Jonathan Chait piece is well worth reading.)
In a related note, John and Patti are both upset that Ms. Spreter doesn't have health or retirement benefits. I'll be the first to acknowledge that, in our screwed up healthcare and social insurance system, that's an incredibly crappy position to be in. But it's important to note that Ms. Spreter is NOT in this position simply because she works in a charter school. In fact, Louisiana law requires charter schools to participate in the state retirement system. But, as Ghezzi notes, Ms. Spreter is not a full-time employee of the school. It's possible the school deliberately avoided making Spreter's job a full-time position because it didn't want to pay benefits--something a lot of private businesses do all the time--and I would also find that wrong. But it's equally possible current enrollment didn't justify a full-time physical science teacher. The point is it's impossible to judge based on the information Ghezzi presents.
Curdled Cheese
Last week the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel ran an article about our recent report, Hot Air, which analyzed state performance reporting under NCLB and suggests that a lot of states are gaming the system by using their standard-setting flexibility to inflate the performance of their students, schools, and districts, with Wisconsin one of the worst offenders. The state Deputy Superintendant of schools objected, saying:
Technically he's right; the intent of NCLB wasn't to rank states on gaming NCLB. That was the intent of our report. It's great that he thinks every district in the state has made a good faith effort, but that's also beside the point--the report didn't address district compliance, it said that the state department of education, where he works, wasn't acting in good faith.
And while the department may believe it did "everything it could" to help close the achievement gap, let me add one thing it may have forgotten: identifying school districts with achievement gaps. Last year Wisconsin identified one (1) district out of 426 as not making adequate yearly progress under NCLB.
I also received this email from an irate Wisconsin librarian:
I've spent some time working on education issues in Wisconsin over the last couple of years and this is rock-solid conventional wisdom up there--everything's great, we're the best, leave us alone. But ACT scores are a bad measure because the percent of students taking them varies hugely from state to state. Here's where Wisconsin ranks on the most recent NAEP tests (based on the average scale score):
Reading 2005:
4th Grade: 20th (tied with four other states)
8th Grade: 17th (tied with one other state)
Math 2005:
4th Grade: 15th (tied with four other states)
8th Grade: 7th (tied with two other states)
In other words, Wisconsin is above average, but it by no means has the best test scores in the country. Moreover, when we turn to low-income students, it looks worse. Here are the rankings for students who are eligible for free and reduced price lunch:
Reading 2005:
4th Grade: 30th (tied with one other state)
8th Grade: 26th
Math 2005:
4th Grade: 27th (tied with five other states)
8th Grade: 26th (tied with one other states
Mediocre at best.
"The intent of the law wasn't to rank states on gaming the system. The intent of the law was to have no child left behind, and I believe absolutely it has brought a significant focus on that issue." He said the DPI[Department of Public Instruction] was committed to doing everything it could to close the gap in achievement between high performing and low performing schools and groups of students. He said everything Wisconsin has done has been approved by federal officials and "every district in the state has made a good faith effort to implement No Child Left Behind."
Technically he's right; the intent of NCLB wasn't to rank states on gaming NCLB. That was the intent of our report. It's great that he thinks every district in the state has made a good faith effort, but that's also beside the point--the report didn't address district compliance, it said that the state department of education, where he works, wasn't acting in good faith.
And while the department may believe it did "everything it could" to help close the achievement gap, let me add one thing it may have forgotten: identifying school districts with achievement gaps. Last year Wisconsin identified one (1) district out of 426 as not making adequate yearly progress under NCLB.
I also received this email from an irate Wisconsin librarian:
Regarding your opinion that the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction manipulates the "No Child Left Behind" mandates to side-step the law -- ludicrous. Wisconsin is a modern-day Utopia with high academic standards and success. Wisconsin high school students have had the highest ACT scores in the nation for years. Do you really think our education system is that flawed if our students are that successful? Wisconsin and Minnesota have the best educational systems and teachers in the nation. The students that they serve are hindered by the "No Child Left Behind" mandates. If you were that concerned about the students in this nation, you would make sure that the students in the private schools were meeting educational standards - oops, there are none!
I've spent some time working on education issues in Wisconsin over the last couple of years and this is rock-solid conventional wisdom up there--everything's great, we're the best, leave us alone. But ACT scores are a bad measure because the percent of students taking them varies hugely from state to state. Here's where Wisconsin ranks on the most recent NAEP tests (based on the average scale score):
Reading 2005:
4th Grade: 20th (tied with four other states)
8th Grade: 17th (tied with one other state)
Math 2005:
4th Grade: 15th (tied with four other states)
8th Grade: 7th (tied with two other states)
In other words, Wisconsin is above average, but it by no means has the best test scores in the country. Moreover, when we turn to low-income students, it looks worse. Here are the rankings for students who are eligible for free and reduced price lunch:
Reading 2005:
4th Grade: 30th (tied with one other state)
8th Grade: 26th
Math 2005:
4th Grade: 27th (tied with five other states)
8th Grade: 26th (tied with one other states
Mediocre at best.
Are White Students Dragging Down Our International Standing?
Last week the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) released the 2006 Condition of Education, a congressionally mandated annual report of trends in American education. This year’s special analysis compared U.S. student performance to our global counterparts on a series of recent international assessments in reading, mathematics, and science. The study shows that while 4th and 8th graders perform relatively well, American high schoolers fail to keep up with their international peers. Though the international comparisons rely primarily on assessments administered to 15-year-olds, national assessments administered to 12th graders (17-18 year-olds) reveal a similar pattern of poor performance on average.
Interestingly, the demographics of America’s high school population who are failing to achieve might not be what one would expect.
As the immigration debate rages on, many are quick to cite the growing number of Hispanic immigrants as contributing to our nation’s poor academic performance. Yet Hispanics are more likely than any other racial or ethnic group in the United States to drop out of high school, with a dropout rate of 25%* compared to slightly over 10% of Blacks and less than 10% of Whites. Furthermore, the dropout rate for Hispanics born outside the United States is 38%, more than double the drop out rate of 15% for second-generation Hispanics. If Hispanics and Blacks are more likely to drop out of high school than Whites, one would expect that high schools are “more white” than are elementary or middle schools.
While scholars debate whether or not these dropout statistics are accurate, most agree that the gap in dropout rates for whites versus minority students is real, and some argue that dropout rates may be even higher than the census data suggest.
According to a recent Charts You Can Trust posting by my colleague, Kevin Carey, Hispanics make up 54% of immigrants coming to the United States (as of 2000). Thus given their high dropout rate, foreign-born Hispanic high school youth seem to be disproportionately missing from this NCES report of high school student performance. The implication is that more diverse elementary and middle schools are performing better on national and international assessments than are our more homogenous high schools.
NCES projects that public school enrollment will increase by 2.5 million students over the next 10 years, largely due to immigration and an increase in the number of children born to immigrants. Yet if our public high schools are struggling to educate an unrepresentative, whiter-than-average student body, how will they cope with these changing demographics?
-Posted by Margaret Price
* The status dropout rate indicates the percentage of 16-through 24-year-olds who are not enrolled in high school and who lack a high school credential relative to all 16-through 24-year-olds. High school credential includes a high school diploma or equivalent credential such as a General Educational Development (GED) certificate.
Interestingly, the demographics of America’s high school population who are failing to achieve might not be what one would expect.
As the immigration debate rages on, many are quick to cite the growing number of Hispanic immigrants as contributing to our nation’s poor academic performance. Yet Hispanics are more likely than any other racial or ethnic group in the United States to drop out of high school, with a dropout rate of 25%* compared to slightly over 10% of Blacks and less than 10% of Whites. Furthermore, the dropout rate for Hispanics born outside the United States is 38%, more than double the drop out rate of 15% for second-generation Hispanics. If Hispanics and Blacks are more likely to drop out of high school than Whites, one would expect that high schools are “more white” than are elementary or middle schools.
While scholars debate whether or not these dropout statistics are accurate, most agree that the gap in dropout rates for whites versus minority students is real, and some argue that dropout rates may be even higher than the census data suggest.
According to a recent Charts You Can Trust posting by my colleague, Kevin Carey, Hispanics make up 54% of immigrants coming to the United States (as of 2000). Thus given their high dropout rate, foreign-born Hispanic high school youth seem to be disproportionately missing from this NCES report of high school student performance. The implication is that more diverse elementary and middle schools are performing better on national and international assessments than are our more homogenous high schools.
NCES projects that public school enrollment will increase by 2.5 million students over the next 10 years, largely due to immigration and an increase in the number of children born to immigrants. Yet if our public high schools are struggling to educate an unrepresentative, whiter-than-average student body, how will they cope with these changing demographics?
-Posted by Margaret Price
* The status dropout rate indicates the percentage of 16-through 24-year-olds who are not enrolled in high school and who lack a high school credential relative to all 16-through 24-year-olds. High school credential includes a high school diploma or equivalent credential such as a General Educational Development (GED) certificate.
Sunday, June 04, 2006
Prop 82 in Trouble?
With the California primary this coming Tuesday, a new Field poll has 46 percent of likely voters saying "no" on the proposed "Preschool for All" referrendum, with 41 percent saying "yes." Thirteen percent say they remain undecided. This is down from over 50 percent support in the last Field poll in April, and the first time Prop 82 has trailed in the polls.
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