AssortedStuff

This is a long, rambling post since it draws on several different sources, together with a large mixture of thoughts from last weekend’s EduCon (and I’m not entirely sure I’m making my points :-).

Anyway, let’s start with a post from earlier this week in which Seth Godin asks Who Will Save Us?

He’s discussing ongoing efforts to rescue the publishing industry but it got me thinking about how much has been written around the theme of “saving” public education as well.

And Godin’s warning to media applies equally to us.

If by save you mean, “what will keep things just as they are?” then the answer is nothing will. It’s over.

Politicians and education “experts” talk a lot about school improvement and reforming the system.

But take a closer look at their ideas makes clear that their overall goal is to maintain the status quo, and make it even quoier if possible.

Evidence of that comes from the article from the Post, also this week, about possible “fixes” to NCLB and especially changes in the adequate yearly progress (AYP) provisions of that law.

Much remains unclear about how Obama would hold schools accountable for results. Experts call it unlikely that the president would seek to junk a results-oriented system that is ingrained in 50 states and the District. In fact, the administration will still rely on those data to compile lists of struggling schools it wants to turn around.

Except that “results-oriented system” doesn’t work. And the administration won’t get rid of it because it’s “ingrained”.

Even worse, that ingrained system, with “results” based entirely on high-stakes standardized testing, has actually made American education worse over the past decade, by obsessively narrowing both the curriculum and teaching methods to focus only the tested topics.

So now we come back to EduCon and specifically to an unscheduled discussion that followed the session I facilitated.

One that boiled down to the idea that the conference gathers together some very smart and dedicated educators for intelligent conversations, but where’s the change to make all these ideas a reality?

Will is asking very much the same thing in his reflections on the weekend.

But while most in attendance want to change the classrooms and the schools they work in, that vision of change is still amorphous. Jon Becker wrote about that fact pre Educon, and I hope he follows up with more thoughts post. I mean David Warlick and others were talking about creating a new story for education like four years ago and we still don’t seem to have a handle on it.

It was a theme that was running around in my head for those three days and one that I heard from others attending, especially those of us who have been part of this event going back to 2007 EduBloggerCon where the idea for EduCon was born.

Ok, what do we do about it? How do we turn lots of good ideas into action?

How do we get our communities to realize that the top down process of teaching and learning no longer works?

That students must take an integral role in both the planning and execution of their own education?

That we need to trust teachers make good decisions for their students and not just follow the script leading to the spring tests?

If you’ve read this far, you probably understand that I have many more questions than answers, and even those need a whole lot more thought.

The ideal would be that this growing EduCon community turns into a grass roots effort to truly change American education one school/district at a time.

Of course, it’s going to take more effort than just getting together once a year to talk and connecting through social media the rest of the time. Maybe the theme of next year’s EduCon needs to be, in the words of the King, a little less talk and a lot more action.

Because it’s frustrating to watch our “leaders” (local, state, national, take your pick) pushing programs to “save” American education when it should be clear that our kids need something better than reinforcing the status quo.

change, education, educon, reform, school

Front page of this morning’s Post, above the masthead, in space normally reserved for major, earth shattering events, comes the news…

The 2010 “challenge” index for DC-area schools has been unleashed on the unsuspecting, and largely statistically clueless, public!

The method for computing this highly-publicized ranking of high schools hasn’t changed.

Divide the number of Advanced Placement, International Baccalaureate or other college-level tests a school gave in 2009 by the number of graduating seniors. Tests taken by all students, not just seniors, are counted.

Also not changed is the glorification of the taking of tests, while factoring in nothing about how student actually score on them.

As with the 2009 release, the list includes something called the Equity and Excellence rate, defined as “the percentage of all seniors who have had at least one score on an AP, IB or Cambridge test that would qualify them for college credit”.

Which is also not an entirely accurate number since colleges make their own decisions as to what score on an AP test will earn credit. Or whether the student will get a pass on taking a similar level prerequisite course instead of credit.

So, what exactly is the purpose of the assembling the “challenge” index in the first place?

The rating is not a measure of the overall quality of the school but illuminates the one quantifiable factor that seems to reveal best the level of a high school’s commitment to preparing average students for college. [my emphasis]

The ONE quantifiable factor. Love to see the study supporting that contention, much less the concept that college is the best goal for every student.

While the Post seems to be avoid a “best” tag, it remains to be seen if Newsweek (owned by the Post), when they likely publish the the national version of the index in May, will refrain from billing Mathews’ list as the “nation’s best high schools” as they have in the past.

Ok, I know it’s probably a hopeless cause to continue ranting about this incredibly shallow assessment of high school quality year, after year.

Especially since both politicians and the press seem to be obsessed with reducing everything done in school to simple, headline-friendly numbers, something for which the “challenge” index is tailor made.

However, it would be great if more people would take a critical look at this and other hyper-simple schemes for assessing the complex process of teaching and learning.

By the way, I thought you added the possessive to a name ending in ’s’ by simply adding an apostrophe. Or am I wrong that the proper punctuation is supposed to be Mathews’ list not Mathews’s list? I’m sure I make plenty of grammatical errors around this place, but I have an excuse. There are no highly trained and paid copy editors around here.

ap, challenge index, high school, jay mathews, washington post

You should probably be careful anytime you include a date in the name of a big reform project.

That date will eventually arrive and it’s likely people will check to see if your reforms actually happened.

Case in point is Renaissance 2010, the high profile attempt to overhaul the Chicago city school system, created by none other than our current Secretary of Education, Arne Duncan.

So, 2010 is here, how did they do?

Six years after Mayor Richard Daley launched a bold initiative to close down and remake failing schools, Renaissance 2010 has done little to improve the educational performance of the city’s school system, according to a Tribune analysis of 2009 state test data.

Scores from the elementary schools created under Renaissance 2010 are nearly identical to the city average, and scores at the remade high schools are below the already abysmal city average, the analysis found.

The moribund test scores follow other less than enthusiastic findings about Renaissance 2010 — that displaced students ended up mostly in other low-performing schools and that mass closings led to youth violence as rival gang members ended up in the same classrooms. Together, they suggest the initiative hasn’t lived up to its promise by this, its target year.

Oh, but it gets better.

Following in the footsteps of Bush’s Texas “miracle” that became No Child Left Behind, Duncan is now incorporating all his wonderfully successful ideas from Ren10 into Race to the Top, the latest meaningless, not to mention expensive, educational-buzz-term-based national school reform program.

Duncan is using an unprecedented $4.35 billion pot of money to lure states into building education systems that replicate key Ren10 strategies. The grant money will go to states that allow charter schools to flourish and to those that experiment with turning around failing schools — all part of the Chicago reform.

Just as the previous administration assigned magical powers to high-stakes standardized testing, the current group is putting it’s faith in charter schools as an all-purpose educational cure-all.

Actually, the charter concept is not a bad one: allow educators to adapt schools to fit the needs of students instead of the other way around.

The execution, on the other hand, in most places has been mediocre at best (criminally dismal in too many cases) largely mirroring that of the Chicago “renaissance”: throwing lots of cash at charters to achieve mixed results.

Of course, there is a middle ground between the all-stick-and-no-carrot philosophy of NCLB and the quiz-show-competition, scattershot approach that is at the core of RTTT.

But finding it is going to require far more complex thinking than most of our national education “leaders” seem to be willing to consider.

arne duncan, chicago, education, nclb, race to the top, reform

In a recent Class Struggle post, Jay Mathews declares that the concerns about budget cuts expressed by parents in our overly-large school district (he calls it hysteria) are “silly”.

The source for his conclusion comes from the comments of parents quoted in another Post column about our economic problems.

They are hysterically concerned about things like increased class sizes, cuts in kindergarten time, major reductions in elementary school music programs, elimination of most summer school program, and more, and in doing so are “so divorced from reality as to be comical”.

So, why is none of this important to the quality of education in our schools?

Well, because our high schools still score well in his “challenge” index, the 2010 edition of which will be unleashed in a couple of weeks (you have been warned).

Beyond the fact that his index is one of the most fraudulent measures of school quality ever devised*, it should be clear to anyone paying attention that our budget problems will most severely impact the elementary schools.

Which will then impact the high schools a few years from now.

Anyway, after making a pitch for his index, Mathews goes on to make several unsupported claims about how the quality of our schools will be maintained, in spite of major, multi-year declines in revenue, all during a time when the numbers of students continues to increase.

He partially attributes this to the fact that the county is one of the richest in the country, with many involved parents like the ones who are quoted, adults who, according to Mathews, “don’t have a true perspective”.

Among other factors he also ignores the large and growing low income neighborhoods of our county, where schools must cope with increasing numbers of non-English speaking and special education students, all of who require additional services that will also be impacted by cuts.

Areas where parents are not the vocal kind that make hysterical and silly comments and who, for the most part, can’t or don’t provide the instructional support to make up for what their kids no long receive at school.

Of course, in the end, Mathews is right that our district is far better than many in this country and will likely continue to be even after the budget is sliced (although I don’t buy his confidence that we won’t lose a lot of great teachers in the process).

However, as we often tell students, the better measure of quality is not found in comparing ourselves with others but comparing ourselves now with where we should be in the future.

*Search this site for many posts explaining why.

challenge index, economy, jay mathews, olsd, parents, post, stupidity

ms lipstick over at Organized Chaos* will be attending the inauguration of the new Virginia governor this weekend and asks us don’t be mad.

She explains that she didn’t vote in last November’s gubernatorial election because she didn’t believe in either candidate (we really did have crap to choose from).

Despite that, she will be going to the inaugural balls in Richmond, the result of invitations received by her husband (you don’t actually think they invite teachers to these things, do you? :-).

Not because she likes the man elected, but because of an attraction to “putting on fancy clothes and dancing”.

While looking forward to the parties, ms lipstick is still feeling a little guilty, based in no small measure on the incoming governor’s choice for Secretary of Education.

This on the day that I learned our governor elect has nominated Gerard Robinson to be our secretary of education. A man whose bio includes starting numerous charter schools, serving as president on the board of Black Alliance for Educational Options. “He is a nationally recognized expert on the modern charter school movement and serves on the Policy Advisory Council at the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools and on the board of the U.S. Department of Education’s National Charter School Resource Center.”

We are in trouble.

Indeed!

Charter schools have shown, at best, mixed results in improving student achievement (aka standardized test scores) over the years while sucking money from the ever shrinking education budget.

In most cases, charters are like private schools in that students who don’t fall in line behind the charter’s mandate are encouraged to seek education elsewhere, unlike public schools who take – and keep – pretty much everyone.

Even the exalted KIPP schools have a high turnover of students, with the result that those students remaining fit the “KIPP model” and show the schools in the best light possible.

Anyway, I for one am certainly not mad at ms lipstick.

I’m sure she will represent us well if she get the chance to use any of the notes assembled from her research during those cocktail party conversations about education.

On the other hand, forget it. Those discussions can wait for another day.

Instead, just have fun.

*An excellent blog that should be among your regular reads, written by someone with the secret identity of mild-mannered Kindergarten teacher here in the overly-large school district.

charter, education, olsd, politics, schools, virginia

President Obama on Wednesday announced a $250 million public-private effort to increase the number and quality of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) teachers.

It shouldn’t surprise anyone to know that almost all the money is going to major colleges and universities who have pledged to train more than 10,000 new science and math teachers by 2015.

And what then? What happens when (if?) those teachers are hired by schools.

They will likely find a few things missing from this and every other education reform plan announced by the administration.

Things like modern lab equipment, computers, decent salaries, reasonable class sizes, not to mention ongoing training for current teachers.

Along with any proposals to change to anything about the curriculum and how it is delivered (a term that all by itself defines much that is wrong with the way society views teaching and learning).

So, where have we heard this before?

During the last panic proposal to improve math and science education, of course.

How did that work out?

education, math, reform, science, stem

One key assumption behind No Child Left Behind – and pretty much every major education reform effort of the past half century – is that a strong education system is essential to American economic growth.

However, as Larry Cuban points out, although multiple reports and even more politicians have repeated the mantra, even economists don’t have evidence to support it.

And current attempts to connect school reform and economic growth are nothing new. Remember our past love affair with Japanese schools?

Recall that in the 1980s, U.S. policymakers including corporate leaders looked to Japan with its remarkable annual growth and pointed to its schools as driving the economy. Educators, economists, and sociologists traveled to Japan to study its schools and contrast them–in highly positive terms–with U.S. schools. But the contrasts fell flat in the 1990s when Japan’s economy nose-dived for that decade until just recently. Few policymakers today use Japan as a model for U.S. schools.

So, if it’s not going to make us a lot of money, is there a good reason to pay for a strong public education system?

After all, there are many reasons to have strong schools in a society beyond, but including, economic ones. Although they hardly get mentioned by policymakers save in throwaway lines at graduation ceremonies, expanded literacy in service of developing an engaged citizenry who, in fulfilling their civic obligations, build better communities and live moral lives are, and have been, historic reasons for investing tax dollars in American schools. But not now with the three-decade concentration in educational policymaking on equating higher graduation rates and college attendance with economic growth.

Although you wouldn’t know it from visiting most of our schools, there IS more to a good education than getting a high school diploma and going to college.

economy, education, larry cuban, nclb, school reform

Back to the continuing budget mess here in the overly-large school district.

The superintendent and others have been holding meetings with employee groups and community members (and distributing poorly worded surveys) to get suggestions on what programs and people should be cut to make things balance financially.

However, he’s asking the wrong question.

Instead the discussion needs to be framed around what we are all willing to pay for.

Just about anywhere you go in the US, it’s pretty much a political given that no elected official would even talk about raising taxes.

And around here, they would likely also be tossed out at the next election for suggesting that schools, or anything else, are more important than adding more asphalt and concrete for people to drive on.

Given those constraints (more like a straightjacket), the larger community should, instead of talking about cuts, be addressing the very difficult question: what will you pay real money for?

Do you want full-day kindergarten? Do you really believe art and music programs are essential or are they just a frills?

Will you pay for the training and support necessary to keep “well-qualified” teachers in every classroom or is that just something we can only afford during good times?

Is technology really a priority or is all that talk about the “future” and “21st century skills” nothing more than nice sounding decorations for political speeches?

Because in many ways, this money discussion is all about the future.

And that that brings me to the title of this post, which is stolen from a recent edition of the Business Week cover story podcast.

In that program a reporter makes the observation that, during economically rotten times like we have now, corporations are “cutting the future” through drastic reductions in their research and development budgets.

We do the same thing as a society with public education.

We slice things that will make future classrooms better – teacher training and technology being prime among those – in order to make administrators and politicians look good now.

So, maybe the bottom line question that needs to be asked about the education budget is: what are you willing to cut from the future to make the status quo look better?

I wonder how all those folks who keep sending me political crap mail and want my vote tomorrow would respond.

Probably not the way I would.

21st century skills, budget, education, future

In his weekly Post column, I actually agree with Jay Mathews’ assessment of the campaign promises on education issues being tossed around by the two candidates for Virginia governor:  Pleasant sound bites with little substance.

Whichever Virginia candidate wins will do his best for kids, even if much of what is being proposed is standard American campaign pap. Both want to raise teachers salaries, a wonderful idea, but neither presents a realistic plan to pay for that. Both support school-business partnerships to prepare students for the real world but don’t say how they are going to solve the old problem that neither business executives nor educators have the time or energy to make such plans work. Both want to reduce dropout rates but cite no examples of this happening recently in any significant way, given the drag of poverty on many children’s lives.

I have to admit that Mathews is also right when he says that Virginia already does a pretty good job of supporting public schools.

Unfortunately, that support is almost entirely in the context of the traditional educational structure.

Neither of the people running for governor, much less anyone else in the state political or educational administrative structure, is proposing anything that would substantially move teaching and learning beyond the process familiar to anyone attending school in the last half of the 20th century.

Charter schools don’t do it – the vast majority are just private schools being run with public money using the same curriculum and pedagogy.

AP and IB classes don’t do it – they still lock schools into a college-is-the-only-goal mentality using programs written by the even more tradition-bound university system.

Improving teacher quality is certainly a good idea but not if the plans are centered around enhancing teaching methods designed for students from 1965.

More standardized testing?  More crap is not better crap!

Yes, voters should feel good “about the great job Virginia educators have done” in the past.

But that’s no reason to keep doing the same thing, only more of it, and assuming that every other factor outside the school will remain static.

Oh, and paying for it with leftover small change.

election, jay mathews, school reform, virginia, washington post

Paul Krugman is a Nobel-prize winning economist and someone who sees a direct connection between education and the economic success of the US.*

He also says that our national “educational neglect” has led to “a slow-motion erosion of America’s relative position” in the world.

And the current financial mess is only feeding that neglect.

But things are about to get much worse, as the economic crisis — its effects exacerbated by the penny-wise, pound-foolish behavior that passes for “fiscal responsibility” in Washington — deals a severe blow to education across the board.

His focus in this column is on college-level education but much of what Krugman says also applies to K12.

There’s no mystery about what’s going on: education is mainly the responsibility of state and local governments, which are in dire fiscal straits. Adequate federal aid could have made a big difference. But while some aid has been provided, it has made up only a fraction of the shortfall.

As a result, education is on the chopping block. And laid-off teachers are only part of the story. Even more important is the way that we’re shutting off opportunities.

Certainly money is never the sole solution to all our problems, educational or otherwise.

However, an excellent public education system, one that provides an excellent foundation for every child no matter where they live, cannot be done on the cheap.

The longer we wait to provide adequate funding for that system, the larger the number of children who are shut off from those opportunities.

* BTW, I’m one who believes the economic connection is NOT the most important reason for creating a strong public education system.

budget, economy, education, paul krugman