2008 April 10 Archive at The Core Knowledge Blog

If you want a preview of an Obama presidency look to his friend, Massachusetts governor Deval Patrick, says the Weekly Standard. The magazine is a conservative organ, so it’s no surprise that authors Charles Chieppo and Jim Stergios of the Pioneer Institute, a Boston think tank, have the long knives out for Obama. Still their take on Patrick’s education moves are noteworthy.

In 2005 the Bay State was the first to place at the top of all four categories of the National Assessment of Educational Progress, attributable to the 1993 Massachusetts Education Reform Act and its hallmark standards, accountability and school choice provisions—and $40 billion dollars of incremental spending on education.

“But the teachers’ unions maintain a deep antipathy to the reforms and to anything that encourages charter schools,” write Chieppo and Stergios. “The unions pumped $3 million into Patrick’s campaign, and the governor called education his ’singular pursuit.’ What he is pursuing is the systematic dismantling of the successful 1993 reforms.” Joe Williams of Democrats for Education Reform said much the same in an op-ed in the Boston Globe in January; he rates an “I told you so” for the piece.

“His first budget eliminated the state’s independent education accountability office,” note the Standard. “Then he used his first two picks for the Board of Education to demolish standards and choice: choosing anti-testing zealot Ruth Kaplan and charter school opponent Paul Reville–whom he also made chairman of the nine-member board.”

The article is downright weak on connecting Obama to Patrick on education, noting merely that similiarities between the two “leave some to wonder” if Patrick is a preview of Obama. But its indictment of Patrick is plenty bad enough.

A New York University study followed students entering the New York City public school system in the 1995-1996 school year and finds that about 40% of them had exited the system by 8th grade.

Student mobility is an underutilized, dead-bang argument for national content standards and curriculum. One out of four kids change schools three or more times over the course of their public school career. A GAO study showed one out of six children had attended three or more schools by the end of the 3rd grade. This high level of mobility has long been associated with lower student achievement and a higher likelihood of dropping out of school. While moving is disruptive for children in any scenario, continuity in curriculum would provide one less moving part, as it were.

Not surprisingly, it’s low-income and minority children whose education is disrupted by mobility the most. This is not news and the new NYU study reinforces it. The authors of the study are most concerned with continuous progression, grade-by-grade, associating “standard academic progress with higher performance on standardized tests.” (Huh? Do they mean to suggest that being held back caused lower performance? Isn’t low performance why they were held back?) Ignoring mobility is tantamount to writing off the academic outcomes of millions of kids.

Update: ASCD’s Educational Leadership has a story about student mobility online today (Thanks, Alexander Russo). It’s all about the emotional toll on teachers “I also thought of myself and the frustrations and heartbreak I had faced each year as students I cared about vanished,” writes Laura Hoeing, a 1st grade teacher in Charlotte, North Carolina. ”At what point would their frequent mobility discourage me from investing in relationships with my students and trying hard to teach them?”