Category Archive for ‘Educational Policy’ at The Core Knowledge Blog

Archive for the 'Educational Policy' Category

“We Are the Poster Child for NCLB”

Published by Robert Pondiscio on May 13, 2008 in Educational Policy. 0 Comments

A sobering look at the intersection of policy and reality courtesy of the Associated Press. Juliet Williams visits Las Palmitas Elementary School and the Coachella Valley Unified School District in Southern California, where “99 percent of students live in poverty and fewer than 20 percent speak English fluently.” Las Palmitas and other schools in are just the type policy makers had in mind when Congress passed the federal No Child Left Behind Act in 2001 to shed light on the disparities facing poor and minority children, she writes.

Nineteen of the district’s 21 schools — including Las Palmitas — have not met the federal law’s performance benchmarks for four years. Now the entire district faces sanctions for the first time. “We have hardworking, dedicated, trained teachers like everybody else. They’ve got to teach a language, they’ve got to teach the content, and they’ve got to counter poverty,” adds Foch “Tut” Pensis, the district’s superintendent. “We are the poster child for NCLB.”

“Over the next few years, hundreds more districts are destined to enter the next phase that California already has begun. The state has ordered districts to undergo everything from reporting how they are implementing the federal law to having a team of specialists assess every aspect of their operations. In the most extreme cases, California districts could be subject to a state takeover,” Wiliams reports. “How California and the other states will turn around those struggling districts is unclear.”

According to the AP, California has 97 school districts that failed to meet their goals under the law for four years, more than twice as many failing districts as any other state so far. Kentucky has the next highest number facing sanctions, with 47. Nationwide, 411 school districts in 27 states now face intervention.

“No one, on a large scale, has figured out how to solve the achievement gap,” Pensis said. “Everybody’s looking for that answer.”

What Hath Sol Wrought

Published by Robert Pondiscio on May 12, 2008 in Educational Policy. 0 Comments

“In recent months, almost unnoticed by the mainstream media, the school voucher movement has abruptly stalled,” writes Greg Anrig in the Washington Monthly, thus becoming the latest member of that mainstream media to take notice of Sol Stern’s piece, “School Choice Isn’t Enough,” from last winter’s City Journal.

“One simple reason why voucher supporters have become disillusioned is that the programs haven’t delivered on their promises. School choice advocates claimed that vouchers would have two major benefits: low-income kids rescued from dysfunctional public schools would do better in private schools; and public schools would improve, thanks to the injection of some healthy competition.

Personally, I’ve always felt that the least compelling argument for school choice in general, and vouchers specifically, is to unleash market forces to improve all schools. As a teacher and a parent, that’s beside the point, and betrays a mindset that values institutions above children. If Smackdown Elementary School stinks, and families have the option to go to The Valhalla School, which is great, try telling those families that choice has failed because Smackdown Elementary still sucks. “I know,” they’ll reply. “Thank goodness I don’t have to send my child there anymore.”

Anrig, the Century Foundation’s vice president for programs, and the author of The Conservatives Have No Clothes: Why Right-Wing Ideas Keep Failing, seems content to ascribe the failure of vouchers to the standard demographics-is-destiny line or argument. Buried deep in the piece is a remarkable paragraph that is probably not higher up because it serves merely to gainsay his entire argument. Still, he deserves credit for including it:

“The conservative infatuation with vouchers did contribute to one genuine accomplishment,” notes Anrig. “The past thirty years have been a period of enormous innovation in American education. In addition to charter schools, all kinds of strategies have taken root: public school choice, new approaches to standards and accountability, magnet schools, and open enrollment plans that allow low-income city kids to attend suburban public schools and participate in various curriculum-based experiments. To the extent that the threat of vouchers represented a “nuclear option” that educators would do anything to avoid, the voucher movement helped to prompt broader but less drastic reforms that offer parents and students greater educational choices.”

Oh. That all? Well, other than that, Mrs. Lincoln, how did you like the play?

Petrilli Schools Obama

Published by Robert Pondiscio on May 7, 2008 in Educational Policy, Parents and Testing. 0 Comments

Mike Petrilli over at Fordham’s Flypaper is offering free advice to presumptive nominee Barack Obama this morning on using education to tack to the center in the general election. Responding to Timesman David Brooks’ observation Obama supporters “look more and more like the McGovern-Dukakis constituency,” Professor Petrilli prescribes a little ed talk:

“He should surely continue to channel Bill Cosby and talk about the need for parents to take responsibility for their children. (Beyond being sensible, this appeals to social conservatives.) This is a standard theme he mentions when addressing predominantly African-American audiences (themselves quite socially conservative); he should use it all the time.

“As for suburban independents, his position on No Child Left Behind most likely appeals to them already, what with his talk about saving art and music and literature from the ravages of “teaching to the test.” But he could go one step further and also talk about high-performing students who are being forgotten by our current education system and the need to help them achieve their potential too. (What suburban independent doesn’t think that his or her own child is gifted?)”

Pay attention, Senator. This will be on the test.

More Than Meets the Eye

Published by Robert Pondiscio on May 5, 2008 in Educational Policy. 0 Comments

A little over a week ago, the Sacramento Bee broke a story that created a minor stir, documenting how many California schools are gaming No Child Left Behind by reclassifying minority kids to different ethnic groups, thus flying below the law’s reporting threshold. Good, solid reporting. One principal, Jim Wong of Will C. Wood Middle School in Sacramento, was on the record, talking about how persuading the parents of four students to change the racial designation of their mixed-race kids kept him out of trouble. Dead-bang, unambiguous gaming the system and flouting the spirit of the law, right?

Today the paper comes back for a second bite at the apple in an editorial defending the principal. And it’s a pretty good defense.

Experience Counts

Published by Robert Pondiscio on May 2, 2008 in Educational Policy. 0 Comments

California’s State Senate has passed legislation that will allow low-performing school districts to pay bonuses to attract experienced math and science teachers. Students at the worst-performing schools are more likely to have science and math teachers who are on emergency credentials or who lack the training, experience and specialization to teach the subjects effectively, notes the Los Angeles Times. Students at such schools are disproportionately Latino and African American

“If we ignore the shortage of math and science teachers in these schools, where they are needed the most, we are essentially telling these young people that they cannot be engineers, scientists, nurses and doctors,” Sen. Gloria Romero, author of the measure tells the Times. ”This is just simply wrong.”

Schools Forced to Act Against Bullying

Published by Robert Pondiscio on May 1, 2008 in Educational Policy. 0 Comments

School districts in Florida will have to adopt policies against bullying and harassment under a bill expected to be signed by the governor. The state Senate on Wednesday unanimously passed the measure, which was taken up after a Cape Coral boy committed suicide in 2005 after being bullied.

“The law would prohibit the bullying or harassment of any public school student or employee during regular school hours or at school-sponsored events and activities,” according to the Associated Press. “The bill also would prohibit bullying over schools’ computer systems. School districts would be required to report all instances of bullying or harassment to appropriate law enforcement agencies and to notify the parents of both the bully and the victim.”

A number of state legislatures have proposed laws requiring schools to have anti-bullying policies and programs, according to National School Safety and Security Services, an advocacy group. The mother of the Florida boy who died in 2005 says she has already spoken to U.S. Sen. Mel Martinez (R-FL) about federal legislation.

Gaming NCLB

Published by Robert Pondiscio on April 27, 2008 in Educational Policy and Testing. 0 Comments

Eighty California schools got “out of trouble” with No Child Left Behind in the past two years by changing the way they classify their students, according to an analysis by the Sacramento Bee. The changes enabled the school to alter their status from failing to passing under the law.

The paper cites the example of Sacramento’s Will C. Wood Middle School. Last August, most of the school’s students had met benchmarks set by No Child Left Behind. But African American students’ math scores fell far short. “One hundred students were categorized as black when they took the test last spring. But if the school had fewer than 100 students in that group, their low scores wouldn’t count,” the Bee reports. “So Principal Jim Wong reviewed the files of all the students classified as African American on the test, he said, and found that four of them had indicated no race or mixed race on their enrollment paperwork. Wong sent his staff to talk to the four families to ask permission to put the kids in a different racial group.”

“You get a kid that’s half black, half white. What are you going to put him down as?” Wong told the paper. “If one kid makes the difference and I can go white, that gets me out of trouble.”

A pretty extraordinary admission for a principal to make on the record. And quite a job of reporting on the games schools play by the Sacramento Bee, which notes California doesn’t verify whether the changes schools make accurately reflect the students they serve.

Attention Seeking Behavior

Published by Robert Pondiscio on April 24, 2008 in Educational Policy. 0 Comments

“No fewer than seven bills that would alter how history is taught are currently before California’s legislature,” reports The Economist. “One is a measure about Filipinos. The others would encourage or force more lessons about African and Latin American cultures, American Indians, the “secret war” in Laos, the deportation of Hispanics in the 1930s, the desegregation of Mexican pupils and the Italian contribution to California.”

Each of these attempts to legislate content face an uphill slog. The magazine notes that California Democrats tend to support such measures, but Governor Schwarzenegger tends to veto them. But a larger battle looms: “Next month a group of academics and bureaucrats will begin holding public hearings on an overhaul of the curriculum framework—the first full one since 2001,” the Economist reports. “The coalitions that have been formed to push for legislation will no doubt make their feelings known.”

This presages what a debate on national content standards might look like, but that is not an argument against the attempt. In Bridging Differences recently, CK board member Diane Ravitch noted, “I see a national curriculum as the product of a professional consensus, one that involves subject-matter experts, teachers, administrators, and even end-users of the public schools like college professors and journalists. I also see such a curriculum evolving from careful research on international curriculum standards about what students at various ages are expected to know and be able to do. And I envision a curriculum that in toto amounts to not more than 50 percent of the school day, so that there would be many variations and additions depending on the state, region, and locale.”

A Wall of Denial

Published by Robert Pondiscio on April 24, 2008 in Educational Policy and Testing. 3 Comments

“A perfectly equal school system is not likely to produce equal students,” notes Barron’s Editorial Page Editor Thomas G. Donlan in an unusually strong commentary titled Another Lost Generation. Labeling No Child Left Behind a failure he notes “a proper policy must require that all children have the opportunity to be educated up to their potential.”

“Testing has identified some schools where hope had vanished. It has galvanized a few states to take over administration of a few of their worst schools,” he notes. “But such takeovers also demonstrated how hard it is for even the best-intentioned bureaucrats to overcome years of professional neglect, decades of physical deterioration and generations of parental incapacity.”

Donlan isn’t merely throwing in his lot with NCLB bashers, however. Far from it. “Many teachers and their advocates have retreated behind a wall of denial,” he writes. “Some denounce high-stakes testing, as though conducting tests without providing consequences for failure would be more useful. Others denounce the tests themselves as too difficult, as though anything could be measured by a test that all students pass. And many denounce the tests, easy or hard, for demanding too much rote regurgitation of facts, as though facts were not the first necessary bricks for building an intellectual edifice.”

One wouldn’t expect to read such a strong, clear-eyed take on education in a paper that covers investing and business. But Donlan’s diagnosis hits the bulls-eye.

“Who has been fooling whom? It seems educators and politicians and parents and students have been fooling each other, and fooling themselves,” he concludes. “Public schools that mismeasure themselves are unlikely to produce real educational achievement. And schools that mismeasure student achievement, even on such a simple scale as graduation rate, are unlikely to solve their own problems.”

A Nation at Risk at 25

Published by E. D. Hirsch, Jr. on April 22, 2008 in Educational Policy. 0 Comments

The following commentary appears in the current issue of Education Week.

In American educational history, A Nation at Risk is significant as a very dramatic official recognition in the 1980s that our schools were declining in effectiveness not only in relation to schools of other nations, but also in relation to our own results in earlier decades. In the 25 years since the report was issued, energetic reform efforts have been put forth, to small overall effect. The best single gauge of overall national school effectiveness—the National Assessment of Educational Progress reading test of 12th graders—has remained flat, and has even declined slightly. This persistent lack of significant improvement is owing to the unwavering persistence of the very ideas that caused the decline in the first place—the repudiation of a definite academic curriculum in the early grades by the child-centered movement of the early 20th century. Given the continued content vagueness of state standards in early grades, especially in language arts, that underlying condition has not much changed. There is still no definite, coherent academic curriculum in the early grades. That is the principal source of the low academic achievement of our high school students.

The elementary grades are much more important than is apparently credited by philanthropies like the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, which has recently been giving many millions to high school reform—with negligible results per dollar. For many years, the philanthropic and policy worlds have placed a lot of emphasis on the two ends of precollegiate education—high school and preschool. They are right about preschool—but not about high school. The general knowledge and vocabulary required for effective learning at the high school level are the fruits of a long process. The way to reform high school is to prepare students effectively in the elementary years to thrive there. If, in recent decades, high school has become a place where students are offered a smorgasbord of watered-down subjects, that is because watered-down subjects are all that our ill-educated students are now prepared to understand.

Philanthropies cannot be altogether blamed. In their emphasis on high school, they have followed the lead of A Nation at Risk,which was overwhelmingly concerned with high school. Its assumption was that the elementary years are foundational, and should be spent on the enabling skills of reading, writing, and reckoning. The authors therefore conceived the truly decisive arena for educational improvement to be grades 9-12, where there had been a severe decline in verbal and math scores. Indeed, for most of its length, A Nation at Risk ignored the first eight grades of schooling. Then, in its last pages, the report finally alluded to the early curriculum as follows:

The curriculum in the crucial eight grades leading to the high school years should be specifically designed to provide a sound base for study in those and later years in such areas as English language development and writing, computational and problem-solving skills, science, social studies, foreign language, and the arts. These years should foster an enthusiasm for learning and the development of the individual’s gifts and talents. (Page 72)

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