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

Archive for the 'Educational Policy' Category

Blaming Parents

Published by Robert Pondiscio on July 30, 2008 in Educational Policy and Teaching. 5 Comments

Parents’ failure to impose moral values in the home has left many children out of control, with teachers now expected to effectively raise young people themselves. So says the head of Voice, Britain’s teachers’ union. Philip Parkin says the standard of parenting skills in the UK had suffered from a downward spiral in the last 15 years as generations of poor parents succeed each other. In a speech to the union’s annual conference, Parkin said long working hours and the decline in old-fashioned family structures has contributed to the problem.

“Schools are being required to take on more and more of the responsibilities that rightly belong to parents; and to provide more of the stability in children’s lives which should be provided by families. There is also the perception that, in general, the skills of parents are declining as one generation succeeds another.”

“In my last 10 or 15 years in school I saw a significant decline in parenting standards.” Parkin added. ”The shortening of many relationships, the creation of more step-families, the emphasis on parents going out to work and the consequent perception of the reduced worth of the full-time parent have all changed the way we behave and the character of childhood.”

I could be very wrong, but it’s hard to imagine such a naked critique of “parenting standards” issuing from a responsible U.S. union leader. For all the sturm und drang in the U.S. about accountability and overcoming societal ills, it says something about the overarching consensus on what schools ought to be able to do that these comments sound so, well, foreign.

The Great Schism

Published by Robert Pondiscio on July 24, 2008 in Educational Policy. 14 Comments

Good reading today on Fordham’s Gadfly. Fordham and Core Knowledge board member Diane Ravitch take longtime friend and ally Checker Finn to task—nicely, politely, but firmly—over Finn’s dismissal of Randi Weingarten’s inaugural speech as AFT President, in which she called for schools to become community centers that offer a range of services.

Checker warns that this means that Weingarten and people like me are “abandoning hope for schools that significantly boost student achievement” just at the time that more states are reporting “stronger test scores” in reading and math. He labels ours a call for “schools that do everything but teach.”

I couldn’t disagree more. I care as much about academic achievement as Checker or anyone else in the world, but I don’t see any contradiction between caring about academic achievement and caring about children’s health and well-being….Checker argues that the “‘broader, bolder’ crowd” (me, Weingarten, Tom Payzant, Richard Rothstein, Marshall Smith, etc.) are making an awful mistake because schools can do only one thing at a time–and they must focus on academics first. To the extent that they worry about character, social development, and physical health, he says, they lose that focus and abandon their pursuit of academic achievement. Hmm. Checker, wasn’t it Secretary of Education Bill Bennett who said that “character, content, and choice” should be the three C’s of American education? Was he wrong then? Should he have stuck with the three R’s instead?

There’s more, lots more. And Finn replies that he’s convinced that many—Ravitch excepted—among the “broader, bolder” crowd that “really are trying to change the subject, diverting attention away from U.S. schools’ mostly-woeful academic performance while letting schools and educators off the hook for academic results by adopting the well-worn Rothstein story line about how we mustn’t really expect kids to learn more until this or that other social problem is solved.”

Obama on Accountability, Vouchers and National Standards

Published by Robert Pondiscio on July 23, 2008 in Educational Policy. 0 Comments

One of Barack Obama’s education chamberlains chatted up DC reporters today about the Senator’s education agenda. According to Edweek’s David Hoff, Obama’s man Michael Johnston said “high standards and accountability are good. The level of funding and the quality of assessments aren’t.” Obama “believes a federal accountability system could measure students’ reading and math skills while not narrowing the curriculum to those areas.” Amen to that. Details to follow?

Fordham’s Mike Petrilli, also there, has issues with some of what he heard. While Obama is opposed to school vouchers “in any context.” Petrilli wonders if ”that hard line will soften if Obama becomes president, particularly if he sends his own daughters to a private school once he moves to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. Johnston, he notes, also ”wouldn’t say if Obama supports national standards and testing, though it was clear that Johnston sees the logic.”

Testify!

Published by Robert Pondiscio on July 18, 2008 in Assessment and Testing and Educational Policy. 0 Comments

“I know this is hard for you to hear Chairman Miller, but we need national standards and national assessments.”

- New York City Schools Chancellor Joel Klein, testifying in Washington this week on what it would take to fix NCLB. (Thanks, A. Russo @ This Week in Education)

More: EdWeek’s David Hoff was there.

You Say “Achievement Gap” Like It’s a Bad Thing

Published by Robert Pondiscio on July 15, 2008 in Educational Policy. 2 Comments

We all have our pet causes and issues in education that get us carbonated. At the top of my list is the fate of potentially high-achieving kids, low-income kids who are left to languish in lowest common denominator schools. Thus I’m happy to see the estimable Jay Mathews devote his Wash Post column to the recent Fordham report, High-Achieving Students in the Era of No Child Left Behind. I’ll think twice, however, about casually tossing around the phrase “achievement gap” in the future, thanks to Uncle Jay.

Why don’t I like talking about the achievement gap? Because we use the term in a way that suggests narrowing the gap is always a good thing, when that is not so. Here are some ways the gap could narrow: Low-income scores improve but high-incomes scores don’t; low-income scores don’t change but high-income scores drop; low-income scores drop but high-income scores drop even more. In each of those cases of gap-narrowing, something bad is happening.

Mathews posits that concerns about the income gap have crept into the way we talk about academic achievement. “I can understand distaste for people who build 50-room mansions with gold bathroom fixtures. But can anyone learn too much?” he asks. “Wisdom tends to help everyone who comes in contact with it. Ski chalets in Aspen are less useful to those of us who can’t afford them.”

Labels, of course, tend to stick once they’ve taken root, and it’s unlikely “achievement gap” will disappear. Low-income underachievement, perhaps?

All Things To Everyone

Published by Robert Pondiscio on July 14, 2008 in Educational Policy. 4 Comments

AFT president-to-be Randi Weingarten says No Child Left Behind is too badly broken to be fixed and will offer an alternative vision of public schools as “community centers that help poor students succeed by offering not only solid classroom lessons but also medical and other services,” reports the New York Times.

Weingarten is expected to be elected to the presidency of the AFT today in Chicago. The Times this morning publishes excerpts from her speech:

Can you imagine a federal law that promoted community schools — schools that serve the neediest children by bringing together under one roof all the services and activities they and their families need?…Imagine schools that are open all day and offer after-school and evening recreational activities, child care and preschool, tutoring and homework assistance. Schools that include dental, medical and counseling clinics.

There’s nothing wrong with the vision, which is thoughtful and humane. The devil, as always, is in the details. Too often in my South Bronx elementary school it felt as if education were an afterthought, and that we functioned as the social services agency of last resort. The resources required for all schools to function as community centers are daunting, to understate the case.

Aligning herself squarely with the “broader, bolder” ed reform group, Weingarten tells the Times in an interview: “We all have to work tenaciously to eliminate the achievement gap and to turn around low-performing schools. But the folks who believe that this can all be done on teachers’ shoulders, which is what No Child tries to do, are doing a huge disservice to America.”

I expect there will be lots more to say as the day goes on.

A Grand Education Bargain

Published by Robert Pondiscio on July 14, 2008 in Educational Policy. 1 Comment

Newsweek pundit Jonathan Alter wants Barack Obama to call for a Grand Education Bargain—much higher pay for teachers in exchange for much more accountability for performance in the classroom.

“Good teachers need to be rewarded with more pay and respect for being members of our noblest profession, says Alter. “They need more resources. But they also need to be removed from the classroom when they fail to improve. Obama occasionally says as much, but goes fuzzy when it comes to how.” Here’s how it will work in this Alter-nate universe:

Obama should hold a summit of all 50 governors and move them toward national standards and better recruitment, training and evaluation of teachers. He should advocate using Title I federal funding as a lever to encourage “thin contracts” free of the insane work rules and bias toward seniority, as offered by the brilliant new superintendent in Washington, D.C., Michelle Rhee. He should offer federal money for salary increases, but make them conditional on differential pay (paying teachers based on performance and willingness to work in underserved schools, which surveys show many teachers favor) and on support for the elimination of tenure. And the next time he addresses them, he should tell the unions they must change their focus from job security and the protection of ineffective teachers to higher pay and true accountability for performance—or face extinction.

Love national standards, but Alter loses credibility when he grandly pronounces in the piece that “we know what works to close the achievement gap.” The answer, natch, is KIPP which, in Alter’s telling, has solved the problem of dealing with teachers unions–apparently the only thing standing between every kid and a Rhodes Scholarship. Don’t misunderstand me, I love KIPP schools. Love ‘em. Did I mention I love KIPP, because I do. But until we have a lottery for every school (act of volition=involved parents), compulsory longer days and Saturday classes, and expel kids who are not down with the program and the school culture, can we PLEASE stop saying KIPP is the true and only heaven. KIPP is a first-rate solution for motivated students and families. And that, by the way, is enough, even if it’s not The Answer.

Update: See Joanne Jacobs on all of this: ”Poor kids need good teachers in well-organized, safe schools using sound curricula. Measuring teacher performance fairly is very difficult. What about good teachers who can’t be effective because their schools are so horribly dysfunctional? What about good teachers who specialize in untested subjects such as history, science, music and art?”

Profiles in Courage

Published by Robert Pondiscio on July 9, 2008 in Educational Policy. 0 Comments

A USA Today op-ed takes up the fight on behalf of Reading First, arguing “ineffectiveness has not been proven” and RF still has strong support at the state level. USAT asks why House and Senate committees voted to cut the program last week. Don’t expect an answer from Sen. Tom Harkin, (D-Iowa) and Rep. David Obey, (D-Wis) whose committees got out the long knives. They were offered the chance to defend their actions on the USAT op-ed page but declined.

The piece also features a nice shout-out for Core Knowledge. Much appreciated.

Adjunct For America

Published by Robert Pondiscio on July 8, 2008 in Educational Policy and Teaching. 3 Comments

Fascinating idea from Andy Rotherham at Eduwonk today, who blogs about creating a mechanism to open schools to part-time teachers, especially retired teachers:

There are some national service ideas floating around on this but they tend to focus on full time teaching. Another way to approach it would be to create more adjunct teachers, especially at the high school level. While teaching full-time may be more intense and more of a time commitment than some people want as a post-retirement option, capturing some of their time is one way to help address the various human capital challenges education faces….There are other part-timers out there, too, for instance mothers with young children, who could be tapped.

I’d add corporations in science and technology to the list of talent sources. If turning out qualified students is their concern, might as well help out. “Facilitating all this would be an attractive niche for a non-profit, too,” Andy notes.

R.I.P. Reading First

Published by Robert Pondiscio on July 2, 2008 in Educational Policy and Literacy. 0 Comments

“Now we’re going to turn back the clock, not only to pre-Bush but pre-Clinton levels. I bet it’s been a long damned time since the federal government spent no money — zero — on reading.”

Ed Secretary Margaret Spellings in USA Today on the apparent demise of Reading First.