Tag Archive for ‘accountability’ at The Core Knowledge Blog

Tag Archive for 'accountability'

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?”

“Exceptional” Schools in Texas

Published by Robert Pondiscio on July 1, 2008 in Assessment and Testing. 3 Comments

Some Texas schools and districts have raised their academic rankings without actually improving student scores on the Texas Assessment of Knowledge and Skills, according to the Dallas Morning News, which files a terrific piece of reporting on the problem.

For example, TAKS reading scores slipped this year at Medrano Elementary School in Dallas. But under a new procedure granted by the Texas Education Agency, Dallas school officials expect Medrano to rise from “acceptable” to the more impressive “recognized” when 2008 rankings come out in August….Critics say this bureaucratic sleight-of-hand can make schools look good on paper when many students still need help. Why, those critics ask, would school leaders strive to improve learning when they can use automatic loopholes as a means to elevate or maintain their ratings?

The paper quotes a Dallas associate superintendent who says, “There are so many measures in an urban district that we have to deal with. When a school gets rated lower because of one group, that is really demoralizing. It condemns the whole school because of one group.”

Am I missing something here? Isn’t the entire point of accountability to guarantee good outcomes for every group of students? Say what you will about NCLB, but redefining failure as success is most certainly not the way to go, as Ed Trust’s Daria Hall points out.

It’s this whole set of decisions that are being made in the interest of adults and not kids. It’s to make schools look better than they are, rather than confronting the fact that far too few students are doing reading or math or science at the level they should be.

While You Were Out

Published by Robert Pondiscio on June 30, 2008 in Assessment and Testing and Research and Reports. 0 Comments

I’m almost sorry I chose to be on the north rim of the Grand Canyon when my home state of New York announced that universal proficiency is nigh. Better than four out of five public school students in the Empire State are suddenly at or above grade level in math up from 73 percent last year while 69 percent of students were at or above state standards.

There’s so much to say about lowering the bar and how the good news doesn’t square with NAEP results, but lots of other commenters including Sol Stern were on the job while I was away:

Sometime in the next decade, the white children of Lake George and the black children of New York City will come face to face with reality. On a high school math Regents test—or on an SAT test, or in a college remediation course—they will discover that they are not quite as proficient as New York State once assured them.

Other fascinating items waiting in my inbox: Karin Chenoweth’s take on the IES Reading First report is crystal clear on what the data shows…and what it doesn’t; and a study shows elementary-school teachers are poorly prepared by education schools to teach math. Hmmm. I wonder why no one is suggesting copying whatever it is that has helped New York’s teachers do so well.

Nice to be back.

A Broader, Bolder Approach to Education

Published by Robert Pondiscio on June 10, 2008 in Education Practice, Education Theory and Opinion. 1 Comment

The Edusphere goes for a We Are The World moment, with full page ads in the New York Times and Washington Post today in support of an initiative called A Broader, Bolder Approach to Education. Led by Helen F. Ladd of Duke University, NYU’s Pedro Noguera, and Tom Payzant of Harvard, and with signatories from Diane Ravitch to Richard Rothstein, the ads argue that schools can’t go it alone in closing the achievement gap, and call for:

Continued school improvement efforts.
Developmentally appropriate and high-quality early childhood, pre-school and kindergarten care and education.
Routine pediatric, dental, hearing and vision care for all infants, toddlers and schoolchildren.
Improving the quality of students’ out-of-school time.

Blogosphere reaction breaks along expected lines. Eduwonk Andy Rotherham takes issue with “the conspicuous soft-pedaling of a focus on results and the explicit rejection that perhaps schools are even a substantial part of the educational problem. At Fordham, Mike Petrilli says “amen” to the homilies but likewise complains “it’s REALLY squishy on school accountability.” Fellow Fordhamite Liam Julian, having none of it, wonders why there’s no call to provide “housing for every family and daisies for all schoolchildren.” Eduwonkette, on the other hand offers “big props” and provides a link for others to sign the statement. Joanne Jacobs plays it down the middle, but wants to see a “privately funded campaign that promotes good parenting: how to help your child develop language and reading skills and how to teach good behavior, for example.”

I’m going to avoid the Blogging 101 temptation to cop an attitude, quip and move on. This is an interesting discussion — it’s the discussion — and I’ll do my small part to encourage a low-temperature, thoughtful discussion, not knee-jerk reactions. The plain truth is, I could argue much of this round or flat, especially the accountability piece, the umbrella which covers everything else.

Continue reading ‘A Broader, Bolder Approach to Education’

A Wall of Denial

Published by Robert Pondiscio on April 24, 2008 in Assessment and Testing and Educational Policy. 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.”

Coming Attractions?

Published by Robert Pondiscio on April 10, 2008 in Education Leadership. 0 Comments

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.

Live By Testing, Die By Testing

Published by Robert Pondiscio on April 9, 2008 in Assessment and Testing, Education Leadership and Teaching. 0 Comments

Good common sense from Eduwonkette on the the Bloomberg tenure track defeat. Reacting to some of the extreme blogging about it, she sounds a note of reason.

“If NYC wants to get serious about value-added, tests need to be given in September and June, and these tests need to be designed to measure growth, which NY state’s tests are not,” says EW.

I’ve resisted weighing in on this because as a former NYC teacher, I’m deeply ambivalent about it. Which is worse, no or phony accountability, or the nuance-averse, blunt instrument accountability of standardized tests? Frankly, neither one is remotely acceptable. I’m a strong supporter of muscular teacher accountability, but over my dead body would I accept being evaluated by a reading test administered short of the halfway mark in the school year. Neither would I want my efficacy gauged six months after my kids left my classroom.

A case could be made that under Bloomberg and Chancellor Klein, New York City has lived and died by standardized test scores. I can’t help but feel that this defeat is at some level the inevitable price they had to pay for their singular focus on testing.

How About “Unacceptable”?

Published by Robert Pondiscio on March 24, 2008 in Educational Policy. 1 Comment

School officials in Massachusetts want to redefine failure. Literally. “To soothe the bruised egos of educators and children in lackluster schools, Massachusetts officials are now pushing for kinder, gentler euphemisms for failure,” the Boston Globe reports. “Instead of calling these schools ‘underperforming,’ the Board of Education is considering labeling them as “Commonwealth priority,” to avoid poisoning teacher and student morale. Schools in the direst straits, now known as ‘chronically underperforming,’ would get the more urgent but still vague label of ‘priority one.’”

Leave it to the lone student representative on the board to speak truth to power. “Why are we spending time on this?,” said Zachary Tsetsos, a 17-year old senior at Oxford High School, who said he finds the debate frivolous. “I don’t want to tiptoe around the issue. I’m not concerned about what title we give these schools. Let’s work on fixing them.”

In the South Bronx community where I taught, I used to say that the schools came in three flavors: bad, worse and holy #$@!. I don’t suppose those would be useful distinctions. But they might be more accurate and convey a more appropriate sense of urgency. If it’s not a school to which you’d send your child, they only term that obtains is unacceptable.

A Contract Hit

Published by Robert Pondiscio on February 18, 2008 in Education Leadership. 0 Comments

A new report from the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation looks at the ostensibly black and white world of accountability vs. union contracts, and finds a surprising amount of grey area. The ultimate responsibility for student achievement tends to fall to principals. But do they have the power to run their buildings like true managers? The Leadership Limbo: Teacher Labor Agreements in America’s Fifty Largest School Districts looked at labor contracts in three areas—compensation, personnel policies, and work rules—and concluded that more than half of the districts studied have labor contracts that are ambiguous. “The collective bargaining agreements and the formal board policies in these districts appear to grant leaders substantial leeway to manage assertively, should they so choose,” the report concludes. Only 15 of the 50 contracts studied are deemed “restrictive or highly restrictive.”

“Districts with high concentrations of poor and minority students tend to have more restrictive contracts than other districts, the report notes. “Another alarming indication of inequity along racial and class lines.”

In Fordham’s Education Gadfly, Checker Finn and Michael Petrilli opine that they tend to see the situation “as more good than bad, for it means, at least in the short run, that aggressive superintendents and principals could push the envelope and claim authority for any management prerogative not barred outright by the labor agreements. And it means that, for a majority of big districts, the depiction of The Contract as an all-powerful, insurmountable barrier to reform may be overstated.”

Stay tuned.

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