Forum with Joel Klein, Wendy Kopp and Cami Anderson; Roxbury Prep Students Best in the State and Close Achievement Gap Again; ING to Give Teachers Refunds; What Matters Most

 

 

Three cheers for Roxbury Prep!  And when was the last time you heard leaders of school EMBRACE testing?!

“At Roxbury Prep, we embrace the MCAS because we love accountability.  The MCAS provides a standard by which families, communities, and lawmakers can evaluate the quality and effectiveness of education across the state,” states Dana Lehman, the school’s Co-Director.  “If schools aren’t helping students make measurable academic progress each year, then families and the public need to know that—and changes need to be made.”  She continues, “Roxbury Prep’s 2006 MCAS results again demonstrate that, with access to a high-quality education, urban students of color can excel academically.”...

Despite the continued controversy surrounding standardized tests, Phillips sees the MCAS as an important advocacy tool for students and families, especially students and families of color.  He argues, “Without the MCAS, families, community activists, and lawmakers would have a difficult time holding schools accountable for their performance.  Students would continue to suffer.”

Good for Spitzer for putting an end to this betrayal of teachers by their union.

Insurance giant ING Group has agreed to refund $30 million to educators who were steered by their union into retirement funds that carried high fees and little-disclosed payments to union coffers.

This is an article written by Randi Weingarten that was published in last Sunday's NYT in a paid piece.  In it, she refers to a recently released report by Common Good (attached and at http://cgood.org/index-1150.html) which is summarized as follows on the Common Good web site:

At the request of Common Good, eight New York City public school teachers volunteered to keep diaries of their workdays in order to illustrate how school bureaucracy impacts teaching.  The following report summarizes and excerpts those diaries.

As the report states, “In recent years, great strides have been made by the New York City  Department of Education to de-regulate the City’s public school system and provide greater autonomy and authority to school leaders ….  While these initiatives are encouraging, as our study indicates, more changes are needed to reduce the adverse effects of bureaucracy on the City’s public school teachers.”

While I'm skeptical of a report that's based on a grand total of eight teachers over 10 school days, let's look at the five major points it makes:

 

1. Student Discipline: Teachers spent a significant amount of time attending to disruptive students. Current practices seem to be burdensome, ineffective or non-existent, and in need of improvement.
2. Assessments and Testing: Due to the time of year that entries were completed, preparing, administering, and grading tests was a common occurrence for several teachers. The teachers described testing as necessary but that it took too much time away from instruction.
3. Mandated Teaching Procedures: The teachers documented several required teaching procedures related to the classroom environment and curriculum. Some reported these as onerous and/or counter-productive to teaching and some questioned whether these were mainly a means to check up on teachers.
4. School Management: Teachers recorded school-wide practices that call into question how effectively their schools are being managed, such as numerous classroom interruptions, changes in schedules, and absent or unresponsive administrators.
5. Paperwork: Teachers completed all different kinds of paperwork throughout their days. Several characterized the paperwork as time-consuming and burdensome while others questioned its overall legitimacy.

Here are my quick comments on each:

1) I'm 100% in agreement on the importance of creating a safe, orderly environment -- without it, learning is virtually impossible.  Creating it is hard -- but as I've seen in countless cases, it CAN be done with a unified, well-organized, perpetual effort by EVERY adult in the school.

 

2) and 3) Here's what Randi has to say about these two points in her article:

One teacher wrote: "This situation exemplifies what education in New York City has become - preparing for tests, testing, and grading tests. What has happened to teaching?"

 

Mandated teaching requirements also created some frustration for the teachers - especially the veterans. "Sometimes I feel like I'm a robot regurgitating the scripted dialogue that's expected of us day in and day out," one writes. Another teacher restates her day despondently: "Teach mini-lesson...Student raises hand with question. Tell him to put hand down. Students not allowed to ask questions during mini-lesson. Feel guilty."

I disagree.  As I've written many times before, testing and well-designed curricula like Success for All are not a barrier to good teaching, but an essential part of it -- as well as managing and evaluating a school and the entire system.  Also, when an alarmingly high % of Randi's members are utterly failing to educate, no wonder she's leading the charge against testing, which of course exposes which teachers, principals and schools are failing to do their job.

 

4) I'm in total agreement that WAY too many schools are poorly managed and that teachers are treated poorly.  In such cases, the lousy principals need to be replaced.

 

5) I also have no reason to doubt that there's excessive paperwork.

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Roxbury Prep Students Best in the State and Close Achievement Gap Again

Roxbury Prep’s 8^th grade math scores highest in the state

 

October 18, 2006 – Roxbury, MA.  On the 2006 8^th grade math MCAS test, Roxbury Preparatory Charter School outperformed every school district in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts.  In fact, Roxbury Prep was ranked 2^nd of 458 schools in the state on the 8^th grade math test.  Furthermore, for the third consecutive year, Roxbury Prep—an Intel and Scholastic School of Distinction—stands as the highest-performing urban middle school in Massachusetts.¹  Roxbury Prep is a public middle school in Roxbury enrolling 200 students of color, 66% of whom qualify for the federal free and reduced price lunch program.

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ING to Give Teachers Refunds

Union members steered into high-fee annuities will get $30 million in a New York agreement.

By Kathy M. Kristof, Times Staff Writer
October 11, 2006

http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-teach11oct11,1,4994438.story?ctrack=1&cset=true

Insurance giant ING Group has agreed to refund $30 million to educators who were steered by their union into retirement funds that carried high fees and little-disclosed payments to union coffers.

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What Matters Most

 

By Randi Weingarten, President, NYC United Federation of Teachers

http://cgood.org/assets/attachments/Randi_Weingarten_10.15.06.pdf

 

During the year, we are required to individually assess our students in reading five times. Each assessment takes 25-40 minutes per child to administer, and that time block does not even include all the time it takes to maintain the records for each of the five assessments. I feel as if I spend more time assessing than teaching. - A New York City Public School Teacher

 

 

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