Whitney Tilson's School Reform Blog

WELCOME TO MY BLOG

2012-01-30T11:06:00.001-05:00

Thank you for visiting my blog. I sometimes don't have time to post here everything that I send to my school reform email list, so if you want to receive my regular (approximately every other day) email updates, please email me at WTilson at tilsonfunds.com.

For more about me and links to my favorite articles, posts and videos on education reform, see my School Reform Resource Page at www.arightdenied.org, in particular my Powerpoint presentation entitled A Right Denied: The Critical Need for Genuine School Reform, which is posted at www.arightdenied.org/presentation-slides.

The idea for this came to me after watching An Inconvenient Truth, Al Gore's documentary about global warming. After seeing it, I thought to myself, "That's exactly what school reformers need as well!" My presentation is meant to be a collection of data and arguments that forcefully advocates for an urgent school reform agenda. I gave this presentation at an event in Washington DC on Nov. 4, 2009. Here are links to the videos:

Part 1: www.youtube.com/watch?v=2crd5D8ZW1k

Part 2: www.youtube.com/watch?v=HiKvBJtUct0

Part 3: www.youtube.com/watch?v=MVkeB58INIE

It has also been made into a documentary, which was released last April. You can see the trailer and, if you wish, order it at: www.2mminutes.com/films/a-right-denied.asp.

Why Chinese Mothers Are Superior

2012-01-30T11:01:00.003-05:00

I'm going to see Amy Chua, the Tiger Mom, at the 92^nd St. Y tonight at 7:30 (tickets are still available: http://www.92y.org/Uptown/Event/Amy-Chua.aspx?utm_source=92Y_HP&utm_medium=Highlights_Amy-Chua&utm_campaign=Adult_Lectures). Here's what I wrote about her book when it first came out (http://edreform.blogspot.com/2011/01/comments-on-why-chinese-mothers-are.html):

Why Chinese Mothers Are Superior

I enjoyed this article by Amy Chua on "Why Chinese Mothers Are Superior" more than any I've read in a LONG time. It's hilarious, hyperbolic and provocative, and will surely provoke strong emotions, especially among people (like my wife and me) raising young children – but there are some very powerful lessons here. This article and Nick Kristof's op ed in today's NYT (below) capture why I believe that this will be the China Century and why the first 10 years of this century are a harbinger of what's to come.

Here's an excerpt from Chua's article (her new book, Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother, is at: www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1594202842/tilsoncapitalpar):

First, I've noticed that Western parents are extremely anxious about their children's self-esteem. They worry about how their children will feel if they fail at something, and they constantly try to reassure their children about how good they are notwithstanding a mediocre performance on a test or at a recital. In other words, Western parents are concerned about their children's psyches. Chinese parents aren't. They assume strength, not fragility, and as a result they behave very differently.

For example, if a child comes home with an A-minus on a test, a Western parent will most likely praise the child. The Chinese mother will gasp in horror and ask what went wrong. If the child comes home with a B on the test, some Western parents will still praise the child. Other Western parents will sit their child down and express disapproval, but they will be careful not to make their child feel inadequate or insecure, and they will not call their child "stupid," "worthless" or "a disgrace." Privately, the Western parents may worry that their child does not test well or have aptitude in the subject or that there is something wrong with the curriculum and possibly the whole school. If the child's grades do not improve, they may eventually schedule a meeting with the school principal to challenge the way the subject is being taught or to call into question the teacher's credentials.

If a Chinese child gets a B—which would never happen—there would first be a screaming, hair-tearing explosion. The devastated Chinese mother would then get dozens, maybe hundreds of practice tests and work through them with her child for as long as it takes to get the grade up to an A.

Chinese parents demand perfect grades because they believe that their child can get them. If their child doesn't get them, the Chinese parent assumes it's because the child didn't work hard enough. That's why the solution to substandard performance is always to excoriate, punish and shame the child. The Chinese parent believes that their child will be strong enough to take the shaming and to improve from it. (And when Chinese kids do excel, there is plenty of ego-inflating parental praise lavished in the privacy of the home.)

I find what Chua describes (no sleepovers, playdates, or ability to make any decisions at all) to be extreme, but if one were to put parental expectations of/pressure on/control of kids on a 0-10 scale, with 10 being what Chua describes, I think the ideal is much closer to 10 than 0 – maybe an 8.

In a world filled with endless, cheap, mind-rotting entertainment via hundreds of TV channels (heavily weighted toward 24/7 sports, cartoons and other junk), the internet, video games, music and movies, I'm firmly convinced that nearly all children will spend every waking hour messing around with these activities and wasting their lives, unless their parents AND schools (but the former much more importantly) keep a very close eye on them, tightly restrict what they can do, and make them to do many things they don't want to do, such as study hard, read books, have a reasonable diet, go to bed on time, dress decently, etc.

I know I sound like an old-school-stick-in-the-mud, but isn't this really, really obvious??? I would argue that this has been true forever, but it's especially important for parents and schools to have very firm oversight today given the decline of social values/norms and the exponential increase in the availability of mindless entertainment. For example, even if my parents hadn't banned me from watching nearly all TV, I probably wouldn't have watched very much because there were only a handful of channels from which to choose – and there certainly weren't Xboxes, computers and the internet. I didn't have much choice but to read!

Very firm oversight combined with high expectations and a no-excuses attitude is sorely lacking in the United States, both among parents and schools (with many wonderful exceptions of course; among schools, for example, the no-excuses charter schools like KIPP (www.kipp.org) (I'm on the board of KIPP NY) are successful in part because they do that same things that Chinese mothers do). Lest you think I'm just perpetuating stereotypes about American youth, check out this data about how they spend their time (from page 19 of my school reform presentation, posted at: www.arightdenied.org/presentation-slides):

The data (as opposed to the tyranny of anecdotes) shows how wildly off-base the documentary Race to Nowhere (www.racetonowhere.com) is. It depicts lots of stressed-out, overworked kids, which is only a problem for a tiny fraction of children in this country. As a nation, our real problem is EXACTLY the opposite!

For more on how Chinese (and Indian) youth are just HUSTLING a lot more than America youth are, I highly recommend a great documentary, Two Million Minutes(www.2mminutes.com/films/global-examination.asp), by my friend Bob Compton (who also did A Right Denied (www.2mminutes.com/films/a-right-denied.asp), the documentary of me giving my school reform presentation)

Here are more comments on Chua and her book:

- In Defense of the Guilty, Ambivalent, Preoccupied Western Mom: http://edreform.blogspot.com/2011/01/in-defense-of-guilty-ambivalent.html

- Tiger mom's memoir meets ferocious roar: http://edreform.blogspot.com/2011/01/tiger-moms-memoir-meets-ferocious-roar.html

- Comments: http://edreform.blogspot.com/2011/01/chuas-article.html

- More of my comments: http://edreform.blogspot.com/2011/01/pisa-scores.html

- Why Chinese Mothers Are Average: http://edreform.blogspot.com/2011/01/why-chinese-mothers-are-average-part.html

- Amy Chua Is a Wimp, David Brooks: http://edreform.blogspot.com/2011/01/amy-chua-is-wimp.html

- Families offer a contrast in studies: http://edreform.blogspot.com/2011/05/families-offer-contrast-in-studies.html

- Asian Like Me: Paper Tigers: What happens to all the Asian-American overachievers when the test-taking ends? (one of the best articles of the year): http://edreform.blogspot.com/2011/05/asian-like-me-paper-tigers-what-happens.html

Reform worth fighting for

2012-01-30T11:01:00.001-05:00

Re. my last email on the MDRC study on NYC's successful new, small schools, here are three comments. First, an op ed in the NY Post by DFER's Joe Williams:

Are these small schools perfect? Of course not. In fact, the MDRC report adds to the growing evidence that, while New York City is graduating students at a higher rate than a decade ago, most of these kids are still not ready for college.

This is sobering stuff, and city leaders must clearly keep their eyes on the issue. But the fact that we're even worried today about how tens of thousands of city youngsters are doing in college classes is a reminder of just how far the needle has moved in Gotham.

Getting to where most of our students are not only graduating from high school but excelling in college will require the same sort of boldness as we saw during the small-schools push. Bloomberg and his would-be successors should read the MRDC report from the vantage point of those whose job it is to drive change.

Many large high schools that made room for these smaller-school programs closed amid a loud uproar from "community" leaders who urged more time to fix the same schools that had wildly failed students for decades. If finding consensus had been the goal (as opposed to moving boldly to help students), thousands more young men and women would be trying to survive in the world without a high-school diploma right now.

Too much, too soon?

Change can be bumpy in a city like New York, especially when it comes to public schools. It's often easier to block anything from happening than it is for us to allow our leaders to stake out strong and compelling positions.

This report is yet another reminder that sometimes the fights are worth it.

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Reform worth fighting for

Lessons of NYC school closings

By JOE WILLIAMS

Last Updated: 12:39 AM, January 26, 2012

http://www.nypost.com/p/news/opinion/opedcolumnists/reform_worth_fighting_for_u9iObYKPHpuSY0do92MGJM#ixzz1koPCkrsQ

As the Department of Education closed nearly two dozen of the city's worst large high schools at the height of the "small-schools boom," one of the critics' most common complaints was that the educrats were doing too much, too soon.

Study Validates Replacement of Big Bad Schools With New Small Schools

2012-01-30T11:00:00.001-05:00

Tom Vander Ark sent me this comment and post:

My post (http://gettingsmart.com/edreformer/study-validates-replacement-of-big-bad-schools-with-new-small-schools/) notes:

* the study dramatically underestimates benefit because it does not compare new school to big bad schools that Joel Klein closed (it compares them to other choices in NYC)

* these would have been better as charters, but the state had a cap in place

* Bob Hughes (and Dick Beatie) deserve a lot of credit.

Here's Vander Ark's post:

Study Validates Replacement of Big Bad Schools With New Small Schools

January 25, 2012 - by Tom Vander Ark

Today MDRC released another study that conclusively proves that new small schools work. That and the fact that every quality school developer in America still opens small schools should finally put to rest criticism about a failed experiment. You'll never see a 3000 student KIPP.

Like the last study, the methodology missed the big impact by comparing new schools to other choices and not the schools they replaced. In many cases the new schools had DOUBLE the graduation rate of disastrously bad schools closed by Joel Klein's administration. Give some credit to Rudy Crew and Harold Levy for launching the differentiated approach to accountability and support.

It's also important to note that these new schools did not benefit from the additional flexibility that charter schools enjoy not by choice but because the state had cap in place. These results would have been even better had there been more ability to restaff and restructure the schools.

Another missing part of this story is the leadership provided by Bob Hughes, New Visions for Public Schools, the largest and most successful intermediary of the last decade. Bob's team helped identify and incubate most of the successful school developers.

Here's the tough medicine. We still don't have reliable and robust improvement strategies for big bad high schools. As this study proves, it's best to close and replace.

Bob Hughes, New Visions

STATEMENT FROM U.S. SECRETARY OF EDUCATION ARNE DUNCAN ON THE NEW MDRC STUDY

2012-01-30T10:53:00.001-05:00

And Arne Duncan weighed in on it as well:

STATEMENT FROM U.S. SECRETARY OF EDUCATION ARNE DUNCAN ON THE NEW MDRC STUDY, 'SUSTAINED POSITIVE EFFECTS ON GRADUATION RATES PRODUCED BY NEW YORK CITY'S SMALL PUBLIC HIGH SCHOOLS OF CHOICE'

"This new, rigorous study by MDRC of New York City's ambitious experiment with small public high schools underscores the great potential to replace failing schools for disadvantaged students with schools that instead narrow achievement and attainment gaps. MDRC's study is important and encouraging on several fronts. It shows that school reform can achieve success at scale, district-wide, and not just in isolated islands of success. It shows that, with community partnerships and dedicated follow-through, high school dropout factories can be closed and replaced with smaller schools that substantially boost graduation rates. And it shows that much of the conventional wisdom about the impossibility of turning around chronically low-performing high schools is either mistaken or badly exaggerated.

"MDRC's rigorous, scientific findings – that New York's non-selective, small high schools are far outperforming the high schools they replace – are one more sign that the Administration's SIG program is on the right track. For too long, educators have tinkered around the edges in low-performing schools, consigning generations of students of color to receiving an inferior education. It's time to transform chronically low-performing schools. It's time to put an end to the tireless tinkering."

More Teachers Union Ads to Come? AFT’s New York City Local Targets Michael Bloomberg

2012-01-30T10:52:00.001-05:00

The unions in CT and NYC are running ads, trying to influence the reform negotiations. Here's RiShawn Biddle's take:

Yesterday, Dropout Nation analyzed how the National Education Association's Connecticut affiliate was taking a defensive move against school reformers with its two-week commercial buy touting its legislative agenda — and how it reflected the next trend for teachers' unions in their effort to preserve the privileges from which they derive their declining influence. Today, the American Federation of Teachers' notoriously bellicose New York City local (whose boss, Michael Mulgrew, is angling to one day succeed predecessor — and current national president — Randi Weingarten) rolled out its own ad buy. Targeting the school reform record of Big Apple Mayor Michael Bloomberg, who is now looking to burnish his success in overhauling what was once the toxic waste dump of American public education with a push for a series of new initiatives such as $20,000 bonuses for teachers rated highly-effective on evaluations, the AFT is proclaiming that the mayor still "doesn't get" that his efforts aren't appreciated by the union. The commercials compliment a series of full-page ads being placed by the union in the Daily News that are supposed to be open letters rallying against the mayor's efforts, including his push to use value-added analysis of student test score data in teacher evaluations.

This campaign isn't just aimed at Bloomberg and attempting to appeal to Big Apple residents…

…This play is also likely an attempt to shape the big election facing the Big Apple next year: Who will succeed Bloomberg as mayor, and thus, boss of the nation's largest — and most reform-minded — school system. With the reformers such as state Board of Regents Chairman Meryl Tisch and City Council Speaker Christine Quinn likely to run for the job — and AFT allies such as city Comptroller John Liu either struggling with political scandals or lack of strong political backers — the AFT must also work hard to reshape the political game on the ground in order to stave off what would likely be another decade of strong reform efforts. Given that the AFT's string of recent public relations disasters in New York City — including the failed lawsuit it filed along with the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People to shut down expansion of charter schools — Mulgrew has to garner some sort of victory. Especially if he wants to succeed the (until-recently) more politically-masterful Weingarten.

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More Teachers Union Ads to Come? AFT's New York City Local Targets Michael Bloomberg

January 24, 2012 No Comments by RiShawn Biddle

http://dropoutnation.net/2012/01/24/more-teachers-union-ads-to-come-afts-new-york-city-local-targets-bloomberg/

Charter School Releases an Ad Supporting Cuomo

2012-01-30T10:51:00.001-05:00

I love this – student power! What a great response to the union ads! Watch the 30-second video at: http://cityroom.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/01/27/charter-school-releases-an-ad-supporting-cuomo/

As he girds for confrontation with what he calls the state's educational bureaucracy, Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo has found an unexpected ally singing his praises on cable television: a group of high school students in East Harlem.

Earlier this month, ninth and tenth graders at the Renaissance Charter High School for Innovation filmed a video inspired by Mr. Cuomo's declaration in his State of the State address that he intended to take a second job as a lobbyist for public school students.

A nonprofit group that supports charter schools, the New York City Charter School Center, saw the video and was impressed. With a few tweaks to make it television-ready, and a modest outlay by the charter center, the clip has been playing this week as a 30-second commercial on NY1, the New York City cable news channel.

The Charter School Center is the latest group to take to the airwaves to praise the governor: last year, a coalition of business leaders called the Committee to Save New York spent nearly $12 million supporting his agenda, mostly through television and radio advertising.

The charter center's ad buy is quite small, and its spot was only scheduled to be shown for a few days. But Mr. Cuomo, who has been able to spend relatively little from his campaign treasury thanks to ads running on his behalf from outside groups, is apparently grateful. Last week, he provided the ultimate virtual show of support: he posted a link to the video on his Twitter account.

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January 27, 2012, 6:45 pm

Charter School Releases an Ad Supporting Cuomo

By THOMAS KAPLAN

http://cityroom.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/01/27/charter-school-releases-an-ad-supporting-cuomo/

Connecticut education commissioner praises agreement reached on teacher evaluations

2012-01-30T10:50:00.001-05:00

Kudos to Stefan Pryor for engineering a teacher evaluation deal in CT:

After years of trying, representatives of teacher unions, superintendents and school boards Wednesday reached consensus on the controversial issue of teacher evaluations.

Stefan Pryor, the new state commissioner of education, Wednesday said the model ties evaluation in part to test scores and teacher observation, while also including input from students, peers and parents.

Pryor said "a tremendous sense of optimism" was palpable in the room after members of a task force charged with the complex task found themselves in agreement on the plan's specifics.

"When we reached consensus on this set of guidelines, the room broke into applause," Pryor said of the meeting of the Performance Evaluation Advisory Council Wednesday.

The commissioner said the breakdown on evaluations includes:

- 45 percent tied to "multiple student learning indicators," with one-half of that tied to student test scores;

- 40 percent to observation of teacher performance and practices;

- 10 percent feedback from peers and parents;
- 5 percent on either student feedback or a statewide student indicator.

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Connecticut education commissioner praises agreement reached on teacher evaluations

Wednesday, January 25, 2012

http://www.nhregister.com/articles/2012/01/25/news/doc4f20a021bfa5e529910038.txt

Can Computers Replace Teachers?

2012-01-30T10:49:00.001-05:00

Andy Rotherham with some sensible thoughts on the role of technology in education:

As a parent and an analyst, I want technology that includes rich content or enables students to access it. And I want technologies that are engaging for students but actually teach them something. Plenty of applications err on one side or the other. And as with lots of offline schoolwork, there are time wasters that aren't helping anyone learn much of anything. If anyone tells you an ed tech tool has "gaming elements," make sure it's not just a game.

American education desperately needs an overhaul that goes far beyond upgrading computers in the classroom. It's the last major American field relatively untouched by technology. But Jobs was right: technology by itself won't fix what ails our schools. He saw teachers' unions and archaic practices as the big barriers. Perhaps, but I'd argue they are symptoms of our larger inattention to instructional quality. The bells and whistles of technology, for all its promise, are distracting us from this mundane but essential reality.

PS-- It's pretty cool to see what Apple is doing with textbooks on the iPad: www.apple.com/education/ibooks-textbooks

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School of Thought

Can Computers Replace Teachers?

Until we figure out how to best use technology in the classroom, the bells and whistles are often a distraction

By Andrew J. Rotherham | @arotherham | January 26, 2012 | 21

http://ideas.time.com/2012/01/26/can-computers-replace-teachers/#ixzz1kstHyfVX

Thoughts about articles re manufacturing

2012-01-30T10:48:00.001-05:00

Speaking of Apple, here are some spot on comments from a friend re. the two articles I sent around re. manufacturing:

I thought these two articles were fascinating and could not stop reading them. I am so glad you forwarded them. The Isaacson biography of Steve Jobs also touched upon the Obama+Silicon Valley dinner and focused on the anecdote of the 30,000 missing engineers--essentially the US could not supply 30,000 engineers period in order to support the 700,000 people working on the iPhone. The Times makes it sound as if it's a question of not being able to source them quick enough but apparently it's a real structural gap in our labor force as Isaacson takes the time to explain in his book.

Like the Times article, Isaacson describes these missing engineers as folks who have a few years of post-high-school training in engineering but are not full-fledged 4-year college graduates. In other words, the kind of training that countries like Germany and so many Asian countries are so good at providing. Seems like this is an urgent memo to our community colleges whose curricula needs some serious strategic overhauling.

But fundamentally, it speaks to the sad state of math education in our country. Like many folks, I was a casual observer of this as I read headlines about our latest PISA failures etc. Seems like that's been going on since we were in school! But now that I am a parent and collaborate with the math committee at my son's school I have seen firsthand how limited we are by very poor curriculum materials and completely inadequate training of elementary school teachers in math instruction. The result: a nation of kids heading to middle school and high school without a strong foundation of mathematical understanding and weak math skills. The repercussions in terms of employability and lifetime earnings potential have been documented by many.

The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly of Obama’s State of the Union Address

2012-01-30T10:47:00.003-05:00

RiShawn Biddle's take on Obama's State of the Union address:

There is honestly little to say about yesterday's State of the Union address. Although President Barack Obama did make clear that he was staying the course on his school reform efforts, he offered little in the way of specifics. While it may be a tad surprising in one way, it isn't because education reform has been the one part of his agenda that has garnered largely bipartisan support (witness outgoing Indiana Gov. Mitch Daniels' praise of the president during his rebuttal). On the other hand, Obama's short-term economic stimulus efforts and push for healthcare reform are the areas that have been his greatest political weaknesses — and threats to his re-election prospects — so he naturally spent more time on touting proposals such as a "January surprise" federal refinancing of home mortgages that could be a short-term boon for homeowners (even as they remain in debt for decades to come).

But the good news is that Obama is, at least rhetorically, not backing down from systemic reform. His call for removing laggard teachers from the classroom once again reminds the National Education Association and the American Federation of Teachers that they can no longer count on the Democratic Party for unquestioned support of the traditional teacher compensation system the unions have long defended. So does the possibility that the administration will try to expand the Teacher Incentive Fund, which helps finance performance pay efforts by states and districts. Considering that his fellow congressional and senate Democrats (especially those facing stiff re-election campaigns), still count on NEA and AFT dollars to finance their campaigns, Obama can't full out call for an end to tenure. But his rhetoric can be used cannily by those rightly pushing to abolish near-lifetime employment policies that harm children and make it difficult to remove laggard teachers. All in all, he is still pushing for teacher quality reforms embraced through Race to the Top and the School Improvement Grant programs.

…The bad news is that Obama once again remains silent on Parent Power and school choice. Certainly the administration will continue to push for the expansion of charter schools. But Obama had a chance to directly call out California's state legislators, who are considering AB 1172, which would allow traditional districts to shutter the expansion of charter schools in the nation's most-populous state if the bureaucracies deem them a negative fiscal impact. Obama could have used the State of the Union to call for states to take charge of approving charter school openings and taking this role out of the hands of traditional districts (which is essentially akin to letting Red Lobster decide if an Applebee's can open next door). He could also have also pushed for states to move toward the Hollywood Model of Education and away from the traditional district system.

The president also had an amazing opportunity to advocate for the rightful role of parents as lead decision-makers in education — and failed on that front. His unwillingness to embrace vouchers is particularly galling given that, thanks to his taxpayer-funded salary, he and Michelle can exercise choice and Parent Power by sending their two daughters to one of the nation's exclusive (if not necessarily top-performing) private schools, and through his exalted status as the nation's School Reformer-in-Chief. With Parent Trigger laws up for consideration in Indiana, Florida, and Arizona this year, Obama's call could have rallied Democrats in those states to step up and support Parent Power. Obama could have also called for states and districts to release value-added teacher data so that parents can know the quality of the teachers who have our kids in their care, something that U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan has supported; the failure to do so is also rather disappointing.

Then there is Obama's continued push to weaken his own school reform accomplishments through the administration's No Child waiver gambit.

…President Obama certainly should get credit for much of his work in spurring systemic reform. But he needs to ditch the No Child waiver gambit — and actually commit to expanding accountability, school choice, and Parent Power — in order to sustain those successes. Our kids deserve a stronger, more-comprehensive push for reforms that can help all of them succeed.

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The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly of Obama's State of the Union Address

January 25, 2012 No Comments by RiShawn Biddle

http://dropoutnation.net/2012/01/25/the-good-bad-and-the-ugly-of-obamas-state-of-the-union-address/

Obama Plan Links College Aid With Affordability

2012-01-30T10:47:00.001-05:00

A very interesting idea:

President Obama is proposing a financial aid overhaul that for the first time would tie colleges' eligibility for campus-based aid programs — Perkins loans, work-study jobs and supplemental grants for low-income students — to the institutions' success in improving affordability and value for students, administration officials said.

Under the plan, which the president outlined on Friday morning in a speech at the University of Michigan, the amount available for Perkins loans would grow to $8 billion, from the current $1 billion. The president also wants to create a $1 billion grant competition, along the lines of the Race for the Top program for elementary and secondary education, to reward states that take action to keep college costs down, and a separate $55 million competition for individual colleges to increase their value and efficiency.

The administration also wants to give families clearer information about costs and quality, by requiring colleges and universities to offer a "shopping sheet" that makes it easier to compare financial aid packages and — for the first time — compiling post-graduate earning and employment information to give students a better sense of what awaits them.

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Obama Plan Links College Aid With Affordability

Doug Mills/The New York Times

President Obama arrived at the University of Michigan on Friday.

By TAMAR LEWIN

Published: January 27, 2012

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/27/education/obama-to-link-aid-for-colleges-to-affordability.html

Mixed Reviews of Obama Plan to Keep Down College Costs

2012-01-30T10:46:00.001-05:00

Mixed reaction in Congress:

In Congress, reaction to the plan seemed to divide along party lines.

"The president is saying that people can't afford to go to college anymore, and that just simply is not true," said Representative Virginia Foxx, the North Carolina Republican who is chairwoman of the House Higher Education subcommittee. "Tuition is too high at most schools, but it isn't the job of the federal government to punish those schools. It's very arbitrary, and the president sounds like a dictator."

Senator Lamar Alexander of Tennessee, a Republican and a former federal secretary of education, offered his own ideas of improving academic efficiency: "I've suggested that they could offer three-year degrees to some students. Colleges could also operate more in the summertime, which would make more efficient use of campuses and reduce their costs."

Many Democrats offered only the blandest of statements praising the president for tackling the affordability issue. "The president's higher education proposal rightly calls on colleges, universities and states to maintain a commitment to keep college costs low making it easier for American families and their children to afford a college education," Representative George Miller, Democrat of California, said in a statement.

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January 27, 2012

Mixed Reviews of Obama Plan to Keep Down College Costs

By TAMAR LEWIN

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/28/education/obamas-plan-to-control-college-costs-gets-mixed-reviews.html

Obama Wades Into Issue of Raising Dropout Age

2012-01-30T10:45:00.001-05:00

Another interesting proposal by Obama:

President Obama's State of the Union call for every state to require students to stay in school until they turn 18 is Washington's first direct involvement in an issue that many governors and state legislators have found tough to address.

While state legislative efforts to raise the dropout age to 18 have spread in recent years, many have had trouble winning passage. Last year, for example, such legislation was considered in Alaska, Illinois, Kentucky, Maryland and Rhode Island — but only Rhode Island actually changed its law.

"Efforts to raise the age usually come up against the argument that requiring students to stay in school when they no longer want to be there is disruptive to other students and not fair to the teacher," said Sunny Deye, a senior policy analyst at the National Conference of State Legislatures. "Home-school groups often oppose raising the compulsory attendance age, and especially now, in this budget crunch, there are major concerns about the fiscal impact."

…Several economists, over two decades, have found that higher dropout ages improve not only graduation rates but entrance to higher education and career outcomes. "The evidence is quite robust that raising the school-leaving age increases educational attainment," said Philip Oreopoulos, an economics professor at the University of Toronto, whose study found, however, that exceptions to the law, lenience in enforcement and weak consequences for truancy could all interfere with an increase. "Ideally, you use both a carrot and stick approach, so that if students have to stay in school longer you're also providing wider curriculum options that might interest them."

In a 2010 report on the dropout problem, Robert Balfanz, a research scientist at Johns Hopkins University, found that of the six states that increased the compulsory school age from 2002 to 2008, two — Illinois and South Dakota — experienced increases in their graduation rates, and one, Nevada, had a decline.

"It's symbolically and strategically important to raise the age to 18, but it's not the magical thing that in itself will keep kids in school," Dr. Balfanz said.

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January 25, 2012

Obama Wades Into Issue of Raising Dropout Age

By TAMAR LEWIN

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/26/education/obama-wades-into-issue-of-raising-dropout-age.html

The True Cost of High School Dropouts

2012-01-30T10:44:00.001-05:00

A NYT op ed on the true (and horrifying costs) of high school dropouts:

If we could reduce the current number of dropouts by just half, we would yield almost 700,000 new graduates a year, and it would more than pay for itself. Studies show that the typical high school graduate will obtain higher employment and earnings — an astonishing 50 percent to 100 percent increase in lifetime income — and will be less likely to draw on public money for health care and welfare and less likely to be involved in the criminal justice system. Further, because of the increased income, the typical graduate will contribute more in tax revenues over his lifetime than if he'd dropped out.

When the costs of investment to produce a new graduate are taken into account, there is a return of $1.45 to $3.55 for every dollar of investment, depending upon the educational intervention strategy. Under this estimate, each new graduate confers a net benefit to taxpayers of about $127,000 over the graduate's lifetime. This is a benefit to the public of nearly $90 billion for each year of success in reducing the number of high school dropouts by 700,000 — or something close to $1 trillion after 11 years. That's real money — and a reason both liberals and conservatives should rally behind dropout prevention as an element of economic recovery, leaving aside the ethical dimensions of educating our young people.

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The True Cost of High School Dropouts

By HENRY M. LEVIN and CECILIA E. ROUSE

Published: January 25, 2012

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/26/opinion/the-true-cost-of-high-school-dropouts.html

Some Lenders to Students Face Greater U.S. Scrutiny

2012-01-30T10:43:00.001-05:00

Great news:

The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau is stepping up its scrutiny of nontraditional lenders to students at profit-making colleges and trade schools that have high rates of default, the newly appointed director of the bureau said Thursday.

The director, Richard Cordray, compared the practices of some parts of the student loan business to those of the subprime mortgage lending machine that contributed to the financial crisis.

"We're seeing some of the schools anticipating as much as a 50 percent default rate on their students, yet they're making those loans anyway," Mr. Cordray said at a news briefing.

"We will be looking closely at those loans. We will be looking closely at the tactics by which they are marketed and making sure that the law is being followed," he said.

…The consumer bureau indicated earlier that it was interested in the subject of predatory student loans. In November, the bureau and the Education Department issued a joint request for information from consumers on the private student loan market, a study that was mandated by the Dodd-Frank financial regulation law. The deadline for comments is Tuesday.

Mr. Cordray said Thursday that the bureau had already seen evidence of problems in the market for private student loans.

"One of the things we see and have seen is lenders who market loans for borrowers knowing that those borrowers are unlikely to be able to pay those loans," Mr. Cordray said. "But they may have other incentives that lead them to make those loans nonetheless. We clearly saw that in the mortgage market in the run-up to the financial crisis, when that market got broken. We also see it, say, in student lending as well."

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January 12, 2012

Some Lenders to Students Face Greater U.S. Scrutiny

By EDWARD WYATT

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/13/business/consumer-agency-sees-problems-in-student-loan-business.html

School Reform in the Kingdom of Happiness

2012-01-30T10:41:00.001-05:00

Bob Compton on the lessons from Finland:

China and India educate for commercial advantage, and each country has more than 200 million school children. Our 55 million kids will face extraordinary competition. But we can't just teach the way they do. Our culture and our kids won't allow it. Nor is the Asian way the best for our children. Preparing our kids to be the world's innovation leaders, and reviving our middle class, requires a uniquely Western approach.

Another country, similar in size to Indiana, has found a way to elevate its students to first in the world in problem solving, scientific literacy and math—Finland. What works in its schools is the muse of open-ended projects where kids learn by doing. Testing is included, but in moderation.

But the Finnish model only works if you have amazing teachers. And amazing teachers only come through a recruitment and training process that is highly selective and rigorous.

In Finland, just 10 percent of applicants are accepted into one of only eight colleges of education. By contrast, Indiana has 45 colleges offering teaching degrees and enrolling is easy. Where Indiana has thousands of teachers leaving each year, Finland has less than 1-percent attrition. Carefully selected and trained, great teachers stay in the profession.

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School Reform in the Kingdom of Happiness

By Bob Compton

Indiana Business Journal

Much as the explorers in "Lost Horizon" stumbled into Shangri-La in the Himalayas, I found myself in the small Kingdom of Bhutan last October. As this tiny place moves into the 21st century, it has committed itself to be a society centered on the pursuit of happiness.

Student Faces Town’s Wrath in Protest Against a Prayer

2012-01-30T10:40:00.001-05:00

What a total disgrace! This is what happens when people watch Fox "News" too much: their brains turn to mush and they start believing conspiracy theories about a war against religion in this country…

She is 16, the daughter of a firefighter and a nurse, a self-proclaimed nerd who loves Harry Potter and Facebook. But Jessica Ahlquist is also an outspoken atheist who has incensed this heavily Roman Catholic city with a successful lawsuit to get a prayer removed from the wall of her high school auditorium, where it has hung for 49 years.

A federal judge ruled this month that the prayer's presence at Cranston High School West was unconstitutional, concluding that it violated the principle of government neutrality in religion. In the weeks since, residents have crowded school board meetings to demand an appeal, Jessica has received online threats and the police have escorted her at school, and Cranston, a dense city of 80,000 just south of Providence, has throbbed with raw emotion.

State Representative Peter G. Palumbo, a Democrat from Cranston, called Jessica "an evil little thing" on a popular talk radio show. Three separate florists refused to deliver her roses sent from a national atheist group. The group, the Freedom From Religion Foundation, has filed a complaint with the Rhode Island Commission for Human Rights.

"I was amazed," said Annie Laurie Gaylor, co-president of the foundation, which is based in Wisconsin and has given Jessica $13,000 from support and scholarship funds. "We haven't seen a case like this in a long time, with this level of revilement and ostracism and stigmatizing."

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Student Faces Town's Wrath in Protest Against a Prayer

Gretchen Ertl for The New York Times

Jessica Ahlquist, a Rhode Island atheist, won a suit against her school's prayer poster.

By ABBY GOODNOUGH

Published: January 26, 2012

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/27/us/rhode-island-city-enraged-over-school-prayer-lawsuit.html

Bracing for $40,000 at City Private Schools

2012-01-30T10:39:00.001-05:00

As someone who's paying three of these tuitions, I wasn't surprised to read about the soaring tuitions at NYC's elite private schools:

Over the past 10 years, the median price of first grade in the city has gone up by 48 percent, adjusted for inflation, compared with a 35 percent increase at private schools nationally — and just 24 percent at an Ivy League college — according to tuition data provided by 41 New York City K-12 private schools to the National Association of Independent Schools.

Indeed, this year's tuition at Columbia Grammar and Preparatory ($38,340 for 12th grade) and Horace Mann ($37,275 for the upper school) is higher than Harvard's ($36,305).

Despite the 48% increase in the past decade, I'd bet that tuition payments account for a lower percentage of total income for the majority of families whose kids attend these schools, as incomes for these families have gone up more than 48%. These schools serve the top 1% (in many cases, the top 1/100^th of 1%), who have been doing awfully well. I couldn't find apples-to-apples 10-year data, but from 1979-2007:

average inflation-adjusted after-tax income grew by 275 percent for the 1 percent of the population with the highest income. For others in the top 20 percent of the population, average real after-tax household income grew by 65 percent.

By contrast, the budget office said, for the poorest fifth of the population, average real after-tax household income rose 18 percent.

And for the three-fifths of people in the middle of the income scale, the growth in such household income was just under 40 percent.

- Source: Congressional Budget Office (www.nytimes.com/2011/10/26/us/politics/top-earners-doubled-share-of-nations-income-cbo-says.html)

So, it's perfectly rational from a supply-demand/economic perspective for these schools to raise tuition the way they have and invest in every conceivable facility and class. Whether it's a good thing from a societal perspective – it certainly further widens the distance between the top 1% and everyone else – is another matter…

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Bracing for $40,000 at City Private Schools

The Dalton School costs $36,970 a year and offers Zen Dance.

By JENNY ANDERSON and RACHEL OHM

Published: January 27, 2012

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/29/nyregion/scraping-the-40000-ceiling-at-new-york-city-private-schools.html

Geoffrey Canada to Receive Medal for Education Impact

2012-01-30T10:38:00.005-05:00

A well-deserved award for Geoffrey Canada:

Geoffrey Canada to Receive Medal for Education Impact

By newseditor

01/25/2012 9:25 AM
http://www.gse.harvard.edu/news-impact/2012/01/hgse-to-award-medal-for-education-impact-to-geoffrey-canada/

Photo courtesy of Harlem Children's Zone

Dean Kathleen McCartney has announced Geoffrey Canada, Ed.M.'75, as the recipient of the second Harvard Graduate School of Education Medal for Education Impact, the highest honor given by the Ed School. The medal is awarded to a person who is making a lasting difference in the field of education and on the lives of learners across the nation and beyond. Canada will receive the honor following anAskwith Forum on March 28.

"For his tireless efforts to strengthen families and to improve outcomes for thousands of children as President and CEO of the Harlem Children's Zone, we are thrilled to award the second Harvard Graduate School of Education Medal for Education Impact to Geoffrey Canada," Dean Kathleen McCartney said. "Geoff's vision for providing comprehensive education, social services, and community-building programs for the families and children who need them most has drawn national attention. He is an inspiration to all of us who believe that all children have the right to an excellent education, regardless of their zip codes."

The Medal for Education Impact honors practitioners, policymakers, and researchers who work across their individual spheres of influence and whose careers are dedicated to education opportunity, achievement, and success for all children. It recognizes those who have a transformative effect on the sector through their entrepreneurial spirit, innovative strategies, collaborative work, and superior leadership.

"To be chosen for this medal by the Harvard Graduate School of Education, which has had such a profound impact on my life and on education reform across the nation, is a deeply felt honor," Canada said.

As president and CEO of the Harlem Children's Zone (HCZ), a nonprofit geared toward helping low-income children and families in New York City, Canada is committed to improving the lives of thousands of children in urban settings through education and services. HCZ is a full-service community organization, comprised of charter schools, preschools, afterschool programs, parenting education, and employment and technology centers for children and residents that currently serves more than 13,000 children and adults.

Canada has received significant praise for his work. In a June 2004, a New York Times Magazine cover story declared HCZ as "one of the most ambitious social experiments of our time." A year later, Canada was named one of America's Best Leaders by U.S. News and World Report. More recently, President Obama has spoken of the program as one he'd like to see replicated in other urban areas nationwide. Canada has received numerous education awards and honorary degrees including the McGraw Prize for Education, Robin Hood Foundation's Heroes of the Year Award, the Jefferson Award for Public Service, the first Heinz Award, and the 2008 HGSE Alumni Council Award to name a few.

DFER’s Ed Reformer of the Month

2012-01-30T10:38:00.003-05:00

DFER's Ed Reformer of the Month:

Friends,

This mustachioed gentleman is John Gregg.

John has been a businessman, president of Indiana's oldest public university, and Speaker of the Indiana House. If all goes well, he'll soon be the Governor of Hoosier State.

Don't let his delightful facial hair fool you; he's a very serious education reformer.

As Speaker, John built bipartisan coalitions to pass two of Indiana's most significant reform efforts, which established the state's first charter schools and created Indiana's landmark K-12 accountability system. But he's not running on his past accomplishments. Here's John in his own words:

"If you fell asleep in 1912 and woke up in 2012, you'd find that just about everything in the world has changed. Unfortunately, public education looks an awful like it did 100 years ago.

"We must create a sense of urgency about closing achievement gaps, raising expectations for a changing economy, and ensuring fiscal transparency and equity.

"We must make Indiana the leader in teacher quality – in terms of preparation, retention, and recognition, and by making teachers leaders of our state's schools.

"We must give teachers the flexibility to innovate in their own classrooms, instead of forcing them into 'one-size-fits-all' solutions.

"We must empower effective classroom teachers – instead of bureaucrats in Indianapolis or Washington, D.C. – to have the strongest voice possible in the policymaking process so they take ownership of our schools.

"But unlike my friends in the GOP who run Indiana today, I will not demonize, marginalize or punish our teachers in the process. I will make my arguments with facts, figures, and reason, instead of making my fellow Hoosiers out to be the enemy."

John has worked very closely with Indiana DFER in structuring his education policy positions. He'll also need our help to fuel his campaign.

We have a long race ahead of us, so please click here to make a contribution today.

Thanks again,

Joe

College Bound: Teacher-Turned-Photographer Returns to Document School’s Success

2012-01-30T10:38:00.001-05:00

A great story and 2-min video: http://lightbox.time.com/2011/09/19/college-bound-allison-payne-documents-how-one-school-gets-100-of-its-students-into-college/#ixzz1ksrWeeEk

College Bound: Teacher-Turned-Photographer Returns to Document School's Success

The North Star Academy in Newark, New Jersey so firmly preaches the inspirational catchphrase "follow your dreams" to its students that even the teachers find it infectious. One teacher, Allison Payne, who had taught at the school for four years, found the message so compelling that she was inspired to leave education to pursue her long-held dream of being a photographer. She quit her job, attended the International Center for Photography in New York City and returned to the school as a photography student to complete this six month-long documentary project.

"North Star changes the lives of everyone who is a part it, not just the students," Payne said. "It teaches you to be relentless in pursuit of your dreams. You start to realize that anything is possible if you are just willing to work hard enough.

Et Tu, Harvard?

2012-01-30T10:37:00.001-05:00

I generally have positive feelings about my alma mater – but not today. My blood is boiling after reading Joe Nocera's op ed in today's NYT about Harvard's disgraceful, gutless capitulation to the NCAA, which as Nocera has documented in four previous columns (N.C.A.A.'s 'Justice' System, More N.C.A.A. 'Justice', Guilty Until Proved Innocent, and Living in Fear of the N.C.A.A.) appears to be an organization too often characterized by imperial, arrogant, abusive and thuggish behavior. What a case study in "power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely." Shame on Harvard, double shame on the NCAA, and kudos to Nocera, whose columns will hopefully lead to Congressional hearings (and maybe Harvard developing a spine).

Despite its behind-the-scenes efforts, Harvard has never once said publicly that the rule is wrong and that Temi is being unfairly punished. On the contrary, in an e-mailed statement, Bob Scalise, the Harvard athletic director, said, "We at Harvard are fully committed to following all N.C.A.A. rules and guidelines." Even, apparently, when those rules are wrong and unjust.

…I would have thought that Harvard was made of sterner stuff. Harvard claims to have values that transcend wins and losses. Harvard has often been a leader in changing how universities act. So long as schools continue to cower in the face of N.C.A.A. abuses, those abuses will continue.

The Temi Fagbenle case was a perfect opportunity for Harvard to stand up for what's right. Maybe next time.

----------------------

January 27, 2012

Et Tu, Harvard?

By JOE NOCERA

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/28/opinion/nocera-et-tu-harvard.html

STOP THE PRESSES! Sustained Positive Effects on Graduation Rates Produced by New York City's Small Public High Schools of Choice

2012-01-30T10:13:00.001-05:00

STOP THE PRESSES! Only two weeks after the release of the seminal NBER study on the long-term impacts of teachers, tonight another hugely important study worthy of its own email was released (the full report is attached; the press release and NYT story are below). This one, by respected research firm MDRC, examined the impact and effectiveness of the 123 small high schools of choice that Bloomberg and Klein set up to replace chronically failing mega-sized high schools that were closed. The researchers tracked tens of thousands of NYC high school students, both ones who won the lottery to attend a small school and those who didn't – and the results are stunningly positive for the new, smaller schools. Here are one friend's comments:

I believe the update has national relevance and particular resonance in cities dealing with school closures and turnaround.

In 2010 MDRC published findings showing small schools very significantly raised graduation rates and rates of staying on track for graduation.

A second cohort of students in the study, which is random-sampled and involves more than 21,000 students, has now graduated and the results are even more emphatic. Small schools raise the graduation rate by 8.6 points for their overwhelmingly disadvantaged student population. That's 43% of the achievement gap in NYC. The percentage of students in these schools passing the English Regents exam at 75 and above--a critical indicator of college success in NY--is 7.1 points higher, or nearly 25% higher, than for similar students in other schools.

There have been innumerable high school reform efforts over the years, particularly since "A Nation At Risk" was published in 1983, but no evidence that any worked at scale. Now there is evidence. And it's happening at a time when the politics and finances of school turnaround have never been more contested and consequential, playing out in districts across the country.

Here's an excerpt from the press release:

At the heart of this reform are 123 small, academically nonselective, public high schools. Each with approximately 100 students per grade in grades 9 through 12, these schools were created to serve some of the district's most disadvantaged students and are located mainly in neighborhoods where large failing high schools had been closed. For 105 of these schools that had more applicants than seats available, MDRC's study takes advantage of the lottery-like features in New York City's high school admissions process to compare over time the academic outcomes of students who won lotteries and enrolled in the small schools with those who sought admission, lost a lottery, and enrolled in other New York City high schools.

In June 2010, MDRC released the first report from its study, which showed that the new small high schools increased students' likelihood of earning credits, progressing through school, and graduating in four years with Regents diplomas. This new brief extends the analysis by a year, allowing for examination of a second cohort of students to reach graduation. The study's new findings include:

· Sustained impacts on graduation with Regents diplomas: With the addition of a second cohort, average four-year graduation effects have reached 8.6 percentage points (meaning nearly nine more graduates for every class of 100 entering ninth-graders). This effect is driven by an increase in Regents diplomas attained.

· Positive graduation effects for virtually every subgroup, including students with low entering proficiency in math and English (levels 1 and 2, in New York City terminology), males and females, blacks and Hispanics, and eligible for free and reduced-priced lunch.

· A positive effect on a measure of college readiness: a 7.6 percentage point (or 25 percent) impact on scoring 75 or higher on the English Regents exam (which exempts students from remedial English at the City University of New York). There was no effect on scoring 75 or higher on the math Regents exam.

· Five-year graduation effect: Students in the new small high schools are 7.1 percentage points more likely to graduate in five years than their control group counterparts (75.2 percent vs. 68.1 percent).

The study looks at graduation by subgroups and finds that enrolling in a small high school of choice substantially increases graduation rates for every major subgroup examined, including students who enter high school below grade level in academic proficiency, low-income students eligible for free or reduced-price lunch, and black and Hispanic, male and female students.

The study is unprecedented in three ways:

1) First, the reforms themselves — closing failing high schools, opening a next generation of small schools redesigned from top to bottom to replace them, and simultaneously introducing a system of choice for all entering high schoolers, which essentially made this choice without charters — the teachers are unionized, etc.

2) Second, the characteristics of the students served — 93% black or Hispanic, 83% low-income, 63% behind in math proficiency grade level when they entered 9th grade and 70% behind in reading proficiency.

3) Third, the findings themselves — large positive impacts at scale on graduation rates with nearly all of those gains due to Regents Diplomas. And these impacts are consistent across every group of students the researchers looked at — students who were behind, black males, economically disadvantaged students, etc.

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For immediate release: January 26, 2012

Contact: John Hutchins, MDRC Communications Director, 212-340-8604

New Findings Show New York City's Small High Schools Continue to Significantly Raise Graduation Rates and Improve English Regents Exam Scores

Graduation Rates at Small Schools, Which Serve Highly Disadvantaged Students, Are 8.6 Percentage Points Higher Than Other Schools

Effects Seen Across Every Subgroup of Students, Including African-American and Hispanic Males, Less-Proficient Students, and Low-Income Students

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City Students at Small Public High Schools Are More Likely to Graduate, Study Says

By WINNIE HU

Published: January 25, 2012

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/26/education/new-york-city-students-at-small-public-high-schools-are-more-likely-to-graduate-study-finds.html

New York City teenagers attending small public high schools with about 100 students per grade were more likely to graduate than their counterparts at larger schools, according to new findings from a continuing study released on Wednesday night.

The findings are part of a study that tracked the academic performance of more than 21,000 students who applied for ninth grade admission at 105 small high schools, mainly in Brooklyn and in the Bronx, from 2005 to 2008. The study appeared to validate the Bloomberg administration's decade-long push to create small schools to replace larger, failing high schools.

Whistle-blowing teachers to open a charter school

2012-01-30T10:06:00.001-05:00

Normally the approval of a charter school isn't a lead item on my email, but the approval of the new Apple Academy in LA is particularly interesting for two reasons: A) some of the founders are teachers who blew the whistle on a cheating scandal that led to the closure of the six-school Crescendo charter network; and B) because of the partnership between my friend Caprice Young, a true reform warrior (former LA School Board member, founder of the CA Charter Schools Assoc, chair of the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools; her bio is at: www.encorpsteachers.com/Team) and former LA union head A.J. Duffy, who, as union head, waged a war against Caprice that led to her being voted off the LA School Board. Here's what I wrote about him last September (http://edreform.blogspot.com/2011/09/at-his-charter-school-ex-utla-head.html):

STOP THE PRESSES! To understand how important it is that former LA union head AJ Duffy is now talking about basically dumping tenure rules, you must understand what kind of union leader he was: the oldest of the old guard, not a reform bone in his body, the worst of the worst – so bad, in fact, that he was GOOD for reformers because he drove people to our side with his behavior. He was so bad that, in one of the all-time classic lines, Steve Barr called him a "pig f**ker" – sort of (www.laweekly.com/2006-12-07/news/the-secret-of-his-success):

So is Duffy's fear off base that Barr might be creaming the top of the student population, selecting only the most capable? "It's bullshit," says Barr. "It's like me saying, 'Duffy's a pig f**ker.' Have I seen him f**k a pig? Do I have photos? No. So I can't say it. He should check these things out before he says them."

And now that the shoe is on the other foot and he's starting a charter school? Here's what he's saying:

A.J. Duffy, who headed a teachers union that has long fought against charter schools, now is starting his own. And some of his ideas are going to trouble some educators and his friends in the labor movement.

The longtime anti-charter crusader wants to make it harder for teachers to earn tenure protections and wants to lengthen that process. He even wants to require teachers to demonstrate that they remain effective in the classroom if they want to keep their tenure protections.

And if a tenured teacher becomes ineffective, he wants to streamline dismissals. The process now in place can stretch out for several years, even with substantial evidence of gross misconduct. Some union leaders, notably Duffy, have defended this "due process" as a necessary protection against administrative abuses.

"I would make it 10 days if I could," Duffy now says of the length of the dismissal process.

These are not viewpoints ever advanced, condoned or accepted by United Teachers Los Angeles, which represents teachers and other professionals in the nation's second-largest school system. Duffy headed that union for six years, until term limits forced him from office in July.

I hope reformers are embracing him with open arms – I love converts! They're extra powerful – for exhibit A, see Diane Ravitch.

I also love the fact that my friend Caprice Young (who, among other things, was the board chair of the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools; she recruited me to the board) is on Duffy's board – the very person he helped drive out of office!

Among those on his board: Former school board President Caprice Young, who went on to head the California Charter Schools Assn., after the teachers union mounted a successful campaign to oust her in 2003. Duffy was a union activist then; he became president in 2005, joining an anti-charter union leadership.

"If you were to put it in evangelical terms, this is about the best conversion I could hope for," said Young, who now heads a nonprofit teacher-recruiting effort. "I hesitate to describe it that way, because this is a collaboration. I've been willing to let go of my preconceived notions about someone with whom I've fought in the past."

And what does Duffy's successor think of his new direction? Not much -- LOL!

Former UTLA President John Perez said he wished Duffy well but said he could not endorse Duffy's new direction. Charter school operators, he said, are laying the groundwork for using public-school funds at private schools through so-called vouchers.

They're also opening the door for corporations "who want to destroy public education by getting their hands on the hundreds of billions of dollars we spend on public education in this country," Perez said.

Thanks for coming over from the dark side, A.J. – I wish you, Caprice and Apple Academy the best of luck!

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Whistle-blowing teachers to open a charter school

They lost their jobs during a cheating scandal at Crescendo schools. Former union chief and charter foe A.J. Duffy will lead them.

A.J. Duffy, left, former teachers union leader and director of the new charter school, celebrates its approval with teachers Elise Sargent and Tanisha Patel and with David Cunningham Jr., president of the Apple Academy board. (Katie Falkenberg, For The Times / January 17, 2012)

By Howard Blume, Los Angeles Times

January 18, 2012

http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-0118-charter-20120118,0,4988587.story

Parents Should Be Allowed to Choose Their Kids’ Teacher

2012-01-30T10:05:00.001-05:00

Andy Rotherham calls for parents to become more engaged in picking their child's teacher (and have the right to do so). Wow, this brings back memories of my parents carefully picking all of my teachers…

The most important decision you will make about your children's education is picking their school, right? That's the conventional wisdom, but it's actually wrong — or at best it's only half-correct. Teacher effectiveness varies a lot within schools, even within good schools, which means that just choosing the right school for your kid is not a proxy for choosing great teachers. So while "school choice" is hotly debated (next week is National School Choice Week, complete with Bill Cosby's blessing and events galore,) there are few rallies being held for giving parents the right to choose a particular teacher. That's because the whole system is stacked against empowering families in this way. In fact, because of how seniority rules generally work, it's a lot more common for teachers to choose their students than for students to choose their teachers.

Just how much individual teachers matter is the big implication of an analysis of 2.5 million students and their instructors that was released in December and highlighted recently in the New York Times.The long-term, large-scale study by economists at Columbia and Harvard used two decades of data to examine differences in student outcomes (including such categories as teen pregnancy and college enrollment) and link those differences with how effective their teachers were at improving student scores on achievement tests. The headline-grabbing finding was that replacing an ineffective teacher with one of average quality would boost a single classroom's lifetime earnings by a quarter-million dollars. And that's just from one year of assigning that group of kids to an average teacher instead of a lousy one. A second study, released January 12 by the Education Trust-West, an education advocacy group in California, examined three years of data on teachers from the Los Angeles public school system and noted that low-income and minority students are twice as likely to have teachers in the bottom 25% of effectiveness. The Ed Trust study did not get as much attention as the one by the Ivy League economists, but it reached the same obvious conclusion: more effective teachers boost learning for students.

The data are sufficiently compelling that these days it's only education's flat-earthers who continue to argue that teachers don't matter a great deal and that efforts to retain and reward the best ones andremove the worst ones aren't essential to improving schools. But for parents there is a more immediate issue: research shows that differences in teacher effectiveness are generally greater within schools than between schools. For instance, when analysts at the National Center for Analysis of Longitudinal Data in Education Research (CALDER) compared teacher quality at high- and low-poverty schools, they found relatively small differences between schools but substantial differences among teachers working in the same schools — especially in high-poverty schools where some really low-performing teachers created an extra drag on the averages. The researchers found that the best teachers in high-poverty schools were as good as the best teachers elsewhere. On the flip side, even "good" schools have lemons.

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School of Thought

Parents Should Be Allowed to Choose Their Kids' Teacher

Schools frown upon making requests, but even good schools have bad teachers

By Andrew J. Rotherham | @arotherham | January 19, 2012 | 16

http://ideas.time.com/2012/01/19/parents-should-be-allowed-to-choose-their-kids-teacher/#ixzz1kNZn2jh3

A Closer Look at DC NAEP Scores

2012-01-30T10:04:00.001-05:00

There have been many attempts to discredit Michelle Rhee's achievements in DC, so it's particularly interesting to see this analysis by Matthew Ladner, which shows that during her tenure the number of special ed and ELL students who didn't take the NAEP test dropped from 13-14% to 4%, which would obviously negatively affect the scores. When Ladner excludes those students, we can see that DC's 4^th graders reading scores went up by 10 points – a full grade level! – in only four years, and that DC's 17-point combined 4^th and 8^th grade gains in reading tied for tops in the nation (with RI and CT):

In order to get a clearer picture on this, I decided to run 4th Grade NAEP scores for students outside of ELL or special education programs. This should minimize the impact of inclusion policy changes. Examined in this fashion, you get the following results:

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A Closer Look at DC NAEP Scores

(Guest Post by Matthew Ladner)

http://jaypgreene.com/2012/01/12/a-closer-look-at-dc-naep-scores/

How Mrs. Grady Transformed Olly Neal

2012-01-30T10:03:00.001-05:00

Nick Kristof with a wonderful story:

IF you want to understand how great teachers transform lives, listen to the story of Olly Neal.

Olly Neal

A recent study showed how a great elementary schoolteacher can raise the lifetime earnings of a single class by $700,000. After I wrote about the study, skeptics of school reform wrote me to say: sure, a great teacher can make a difference in the right setting, but not with troubled, surly kids in a high-poverty environment. If you think that, or if you scoff at the statistics, then listen to Neal.

In the late 1950s, Olly Neal was a poor black kid with an attitude. He was one of 13 brothers and sisters in a house with no electricity, and his father was a farmer with a second-grade education. Neal attended a small school for black children — this was in the segregated South — and was always mouthing off. He remembers reducing his English teacher, Mildred Grady, to tears.

"I was not a nice kid," he recalls. "I had a reputation. I was the only one who made her cry."

Neal adds: "She would have had good reason to say, 'this boy is incorrigible.' "

A regular shoplifter back then, Neal was caught stealing from the store where he worked part time. He seemed headed for a life in trouble.

Carolyn F. Blakely, then a new teacher at the school (who retired last year as the dean of the Honors College that now bears her name at the University of Arkansas at Pine Bluff), remembers Neal as an at-risk kid prone to challenge authority. At the time, even teachers in the school called students "Mr." or "Miss," but Neal disrupted class by addressing her impertinently as "Carolyn."

To deal with kids like him, Blakely told me, "I'd go home and stand in front of the mirror and practice being mean."

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How Mrs. Grady Transformed Olly Neal

By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF

Published: January 21, 2012

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/22/opinion/sunday/kristof-how-mrs-grady-transformed-olly-neal.html

Teacher Evaluations Issue: Not ‘If,’ but ‘How’

2012-01-30T10:02:00.001-05:00

The latest on the teacher evaluation battle going on in NY:

In the long-simmering debate over how to judge the quality of New York State school employees, there is one thing all sides agree on: a system should be in place.

The sticking point has been agreeing about how to do it. There is the fight between New York City and its teachers' union over the parameters of an evaluation system that must be put in place in 33 struggling schools. And there is the fight waged in court by the state teachers' union, which sued the Board of Regents last year over its interpretation of a law on teacher evaluations.

Some $800 million in federal money is on the line, as well as millions in state aid to local schools. On Tuesday, Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo put everyone on notice when he unveiled the details of his budget plan, ordering school districts to settle on a new teacher evaluation system by Jan. 17, 2013, or lose their share of a proposed 4 percent increase in education spending.

He gave the Regents and the teachers' union 30 days to resolve their lawsuit. It is either that, he said, or adopt an evaluation system that he would impose.

The sides are not as far apart as their public posture would indicate. Three weeks before Mr. Cuomo set the deadline, the union had already acceded to one of the state's key demands. It agreed that most of the 60 points teachers could earn on subjective measurements should be based on classroom observations — something the state's education commissioner, John B. King Jr., had been pushing for. Of the total score of 100, results from student testing would account for the other 40 points.

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Teacher Evaluations Issue: Not 'If,' but 'How'

By FERNANDA SANTOS

Published: January 18, 2012

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/19/nyregion/on-new-york-state-teacher-evaluations-a-sticking-point-how.html

Use the Data, but Constructively

2012-01-30T10:01:00.003-05:00

E4E's Sydney Morris weighs in on the teacher evaluation debate:

Use the Data, but Constructively

Sydney Morris is a former public school teacher and the co-founder of Educators 4 Excellence, a national nonprofit that seeks to elevate the voices of teachers in education policy.

Updated January 16, 2012, 7:00 PM

http://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2012/01/16/can-a-few-years-data-reveal-bad-teachers/use-the-data-but-use-it-constructively

The recent study by Harvard and Columbia economists showed a link between quality teaching and higher test scores and between higher test scores and positive life outcomes. Researchers found that students with top teachers are less likely to become pregnant as teenagers, more likely to enroll in college, and more likely to earn more money as adults. These new findings highlight something that we as teachers have always intuitively known – that what we do everyday in our classrooms has far-reaching impact.

Despite this knowledge, a false dichotomy exists between proponents and opponents of using student-growth data to evaluate teachers. We often hear of the "reformers" who want to use student test scores to identify and fire the lowest-performing teachers, and conversely, the teachers' unions who are painted as defenders of the status quo.

Lost in this back and forth are the voices of real classroom teachers who want meaningful evaluations that give them the feedback and support they need to improve their craft. In Educators 4 Excellence's work with nearly 4,000 teachers in Los Angeles and New York City – the nation's two largest school districts – we have consistently heard from educators that they believe their students' academic growth should be one, among many, indicators of their performance.

Logically, performance measures should be used in staffing and compensation decisions. But this should not be the end goal of teacher evaluations. Ultimately, they should be mechanisms for support, offering teachers feedback on what's working and pathways to improvement. Test scores alone will not provide this information and should be coupled with other measures, like classroom observations and student surveys.

Instead of debating how teacher evaluations should be used, we should be focused on what they look like and how they are implemented. To answer these questions, we need to bridge the gap between policy and practice by seeking advice straight from the classroom. Teachers matter – and their voices and ideas should too.

Measuring the Value of Good Teachers

2012-01-30T10:01:00.001-05:00

E4E member Susan Keyock had her letter to the editor of the NYT published – one of the few non-dopey letters on this topic that the NYT has published:

Measuring the Value of Good Teachers

Published: January 16, 2012

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/17/opinion/measuring-the-value-of-good-teachers.html

To the Editor:

Re "Big Study Links Good Teachers to Lasting Gain" (front page, Jan. 6):

This study reiterates what others have found before it: teacher effectiveness, which can be partly evaluated using test score data, has the power to affect the futures of innumerable students, for better or worse. Real reform in education can be realized only when this fact is acknowledged by teachers who stand up and demand to be fairly evaluated by multiple measures, with one of those measures being test score data.

Having taught for 12 years in high-need urban areas, I have been a first-hand witness to the effects of teacher quality. Students need and deserve to have teachers who are constantly improving their craft. Neglecting to do so has too high a price tag.

The fair use of test score data is one crucial step to assuring a brighter future for our youth.

SUSAN KEYOCK
Astoria, Queens, Jan. 8, 2012

Teachers Take the Helm of Local School Reform

2012-01-30T10:00:00.001-05:00

E4E's Exec Dir in LA on the new teacher contract there:

There was very little fanfare about a landmark change to the teacher's contract in Los Angeles. This was because the contractual change wasn't decidedly pro-union or pro-district. Instead, it was pro-teacher.

After months of rancorous debate, the union and district put forth a resolution that gives teachers unprecedented control over the fate of their schools. The agreement essentially reverses a top-down approach to reform, giving individual schools local power over matters such as redesigning their governance, tailoring union contracts, lengthening the school day or making curricular decisions that lift student achievement. In doing so, the union and district made a bold statement -- teachers and administrators are most qualified to transform their schools.

Leading up to the vote, there was concern from both unionists and reformers who felt their sides were losing something. Charter school advocates worried that the change would halt the momentum of Public School Choice, a program where district schools and charter organizations compete to take over new and struggling campuses. Under the new provision, the district agreed to remove charters from the competition. Meanwhile, staunch unionists worried that the contractual change would signal the end of a truly united union. They argued that enabling teachers at different schools to modify their contracts would weaken an ironclad and hard-fought teacher's contract.

But classrooms teachers viewed the agreement as a huge opportunity to finally have a say in how their schools move forward and address their unique challenges. Nearly 70 percent of teachers voted in favor of the agreement.

This type of teacher-led change is exactly what Educators 4 Excellence has been fighting for over the past few years. With more than 3,500 members nationwide, E4E elevates the voices of teachers in the policy decisions that shape our classrooms and careers. Our members in California were clamoring for teacher-created change, which was the catalyst for the launch of E4E's chapter in Los Angeles.

-----------------------------------

Ama Nyamekye

Executive director, Educators 4 Excellence Los Angeles

Teachers Take the Helm of Local School Reform

Posted: 1/12/12 11:17 AM ET

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/ama-nyamekye/la-teachers-contract_b_1200380.html

MET Made Simple: Building Research-Based Teacher Evaluations

2012-01-30T09:59:00.003-05:00

The New Teacher Project is out with a new report on teacher evaluations. Here's the summary:

January 13, 2012

MET Made Simple: Building Research-Based Teacher Evaluations

Dear Friends,

Have you taken the time to read "Gathering Feedback for Teaching," the new report from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation's Measures of Effective Teaching (MET) project? You should. The MET project is the most comprehensive study to date on teacher evaluations, an area that has suffered from a scarcity of research – until now.

If you have not yet found the time, or you would like a concise summary that includes specific advice for practitioners, look no further.

Today, we're releasing "MET Made Simple: Building Research-Based Teacher Evaluations." It's a short guide to the most important findings from MET, along with implementation recommendations based on our experience helping states and urban school districts across the country improve teacher evaluation systems. Key points include:

· Teachers generally appear to be managing their classrooms well, but are struggling with fundamental instructional skills. This is a sobering reality, but it points to enormous untapped potential in the current teacher workforce.

· Classroom observations can give teachers valuable feedback, but are of limited value for predicting future performance. Observations can help teachers understand their strengths and weaknesses, but they can't accurately predict future success in the classroom. This is significant, because most schools currently evaluate teachers primarily or solely based on observations.

· "Value-added" analysis is more powerful than any other single measure in predicting a teacher's long-term contributions to student success. It also reflects more than just high standardized test scores. Teachers with high value-added scores helped students master higher-level thinking skills and even helped them enjoy school more.

· Evaluations that combine several strong performance measures will produce the most accurate results. MET researchers gave an academic seal of approval to the approach to improving teacher evaluations that many states and districts are already developing: a combination of multiple measures, including student learning.

Click here to download "MET Made Simple." If you have any questions about the report or want to learn more, e-mail us at info@tntp.org.

The most interesting finding to me was the importance of student surveys, which are better at determining teacher effectiveness than classroom observations.

Jon Stewart on Newt Gingrich

2012-01-30T09:59:00.001-05:00

Newt Gingrich's incredibly offensive offer to go speak at the NAACP annual convention and tell the audience why blacks should favor jobs instead of food stamps is exhibit A in why Republicans are never going to get any traction with black politicians, community leaders, etc. Jon Stewart does a hilarious roasting of Gingrich on this: www.thedailyshow.com/watch/thu-january-12-2012/indecision-2012---black-to-the-future

Andre Agassi to celebrate Philly charter school

2012-01-30T09:58:00.003-05:00

Great new for KIPP Philadelphia – and kudos to Andre Agassi!

Tennis great Andre Agassi and officials of a California real estate company created an unusual joint venture last year to help successful charter schools find affordable and sustainable buildings.

On Tuesday, they will celebrate their first charter-school investment: KIPP Philadelphia Elementary Academy at 2409 W. Westmoreland St. in North Philadelphia's Tioga section.

"KIPP is the gold standard when it comes to operating charter schools and educating these kids," Agassi said in an interview Monday. "And Philly is a place that blends well with what we are trying to accomplish."

Agassi and other representatives from the Canyon-Agassi Charter School Facilities Fund are scheduled to join Mayor Nutter and KIPP officials at a 1 p.m. ribbon-cutting ceremony.

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Andre Agassi to celebrate Philly charter school

By Martha Woodall

Inquirer Staff Writer

http://www.philly.com/philly/news/local/137936398.html

“Women Worse at Math than Men” Explanation Scientifically Incorrect, MU Researchers Say

2012-01-30T09:58:00.001-05:00

As the father of a daughter who loves math and chemistry, I was especially glad to read this:

"Women Worse at Math than Men" Explanation Scientifically Incorrect, MU Researchers Say
Popular theory debunked; researchers say gender stereotype and math skills are unrelated

Story Contact: Steven Adams, AdamsST@missouri.edu, 573 882-8353

For photos available with this release, please click here.

COLUMBIA, Mo. – A University of Missouri researcher and his colleague have conducted a review that casts doubt on the accuracy of a popular theory that attempted to explain why there are more men than women in top levels of mathematic fields. The researchers found that numerous studies claiming that the stereotype, "men are better at math" – believed to undermine women's math performance – had major methodological flaws, utilized improper statistical techniques, and many studies had no scientific evidence of this stereotype.

This theory, called stereotype threat, was first published in 1999 in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology. Essentially, the theory is that due to the stereotype that women are worse than men in math skills, females develop a poor self-image in this area, which leads to mathematics underachievement.

"The stereotype theory really was adopted by psychologists and policy makers around the world as the final word, with the idea that eliminating the stereotype could eliminate the gender gap," said David Geary, Curators Professor of Psychological Sciences in the MU College of Arts and Science. "However, even with many programs established to address the issue, the problem continued. We now believe the wrong problem is being addressed."

In the study, Geary and Giljsbert Stoet, from the University of Leeds in the United Kingdom, examined 20 influential replications of the original stereotype theory study. The researchers found that many subsequent studies had serious scientific flaws, including a lack of a male control group and improperly applied statistical techniques.

"We were surprised the researchers did not subject males to the same experimental manipulations as female participants," Geary said. "It is reasonable to think that men also would not do well if told 'men normally do worse on this test' right before they take the test. When we adjusted the findings based on this and other statistical factors, we found little to no significant stereotype theory effect."

The researchers believe that basing interventions on the stereotype threat is actually doing more harm than good, as vital resources are being dedicated to a problem that does not exist.

"These findings really irritate me, as a psychologist, because this is a science where we are really trying to discover what the issues are," Geary said. "The fact is there are still a disproportionate number of men in top levels of science, technology, engineering and mathematics. We need more women to succeed in these fields for our economy and for our future."

The study, "Can stereotype threat explain the sex gap in mathematics performance and achievement?" will be published in the journal Review of General Psychology.

View this news release on the Web at:
http://munews.missouri.edu/news-releases/2012/0118-%e2%80%9cwomen-worse-at-math-than-men%e2%80%9d-explanation-scientifically-incorrect-mu-researchers-say/

What the Top 1% of Earners Majored In

2012-01-30T09:56:00.001-05:00

Interesting data on the college majors of the top 1% of earners (I was surprised to see that my major, international relations, was 6^th):

We got an interesting question from an academic adviser at a Texas university: could we tell what the top 1 percent of earners majored in?

The writer, sly dog, was probably trying to make a point, because he wrote from a biology department, and it turns out that biology majors make up nearly 7 percent of college graduates who live in households in the top 1 percent.

According to the Census Bureau's 2010 American Community Survey, the majors that give you the best chance of reaching the 1 percent are pre-med, economics, biochemistry, zoology and, yes, biology, in that order.

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January 18, 2012, 10:00 am

What the Top 1% of Earners Majored In

By ROBERT GEBELOFF and SHAILA DEWAN

12:21 p.m. | Updated to add a fuller list of majors at the bottom of the post.

http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/01/18/what-the-top-1-of-earners-majored-in

How Big-Time Sports Ate College Life

2012-01-30T09:50:00.001-05:00

Yet another reason other countries are kicking out butt academically – what a total disgrace!

There is nothing recreational about Division I football today, points out Dr. Sack, who played for Notre Dame in the 1960s. Since then, athletic departments have kicked the roof off their budgets, looking more like independent franchises than university departments.

It is that point — "this commercial thing" in the middle of academia, as Charles T. Clotfelter, a public policy professor at Duke, put it — that some believe has thrown the system out of kilter. In his recent book "Big-Time Sports in American Universities," Dr. Clotfelter notes that between 1985 and 2010, average salaries at public universities rose 32 percent for full professors, 90 percent for presidents and 650 percent for football coaches.

The same trend is apparent in a 2010 Knight Commission report that found the 10 highest-spending athletic departments spent a median of $98 million in 2009, compared with $69 million just four years earlier. Spending on high-profile sports grew at double to triple the pace of that on academics. For example, Big Ten colleges, including Penn State, spent a median of $111,620 per athlete on athletics and $18,406 per student on academics.

… "Here is evidence that suggests that when your football team does well, grades suffer," said Dr. Waddell, who compared transcripts of over 29,700 students from 1999 to 2007 against Oregon's win-loss record. For every three games won, grade-point average for men dropped 0.02, widening the G.P.A. gender gap by 9 percent. Women's grades didn't suffer. In a separate survey of 183 students, the success of the Ducks also seemed to cause slacking off: students reported studying less (24 percent of men, 9 percent of women), consuming more alcohol (28 percent, 20 percent) and partying more (47 percent, 28 percent).

While acknowledging a need for more research, Dr. Waddell believes the results should give campus leaders pause: fandom can carry an academic price. "No longer can it be the case where we skip right over that inconvenience," he said.

Dr. Clotfelter, too, wanted to examine study habits. He tracked articles downloaded from campus libraries during March Madness, the National Collegiate Athletic Association basketball tournament. Library patrons at universities with teams in the tournament viewed 6 percent fewer articles a day as long as their team was in contention. When a team won an upset or close game, article access fell 19 percent the day after the victory. Neither dip was made up later with increased downloads.

"Big-time sports," Dr. Clotfelter said, "have a real effect on the way people in universities behave."

AT Duke, one of the country's top universities, men's basketball sets the rhythms of campus life. Of 600 students who study abroad each year, only 100 do it in the spring. It probably doesn't need to be said, but you don't schedule anything opposite a basketball game. Ever. "If there's a basketball game, you don't hold the meeting, you don't hold the event," said Larry Moneta, vice president for student affairs.

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How Big-Time Sports Ate College Life

By LAURA PAPPANO

Published: January 20, 2012

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/22/education/edlife/how-big-time-sports-ate-college-life.html

IT was a great day to be a Buckeye. Josh Samuels, a junior from Cincinnati, dates his decision to attend Ohio State to Nov. 10, 2007, and the chill he felt when the band took the field during a football game against Illinois. "I looked over at my brother and I said, 'I'm going here. There is nowhere else I'd rather be.' " (Even though Illinois won, 28-21.)

The New American Divide

2012-01-30T09:48:00.001-05:00

I'm skeptical of anything Charles Murray writes, but this research is very interesting about how the upper class and working class in this country have grown apart over the past 50 years in nearly every way: marriage, single parenthood, likelihood of being in the workforce, crime, and attending church. In short, working class people collectively have been making increasingly bad decisions, which have harmed their life outcomes:

In Belmont and Fishtown, here's what happened to America's common culture between 1960 and 2010.

Marriage: In 1960, extremely high proportions of whites in both Belmont and Fishtown were married—94% in Belmont and 84% in Fishtown. In the 1970s, those percentages declined about equally in both places. Then came the great divergence. In Belmont, marriage stabilized during the mid-1980s, standing at 83% in 2010. In Fishtown, however, marriage continued to slide; as of 2010, a minority (just 48%) were married. The gap in marriage between Belmont and Fishtown grew to 35 percentage points, from just 10.

Single parenthood: Another aspect of marriage—the percentage of children born to unmarried women—showed just as great a divergence. Though politicians and media eminences are too frightened to say so, nonmarital births are problematic. On just about any measure of development you can think of, children who are born to unmarried women fare worse than the children of divorce and far worse than children raised in intact families. This unwelcome reality persists even after controlling for the income and education of the parents.

In 1960, just 2% of all white births were nonmarital. When we first started recording the education level of mothers in 1970, 6% of births to white women with no more than a high-school education—women, that is, with a Fishtown education—were out of wedlock. By 2008, 44% were nonmarital. Among the college-educated women of Belmont, less than 6% of all births were out of wedlock as of 2008, up from 1% in 1970.

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The New American Divide

The ideal of an 'American way of life' is fading as the working class falls further away from institutions like marriage and religion and the upper class becomes more isolated. Charles Murray on what's cleaving America, and why.

By CHARLES MURRAY

http://professional.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970204301404577170733817181646.html

Industriousness: The norms for work and women were revolutionized after 1960, but the norm for men putatively has remained the same: Healthy men are supposed to work. In practice, though, that norm has eroded everywhere. In Fishtown, the change has been drastic. (To avoid conflating this phenomenon with the latest recession, I use data collected in March 2008 as the end point for the trends.)

The primary indicator of the erosion of industriousness in the working class is the increase of prime-age males with no more than a high school education who say they are not available for work—they are "out of the labor force." That percentage went from a low of 3% in 1968 to 12% in 2008. Twelve percent may not sound like much until you think about the men we're talking about: in the prime of their working lives, their 30s and 40s, when, according to hallowed American tradition, every American man is working or looking for work. Almost one out of eight now aren't. Meanwhile, not much has changed among males with college educations. Only 3% were out of the labor force in 2008.

There's also been a notable change in the rates of less-than-full-time work. Of the men in Fishtown who had jobs, 10% worked fewer than 40 hours a week in 1960, a figure that grew to 20% by 2008. In Belmont, the number rose from 9% in 1960 to 12% in 2008.

Crime: The surge in crime that began in the mid-1960s and continued through the 1980s left Belmont almost untouched and ravaged Fishtown. From 1960 to 1995, the violent crime rate in Fishtown more than sextupled while remaining nearly flat in Belmont. The reductions in crime since the mid-1990s that have benefited the nation as a whole have been smaller in Fishtown, leaving it today with a violent crime rate that is still 4.7 times the 1960 rate.

Religiosity: Whatever your personal religious views, you need to realize that about half of American philanthropy, volunteering and associational memberships is directly church-related, and that religious Americans also account for much more nonreligious social capital than their secular neighbors. In that context, it is worrisome for the culture that the U.S. as a whole has become markedly more secular since 1960, and especially worrisome that Fishtown has become much more secular than Belmont. It runs against the prevailing narrative of secular elites versus a working class still clinging to religion, but the evidence from the General Social Survey, the most widely used database on American attitudes and values, does not leave much room for argument.

For example, suppose we define "de facto secular" as someone who either professes no religion at all or who attends a worship service no more than once a year. For the early GSS surveys conducted from 1972 to 1976, 29% of Belmont and 38% of Fishtown fell into that category. Over the next three decades, secularization did indeed grow in Belmont, from 29% in the 1970s to 40% in the GSS surveys taken from 2006 to 2010. But it grew even more in Fishtown, from 38% to 59%.

Money Flows to Republican Backers of Gay Marriage

2012-01-30T09:47:00.001-05:00

This article about the political work that led to the passage of the bill legalizing gay marriage in NY is a brilliant example of what school reformers must do:

Gay rights advocates from Wall Street to Hollywood poured donations into the coffers of four little-known Republican state senators after the lawmakers provided the decisive votes for same-sex marriage in New York last June, according to new campaign finance filings released on Tuesday.

The support for the four senators, whose votes broke ranks with their party, is seen by gay rights leaders as symbolically important for their movement nationally, because in many states same-sex marriage could become law only with support from Republicans, as well as conservative Democrats. Maryland, New Jersey and Washington State are expected to consider same-sex marriage legislation this year.

The four New York Republicans had been threatened with political retribution by the state's Conservative Party, and now face possible challenges from both the left and the right, but same-sex marriage supporters had promised to help them politically if they supported the issue.

"It was essential to send a clear signal around the country that we will support those who support equality, irrespective of party," said Brian Ellner, a senior strategist for the Human Rights Campaign, a gay rights group. "We were able to win marriage in New York with a bipartisan coalition of fair-minded elected officials. We need to replicate that if we are to keep winning."

All four Republicans who voted for same-sex marriage sharply increased their fund-raising in the six months after the marriage bill passed, in many cases raising money from people they had never met. And Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo, a Democrat who forcefully pushed the legislation, raised $6 million in six months helped by fund-raisers that highlighted his support for same-sex marriage.

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Money Flows to Republican Backers of Gay Marriage

By DANNY HAKIM

Published: January 17, 2012

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/18/nyregion/money-flows-to-gop-backers-of-gay-marriage-in-new-york.html

ALBANY — Gay rights advocates from Wall Street to Hollywood poured donations into the coffers of four little-known Republican state senators after the lawmakers provided the decisive votes for same-sex marriage in New York last June, according to new campaign finance filings released on Tuesday.

Teach For America one of the top companies to work for

2012-01-30T09:46:00.001-05:00

Kudos to Teach for America!

Hi Team:

I am writing to share exciting news. For the second consecutive year, Teach For America is on FORTUNE Magazine's list of 100 Best Companies to Work For. This year we jumped from #82 to #70.

I have to say, I think this is pretty cool. It's cool because it makes me feel good about us, and I heard from so many of our staff last year that it made you feel good too. Lots of stories about how this made it easier to explain to grandparents why we've got great jobs. And we should feel good – we're doing good work, working hard, and we should be proud of the contribution we're making to building this movement. It is also cool because being on the list advances the cause in other ways – it helps us communicate with supporters, it helps us recruit potential staff members. But mostly it is cool because of how they decide the list – they asked us what we thought about our work, our organization, and our colleagues, and we said we were pretty psyched about everything, a lot more so than nearly everyone else in the country. With all the hard work we do (and have left to do), it is good to pause for a moment and celebrate the role every one of us play in making this a great place to work for everyone else here. If each of us didn't do that, this whole thing wouldn't work. It's the people who make the Team, and this is a pretty great Team.

As I said, this is good for us in lots of ways, so if you feel like spreading the news, here's how to do it:

· Facebook: Proud to work at Teach For America, just named one of FORTUNE Magazine's 100 Best Companies to Work For. http://cnnmon.ie/x5tBZL

· Twitter: Proud to work at @TeachForAmerica, named one of @FORTUNEMagazine's 100 Best Companies to Work For http://cnnmon.ie/x5tBZL #bestcos

· LinkedIn: Proud to work at Teach For America, just named one of FORTUNE Magazine's 100 Best Companies to Work For http://cnnmon.ie/x5tBZL

Congratulations to all.

Appreciatively,

Matt

Matt Kramer

President, Teach For America

Interesting movie

2012-01-30T09:45:00.001-05:00

Looks like an interesting movie about a substitute teacher (played by Academy Award winner Adrien Brody), from the producer of The Hurt Locker and the director of American History X: http://detachment-film.com/

How the U.S. Lost Out on iPhone Work

2012-01-30T09:32:00.001-05:00

Here's an excerpt from the Apple article:

Though components differ between versions, all iPhones contain hundreds of parts, an estimated 90 percent of which are manufactured abroad. Advanced semiconductors have come from Germany and Taiwan, memory from Korea and Japan, display panels and circuitry from Korea and Taiwan, chipsets from Europe and rare metals from Africa and Asia. And all of it is put together in China.

In its early days, Apple usually didn't look beyond its own backyard for manufacturing solutions. A few years after Apple began building the Macintosh in 1983, for instance, Mr. Jobs bragged that it was "a machine that is made in America." In 1990, while Mr. Jobs was running NeXT, which was eventually bought by Apple, the executive told a reporter that "I'm as proud of the factory as I am of the computer."As late as 2002, top Apple executives occasionally drove two hours northeast of their headquarters to visit the company's iMac plant in Elk Grove, Calif.

But by 2004, Apple had largely turned to foreign manufacturing. Guiding that decision was Apple's operations expert, Timothy D. Cook, who replaced Mr. Jobs as chief executive last August, six weeks before Mr. Jobs's death. Most other American electronics companies had already gone abroad, and Apple, which at the time was struggling, felt it had to grasp every advantage.

In part, Asia was attractive because the semiskilled workers there were cheaper. But that wasn't driving Apple. For technology companies, the cost of labor is minimal compared with the expense of buying parts and managing supply chains that bring together components and services from hundreds of companies.

For Mr. Cook, the focus on Asia "came down to two things," said one former high-ranking Apple executive. Factories in Asia "can scale up and down faster" and "Asian supply chains have surpassed what's in the U.S." The result is that "we can't compete at this point," the executive said.

… "The entire supply chain is in China now," said another former high-ranking Apple executive. "You need a thousand rubber gaskets? That's the factory next door. You need a million screws? That factory is a block away. You need that screw made a little bit different? It will take three hours."

… "They could hire 3,000 people overnight," said Jennifer Rigoni, who was Apple's worldwide supply demand manager until 2010, but declined to discuss specifics of her work. "What U.S. plant can find 3,000 people overnight and convince them to live in dorms?"

…Another critical advantage for Apple was that China provided engineers at a scale the United States could not match. Apple's executives had estimated that about 8,700 industrial engineers were needed to oversee and guide the 200,000 assembly-line workers eventually involved in manufacturing iPhones. The company's analysts had forecast it would take as long as nine months to find that many qualified engineers in the United States.

In China, it took 15 days.

Companies like Apple "say the challenge in setting up U.S. plants is finding a technical work force," said Martin Schmidt, associate provost at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In particular, companies say they need engineers with more than high school, but not necessarily a bachelor's degree. Americans at that skill level are hard to find, executives contend. "They're good jobs, but the country doesn't have enough to feed the demand," Mr. Schmidt said.

Some aspects of the iPhone are uniquely American. The device's software, for instance, and its innovative marketing campaigns were largely created in the United States. Apple recently built a $500 million data center in North Carolina. Crucial semiconductors inside the iPhone 4 and 4S are manufactured in an Austin, Tex., factory by Samsung, of South Korea.

But even those facilities are not enormous sources of jobs. Apple's North Carolina center, for instance, has only 100 full-time employees. The Samsung plant has an estimated 2,400 workers.

"If you scale up from selling one million phones to 30 million phones, you don't really need more programmers," said Jean-Louis Gassée, who oversaw product development and marketing for Apple until he left in 1990. "All these new companies — Facebook, Google, Twitter — benefit from this. They grow, but they don't really need to hire much."

---------------------

The iEconomy

How the U.S. Lost Out on iPhone Work

By CHARLES DUHIGG and KEITH BRADSHER

Published: January 21, 2012

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/22/business/apple-america-and-a-squeezed-middle-class.html

Making It in America

2012-01-30T09:31:00.001-05:00

And here's an excerpt from the Standard Motor Products article:

The combination of skilled labor and complex machines gives American factories a big advantage in manufacturing not only precision products, but also those that are made in small batches, as is the case with many fuel injectors. Luke can quickly alter the program in a Gildemeister's computer to switch from making one kind of injector to another. Standard makes injectors and other parts for thousands of different makes and models of car, fabricating and shipping in small batches; Luke sometimes needs to switch the type of product he's making several times in a shift. Factories in China, by contrast, tend to focus on long runs of single products, with far less frequent changeovers.

It's no surprise, then, that Standard makes injectors in the U.S. and employs high-skilled workers, like Luke. It seems fairly likely that Luke will have a job for a long time, and will continue to make a decent wage. People with advanced skills like Luke are more important than ever to American manufacturing.

But why does Maddie have a job? In fact, more than half of the workers on the factory floor in Greenville are, like Maddie, classified as unskilled. On average, they make about 10 times as much as their Chinese counterparts. What accounts for that?

…For Maddie to achieve her dreams—to own her own home, to take her family on vacation to the coast, to have enough saved up so her children can go to college—she'd need to become one of the advanced Level 2s. A decade ago, a smart, hard-working Level 1 might have persuaded management to provide on-the-job training in Level-2 skills. But these days, the gap between a Level 1 and a 2 is so wide that it doesn't make financial sense for Standard to spend years training someone who might not be able to pick up the skills or might take that training to a competing factory.

It feels cruel to point out all the Level-2 concepts Maddie doesn't know, although Maddie is quite open about these shortcomings. She doesn't know the computer-programming language that runs the machines she operates; in fact, she was surprised to learn they are run by a specialized computer language. She doesn't know trigonometry or calculus, and she's never studied the properties of cutting tools or metals. She doesn't know how to maintain a tolerance of 0.25 microns, or what tolerance means in this context, or what a micron is.

Tony explains that Maddie has a job for two reasons. First, when it comes to making fuel injectors, the company saves money and minimizes product damage by having both the precision and non-precision work done in the same place. Even if Mexican or Chinese workers could do Maddie's job more cheaply, shipping fragile, half-finished parts to another country for processing would make no sense. Second, Maddie is cheaper than a machine. It would be easy to buy a robotic arm that could take injector bodies and caps from a tray and place them precisely in a laser welder. Yet Standard would have to invest about $100,000 on the arm and a conveyance machine to bring parts to the welder and send them on to the next station. As is common in factories, Standard invests only in machinery that will earn back its cost within two years. For Tony, it's simple: Maddie makes less in two years than the machine would cost, so her job is safe—for now. If the robotic machines become a little cheaper, or if demand for fuel injectors goes up and Standard starts running three shifts, then investing in those robots might make sense.

"What worries people in factories is electronics, robots," she tells me. "If you don't know jack about computers and electronics, then you don't have anything in this life anymore. One day, they're not going to need people; the machines will take over. People like me, we're not going to be around forever."

…I went to South Carolina, and spent so much time with Maddie, precisely because these issues are so large and so overwhelming. I wanted to see how this shift affected regular people's lives. I didn't come away with a handy list of policies that would solve all the problems of unskilled workers, but I did note some principles that seem important to improving their situation.

It's hard to imagine what set of circumstances would reverse recent trends and bring large numbers of jobs for unskilled laborers back to the U.S. Our efforts might be more fruitfully focused on getting Maddie the education she needs for a better shot at a decent living in the years to come. Subsidized job-training programs tend to be fairly popular among Democrats and Republicans, and certainly benefit some people. But these programs suffer from all the ills in our education system; opportunities go, disproportionately, to those who already have initiative, intelligence, and—not least—family support.

I never heard Maddie blame others for her situation; she talked, often, about the bad choices she made as a teenager and how those have limited her future. I came to realize, though, that Maddie represents a large population: people who, for whatever reason, are not going to be able to leave the workforce long enough to get the skills they need. Luke doesn't have children, and his parents could afford to support him while he was in school. Those with the right ability and circumstances will, most likely, make the right adjustments, get the right skills, and eventually thrive. But I fear that those who are challenged now will only fall further behind. To solve all the problems that keep people from acquiring skills would require tackling the toughest issues our country faces: a broken educational system, teen pregnancy, drug use, racial discrimination, a fractured political culture.

This may be the worst impact of the disappearance of manufacturing work. In older factories and, before them, on the farm, there were opportunities for almost everybody: the bright and the slow, the sociable and the awkward, the people with children and those without. All came to work unskilled, at first, and then slowly learned things, on the job, that made them more valuable. Especially in the mid-20th century, as manufacturing employment was rocketing toward its zenith, mistakes and disadvantages in childhood and adolescence did not foreclose adult opportunity.

For most of U.S. history, most people had a slow and steady wind at their back, a combination of economic forces that didn't make life easy but gave many of us little pushes forward that allowed us to earn a bit more every year. Over a lifetime, it all added up to a better sort of life than the one we were born into. That wind seems to be dying for a lot of Americans. What the country will be like without it is not quite clear.

---------------------

Making It in America

In the past decade, the flow of goods emerging from U.S. factories has risen by about a third. Factory employment has fallen by roughly the same fraction. The story of Standard Motor Products, a 92-year-old, family-run manufacturer based in Queens, sheds light on both phenomena. It's a story of hustle, ingenuity, competitive success, and promise for America's economy. It also illuminates why the jobs crisis will be so difficult to solve.

By Adam Davidson

Dean Kaufman

http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2012/01/making-it-in-america/8844/?single_page=true

In education-packed speech, Bloomberg vows to bypass UFT

2012-01-16T20:48:00.001-05:00

STOP THE PRESSES!!! Mayor Bloomberg just went to WAR with the AFT (in the best possible way) in his 10^th State of the City Address tonight. Get this: for the 33 chronically failing schools, in which the union is refusing to agree to a teacher evaluation system, thereby jeopardizing $58 million in federal funding, Bloomberg said, "Fine, is that's the way you want to play it, I'll adopt a different transformation model – one that requires replacing a minimum of HALF of the teachers!" This is what Deborah Gist used so effectively in Central Falls, RI. Overall, his proposals are REALLY bold and courageous – kudos! Here's GothamSchools with the coverage (the entire speech, half of which was devoted to education, is at: http://blogs.wsj.com/metropolis/2012/01/12/mayor-bloombergs-state-of-city-speech):

In education-packed speech, Bloomberg vows to bypass UFT

by Philissa Cramer, at 2:00 pm

Mayor Bloomberg is attempting to breathe new life into his enervated education agenda today with an ambitious and startling list of proposals that include paying top teachers $20,000 bonuses and bypassing the union to overhaul struggling schools.

Perhaps most interesting is the way that he is outlining, in his 10th State of the City address right now in the Bronx, to resuscitate stalled efforts to transform 33 struggling schools — and still receive the $58 million in federal funds that were supposed to support them. The state cut off the city's access to those funds last month, arguing that Bloomberg's failure to reach a deal with the teachers union on evaluations of teachers made the city ineligible for them.

But today Bloomberg argued that the city could still get the federal support without a deal. His plan is to change the city's approach to overhauling those schools, using the "turnaround" model. That model requires that at least 50 percent of a school's teachers be removed.

"We believe that when we take this action, we will have fulfilled the state's requirements and the schools will be eligible for the $58 million in funding," he is set to say.

The city had originally wanted to use the turnaround model, one of four federally mandated options, to overhaul the 33 schools. But it turned to backup models, "transformation" and "restart," because the union would not agree. Today, Bloomberg says he believes the union's current contract permits turnaround, according to his prepared remarks.

In a telephone call before the address, a union official said immediately that that was not the case, auguring a fight that could drag on or even wind up in court.

The proposal is one of several surprising and bold education plans that Bloomberg is outlining today at the city's oldest high school, Morris High School in the South Bronx. Fully half of his State of the City address is devoted to education.

Other proposals include a $20,000 raise for teachers who get the top rating on the disputed evaluations for two years in a row and $25,000 to pay off student loans for new teachers who come from the top of their college class.

Those policies are designed to attract and retain good teachers, and Bloomberg is arguing that he expects the union's support for them. The proposals, of course, depend on evaluations that the city and the union have not yet agreed on. And the $20,000 bonuses also represent individual merit pay for teachers, which the United Federation of Teachers has rejected in the past.

The mayor said the city is ramping up plans for the new schools that Chancellor Dennis Walcott introduced in September. Bloomberg said the city will open 100 new schools before he leaves office in 2013, including 50 charter schools. The city will help some charter networks — such as KIPP and Eva Moskowitz's Success Academy schools — grow faster and also bring in new charter school operators to the city. One of those, a chain called Rocketship that focuses on the technology-infused "blended learning" model, has already accepted the city's invitation, Bloomberg announced.

And Bloomberg announced new efforts to push students along the path to college, by helping them get financial aid, and careers, through new schools with a vocational focus and a mentoring program involving local businesses.

Bloomberg left lots of questions unanswered: How does the workaround at the 33 struggling schools resolve the conflict over teacher evaluations? Will the state start federal funds flowing now, even though the switch to turnaround wouldn't happen until September? Where will the funds for raises and loan repayments come from? Are the charter school networks Bloomberg mentions prepared to scale up faster?

We will be trying to find answers to these questions and others this afternoon.

In chronological order, according to the prepared remarks, Bloomberg proposed to:

· Give new teachers who come from the "top tier" of their college class $25,000 to pay off student loans.

· Raise the salaries of teachers who are rated "highly effective" for two years on new evaluations by $20,000

· Use a turnaround program in state law to remove half of teachers at SIG schools, to get federal funding back

· Open 100 new schools in the next two years, including 50 charter schools

· Speed the expansion plans of charter networks such as KIPP and Success Academy

· Recruit new charter school operators to come to the city, such as Rocketship, which has committed

· Open three new grade 9-14 schools and at least a dozen new career and technical schools and programs

· Ask local business and companies to offer mentoring and internships for students; Bloomberg LP is in

· Help students apply for federal financial aid, using assistance from the Obama administration

· Lead the charge for the New York State Dream Act to help undocumented students attend college

The Value of Teachers

2012-01-16T20:47:00.001-05:00

If I hadn't just learned of Bloomberg's speech, Nick Kristof's op ed in today's NYT might have been a STOP THE PRESSES as well. He takes the new NBER study and comes to the logical, inescapable conclusions – on the most influential newspaper page on the planet. So cool! (My emphasis added)

Suppose your child is about to enter the fourth grade and has been assigned to an excellent teacher. Then the teacher decides to quit. What should you do?

The correct answer? Panic!

Well, not exactly. But a landmark new research paper underscores that the difference between a strong teacher and a weak teacher lasts a lifetime. Having a good fourth-grade teacher makes a student 1.25 percent more likely to go to college, the research suggests, and 1.25 percent less likely to get pregnant as a teenager. Each of the students will go on as an adult to earn, on average, $25,000 more over a lifetime — or about $700,000 in gains for an average size class — all attributable to that ace teacher back in the fourth grade. That's right: A great teacher is worth hundreds of thousands of dollars to each year's students, just in the extra income they will earn.

The study, by economists at Harvard and Columbia universities, finds that if a great teacher is leaving, parents should hold bake sales or pass the hat around in hopes of collectively offering the teacher as much as a $100,000 bonus to stay for an extra year. Sure, that's implausible — but their children would gain a benefit that far exceeds even that sum.

Conversely, a very poor teacher has the same effect as a pupil missing 40 percent of the school year. We don't allow that kind of truancy, so it's not clear why we should put up with such poor teaching. In fact, the study shows that parents should pay a bad teacher $100,000 to retire (assuming the replacement is of average quality) because a weak teacher holds children back so much.

Our faltering education system may be the most important long-term threat to America's economy and national well-being, so it's frustrating that the presidential campaign is mostly ignoring the issue. Candidates are bloviating about all kinds of imaginary or exaggerated threats, while ignoring the most crucial one.

…What shone through the study was the variation among teachers. Great teachers not only raised test scores significantly — an effect that mostly faded within a few years — but also left their students with better life outcomes. A great teacher (defined as one better than 84 percent of peers) for a single year between fourth and eighth grades resulted in students earning almost 1 percent more at age 28.

Suppose that the bottom 5 percent of teachers could be replaced by teachers of average quality. The three economists found that each student in the classroom would have extra cumulative lifetime earnings of more than $52,000. That's more than $1.4 million in gains for the classroom.

Some Republicans worry that a federal role in education smacks of socialism. On the contrary, schools represent a tough-minded business investment in our economic future. And, increasingly, we're getting solid evidence of what reforms may help: teacher evaluations based on student performance, higher pay and prestige for good teachers, dismissals for weak teachers.

That, and not most of the fireworks that passes for politics these days, is the debate we should be having on a national stage.

-----------------------

January 11, 2012

The Value of Teachers

By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/12/opinion/kristof-the-value-of-teachers.html

New Study Gauges Teachers Impact on Students' Lifetime Earnings

2012-01-16T20:46:00.001-05:00

A great interview with one of the authors of the study:

RAY SUAREZ: You know, a lot of the schools with the worst performance in national standardized tests are also schools in poor neighborhoods, where you also have high teacher turnover.

If you identify high-value-added teachers, as you call them, how do you get them to stay in a school that needs a lot of help?

RAJ CHETTY: That's a great question.

High turnover is indeed a problem, because one of the things that we see in the data is that teachers' value-added grows as they become more experienced. So the first time a teacher is teaching, it's quite natural they're learning on the job and they don't do quite as well as after they have a few years of experience.

And so in these lower-income neighborhoods, where you have a lot of teacher turnover, that's a further reason that those children are not getting as great opportunities as we think they should be.

How you reduce turnover, I think, paying teachers bonuses, especially if they are doing very well, possibly increasing teacher salaries, providing more support so that the classroom environment in which they're teaching is more constructive, easier to teach in, I think all of these things could potentially be very helpful.

RAY SUAREZ: Is -- could it also be concluded from your study that it ought to be easier to fire ineffective teachers? And I'm really sorry the union leader isn't here with us right now when I'm asking this question.

But is that part of your conclusion?

RAJ CHETTY: Yes.

I think -- you know, let me make an analogy here. Suppose you are managing a baseball team, say, the Boston Red Sox, and you're trying to do as well as you can. You have players with different batting averages. One approach you might take is to bring the hitting coach out and try to raise the batting averages of the players you have.

But I think it also makes a lot of sense -- and this will make sense to sports fans -- that, on occasion, you might decide to let some of the players with lower batting averages go, and try to get somebody else who might do better. And so I think it makes sense to use a combination of those tools.

Here, I think the stakes are even much bigger. We're talking about the future of our children, rather than winning a baseball game. So I think it does make sense to consider those policies seriously.

----------------

http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/education/jan-june12/teachers_01-06.html

The Persistence Of Both Teacher Effects And Misinterpretations Of Research About Them

2012-01-16T20:44:00.001-05:00

Here's a response Matthew Di Carlo on the Albert Shanker Institute blog, which I expected to be much more critical than it is:

In a new National Bureau of Economic Research working paper on teacher value-added, researchers Raj Chetty, John Friedman and Jonah Rockoff present results from their analysis of anincredibly detailed dataset linking teachers and students in one large urban school district. The data include students' testing results between 1991 and 2009, as well as proxies for future student outcomes, mostly from tax records, including college attendance (whether they were reported to have paid tuition or received scholarships), childbearing (whether they claimed dependents) and eventual earnings (as reported on the returns). Needless to say, the actual analysis includes only those students for whom testing data were available, and who could be successfully linked with teachers (with the latter group of course limited to those teaching math or reading in grades 4-8).

The paper caused a remarkable stir last week, and for good reason: It's one of the most dense, important and interesting analyses on this topic in a very long time. Much of the reaction, however, was less than cautious, specifically the manner in which the research findings were interpreted to support actual policy implications (also see Bruce Baker's excellent post).

What this paper shows – using an extremely detailed dataset and sophisticated, thoroughly-documented methods – is that teachers matter, perhaps in ways that some didn't realize. What it does not show is how to measure and improve teacher quality, which are still open questions. This is a crucial distinction, one which has been discussed on this blog numerous times (alsohere and here), as it is frequently obscured or outright ignored in discussions of how research findings should inform concrete education policy.

The Persistence Of Both Teacher Effects And Misinterpretations Of Research About Them

Posted by Matthew Di Carlo on January 8, 2012

http://shankerblog.org/?p=4708

Diane Ravitch Blocked Me on Twitter

2012-01-16T20:43:00.001-05:00

Ya know, of these days, Diane Ravitch is going to surprise me by doing or saying something that's even slightly even-handed, balanced or thoughtful – but today's not that day! The moment the NBER study came out, she quickly realized that the findings weren't consistent with the talking points of her union boss buddies so she went into full-scale attack mode WITHOUT EVEN READING THE REPORT (how typical). She starting tweeting all sorts of questions and critiques, which were answered in the paper, but when a senior at Duke, Tom Burr, tweeted back with this information and challenged her, SHE BLOCKED HIM. I am NOT making this up! See Burr's blog post on Teach For Us.org below, where he documents the exchange – and concludes by calling her out for the fraud that she is:

@TomBurr

: @DianeRavitch You asked a question, I answered it, you refused to acknowledge. People are being misled by you whether you mean it or not.

@TomBurr: @DianeRavitch Nearly all of the questions you ask can be found in the paper that you ave(sic) not read. Fits my definition of cheapening debate.

And that is the real point of my story. Were some anonymous rando(myself, for example) asking questions like Diane Ravitch was, there would be no problem. Yes, they could find these things themselves, but its just annoying and not harmful. Diane Ravitch, however, has a greater responsibility as an academic and as a public figure. I'm repeating myself, but for her to rapid-fire off seemingly incriminating questions without bothering to read the actual paper the article is based on is disgusting. Furthermore, when her questions are answered, refusing to acknowledge them is out and out dishonesty.

Finally, when I woke up this morning, I found that she had blocked me. In my opinion, she is a fraud.

Diane Ravitch Blocked Me on Twitter

by tmb11

http://princegeorge.teachforus.org/2012/01/08/diane-ravitch-blocked-me-on-twitter/

ETA: Can't figure out how to get comments working.

A Case Study in Bias

2012-01-16T20:41:00.002-05:00

Stuart Buck with more documentation of Ravitch's bias (as if any were needed):

Saturday, January 07, 2012

A Case Study in Bias

http://stuartbuck.blogspot.com/2012/01/case-study-in-bias.html

Two studies came out comparing the performance of schools or teachers. In the first case, Raj Chetty, John Friedman, and Jonah Rockoff came up with just about the most extensive and sophisticated study of teachers' value-added that I've ever seen. As highlighted in the New York Times, the study includes estimates for how much high-quality teachers improve their students' income years later, and also (see pp. 29 ff.) includes a new way to check for bias by looking at how cohorts of students change performance when a high or low value-added teacher arrives from somewhere else. Very cool.

But such a study, implying that some teachers are better than others, and that teacher quality can be revealed by how well their students do on tests (conditioning on prior achievement and student demographics), is disturbing to some people. Diane Ravitch tweeted at least 67 times the day the study came out, trying to undermine the study by questioning its lack of peer review (so far), the way in which it was conducted, and the very project of looking at test scores in the first place.

In the second case, there's a group called Educate Now in Louisiana that released a PDF chart (available here) that merely lists the schools in New Orleans identified by whether they are Recovery School District schools or voucher-accepting private schools, and then listing what percentage of students score above basic on English and Math in grades 3-5. That's all. No attempt to control for the individual students' prior achievement, no attempt to control for any student demographic variables such as poverty, no attempt to control for the fact that students are eligible for vouchers only if they had been attending a failing public school, no statistical analysis whatsoever.

This is as primitive as it gets, and is a horrible way to judge the merit of voucher schools (as I explained here).

Did Diane Ravitch tweet 67 times criticizing this purported attempt to compare voucher schools to public schools? No: right in the midst of her incessant criticism of an immeasurably superior study, she sent out one tweet that said, "How did voucher schools in New Orleans do?" followed by a link.

Ravitch here displays the worst sort of intellectual bias: when what looks like one of the best studies out there doesn't fit her ideology, she acts as if it is far more questionable than the baloney that she otherwise is happy to plug. To be sure, it's OK to ask questions about the new value-added study, what it means, how it was done, and whether it was oversold in the media. But it's not OK to pass along a worthless analysis of the merits of vouchers.

Anti-reformers need to think a bit more carefully about whether they want someone as their standard-bearer who doesn't know the difference between good and bad research (or, worse, who doesn't care).

Diane Ravitch Blocked Me on Twitter

by tmb11

http://princegeorge.teachforus.org/2012/01/08/diane-ravitch-blocked-me-on-twitter/

New Education Trust—West Study Reveals Stunning Inequities in Access to Effective Teachers for Latino, African-American and Low-Income Students in Nation’s Second Largest School District

2012-01-16T20:36:00.001-05:00

Education Trust—West with a new study out today that's consistent with the NBER one in terms of the importance and impact of teacher quality, but also has critically important new data about how low-income, black and Latino children are much less likely to get high-quality teachers:

Today, The Education Trust—West releases the findings of a two- year-long study of data from the second largest school district in the nation, revealing profound inequities in access to effective teaching. In Learning Denied: The Case for Equitable Access to Effective Teaching in California's Largest School District, The Education Trust—West finds that low-income students and students of color in the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) are less likely to be taught by the district's top teachers – the very teachers capable of closing the district's achievement gaps. These inequities are exacerbated by teacher mobility patterns and quality-blind layoffs.

"This is one of the largest and most comprehensive analyses of this type ever completed, accounting for over 17,500 teachers and more than a million students," said report co-author Carrie Hahnel, Director of Policy and Research at The Education Trust—West. "We were able to quantify the impact of effective teachers on student learning. We looked at the extent to which students of color and students in poverty had access to effective teachers, and we also looked at the impact of quality-blind teacher layoffs."

The report reveals that:

· Teachers have the potential to dramatically accelerate the learning of their students – with the average student taught by a top 25% teacher (top quartile in terms of value-added) gaining half a year more of learning in English-Language Arts and four months in math than a student placed with a teacher in the bottom 25% (bottom quartile).

· Second-graders who started off behind academically and then had three top quartile teachers accelerated to academic proficiency, while students with consecutive bottom quartile teachers remained stuck below grade level.

· Commonly used measures of teacher quality, such as years of experience, are poor predictors of effectiveness in the classroom. While teachers do improve over time, the differences among teachers are far greater than those between teachers at different levels of experience. For example, the difference between a 10th-year teacher and first-year teacher is only about three and a half weeks in ELA and two and a half weeks in math.

· Effective teachers are inequitably distributed in LAUSD with Latino, African-American and low-income students much less likely to have access to top-quartile teachers. In addition, these top teachers are more likely to leave the district's highest need schools.

· Quality-blind teacher layoffs in 2009 resulted in the removal of high value-added teachers from the highest need schools. If the district had instead laid off teachers based on effectiveness, only about 5 percent of the ELA teachers and 3 percent of the math teachers actually cut by LAUSD would have been laid off.

"These findings should be cause for both optimism and deep concern," said Arun Ramanathan, Executive Director of The Education Trust—West, a statewide education advocacy organization. "We now know that great teachers have the power to help students catch up when they're behind. But you can't catch up when you don't have access to the best teachers."

The report reveals that a low-income student is more than twice as likely to have a low value-added ELA teacher as a higher income peer, and 66 percent more likely to have a low-value added math teacher. Latino and African-American students are two to three times more likely to have bottom-quartile teachers in math and ELA, respectively, than their white and Asian peers.

--------------------------

New Education Trust—West Study Reveals Stunning Inequities in Access to Effective Teachers for Latino, African-American and Low-Income Students in Nation's Second Largest School District

Contact: Eric Wagner (510) 465-6444, ext 318;
Email: ewagner@edtrustwest.org

http://www.edtrust.org/west/press-room/press-release/new-education-trust%E2%80%94west-study-reveals-stunning-inequities-in-access-t

Parents Rebel Against School

2012-01-16T20:35:00.001-05:00

I continue to believe that Parent Trigger laws are a critically important tool to effect change. Here's a great story about another school in California in which the parents have organized to "throw the bums out". I love the union spokesperson's response – so typical: blame the victims of the failing school:

Fed-up parents of students attending a low-performing school in Southern California aim to use the power given to them by the state to take an unusual step: fire the school.

This power, called a Parent Trigger, was passed into law in California in 2010, but parents are attempting for only the second time to use it at Desert Trails Elementary outside Los Angeles. Their effort to force Adelanto Elementary School District to overhaul the school, or turn it into a charter school run by the parents themselves, is expected to be closely watched across the nation.

Similar legislation passed in Texas and Mississippi last year and is under consideration in Florida, Pennsylvania and Indiana this year.

The parents group has gathered the signatures of 70% of the parents at the school and plans to deliver a petition to school district officials on Thursday. Under the law, parents can force a district to close a school, convert it to a charter or replace the principal and the teachers if at least 50% of them sign a petition. Last year, parents in Compton tried to trigger such a change, but their petition has been tied up in a lengthy court battle with the school district.

"We've been complaining for years that our school needs some help and nobody was listening, so we are taking it into our own hands," said Doreen Diaz, who has a fifth-grade daughter at the Desert Trails school and spearheaded the petition drive.

Officials of the school district say some overhauls sought by parents would be costly and difficult to implement.

Parent Trigger laws like the one in California are at the vanguard of the fight over fixing the nation's lowest-achieving schools and the power struggle over who will make those fixes. The nation's teachers unions have generally opposed the trigger laws, arguing that they focus on closing schools or firing staff, instead of bringing more resources to troubled campuses.

The unions note that, in California at least, the effort has been coordinated by Parent Revolution, a nonprofit funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and the Walton Family Foundation, which support big school overhauls and have been critical of teachers unions. Parent Revolution helped organize parents in Compton and at Desert Trails.

"Our concern with the Parent Trigger law is it assumes that the problem at these schools is the teaching staff or the leadership," said Frank Wells, spokesman for the California Teachers Association. "Then it suggests changes that might not be the panacea for what is keeping a school down, such as extreme poverty or student transiency."

Parent Revolution sees the law—and the parent organizations they help form—as a counterweight to the unions and the school districts. "Right now, we have a duopoly that hasn't served kids," said Gabe Rose, deputy director of the nonprofit. "Parents are the third leg to the stool."
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U.S. NEWS
JANUARY 12, 2012
http://professional.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970203436904577155172392128512.html

Parents Rebel Against School

Petition Drive Under California Law Could Lead to Mass Firings or Charter Shift

By STEPHANIE BANCHERO

Charter Network Facing Closure

2012-01-16T20:31:00.001-05:00

A 3-school charter network is being shut down in NYC – again, dopey critics will celebrate this and claim it's negative for charter schools, but to the contrary it's great news that there's accountability (which should be applied to ALL public schools). The biggest enemy of charter schools isn't the unions – it's crappy charter schools!

For the first time, officials are moving to shut down an entire New York City charter-school network.

Three schools that make up the Believe High School Network are slated to close in June after the state Education Department said on Tuesday it plans to revoke the charters of the two schools it oversees. The announcement came a day after the city Department of Education said it would close the Believe school under its purview.

Although the city's struggling schools generally face closure because of poor academic performance, the Believe schools are being targeted for fiscal and governance problems.

---------------------

NY SCHOOLS
JANUARY 11, 2012
http://professional.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970204124204577153370856801162.html

Charter Network Facing Closure

By LISA FLEISHER and ALISON FOX

Troubled Online Charter Schools

2012-01-16T20:29:00.001-05:00

A NYT editorial earlier this week slamming online charter schools:

January 10, 2012

Troubled Online Charter Schools

NYT editorial

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/11/opinion/troubled-online-charter-schools.html

Charter schools, which receive public money but are subject to fewer state regulations, are operating in 40 states. A growing body of research shows that charter schools generally perform no better than traditional schools and are often worse as measured by student test data. This is particularly true of online charter schools, which educate more than 200,000 full-time students and are spreading quickly across the country.

The need for closer scrutiny of these schools by state officials is underscored in a report published last week by the National Education Policy Center, a research center at the University of Colorado in Boulder. The study found that only 27 percent of privately managed online schools achieved adequate yearly progress on standardized tests, as defined by the federal government, in the 2010 school year as opposed to 52 percent of privately managed brick-and-mortar charter schools.

A recent investigation by The Times focusing partly on K12 Inc., one of the biggest online learning companies, and on Pennsylvania, which allows full-time online students, found that some high school teachers complained of managing too many online students. The overall picture was one of low student achievement and high turnover rates. These complaints are similar to those made about the for-profit college industry, which has been criticized for recruiting students who have no hope of graduating.

Despite lower operating costs, the online companies in some states collect nearly as much money as brick-and-mortar charter schools. In Pennsylvania, for example, the per-student cost for online charter schools was about $10,000. By all indications, taxpayers are getting very little for their money. A study released last spring by Stanford University's Center for Research on Education Outcomes found that students in eight Pennsylvania online schools performed far worse in math and science than their traditional school counterparts.

Online programs that supplement traditional schooling have a place on the menu of education options. But there is growing evidence that full-time online schools may be inappropriate for a great majority of students and need to be monitored closely in states that allow them.

I still get irritated at how the CREDO study is cited almost exclusively as the definitive one on charters, despite its many flaws. The correct message is NOT "that charter schools generally perform no better than traditional schools and are often worse as measured by student test data" – rather, that states with crappy charter laws have crappy charter schools (probably worse than comparable regular public schools), while states (like NY) with strong charter laws have charters that are, on average, much better (as the follow-up CREDO study showed).

U.S. Faults State’s Progress on Race to the Top Goals

2012-01-16T20:25:00.001-05:00

Good for Arne Duncan for holding NY's feet to the fire – it must have been one contributor to Bloomberg's strong stand tonight:

New York is one of three states on the federal government's watch list because it has not yet complied with the goals it set when applying for financial assistance through the federal Race to the Top program.

In a strongly worded statement on Monday, the education secretary, Arne Duncan, said that despite "significant progress," New York had "hit a roadblock" in recent months, failing to put in place a planned database to track student records across school districts and failing to fulfill a promise to adopt a system to evaluate the work of teachers and principals.

The state has not fallen as far behind as Hawaii, which was warned last month that it risked losing its federal grant over delays in adopting a teacher evaluation system. But New York's progress, along with that of Florida, has been slow enough to raise concerns.

"New York has a chance to be a national leader, or a laggard, and we are only interested in supporting real courage and bold leadership," Mr. Duncan said. "Backtracking on reform commitments could cost the state hundreds of millions of dollars."

Through the Race to the Top program, New York has received about $700 million, at least half of which was to go directly to school districts.

------------------------------------

U.S. Faults State's Progress on Race to the Top Goals

Nathaniel Brooks for The New York Times

Richard C. Iannuzzi, president of the state teachers' union, called the education commissioner, John B. King Jr., "a bully" on Monday because he had suspended grants to failing schools.

By FERNANDA SANTOS

Published: January 10, 2012

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/10/education/us-faults-new-york-state-on-race-to-the-top-goals.html

New Urgency On Teacher Evaluations

2012-01-16T20:22:00.001-05:00

It's also one of the factors leading Gov. Cuomo to push hard on this – it's great to see the unions getting slammed (well deserved) on all sides:

New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo on Tuesday blamed the Assembly for the failure of a new statewide teacher-evaluation process, saying lawmakers needed to overhaul the way teachers and principals are assessed.

Mr. Cuomo, who called himself a lobbyist for students in his State of the State address last week, accused the Assembly of protecting the needs of teachers unions over schoolchildren.

He called on the state Department of Education, local school districts and unions to "expedite" negotiations over the new method to rate teachers and principals.

"We have a system that protects the massive education bureaucracy rather than focusing on investing in our classrooms," Mr. Cuomo said in a statement released Tuesday.

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NY POLITICS
JANUARY 11, 2012
http://professional.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970204124204577153203213954554.html

New Urgency On Teacher Evaluations

By LISA FLEISHER

Cuomo's Slow Education

2012-01-16T20:20:00.001-05:00

A great WSJ editorial pushing Cuomo:

Andrew Cuomo says he wants to be New York's school reform Governor. That sounds great, but it's going to require bolder leadership than setting up another education commission like the one he proposed last week.

In 2010, as part of an effort to qualify for $700 million in federal Race to the Top grants, New York passed a law that called for a teacher evaluation system. Eighteen months later, no such system is in place. The state law requires that each school district reach agreement with local teachers unions on evaluations, and unions have been unwilling to cooperate. Now there's a shocker.

…If Mr. Cuomo wants to help New York's schoolchildren, especially kids trapped in low-performing schools that employ the worst teachers, his best vehicle is the budget he'll submit later this month, not another bipartisan commission. The Governor could call for a new, meaningful state-wide evaluation system that weighs student test scores; provides a speedy process for disciplining and ousting bad teachers; and puts teachers unions on notice that they will either accept an evaluation system with teeth or have one imposed on them.

Mr. Cuomo's approval rating is near 70%, which is political capital he could use to take on the education status quo. The alternative is waiting for reform "buy-in" from unions that have repeatedly demonstrated that student well-being is secondary to the interests of their members. Either that or Mr. Cuomo should give back the $700 million that his state was granted under false pretenses.

REVIEW & OUTLOOK
JANUARY 12, 2012
http://professional.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970204124204577149403359290924.html

Cuomo's Slow Education

New York should give back its Race to the Top money.

America’s Unlevel Field

2012-01-16T20:04:00.001-05:00

Krugman must have read my rant last month (http://edreform.blogspot.com/2011/12/as-movement-we-have-so-far-largely.html ;-):

Let's talk for a minute about the actual state of the playing field.

Americans are much more likely than citizens of other nations to believe that they live in a meritocracy. But this self-image is a fantasy: as a report in The Times last week pointed out, America actually stands out as the advanced country in which it matters most who your parents were, the country in which those born on one of society's lower rungs have the least chance of climbing to the top or even to the middle.

And if you ask why America is more class-bound in practice than the rest of the Western world, a large part of the reason is that our government falls down on the job of creating equal opportunity.

The failure starts early: in America, the holes in the social safety net mean that both low-income mothers and their children are all too likely to suffer from poor nutrition and receive inadequate health care. It continues once children reach school age, where they encounter a system in which the affluent send their kids to good, well-financed public schools or, if they choose, to private schools, while less-advantaged children get a far worse education.

Once they reach college age, those who come from disadvantaged backgrounds are far less likely to go to college — and vastly less likely to go to a top-tier school — than those luckier in their parentage. At the most selective, "Tier 1" schools, 74 percent of the entering class comes from the quarter of households that have the highest "socioeconomic status"; only 3 percent comes from the bottom quarter.

And if children from our society's lower rungs do manage to make it into a good college, the lack of financial support makes them far more likely to drop out than the children of the affluent, even if they have as much or more native ability. One long-term study by the Department of Education found that students with high test scores but low-income parents were less likely to complete college than students with low scores but affluent parents — loosely speaking, that smart poor kids are less likely than dumb rich kids to get a degree.

It's no wonder, then, that Horatio Alger stories, tales of poor kids who make good, are much less common in reality than they are in legend — and much less common in America than they are in Canada or Europe. Which brings me back to those, like Mr. Romney, who claim to believe in equality of opportunity. Where is the evidence for that claim?

Think about it: someone who really wanted equal opportunity would be very concerned about the inequality of our current system. He would support more nutritional aid for low-income mothers-to-be and young children. He would try to improve the quality of public schools. He would support aid to low-income college students. And he would support what every other advanced country has, a universal health care system, so that nobody need worry about untreated illness or crushing medical bills.

--------------------------------

January 8, 2012

America's Unlevel Field

By PAUL KRUGMAN

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/09/opinion/krugman-americas-unlevel-field.html

Thoughtful Response from Wendy Kopp

2012-01-16T20:03:00.001-05:00

A thoughtful response from TFA's Wendy Kopp to Ravitch's (and Matt Damon's mom's) foolishness:

Happy 2012 to the Teach For America community! I've returned rested and re-centered for the journey ahead and hope you each had rejuvenating breaks as well.

One of my New Year's resolutions is to do more to communicate with all of you as well as those outside our organization in an effort to forge greater understanding and generate more progress for kids. In that spirit, I thought a good way to kick off the year would be to answer the question that Diane Ravitch posed earlier this week about the sincerity of the December op-ed that NEA president Dennis van Roekel and I co-authored in USA Today. Diane asked how it was that the NEA, which is committed to strengthening teacher preparation, would take this step. She also expressed her hope that I might clarify my intentions in making this statement that "on its face appears to repudiate the TFA model."

As you know well, for more than twenty years, we as an organization have invested tremendous resources and energy into the work of building a force of new teachers who succeed with students in our nation's most challenging and hard-to-staff classrooms and in the process gain the foundational experience for a lifetime of educational leadership and advocacy. We have grounded our approach in ongoing research about the mindsets, skills and knowledge that differentiate the most successful teachers in high-need urban and rural schools and have continuously improved our programs, investing substantially in recruiting and selecting teachers who have the personal characteristics that are important to success and in providing them with intensive pre-service training and extensive ongoing support and professional development.

While we know there is much more we can and must do to strengthen our outcomes, we take heart from the significant body of rigorous research that shows that our corps members have a positive impact on student achievement relative to other teachers in their schools. The op-ed Dennis and I wrote endorsed Education Secretary Arne Duncan's call for states to evaluate the success of the graduates of teacher-preparation programs, and in each of the two states that have done this (Louisiana and Tennessee), Teach For America came out as among the most successful programs, with our teachers looking more like veteran teachers than like other new teachers.

Diane particularly asks whether I'm ready to change our model and embrace a "residency" approach to teacher development that the NEA has recently advocated. The reality is that our approach looks far more like a residency model than most teacher-preparation programs currently do, given our investment in selecting teachers carefully and providing them with a coherent program of pre-service and ongoing professional development that extends through their first two years. We will continue exploring ways of strengthening our own program and also share the NEA's view that we should encourage new approaches and pathways for developing the diverse teaching force we need. Still, I believe we should proceed with caution. The studies that have been done on existing residency models, including Boston's pioneering urban teacher residency and Tennessee's adaptation of it, do not show positive impact on student achievement within teachers' initial two years. I also worry that such a resource-intensive approach may not be possible on a very broad scale, and our own research shows that the longer up-front teaching commitments required by residency models will turn away some of the diverse, highly sought-after individuals we need in our classrooms.

In joining together to call for greater investment in teacher recruitment and development, and in high standards for teacher preparation, the NEA and Teach For America weren't throwing under the rug some lingering questions we have about each other's approaches but were instead working to build support for areas where we strongly agree. Implicitly, we were acknowledging the need to move beyond the too often rancorous and misinformed debate about "traditional" versus "alternative" approaches to teacher preparation and to embrace a shared mission of continuous improvement. We also wanted to demonstrate the collaborative, generous-spirited approach that we believe will be critical if we are going to make the sustained, bold educational change we need to see in the United States. We need to move beyond the vitriol, listen to each other, and leverage each other's strengths in a shared campaign to advance student interests.

I hope the December op-ed and this communication are helpful steps in the direction of fostering greater understanding about our beliefs and facilitating a collaborative-minded conversation that will move the needle for our kids! More soon. I hope everyone has a wonderful weekend and a good start to the new year!

Wendy

This text first appeared as an email to the Teach For America staff from founder and CEO Wendy Kopp on January 6, 2012. It is posted here to be shared with others in the Teach For America community. http://www.teachforamerica.org/press-room/thoughts-from-wendy/january-2012

The Bronx High-School Teacher Who Says It’s Not Just the Students Who Cheat

2012-01-16T20:02:00.001-05:00

A provocative story from the trenches in this week's NY Magazine:

Cheating is so widespread among teachers and students it's almost laughable. I call it the Mississippi River of cheating: A kid in the front-right corner of the classroom will have a wildly wrong answer to a test, and a kid in the back-right corner of the room will have the same exact wrong answer. With teachers, the cheating is more of a massaging of the numbers on the Regents. The Regents are damn near everything. As teachers, we massage the tests to make sure if a kid is close to passing, he or she does. We don't take a 30 and make it a 65, but we do our best to make that 62 a 65.

Now, I understand that people might look down on this—how could teachers do this, blah blah blah, and it's true. But we are cogs in the breakdown of accountability. This test is a requirement to pass high school and graduate. If the student doesn't pass, the parent comes in screaming that he was a mere three points from passing. The principal hears it. Then we hear it. Then he ends up passing anyway. This is the norm. Seniors are the worst, because they feel so entitled that we have to cover our asses nineteen different ways to fail them. There have been stories of guidance counselors' flat-out changing grades and passing seniors who should have failed but miraculously walked on graduation day.

Out of 3,000 kids at my school, seventeen are white. If you look at the statistics in NYC, I think about 15 percent of the students are white. It's a weird thing. It's kind of segregated. And the racism among students is horrible. Upstate, a kid would be expelled for saying the kinds of stuff my kids say. Here's an example of a typical conversation: One kid was African, one was Jamaican. The Jamaican kid was insulting him for being from Africa, calling him "spearchucker." I told him he was being ridiculous. "Guys, I hate to say this, but to white people, you are both the same. They don't give a crap if you're Jamaican or African. The police pull you over, what are they putting on that form? Black." If you were to say that to a very liberal-minded white person, they'd probably be horrified. But the kids weren't offended. They understood.

The Bronx High-School Teacher Who Says It's Not Just the Students Who Cheat

NY Magazine, Published Jan 8, 2012
http://nymag.com/news/features/insiders/teacher-2012/

Note: Individuals pictured are not the sources of these stories.

(Photo: Christopher Anderson/Magnum Photos/New York Magazine)

Longer School Day Begins Monday At Select Chicago Public Schools

2012-01-16T20:01:00.001-05:00

Great to see the extended school day spreading in Chicago:

Longer School Day Begins Monday At Select Chicago Public Schools (VIDEO)

First Posted: 1/9/12 03:25 PM ET Updated: 1/9/12 03:25 PM ET

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/01/09/longer-school-day-begins-_n_1194127.html

Forty schools across Chicago that signed on to Mayor Rahm Emanuel's longer school day initiative earlier this year greeted students returning from winter break Monday with an extra 90 minutes of instruction.

CPS schools Melody Elementary and Mays Academy join 38 charter schools across the city that agreed to begin a longer school day in January, debuting new schedules this week that include extra time for reading, social studies, fitness classes or recess and new character development lessons, the Chicago Tribune reports. The CPS schools lengthening school days this week will have $75,000 in incentive funds to help occupy the extra time with meaningful instruction, and the charter schools making similar schedule adjustments were also extended monetary incentives for starting early.

At Mays Academy, 300 students from kindergarten through eighth grade will now have class for 7 and a half hours, where previously they only had 5 hours and 45 minutes of scheduled class time, ABC 7 Chicago reports.

"We are used to being here for a long school day because we are a community school, but now we can put that extra 90 minutes directly [into] academics," Patricia McCann-Nichols, the school's principal, told ABC.

Emanuel's campaign to lengthen school days and classroom time has been hotly contested by the Chicago Teachers Union, who filed an unfair labor complaint in the fall. But many schools were swayed by the lump sum discretionary funding offered as an incentive to switch to the pilot program, which awarded schools either $150,000 or $75,000 based on when the schedule change was implemented.

CPS CEO Jean-Claude Brizard has vowed to implement longer school days and a lengthened school year at all Chicago schools by next year. The longer schedule was already implemented at 11 schools across the district.

The Story of How the NY NAACP Sued Charter Schools Serving Black Kids

2012-01-16T20:00:00.001-05:00

A great 6-min video by Bob Bowden on the NAACP's unconscionable opposition to high-quality charter schools in NYC: http://choicemedia.tv/2012/01/12/whose-side-are-you-on-the-naacp-sues-charter-schools:

The Story of How the NY NAACP Sued Charter Schools Serving Black Kids

As school choice becomes more integrated into the fabric of American public education, teachers unions have been using a new tactic to fight these reforms: the lawsuit. And it's making for strange bedfellows.

The United Federation of Teachers, the New York City teachers union, joined forces with the New York State NAACP in a lawsuit to evict charter schools from buildings shared with traditional district schools. This despite the high percentage of students of color that attend the city's public charter schools.

Why would the NAACP agree to sue the very charter schools that were providing so many black kids with a high quality education?

Fatal Stampede in South Africa Points Up University Crisis

2012-01-16T19:59:00.001-05:00

This sort of puts some of our problems in perspective…

They lined up well before dawn, some driving from the deep countryside with bags of fluffy blankets and neatly packed sandwiches, to wait for the gates to a new life to open. They hoped for a shot at a coveted spot at one of South Africa's public universities, and with it a chance to escape the indignity of joblessness that afflicts more than a third of the nation. By morning, the line was more than a mile long.

As the gates were about to open at 7:45 Tuesday morning, thousands of students, many accompanied by their anxious parents, surged forward, desperate to win one of several hundred last-chance places still open at the University of Johannesburg. Amid shoving and screams, one woman, the mother of a prospective student, was trampled to death and several others were badly injured in a frantic scrum.

The stampede embodied the broad crisis in South Africa's overstretched higher education system as it struggles to extend opportunities once reserved for whites to all South Africans. It is a problem of grade school mathematics: Too many students are seeking too few seats at the country's public universities, which turn away more than half of their applicants, leaving few options for most high school graduates.

Not only that, the squeeze plays into a wider problem of unemployment among young people.

The jobless rate among youths is nearly 70 percent, a staggering problem that even a college degree does not promise to solve. Adcorp, a temporary staffing firm, said in a recent report that there were 600,000 unemployed college graduates in South Africa.

The rush at the university's gates, two days after the governing African National Congress celebrated its centennial in a lavish, weekend-long party, underscored the deep frustration many people here have with the slow pace of progress almost 18 years after the end of white minority rule.

"There just aren't enough places for everybody," said Karabo Dihba, a 22-year-old would-be applicant who hoped to earn an engineering degree, standing amid the abandoned shoes, blankets and rubbish that littered the area outside the university's gates. "What are we supposed to do?"

Access to higher education for all South Africans was one of the most cherished goals of the struggle against white minority rule.

Fatal Stampede in South Africa Points Up University Crisis

Adrian De Kock/Associated Press

A prospective student's mother was killed Tuesday at the University of Johannesburg.

By LYDIA POLGREEN

Published: January 10, 2012

JOHANNESBURG — They lined up well before dawn, some driving from the deep countryside with bags of fluffy blankets and neatly packed sandwiches, to wait for the gates to a new life to open. They hoped for a shot at a coveted spot at one of South Africa's public universities, and with it a chance to escape the indignity of joblessness that afflicts more than a third of the nation. By morning, the line was more than a mile long.

What Works in Urban Schools

2012-01-16T19:57:00.001-05:00

This What Works in Urban Schools conference on Jan. 21 in NYC looks excellent:

Please join us on Saturday, January 21, 2012 for the first annual What Works in Urban Schools conference.

There is one week left to register, so please sign up today and share this opportunity with other New York City educators.

What Works is a new professional development opportunity for New York City educators to come together across schools and organizations to learn and share. Our explicit goal is to bring together a community of educators from across traditional public schools, charter schools, and independent schools – all eager to improve their craft, all aligned around common teaching and learning goals and aspirations.

The conference program features more than 30 workshops spanning K-12 content areas, a panel on character education, and structured peer conversations on college readiness and classroom challenges. Highlight presenters include:

David Coleman, leading author and architect of the Common Core State Standards
Martin Seligman, preeminent scholar on positive psychology and character education
Dave Levin, Co-Founder of KIPP and Superintendent of KIPP NYC
Christopher Emdin, professor of math, science, and technology at Teachers College
Ruth Culham, author of 6+1 Traits of Writing
Marc Lamont Hill, host of Our World With Black Enterprise
With additional sessions on explicit vocabulary instruction, scaffolding for ELLs, response to intervention, setting and tracking character goals, and much more!

Join us in celebrating the rewards and challenges of teaching in New York City urban schools.

Click here for more information and to register:

www.WhatWorksInEd.org

THE LONG-TERM IMPACTS OF TEACHERS: TEACHER VALUE-ADDED AND STUDENT OUTCOMES IN ADULTHOOD

2012-01-16T19:55:00.001-05:00

DOUBLE STOP THE PRESSES!!! This study, THE LONG-TERM IMPACTS OF TEACHERS: TEACHER VALUE-ADDED AND STUDENT OUTCOMES IN ADULTHOOD, may well be the most important EVER done in the field of education – and will give we reformers a huge tailwind going forward – so I'm dedicating an entire email to it.

It's important for many reasons:

1) It underscores and puts hard numbers around the critical importance (and value) of effective teachers;

2) It highlights and documents the vast differences among teachers;

3) It shows that value-added systems (using standardized tests) are highly effective in measuring teacher effectiveness (i.e., identifying lousy, average, and great teachers). The media is focusing on 1) and 2), but 3) is perhaps the most stunning result – I would not have expected such powerful results.

4) The study has important implications for New York State and NYC because the data is from NYC (don't ask me how I know, but I do). Think about it: NYS tests have long been criticized (with good reason), but nevertheless, they're able to identify effective (and ineffective) teachers with remarkable accuracy – this is unbelievably powerful!

5) Lastly, the study is very powerful because it's credible in so many ways: millions of students tracked over decades; multiple measures of outcomes; done by three Ivy League professors (two Harvard and one Columbia) who, importantly, have no prior association with either the reform or anti-reform camps.

Here's the summary of the 93-page report (with a friend's highlighting added), which is posted at: http://obs.rc.fas.harvard.edu/chetty/value_added.pdf:

Executive Summary of National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper No. 17699, December 2011

THE LONG-TERM IMPACTS OF TEACHERS:

TEACHER VALUE-ADDED AND STUDENT OUTCOMES IN ADULTHOOD

Raj Chetty, Harvard University and NBER

John N. Friedman, Harvard University and NBER

Jonah E. Rockoff, Columbia University and NBER

Many policy makers advocate increasing the quality of teaching, but there is considerable debate about the best way to measure and improve teacher quality. One method is to evaluate teachers based on their impacts on students' test scores, commonly termed the "value-added" (VA) approach. A teacher's value-added is defined as the average test-score gain for his or her students, adjusted for differences across classrooms in student characteristics such as prior scores. School districts from Washington D.C. to Los Angeles have begun to use VA to evaluate teachers. Proponents argue that using VA can improve student achievement (e.g. Hanushek 2009), while critics argue that test score gains are poor proxies for a teacher's true quality (e.g. Baker et al. 2010).

The debate about VA stems from two fundamental questions. First, does VA accurately measure teachers' impacts on scores or does it unfairly penalize teachers who may systematically be assigned lower achieving students? Second, do high VA teachers improve their students' long-term outcomes or are they simply better at teaching to the test? Researchers have not reached a consensus about the accuracy and long-term impacts of VA because of data and methodological limitations.

We address these two questions by tracking one million children from a large urban school district from 4th grade to adulthood. We evaluate the accuracy of standard VA measures using several methods, including natural experiments that arise from changes in teaching staff. We find that when a high VA teacher joins a school, test scores rise immediately in the grade taught by that teacher; when a high VA teacher leaves, test scores fall. Test scores change only in the subject taught by that teacher, and the size of the change in scores matches what we predict based on the teacher's VA. These results establish that VA accurately captures teachers' impacts on students' academic achievement and thereby reconcile the conflicting conclusions of Kane and Staiger (2008) and Rothstein (2010). These methods provide a simple yet powerful method to estimate the bias of value-added models in any district; interested readers can download computer code to implement these tests from this link.

In the second part of our study, we analyze whether high VA teachers also improve students' long-term outcomes. We find that students assigned to higher VA teachers are more successful in many dimensions. They are more likely to attend college, earn higher salaries, live in better neighborhoods, and save more for retirement. They are also less likely to have children as teenagers.

Teachers' impacts on students are substantial. Replacing a teacher whose true VA is in the bottom 5% with a teacher of average quality would generate lifetime earnings gains worth more than $250,000 for the average classroom. VA estimates are less reliable when they are based on data from a small number of classes. However, even after observing teachers' impacts on test scores for one year, estimates of VA are reliable enough that such personnel changes would yield large gains on average.

Teachers have large impacts in all the grades we analyze (4 to 8), implying that the returns to education remain large well beyond early childhood. Teachers' impacts on earnings are also similar in percentage terms for students from low and high income families. As a rough guideline, parents should be willing to pay about 25% of their child's income at age 28 to switch their child from a below-average (25th percentile) to an above-average (75th percentile) teacher. For example, parents whose children will earn around $40,000 in their late 20s should be willing to pay $10,000 to switch from a below-average to an above-average teacher for one grade, based on the expected increase in their child's lifetime earnings.

Overall, our study shows that great teachers create great value – perhaps several times their annual salaries – and that test score impacts are helpful in identifying such teachers. However, more work is needed to determine the best way to use VA for policy. For example, using VA in teacher evaluations could induce undesirable responses that make VA a poorer measure of teacher quality, such as teaching to the test or cheating. There will be much to learn about these issues from school districts that start using VA to evaluate teachers. Nevertheless, it is clear that improving the quality of teaching – whether using value-added or other tools – is likely to have large economic and social returns.