Whitney Tilson's School Reform Blog

WELCOME TO MY BLOG

2012-01-16T20:59:00.001-05:00

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.

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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

Big Study Links Good Teachers to Lasting Gain

2012-01-16T19:53:00.001-05:00

Lastly, here's the NY Times cover story from last Friday about it:

Big Study Links Good Teachers to Lasting Gain

By ANNIE LOWREY

Published: January 6, 2012

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/06/education/big-study-links-good-teachers-to-lasting-gain.html

WASHINGTON — Elementary- and middle-school teachers who help raise their students' standardized-test scores seem to have a wide-ranging, lasting positive effect on those students' lives beyond academics, including lower teenage-pregnancy rates and greater college matriculation and adult earnings, according to a new study that tracked 2.5 million students over 20 years.

The Central Falls Success

2012-01-16T19:51:00.001-05:00

An interesting op ed in the NYT by Joe Nocera. Even more than the collaboration between a charter school and a regular public school, it shows the impact that high-quality schools can have, even (or perhaps, especially) with disadvantaged kids.

Central Falls, though, also has one of the most promising reading experiments in the country. The Learning Community, a local charter school, and the Central Falls public elementary schools have joined forces in a collaboration that has resulted in dramatic improvements in the reading scores of the public schoolchildren from kindergarten to grade 2. Given the mistrust of charter schools by public schoolteachers, creating this collaboration was no small feat. And while the city's bankruptcy now threatens it, the Central Falls experiment not only needs to be preserved, it should be replicated across the country. I haven't seen anything that makes more sense.

I have two comments:

A) NOBODY thinks charter schools are THE answer, or that charters can possibly replace the existing school system. But: a) charter schools are taking big market share and making a huge impact in many places including Harlem (20%+ of first graders attend some of the top charter schools in the country), DC (40%+), and especially New Orleans, where the system was basically entirely charterized after Katrina and has shown incredible gains since then; b) top charters like KIPP have been laboratories of innovation, showing what's possible, especially among disadvantaged kids – and how to achieve it. Smart supers like Joel Klein are taking this learning and applying it across the entire system – extending the school day, empowering principals, measuring results, holding people accountable, etc.

B) Nocera is correct that the type of collaboration he writes about is all too rare, but he and/or many NYT readers might not be aware why. I've visited a ton of high-performing charters, many of which share the same building with truly awful regular public schools, and I've never encountered a charter school that was unwilling to partner, share techniques, etc. The problem is that the folks in the regular school are usually enormously threatened by the success of the charter school and retreat into excuses like "they have more money" or "they don't have the same horrible kids or parents that we do", etc. rather than saying, "Hey, what are they doing down the hall that's unique/innovative/successful, what can we learn from it, and how might we partner with them"? Sadly, I have NEVER ONCE heard of the latter happening – and it's not because the charter schools have locked the doors!

I emailed RI Ed Superintendent Deborah Gist to ask for further background on what's happening in Central Falls and she replied (shared with permission):

The numbers look good. Here is a report with data on student proficiency and improvements since the collaboration began between The Learning Community and Central Falls Schools. You can find more general information about the program here.

No matter how you look at it Central Falls (and even the Learning Community) have improvements that need to be made. My agency does too for that matter. However, they are on a path to improvement, and importantly, it is a path that the teachers—after a time of significant initial skepticism—have come to believe in. I am confident that kind of change is what will make the effort and the improvements sustainable in the long term.

And, finally, as you described, it is a great example of the power that having charter schools in a community can have to improve existing neighborhood schools. Central Falls received one of the Gates charter collaboration planning grants, and they are working with several charter schools in the community to collaborate on improving student achievement. Dr. Gallo is the perfect example of the kind of leader who focuses on doing whatever it takes and doesn't get caught up in fights over turf or power or money. She wants what is best for the kids in Central Falls whether they are in her schools or in charter schools.

Imagine if we all operated that way!

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

January 2, 2012

The Central Falls Success

By JOE NOCERA

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/03/opinion/nocera-the-central-falls-success.html

Teachers Resist High-Tech Push in Idaho Schools

2012-01-16T19:50:00.001-05:00

A very interesting cover story in the NYT about the battle about technology in schools taking place in Idaho. As I've written before, I have mixed feelings about this – it is NOT a clear-cut reformers-good, defenders-of-the-status-quo-bad story:

Last year, the state legislature overwhelmingly passed a law that requires all high school students to take some online classes to graduate, and that the students and their teachers be given laptops or tablets. The idea was to establish Idaho's schools as a high-tech vanguard.

To help pay for these programs, the state may have to shift tens of millions of dollars away from salaries for teachers and administrators. And the plan envisions a fundamental change in the role of teachers, making them less a lecturer at the front of the room and more of a guide helping students through lessons delivered on computers.

This change is part of a broader shift that is creating tension — a tension that is especially visible in Idaho but is playing out across the country. Some teachers, even though they may embrace classroom technology, feel policy makers are thrusting computers into classrooms without their input or proper training. And some say they are opposed to shifting money to online classes and other teaching methods whose benefits remain unproved.

"Teachers don't object to the use of technology," said Sabrina Laine, vice president of the American Institutes for Research, which has studied the views of the nation's teachers using grants from organizations like the Gates and Ford Foundations. "They object to being given a resource with strings attached, and without the needed support to use it effectively to improve student learning."

In Idaho, teachers have been in open revolt. They marched on the capital last spring, when the legislation was under consideration. They complain that lawmakers listened less to them than to heavy lobbying by technology companies, including Intel and Apple. Teacher and parent groups gathered 75,000 verified signatures, more than was needed, to put a referendum on the ballot next November that could overturn the law.

"This technology is being thrown on us. It's being thrown on parents and thrown on kids," said Ms. Rosenbaum, 32, who has written letters to the governor and schools superintendent. In her letters she tells them she is a Republican and a Marine, because, she says, it has become fashionable around the country to dismiss complaining teachers as union-happy liberals.

"I fought for my country," she said. "Now I'm fighting for my kids."

Gov. C. L. Otter, known as Butch, and Tom Luna, the schools superintendent, who have championed the plan, said teachers had been misled by their union into believing the changes were a step toward replacing them with computers. Mr. Luna said the teachers' anger was intensified by other legislation, also passed last spring, that eliminated protections for teachers with seniority and replaced it with a pay-for-performance system.

Some teachers have also expressed concern that teaching positions could be eliminated and their raises reduced to help offset the cost of the technology.

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

Grading the Digital School

Teachers Resist High-Tech Push in Idaho Schools

Jim Wilson/The New York Times

Ann Rosenbaum, a teacher at Post Falls High School in Idaho, tries to engage students with questions, using the Socratic method, instead of relying on technology.

By MATT RICHTEL

Published: January 3, 2012

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/04/technology/idaho-teachers-fight-a-reliance-on-computers.html

POST FALLS, Idaho — Ann Rosenbaum, a former military police officer in the Marines, does not shrink from a fight, having even survived a close encounter with a car bomb in Iraq. Her latest conflict is quite different: she is now a high school teacher, and she and many of her peers in Idaho are resisting a statewide plan that dictates how computers should be used in classrooms.

From the Fab Five to the Three Rs

2012-01-16T19:49:00.001-05:00

Kudos to former NBA star Jalen Rose:

Those efforts drove him to start the school in the first place, since he saw many promising high-schoolers who had earned straight-As but couldn't score higher than a 14 out of 36 on the ACT. "What were they teaching these kids? There are just so many poor-performing schools here, and there are so many kids in our city that want to do the right thing, and families that want to put their kids in a quality school. But they can't."

So he threw out a life raft by starting his academy. "Only 28% of ninth graders in the Detroit public schools are graduating high school," he notes. The rest "become the statistic you read about in the newspaper. They are the people that are robbing you at the ATM machine."

Why's the situation so bad? "It starts at the top. A lot of the schools are poorly managed," he says. "Some of them have models that aren't set up for success. The kids have no interaction. They get lost."

At the Leadership Academy, "we have a 20-to-1 student teacher ratio and 10-to-1 in math and English. We want to invest in every young man or woman who comes here." That means tailoring achievement standards for every student. "There may be a kid reading at a fourth-grade level [when he enters ninth grade] who when he graduates is reading at a tenth-grade level. That's a victory."

His school also doesn't have tenure for teachers. "I hate tenure. Tenure allows teachers to put their feet up on the desk and possibly have a job forever. That's why I got turned on to charter schools. It's a business model. Every employee and every teacher will be monitored by performance."

Kids too: "We have a code of conduct here. If they act up, they're suspended. They come back with a better attitude."

What about the risk that setting up a high school means intervening too late in kids' lives? "I feel like the eight most at-risk years for young men or young women are the four they're in high school and the four they should be in college. You ask any adult whose dreams didn't come true or goals they didn't get accomplished, they point back to that eight-year period when they started driving, their hormones started taking over, they started having sex, they started partying," says Mr. Rose. "That's when you're in a position to make those poor decisions and actually execute them. That's why I really wanted to influence this age group."

He also wants to influence parents—empowering them to demand better schools for their kids. The rigid system of school boards telling families where their kids have to go to school perpetuates poverty and a sense of entrapment, he says: "Forty-seven percent of Detroit area parents are functionally illiterate. So that puts their kids at a real handicap. Say my mom is one of those 47%. That doesn't mean that I shouldn't have a fair opportunity for a quality public education. But since my mom is functionally illiterate and we grew up on the west side of Detroit, I'm forced to go to this school that has been a poor-performing school for 30 years."

"There should be parental choice," he says clearly. "Schools should be open. If it's a public education, and the school in your district is poor-performing, you should be able to put your student or kid wherever you want."

Choice could be relatively easily implemented, he says. "I'm a taxpaying citizen, right? So if I'm paying $4,000 worth of taxes and I don't want my kid to go to this school, why can't they give me my $4,000 and allow me to pick where I want to put my kids?"

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

THE WEEKEND INTERVIEW
DECEMBER 31, 2011
http://professional.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970203413304577088270404438882.html

From the Fab Five to the Three Rs

After 20 years of basketball fame and fortune, Jalen Rose returns home to Detroit to promote school reform and parental choice.

By STEPHEN MOORE

The Top Eight Books of 2011 That School Reformers Should Read

2012-01-16T19:47:00.001-05:00

RiShawn Biddle with the best 8 ed-reform books of 2011 (sadly, I've only had a chance to read two, both of which I highly recommend, Class Warfare and parts of Special Interest):

What to read? These days, this isn't exactly a question likely on the minds of school reformers. After all, between the dirge of reports, the flurry of op-eds, and the hundreds of tweets churned out daily, there is certainly a lot to read. But everyone needs to take a few days out of the year to just plain read a book. Why? Partly for pleasure. But also because we all need intellectual stimulation, and to glean new ideas and insights on how to overhaul a failed education system; there is so much that can be gotten out of one good book. More importantly, we have to show the importance of literacy own children (including nephews and nieces) and not just talk about it.

This year, Dropout Nation is offering its help by selecting The Top Eight Books of 2011 That School Reformers Should Read. Culled from more than 100 books, the selections include a wide range of texts. This includes three books that aren't specifically focused on education; after all, school reformers need to continually glean lessons from history and from other sectors in order to build up the movement's intellectual caliber. (It also makes one well-rounded.)

The selections were judged on four criteria: Does it have a strong narrative or polemical power (also known as "is it well-written" or, would Mrs. Dropout Nation fall to sleep on it)? Are the lessons relevant to the reform of American public education? Is the book thought-provoking (or does it offer new arguments or new thinking on familiar issues)? And would you pay at least $14 to put it on your Nook Color or Kindle Fire (or, for those of you still reading traditional books, pay at least $20 for the paperback or hardcover)?

Below are Dropout Nation's selections. Offer your own suggestions in the comments. And, most importantly, read, read, read.

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

The Top Eight Books of 2011 That School Reformers Should Read

December 20, 2011 1 Comment by Dropout Nation Editorial Board

http://dropoutnation.net/2011/12/20/the-top-eight-books-of-2011-that-school-reformers-should-read/

Harder for Americans to Rise From Lower Rungs

2012-01-16T19:46:00.001-05:00

A VERY interesting and important article about lack of class mobility in the U.S. – and how even some Republicans are acknowledging it. There are many explanations, but I think the single biggest one is the crappy schools that this country systematically provides poor kids:

Benjamin Franklin did it. Henry Ford did it. And American life is built on the faith that others can do it, too: rise from humble origins to economic heights. "Movin' on up," George Jefferson-style, is not only a sitcom song but a civil religion.

But many researchers have reached a conclusion that turns conventional wisdom on its head: Americans enjoy less economic mobility than their peers in Canada and much of Western Europe. The mobility gap has been widely discussed in academic circles, but a sour season of mass unemployment and street protests has moved the discussion toward center stage.

Former Senator Rick Santorum of Pennsylvania, a Republican candidate for president, warned this fall that movement "up into the middle income is actually greater, the mobility in Europe, than it is in America." National Review, a conservative thought leader, wrote that "most Western European and English-speaking nations have higher rates of mobility." Even Representative Paul D. Ryan, a Wisconsin Republican who argues that overall mobility remains high, recently wrote that "mobility from the very bottom up" is "where the United States lags behind."

Liberal commentators have long emphasized class, but the attention on the right is largely new.

"It's becoming conventional wisdom that the U.S. does not have as much mobility as most other advanced countries," said Isabel V. Sawhill, an economist at the Brookings Institution. "I don't think you'll find too many people who will argue with that."

One reason for the mobility gap may be the depth of American poverty, which leaves poor children starting especially far behind. Another may be the unusually large premiums that American employers pay for college degrees. Since children generally follow their parents' educational trajectory, that premium increases the importance of family background and stymies people with less schooling.

At least five large studies in recent years have found the United States to be less mobile than comparable nations. A project led by Markus Jantti, an economist at a Swedish university, found that 42 percent of American men raised in the bottom fifth of incomes stay there as adults. That shows a level of persistent disadvantage much higher than in Denmark (25 percent) and Britain (30 percent) — a country famous for its class constraints.

Meanwhile, just 8 percent of American men at the bottom rose to the top fifth. That compares with 12 percent of the British and 14 percent of the Danes.

Despite frequent references to the United States as a classless society, about 62 percent of Americans (male and female) raised in the top fifth of incomes stay in the top two-fifths, according to researchby the Economic Mobility Project of the Pew Charitable Trusts. Similarly, 65 percent born in the bottom fifth stay in the bottom two-fifths.

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

Harder for Americans to Rise From Lower Rungs

By JASON DePARLE

Published: January 4, 2012

http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2012/01/04/us/comparing-economic-mobility.html

Want a Job? Go to College, and Don’t Major in Architecture

2012-01-16T19:45:00.001-05:00

Very interesting data on unemployment rates and wages, especially for recent college grads, by college major:

For all the bellyaching about wasted degrees and the many indebted grads stuck on their parents' couches, recent college graduates are still doing a lot better than their less-educated counterparts. Unemployment for new graduates is around 8.9 percent; the rate for workers with only a high school degree is nearly three times as high, at 22.9 percent.

That's according to a new report [PDF] from Georgetown's Center on Education and the Workforce. The report also had some fascinating statistics on earnings and jobless rates by college major, something we've written about before.

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

January 5, 2012, 11:00 am

Want a Job? Go to College, and Don't Major in Architecture

By CATHERINE RAMPELL

http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/01/05/want-a-job-go-to-college-and-dont-major-in-architecture

Charters Don't Have to Pay Rent, for Now

2012-01-16T19:44:00.001-05:00

Great news for NY charters:

Charters Don't Have to Pay Rent, for Now

Jan. 3, 2012, 2:39 p.m.

http://www.nytimes.com/schoolbook/2012/01/03/charters-dont-have-to-pay-rent-for-now

By Anna M. Phillips

A state Supreme Court judge has rejected a request from public school parents and advocacy organizations for a preliminary injunction to require New York City to charge charter schools rent for the space they occupy inside public school buildings.

The ruling, by Justice Paul G. Feinman last Wednesday, said the parents and organizations had failed to prove that the traditional public schools would lose substantive benefits if the city continued to give space rent-free before resolution of a broader lawsuit. Justice Feinman did not take a stand on whether charter schools should have to cover the costs of operating in public space, the question at the center of the suit, which contends in part that the city is owed at least $100 million.

"While $100 million is no small sum, particularly in dire budgetary times, apparently this represents but a small part of the B.O.E.'s budget, and there is no guarantee at all that any part of such sum, if returned to the B.O.E., would manifest itself in more teachers for the public schools plaintiffs represent (or for any public school), as plaintiffs claim," the justice wrote, referring to the city's Education Department.

Charging charter schools for rent, which the city is legally allowed to do, would "tip the equities seriously out of balance" if done midyear, the justice wrote, potentially resulting in the closing of numerous charter schools.

Arthur Z. Schwartz, a lawyer for the parents and advocacy organizations, said the case would go to trial.

"The judge didn't rule on the merits so the claim is going to proceed," he said.

Charter school advocates counted the ruling as a victory.

"While today's ruling is only preliminary, we are confident that we will prevail ultimately as well," said James Merriman, head of the New York City Charter School Center. "It is past time for these pointless attacks on charter schools to come to an end and instead to begin to work together to provide children a great public education in New York City."

Two-Thirds of Public School Parents Believe New Orleans Schools are Better Than Before

2012-01-16T19:43:00.001-05:00

Great news from New Orleans as well:

Two-Thirds of Public School Parents Believe
New Orleans Schools are Better Than Before

90% of parents also strongly agree that school choice is important

A new study, released as part of the "Spotlight on Choice" project by the Scott S. Cowen Institute for Public Education Initiatives at Tulane University, finds that two-thirds of New Orleans parents agree that the city's school system is better than the school system that existed before Hurricane Katrina. This is a dramatic improvement over the 31% who
agreed in the same survey in 2009.

In addition, 90% of parents agree that it's important to be able to choose where their child attends school.

This new data – coupled with continued gains in student achievement – provides a fuller picture of how families experience New Orleans' predominantly charter school system.

The lessons are clear: our schools are improving and school choice is fundamental.

Of course, much work remains, but the data gives reason for continued optimism.

To read more about the Scott S. Cowen Institute for Public Education Initiatives' third annual public opinion poll,click

here.

For December 14, 2011 coverage on nola.com, click here.

The 2011 EIA Public Education Quotes of the Year

2012-01-16T19:40:00.001-05:00

Some great quotes Mike Antonucci has compiled!

The Education Intelligence Agency

COMMUNIQUÉ – January 3, 2012

On the Web at http://www.eiaonline.com

The 2011 EIA Public Education Quotes of the Year

EIA is proud to present the 2011 Public Education Quotes of the Year, in countdown order. Enjoy!

10) "That's what you're deciding on today - about whether or not you want to inject yourself into the individual, private decisions that employees make about their money." - Kevin Watson, a lobbyist for the Florida Education Association, on a bill in the state legislature that would require unions to get written authorization from members in order to use dues for political purposes. (March 21 Florida Times-Union)

9) "The governor has selected some of the smartest policy thinkers in California. They're experienced, they're thoughtful and they're largely independent minded, with the exception of the CTA staffer." - Bruce Fuller, professor of education at UC Berkeley, commenting on Gov. Brown's appointment of California Teachers Association lobbyist Patricia Ann Rucker to the state board of education. (January 8 Los Angeles Times)

8) "In the 30-some years we were part of the (American Federation of Teachers union), we never had to use their services. There were never any grievances that warranted that. We really - and I'm going to be honest - never really got much out of it.Jump

" - Becky Seitz, former president of the AFT affiliate in North Cape, Wisconsin. (December 10 Journal-Times)

7) "It appears that budgeting errors were made. It's not good fiscal sound practice to spend more money than what you have coming in.Jump

" - Broward Teachers Union communications director John Ristow. (December 6 NBC-TV Miami)

6) "It makes perfect sense to me that students in the Education Department of a university would have the highest GPAs because they are being taught by trained educators. I would expect the lowest GPAs to be among the math and engineering students because mathematicians have still not figured out how to teach math." - Educator and author Nancy Illing, commenting on a story about grade inflation at teachers' colleges. (June 10 Teacher Beat)

5) "The fact that we have so many private schools is detrimental to the public school system." - Shirley Parola, a retired teacher, speaking at an education reform forum in Hawaii. (May 5Honolulu Star-Advertiser)

4) "Sixty-seven is kind of advanced." - California Teachers Association spokesman Frank Wells, commenting on the plan by 73-year-old Gov. Jerry Brown to raise the public employee retirement age to 67. (October 30 Bloomberg)

3) "I disagree with him completely that our system is broken. It's not our system, it's the preparation of our kids these days. For my school, is it my fault that students come to me in the eighth grade and read at a second grade level?" - Ruby Caliendo, a middle school teacher in Nevada, commenting on Gov. Brian Sandoval's budget address. (January 25 Las Vegas Sun)

2) "Even Jesus needed an executive session with his disciples." - Bruce Cole of the Colorado Springs Education Association, explaining why the union doesn't want teacher contract negotiations conducted in public. (March 9 Colorado Springs Gazette)

1) "If you want to divide that $240,000 into the amount of hours spent, I think you would find that the per hour was probably not much at all, considering the work that had to be done." - Former National Education Association President Reg Weaver, explaining why he deserves his $242,657 annual pension from the state of Illinois. (October 23 Chicago Tribune)

# # #

The Education Intelligence Agency conducts public education research, analysis and investigations. E-Mail: mike@eiaonline.com

Matt Damon and Mother Reject Union's Award

2012-01-16T19:39:00.001-05:00

This is too funny (see full letter at the end of this email):

The actor Matt Damon and his mother, a professor of education, on Wednesday turned down an award from the country's largest teachers union after reading an opinion article that the union's president had co-authored with the founder of Teach for America.

Writing that she was "confused by your collaboration" with Teach for America, Dr. Nancy Carlsson-Paige said she and her son, Mr. Damon, no longer desired to be nominated for the National Education Association's Friend of Education Award.

http://www.nytimes.com/schoolbook/2012/01/05/matt-damon-and-mother-reject-unions-award/

Matt Damon and Mother Reject Union's Award

Jan. 5, 2012, 11:25 a.m.

By Anna M. Phillips

12:19 p.m. | Updated The actor Matt Damon and his mother, a professor of education, on Wednesday turned down an award from the country's largest teachers union after reading an opinion article that the union's president had co-authored with the founder of Teach for America.

In the opinion piece that Dr. Carlsson-Paige referred to, Dennis Van Roekel, president of the N.E.A., and Wendy Kopp, founder of T.F.A., urged the importance of evaluating and improving teacher training programs across the country. Yet in her e-mail to Mr. Van Roekel, Dr. Carlsson-Paige said she finds this message somewhat disingenuous on the part of T.F.A.

"I am very familiar with TFA and believe that its short-term, minimal training of teachers undermines teacher quality and harms children who too often get an inadequate education with its teachers," the e-mail states.

Already a celebrity in the entertainment arena, Mr. Damon became one in the education world during a rally in Washington last July, where he publicly opposed the emphasis on standardized testing in public schools and the pressure educators are under to teach to those tests.

"This has been a horrible decade for teachers," he told the crowd, according to a report by the Washington Post. "The next time you feel down or exhausted . . . please know there are millions of people behind you."

Dr. Carlsson-Paige is an education teacher at Lesley University in Cambridge, Mass., and founded the university's Center for Peaceable Schools and Communities, and focuses on the impact of violence on children.

On Thursday, Mr. Van Roekel issued a written response to Dr. Carlsson-Paige's letter, saying:

"I respect Matt Damon and thank him for his support of public education."

"I believe NEA should talk to those who support public education, even if we don't agree on everything, and work together to serve students.

Wendy Kopp and I agree that students will benefit from stronger
recruiting and teacher preparation.

"NEA isn't going to quit fighting for students and our members, or for stronger teacher preparation. In fact, better teacher preparation is part of our 3-point plan on Leading the Profession that was released last month."

Dr. Carlsson-Paige's letter:

From: Nancy Carlsson-Paige
Date: Wed, 4 Jan 2012 20:03:02 -0500
To: Dennis Van Roekel, Paul Toner
Subject: Friend of Education
January 4, 2012

Dear Mr. Van Roekel,

You wrote a lovely letter of appreciation last August to my son Matt Damon after he stood with teachers at the Save Our Schools rally. I was so happy to read your letter and forward it on to Matt.

In October, Paul Toner, President of the MTA, asked if Matt and I would accept the nomination for the Friend of Education Award to be given by the NEA in July, 2012. After some discussion and deliberation, Matt and I decided we would accept the nomination if it became a reality.

Recently, I read the opinion piece you wrote with Wendy Kopp in USA Today and was upset and confused by your collaboration with Teach for America. I am a life long teacher educator. I believe that one of the first things we must do to improve our nation's schools is to extend, strengthen, and support teacher preparation. I am very familiar with TFA and believe that its short-term, minimal training of teachers undermines teacher quality and harms children who too often get an inadequate education with its teachers.

In your letter to Matt in August, you wrote about a first-grade teacher who was retiring because she wouldn't teach to a script. You said that teaching to the test strips teachers of their professionalism. Yet it is the best-trained, most knowledgeable teachers who can offer the most meaningful, excellent education in this test-driven climate. It's the under-prepared teachers who are most often teaching to tests and using scripts because they don't have the knowledge base to do otherwise.

I have decided that because of your collaboration with TFA, it would not be wise for me or for Matt to be nominated for the Friend of Education Award. I regret this turn of events.

Nancy Carlsson-Paige
Professor Emerita
Lesley University

HAPPY NEW YEAR!

2012-01-04T13:37:00.001-05:00

Here's our holiday card. HAPPY NEW YEAR!

Here’s to the crazy ones

2012-01-04T13:36:00.003-05:00

A great quote to start the year on: I'm halfway through Walter Isaacson's new book on Steve Jobs, which I'm really enjoying. It includes the text from one of Apple's first commercials after Jobs returned to company, Think Different, and it really resonated with me because it captures we reformers (my emphasis added):

Here's to the crazy ones. The misfits. The rebels. The troublemakers. The round pegs in the square holes. The ones who sees things differently. They not fond of rules. And they have no respect for the status quo. You can quote them, disagree with them, glorify or vilify them. About the only thing you can't do is ignore them. Because they change things. They push the human race forward. And while some may see them as the crazy ones, we see genius. Because the only people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world are the ones who do.

You can watch the commercial at: www.youtube.com/watch?v=4oAB83Z1ydE

In Washington, Large Rewards in Teacher Pay

2012-01-04T13:36:00.001-05:00

STOP THE PRESSES!!! A VERY important article about the merit pay system in DC, which was implemented in conjunction with the IMPACT teacher evaluation system. Critics of merit pay like to point out that there's little evidence that it works, but that's because, until now, it's never really been tried (the unions coopted the pilot program in NYC, for example, and turned it into a hollow shell of a true merit pay system). In DC, there's a REAL evaluation system (not, as critics maintain, driven solely by test scores; the biggest part of it is based on multiple classroom evaluations) with REAL consequences, both good and bad: the best teachers each BIG rewards ("We want to make great teachers rich," said Jason Kamras, the district's chief of human capital) and ineffective teachers are identified and given support, but if they don't improve, they're out of a job;

During her first six years of teaching in this city's struggling schools, Tiffany Johnson got a series of small raises that brought her annual salary to $63,000, from about $50,000. This year, her seventh, Ms. Johnson earns $87,000.

That latest 38 percent jump, unheard of in public education, came after Ms. Johnson was rated "highly effective" two years in a row under Washington's new teacher evaluation system. Those ratings also netted her back-to-back bonuses totaling $30,000.

"Lots of teachers leave the profession, but this has kept me invested to stay," said Ms. Johnson, 29, who is a special-education teacher at the Ron H. Brown Middle School in Northeast Washington. "I know they value me."

That is exactly the idea behind what admirers consider the nation's most advanced merit pay system for public school teachers. This fall, the District of Columbia Public Schools gave sizable bonuses to 476 of its 3,600 educators, with 235 of them getting unusually large pay raises.

"We want to make great teachers rich," said Jason Kamras, the district's chief of human capital.

The profession is notorious for losing thousands of its brightest young teachers within a few years, which many experts attribute to low starting salaries and a traditional step-raise structure that rewards years of service and academic degrees rather than success in the classroom.

Many districts have tried over the last decade to experiment with performance pay systems but have frequently been thwarted by powerful teachers' unions that negotiated the traditional pay structures. Those that have implemented merit pay have generally offered bonuses of a few thousand dollars, often as an incentive to work in hard-to-staff schools or to work extra hours to improve students' scores. Several respected studies have found that such payments have scant effect on student achievement; since most good teachers already work hard, before and after class, there are limits to how much more can be coaxed out of them with financial incentives.

But Washington is the leader among a handful of large cities that are seeking a more fundamental overhaul of teacher pay. Alongside the aggressive new evaluation system that has made the city famous for firing poor-performing teachers — more than 400 over the past two years — is a bonus-and-raise structure aimed at luring talented people to the profession and persuading the most effective to stick with it.

"The most important role for incentives is in shaping who enters the teaching profession and who stays," said Eric A. Hanushek, a professor of economics at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University. "Washington's incentive system will attract talented teachers, and it'll help keep the best ones."

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

In Washington, Large Rewards in Teacher Pay

Tiffany Johnson, a special-education teacher, got a large raise after earning the rating "highly effective" for two years in a row.

By SAM DILLON

Published: December 31, 2011

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/01/education/big-pay-days-in-washington-dc-schools-merit-system.html

Some wise thoughts from a friend:

2012-01-04T13:35:00.001-05:00

Some wise thoughts from a friend:

Your stuff on poverty was right on the money! The message really needn't be that hard to comprehend: First, schools serving poor kids can get so much better, they can even be stellar (some already are), and those of us who believe in justice, equality and human dignity for poor kids have an obligation to bust our asses to make schools great. Full stop, no excuses, let's get moving.

Second, where you find broken schools you are also likely to find a whole bunch of other broken stuff that is deeply connected to poverty (broken social service systems, housing, medical care, criminal process, and more). The same poor kids who are screwed by the broken schools are screwed by the broken everything else. Those of us who believe in justice, equality and human dignity have an obligation to fix that too. Of course, nobody can work on everything at once, so we pick our battles. But as we slog away in our corner of the world we should never lose sight of the larger justice struggle either.

Some great quotes

2012-01-04T13:34:00.001-05:00

Some great quotes (thanks to Gwen Samuel of the State of CT Black Alliance):

· "I for one believe that if you give people a thorough understanding of what confronts them and the basic causes that produce it, they'll create their own program, and when the people create a program, you get action." Malcolm X

· Education then, beyond all other devices of human origin, is the great equalizer of the conditions of men, the balance-wheel of the social machinery. Horace Mann

· Individual rights are not subject to a public vote; a majority has no right to vote away the rights of a minority; the political function of rights is precisely to protect minorities from oppression by majorities (and the smallest minority on earth is the individual). Ayn Rand

· People pay for what they do and still more for what they have allowed themselves to become. And they pay for it very simply; by the lives they lead. James A. Baldwin

· Now I say that with cruelty and oppression it is everybody's business to interfere when they see it. Anna Sewell

· The ultimate tragedy is not the oppression and cruelty by the bad people but the silence over that by the good people. Martin Luther King, Jr.

· Education is our only political safety. Outside of this ark all is deluge. Horace Mann

A teacher who is attempting to teach without inspiring the pupil with a desire to learn is hammering on cold iron.
Horace Mann

Teacher Evaluation Effort Derails

2012-01-04T13:32:00.003-05:00

I'm not surprised by this stalemate. The last thing the unions want is a teacher evaluation system, even a fair and effective one (despite their claims to the contrary), as it would conflict with union "solidarity" – hard to find better evidence of the longshoreman's union mentality of the teachers union – and expose as a lie the nonsense that teachers have little or no impact on students, especially those from disadvantaged backgrounds. The unions are also betting that they'll get the money anyway, so it's up to John King and Meryl Tisch (and, at the national level, Obama and Duncan) to stand firm and make sure there are consequences:

Plans for a new teacher rating system for New York City schools that would include measures of student performance—a hallmark of national education reform efforts—were dealt a setback on Friday after negotiations broke down between the city and the teachers union.

The failure to reach an agreement before a year-end deadline had an immediate, if minimal, effect: The state suspended a program to funnel nearly $60 million in federal funds to the city to improve a small number of troubled schools. The money represents less than 0.3% of the Department of Education's annual budget.

More broadly, however, the breakdown suggests a stalemate over implementing new teacher evaluations for the entire city school system, a state requirement that's also one of the most ambitious items on Mayor Michael Bloomberg's schools agenda. In addition, including student performance in teacher evaluations is a key component of President Barack Obama's education policies.

…Under the new system in New York City, an analysis of student scores on state tests would count for 20% of teachers' ratings, while another 20% would come from new tests the city is developing. The rest would be based on a rubric that includes things such as lesson plan preparations and use of tests and data in instruction. Also included would be classroom observations by principals, but none by peer teachers, which the union supports.

The sticking point for a deal was whether teachers should be able to appeal a low rating to an outside arbitrator. Union officials said an appeal process would prevent principals from abusing their authority, but the city dismissed it as an unnecessary layer of bureaucracy.

"They were never really serious about getting this done," Mr. Mulgrew said of the Department of Education. Privately, department officials had similar complaints about the union.

Mr. Walcott accused the union of showing it "is more interested in protecting the worst performing teachers than in implementing a meaningful teacher evaluation system that will benefit our students."

"The union is so determined to create procedural hurdles that they are willing to jeopardize tens of millions of dollars for our schools," he said in a statement.

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

NY SCHOOLS
DECEMBER 31, 2011
http://professional.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970204720204577131102552452994.html

Teacher Evaluation Effort Derails

By LISA FLEISHER

Schools marred by testing scandals in 2011

2012-01-04T13:32:00.001-05:00

This article in the USA Today covers the testing scandals that have bubbled up around the country:

By the time it's over, 2011 may well go down as the Year of the Test Scandal. From Waterbury to Atlanta to Asbury Park, N.J., public schools came under fire this year from media and public officials after investigations found evidence of test tampering by educators. The revelations came as schools, nearly a decade into the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) era of test-based accountability, struggled to increase the percentage of students deemed "proficient" on state math and reading tests.

Among the most high-profile cases:

•In Atlanta, three years after the Journal-Constitution began probing unusual gains on test scores, a state investigation in July found that 178 teachers and principals had tampered with tests over the past decade. Last week, investigators said educators in 11 schools in southwest Georgia's Dougherty County also had cheated.

•In Washington, federal investigators are assisting a city probe of high erasure rates on math and reading exams after a USA TODAY investigation in March raised doubts about scores in more than 100 schools.

•In Camden, N.J., last month, school officials paid an $860,000 settlement to a former high school principal who claimed his superiors forced him to alter student test scores. In July, state officials ordered an investigation of 34 schools after an analysis of standardized test scores revealed high wrong-to-right erasure rates.

More suspicion

As in Atlanta and D.C., the revelations came to light after news organizations statistically analyzed improbably rising scores. This month, the New Jersey Department of Education reimbursed The Pressin Asbury Park, N.J., $40,290 for legal fees tied to the newspaper's investigation of school test tampering. The state said it had blacked out the names of schools in its "erasure analysis" reports over three years in anticipation of its own investigation.

Testing critics say the cases highlight test scores that seem too good to be true — and have emboldened other news media organizations to take a closer look.

"There is much more suspicion of unusual score gains and much more inclination to ask questions and dig," says Bob Schaffer of the National Center for Fair and Open Testing, also known as FairTest.

…"It was a huge year for this," says Mike Petrilli of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, a Washington education think tank. He says cheating stories were "big news for a while, but I don't think it changed the direction of public policy."

Petrilli, who admits that the split between the scandal and its practical effects offers "some amount of cognitive dissonance," says lawmakers are still comfortable tying teacher pay to test scores. Looking beyond the bubble-sheet scandals, he says, they know that a new generation of computer-based tests will be harder to game. For one thing, teachers won't be able to take test papers home because there will be no papers — by 2014, most of the tests will be completed online. And the new tests will minimize the number of easy-to-erase multiple-choice questions.

"I think there's the sense that the accountability conversation has moved on," Petrilli says.

I think Petrilli is right that the practical effects haven't been major, but it's critically important that reformers get in front of this. This is what I wrote in July as the Atlanta testing scandal came to light (http://edreform.blogspot.com/2011/07/systematic-cheating-is-found-in.html):

Defenders of the status quo will surely try to use this scandal to try to roll back any type of accountability system, but (as always) they'll be wrong. Of course adults who are lousy at their jobs will try to cheat if they worry about being exposed and possibly losing their jobs – we reformers need to be VERY aware of this. But the answer to this is to make sure that cheating is difficult – and the consequences for doing so severe. For example, I think every teacher who cheated should be fired immediately and charges should be brought against Beverly Hall.

I added this in a subsequent email (http://edreform.blogspot.com/2011/07/atlanta-schools-created-culture-of.html):

I don't think I've ever written these words before, but Diane Ravitch has it exactly right: "To say that tests create cheating is wrong. What creates cheating is people who cheat. If we spent as much time teaching kids as showing them the answer, they might have learned to read."

OK, OK, pick yourself up off the floor – Ravitch didn't really say this about the Atlanta scandal: she said it about a NYC scandal in 1999 (www.nytimes.com/1999/12/12/weekinreview/ideas-trends-crossed-fingers-liar-liar-pants-on-fire.html), before she went off on a crazed personal vendetta, lost her marbles, and became a spokesperson for the unions. While it's hard to believe now, she really used to be top notch.

This is what RiShawn Biddle wrote at the time (http://dropoutnation.net/2011/07/15/three-thoughts-weingarten-coulson-atlanta):

what education traditionalists are doing is simply trying to let teachers and principals off the hook for actually doing their job: Ensuring that every child gets a high-quality education, is proficient in reading and math, and has the skills they need to succeed in traditional and technical colleges, and in the working world. Certainly, teaching is a difficult career, and becoming even more challenging; there are plenty of teachers who are learning that they lack the subject-matter knowledge, instructional competence, entrepreneurial drive, zeal for improving the lives of children and empathy for kids of all backgrounds needed to be high-quality instructors. There are also principals who now realize that they cannot handle the complexities of leading schools in an age in which using data to support the work of good-to-great teachers, get rid of laggards, and revamp school activities, is more critical than ever. They should leave the profession. Supporting efforts to cheat kids out of accurate and honest assessment of their achievement — and denying them a high-quality instruction — is unacceptable and should not be used by anyone to justify their opposition to reform.

Meanwhile the Atlanta cheating scandal, massive as it is, pales in comparison to the pervasive practices in American public education that deny far too many children the high-quality education they deserve.

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Schools marred by testing scandals in 2011

By Greg Toppo, USA TODAY

Updated 9h 46m ago

http://www.usatoday.com/news/education/story/2011-12-29/schools-test-scandal/52274708/1

Are D.C. school officials hiding test data?

2012-01-04T13:31:00.001-05:00

Jay Mathews is raising fair questions in DC:

Caveon visited some schools and did some interviews. In nearly every case it accepted as "plausible" the explanations it got from school personnel for the wrong-to-right erasures – for example, that students were trained to check their answers. That explanation makes no sense to me or to several veteran educators I have asked about it. Do third-graders really check their answers and suddenly realize that many are wrong? Or are they just eager to get the test over and go to recess?

Caveon did not interview students or compare students' test scores with their scores on previous tests, which might also have indicated tampering by teachers or principals bent on showing score improvements. A much more thorough Georgia state investigation of test tampering in Atlanta uncovered massive fraud by principals and teachers.

So why not release the D.C. 2011 erasure results now? Is it possible that OSSE officials do not want a repeat of what happened the last time it released erasure results from previous years to reporters for USA Today and to my colleague Bill Turque. The USA Today report last March, which included precise data for more than 100 schools, showed incredible numbers of changed answers. That created widespread doubt about the D.C. results, forced D.C. Schools Chancellor Kaya Henderson to ask the D.C. inspector general to investigate, and created great interest in what the 2011 erasure results would show.

I am sure the results of the new investigation will be interesting when we finally get to see them. But I strongly suspect that anyone able to read this newspaper would be able to provide an intelligent and useful analysis right now of what is going on, if only OSSE would release the data that up to now it has not shown to even its own technical advisers.

I'm certain that Michelle Rhee didn't condone cheating or look the other way, as Beverly Hall did in Atlanta, but I also have no doubt that there was an increase in cheating in DC after she implemented the IMPACT system. Both the resulting job losses as well as the big bonuses make the incentives to cheat greater in DC than perhaps anywhere, so there needs to be careful monitoring going forward and a full investigation and complete openness about the past few years. I suspect what we'll find is that there was cheating by a few percent of the teachers (all of whom need to be fired, along with their principals if they knew of or directed this) – but that DC's progress in recent years is very genuine.

Here's what I wrote about this in August (http://edreform.blogspot.com/2011/08/eager-for-spotlight-but-not-if-it-is-on.html):

Here's Michael Winerip (who else?) on the supposed DC testing scandal that Michelle Rhee is supposedly trying to cover up.

And yet, as voracious as she is for the media spotlight, Ms. Rhee will not talk to USA Today.

At the end of March, three of the paper's reporters — Marisol Bello, Jack Gillum and Greg Toppo — broke a story about the high rate of erasures and suspiciously high test-score gains at 41 Washington schools while Ms. Rhee was chancellor.

In reality, the situation is far more complex than Winerip lets on. It's an extremely important issue, worthy of real thought and discussion. First, it's blindingly obvious that if one introduces rewards for good performance and penalties (including loss of job) for poor performance, and the way performance is evaluated is, in part, via tests, then there is strong incentive to cheat on these tests and, given the opportunity, many people will do so. (Do you think the College Board understands this when administering SATs, achievement tests, AP exams, etc.???) Therefore, we reformers, as we introduce accountability systems into school systems that previously had none (shocking, isn't it?), need to be VERY conscious of this issue and take strong steps to deter cheating, ideally before it happens (by having rigorous monitoring) and also afterward, by examining erasures, statistical anomalies, etc., thoroughly investigating suspicious activity, and really punishing those who cheat. Otherwise, we'll get more Atlantas and that would be a DISASTER for reform efforts.

Despite the fact that union members engaged in the bad behavior and nobody thinks Beverly Hall was a real reformer, deniers like Ravitch are ironically using the Atlanta scandal as a weapon against reform: "You see, this is what happens when you introduce accountability, in part by using tests. The poor teachers, under so much pressure, have no choice but to cheat." Could you imagine anyone saying, "We're not going to publish money managers' performance figures because if we did so, they'd have incentive to engage in insider trading."??? No, instead, the SEC carefully monitors insider trading, investigates suspicious activity (including wiretaps, subpoenas, etc.), and puts bad people in jail. That's what needs to happen in our school systems as well…

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

Are D.C. school officials hiding test data?

By Jay Mathews

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/class-struggle/post/are-dc-school-officials-hiding-test-data/2011/12/24/gIQAjoP2IP_blog.html#pagebreak

Suspicious DC CAS erasures down in 2011, but OSSE withholds school-by-school data

2012-01-04T13:30:00.001-05:00

Perhaps in response to Jay Mathews's column, at least some of the DC data was released:

After months of FOIA requests and general nagging, the Office of the State Superintendent of Education has finally released data that appear to show rates of suspicious DC CAS answer sheet erasures continuing to decline in 2011.

An analysis of 2011 reading, math, science and biology exams by their publisher, CTB/McGraw-Hill, shows that 128 classrooms in public and public charter schools in the District had high rates of wrong-to-right erasures.

That's a drop of nearly 50 percent from 253 classrooms in 2009. The 128 classrooms represent less than 3 percent of the total number of classrooms in which students were tested.

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

Suspicious DC CAS erasures down in 2011, but OSSE withholds school-by-school data

By Bill Turque

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/dc-schools-insider/post/suspicious-dc-cas-erasures-down-in-2011-but-osse-withholds-school-by-school-data/2011/12/31/gIQA9s7pSP_blog.html

Outside firm will check for cheating on District’s standardized test

2012-01-04T13:29:00.001-05:00

This is good to see as well:

A D.C. government education agency is seeking an outside firm to investigate the city's 2011 standardized test scores.

Officials said the probe will be part of a strengthened set of procedures to ensure the validity of results on the annual D.C. Comprehensive Assessment System. Scores from previous years have come under scrutiny. In May, the District invalidated some 2010 results at three schools after an investigation found evidence of or reasons for a strong suspicion of cheating.

"Testing impropriety is an issue this agency takes very seriously," State Superintendent of Education Hosanna Mahaley said in a statement Friday. "Any violation of security undermines trust and faith in our entire educational system by casting doubt on the positive growth we have begun to see citywide."

The outside firm will review individual classroom results that have been flagged for scrutiny, based on a new set of measures education officials developed to improve test validity, Mahaley spokesman Marc Caposino said Saturday. The measures include monitoring for surprising jumps in performance, unusually uniform classroom performance on tests, and high numbers of answers that have been erased and changed from wrong to right.

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

Outside firm will check for cheating on District's standardized test

By Michael Alison Chandler, Published: December 24

http://www.washingtonpost.com/local/education/outside-firm-will-check-for-cheating-on-districts-standardized-test/2011/12/24/gIQA3bKAGP_story.html

Why 2 Paychecks Are Barely Enough

2012-01-04T13:28:00.001-05:00

Fascinating analysis of how the desire to live in districts with good schools helped fuel the housing bubble and, over the last 40 years, the rise of two-income families:

Why 2 Paychecks Are Barely Enough

ROBERT H. FRANK An economics professor at the Johnson Graduate School of Management at Cornell University.

NYT

www.nytimes.com/2012/01/01/business/from-6-economists-6-ways-to-face-2012-economic-view.html

WHY do many middle-class families now struggle to get by on two paychecks, whereas most got by on just one back in the 1950s and '60s?

The answer, according to "The Two-Income Trap," by Elizabeth Warren and Amelia Warren Tyagi, is that many second paychecks today go toward financing a largely fruitless bidding war for homes in good school districts.

Parents naturally want to send their kids to good schools. But quality is relative. Because the best schools tend to be those serving expensive neighborhoods, parents must outbid 50 percent of other parents with the same goal just to send their children to a school of average quality.

How hard is that? I constructed a measure I call the toil index. It tracks the number of hours a median earner must work each month to earn the implicit rent for the median-priced house.

From 1950 to 1970, when incomes were growing at about the same rate for families up and down the income ladder, the toil index actually declined slightly. But since 1970 — a period during which income inequality has grown — the toil index has risen sharply.

The increase in two-earner households explains only part of it. The climb in the toil index was also driven by the easy credit that fueled the housing bubble, as well as by an expenditure cascade in housing caused by growing income disparities.

Since 1970, the top 1 percent have captured most of the income growth in the nation. Like everyone else, the rich spend more on housing when they have more money. High-end houses become bigger and fancier. That shifts the frame of reference for the near rich, and so on down the income ladder. Because the median hourly wage, adjusted for inflation, has been falling, there's really no other way to explain why the median new house built in the United States in 2007 was about 50 percent larger than its counterpart in 1970.

The increase in the toil index has been spectacular. From a postwar low of 41 hours a month in 1970, it rose to more than 100 hours in 2005. Although it has fallen since the housing bubble burst, the middle-class squeeze persists.

Growing income disparities don't just make the 99 percent angry. They also raise the cost of achieving basic goals.

Two Comics

2012-01-04T13:27:00.001-05:00

Two good comics on some of the unique challenges of educating today's kids:

And:

The parade of life

2012-01-04T13:24:00.001-05:00

My favorite sportswriter, Rick Reilly, with a very powerful, emotional story about organ donors:

But Rudy wasn't there anymore. He was all over America. He had checked the donor box on his driver's license, so his lungs went here, his kidneys there, and his pancreas somewhere else. His heart stayed close, though. It went to a man named Sammy Robinson, 44, in nearby Hughes, Ark., who'd been waiting for eight months.

"Rudy saved my life," Sammy says. "I told his mom, 'I know you lost a son. But I want you to know you've gained another.'"

…There were 65 million registered donors in the U.S. in 2006. Now there are 102 million. That's still only 42 percent of 18-and-over Americans, but people are starting to get it: Death can mean life.

This is the easiest thing you can do to get the new year off to a great start – become an organ donor. Just go to http://donatelife.net/register-now/and select your state.

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

December 29, 2011

The parade of life

By Rick Reilly
ESPN.com
Archive

Best Analogies for success

2012-01-04T13:22:00.001-05:00

With the beginning of a new year, I'd like to step back and share some big-picture thoughts on what success – and a path to get there – might look like. I wrote an article about this in 2005 (full text below and at: http://www.fool.com/investing/high-growth/2005/02/11/learning-from-ideas-for-public-schools.aspx). Here's an excerpt:

Through various organizations I've been involved with over the years, I've studied a wide range of schools -- public, private, charter, parochial, etc. Among those that serve the most difficult students in the toughest neighborhoods, there are schools that are achieving educational miracles, and their secrets of success are quite similar (for a great book on this topic, I recommend No Excuses: Closing the Racial Gap in Learning). So what are their secrets and how might they be applied to the public education system?

…Empowering key people
The first step to reforming any large, dysfunctional organization -- note that this also applies equally to companies (think about this the next time you're evaluating a corporate turnaround effort) -- is identifying and empowering the key people. By this, I don't mean the senior executives; I mean the people on the front lines closest to the customers. In a police department, these are the patrol officers and precinct commanders; in a school system, the teachers and principals.

US Military

2012-01-04T13:21:00.001-05:00

One important analogy is the U.S. military, which I think has a lot of lessons for our schools – both are enormously large, sprawling bureaucracies, but one is, by far, the best in the world, while the other is, at best, middle of the pack. And the U.S. military wasn't always this way – after Vietnam, it was a broken, demoralized institution, just like our schools today. How did it turn itself around? What are the lessons we can apply to our schools? If someone reading this wants to research this and write up something on it, I'll fund it!

I wrote in April (http://edreform.blogspot.com/2010/04/on-distant-battlefields-survival-odds.html):

You might wonder why I'm sending around an article about treating battlefield injuries in Iraq and Afghanistan – the reason is that I think the U.S. educational system can learn a great deal from the U.S. military. Both are among the largest government systems in the world, with millions of employees, yet one is dismal, trailing most other developed countries, while the other is HIGHLY effective. It's remarkable to see how the military learns the lessons from the front lines and spreads the learning rapidly – something that doesn't happen at all in education. Perhaps this is because people die quickly if the military doesn't learn and adapt, whereas the carnage from our failing educational system isn't as visible and directly attributable (it's so easy to blame the victims, after all)

Nick Kristof with a great article on Our Lefty Military (http://edreform.blogspot.com/2011/07/our-lefty-military.html):

Yet if we seek another model, one that emphasizes universal health care and educational opportunity, one that seeks to curb income inequality, we don't have to turn to Sweden. Rather, look to the United States military.

You see, when our armed forces are not firing missiles, they live by an astonishingly liberal ethos — and it works. The military helped lead the way in racial desegregation, and even today it does more to provide equal opportunity to working-class families — especially to blacks — than just about any social program. It has been an escalator of social mobility in American society because it invests in soldiers and gives them skills and opportunities.

The United States armed forces knit together whites, blacks, Asians and Hispanics from diverse backgrounds, invests in their education and training, provides them with excellent health care and child care. And it does all this with minimal income gaps: A senior general earns about 10 times what a private makes, while, by my calculation, C.E.O.'s at major companies earn about 300 times as much as those cleaning their offices. That's right: the military ethos can sound pretty lefty.

"It's the purest application of socialism there is," Wesley Clark, the retired four-star general and former supreme allied commander of NATO forces in Europe, told me. And he was only partly joking.

"It's a really fair system, and a lot of thought has been put into it, and people respond to it really well," he added. The country can learn from that sense of mission, he said, from that emphasis on long-term strategic thinking.

The military is innately hierarchical, yet it nurtures a camaraderie in part because the military looks after its employees. This is a rare enclave of single-payer universal health care, and it continues with a veterans' health care system that has much lower costs than the American system as a whole.

Perhaps the most impressive achievement of the American military isn't its aircraft carriers, stunning as they are. Rather, it's the military day care system for working parents.

While one of America's greatest failings is underinvestment in early childhood education (which seems to be one of the best ways to break cycles of poverty from replicating), the military manages to provide superb child care. The cost depends on family income and starts at $44 per week.

Fighter Pilots

2012-01-04T13:20:00.001-05:00

Fighter pilots. I wrote in May (http://edreform.blogspot.com/2011/05/high-cost-of-low-teacher-salaries.html):

I view great teaching as a skill similar to a highly skilled profession like being a fighter pilot. Imagine for a moment that we hired, trained, evaluated and promoted/fired pilots the way we do teachers – what would it look like? Well, we'd start by recruiting most pilots from the bottom third of college graduates, then putting them through utterly useless training schools, then immediately upon graduation giving them in the toughest assignments, with little or no support or mentoring, then ranking 99% of them satisfactory every year, firing only 1 in a 1,000 for poor performance, and basing everything about assignments, pay, etc. purely on seniority.

Such a system would of course be a disaster: some pilots would be great, but some would be dreadful – and they'd be the most likely ones to stick around – resulting in, say, 10% of all fighter jets needlessly crashing every year (not to mention jets bombing the wrong targets, etc.). OF COURSE if this were happening, there would be a hue and cry, and everyone would rightly point fingers at the pilots who were doing terrible jobs. However, in addition, we'd have to look beyond the people on the front line – the ENTIRE SYSTEM IS BROKEN, from start to finish!

The New Frontier in Air Safety

2012-01-04T13:17:00.003-05:00

Speaking of flying, this WSJ article last week about the extraordinary improvements in air traffic safety left me asking how we, as a nation, set ambitious goals in this area during the Clinton administration – and met them – yet we've pretty much never met the ambitious goals we've set in K-12 education??? There are big differences, obviously – strong central control, only a few major airlines, etc., but I think there are lessons: a "no excuses" approach, identifying and analyzing problems in great depth, collecting and using data, etc.

Here's some good news for anyone boarding a plane this holiday season: Flying on U.S. airlines has become so safe that experts increasingly believe the biggest remaining risk of an accident is when the wheels are on the ground.

…That's largely because over the past few years, safety programs have achieved remarkable success in reducing airborne risks. Joint industry-government efforts have made once-deadly problems such as navigation errors, fuel-tank fires, weather-related crashes and engine malfunctions a rarity.

There were no fatalities on U.S. commercial flights in 2011. The year before, the only deaths were two pilots who perished in a U.S. cargo plane that caught fire and crashed in Dubai.

…From the late 1990s to the end of the last decade, the fatal-crash rate of U.S. scheduled carriers fell by more than 80%, with no fatalities at all in some years. Improvements in the U.S. have exceeded the ambitious goals established during President Bill Clinton's administration.

…Today's safety efforts depend on expanding databases documenting the full gamut of close calls before they turn into accidents. As part of that effort, at least 37 U.S. airlines, seven more than 18 months ago, are now encouraging pilots to voluntarily file reports about all types of safety lapses, with assurances there will be no punishment. Safety experts have access to more than 100,000 such reports, along with some 30,000 voluntary incident reports filed by air-traffic controllers nationwide.

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BUSINESS
DECEMBER 23, 2011
http://professional.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970203686204577113693683788110.html

The New Frontier in Air Safety

Skies Are Now So Safe on U.S. Flights That Experts Turn Focus to 'Surface Threats'

By ANDY PASZTOR

Doctors

2012-01-04T13:17:00.001-05:00

While one often reads about scandals involving incompetent doctors, I think the U.S., overall, probably has the best doctors in the world. How do we do this and how might we adopt the lessons for teachers? I wrote about this in my February Huffington Post article, Rebutting Seven Myths About Teach for America (www.huffingtonpost.com/whitney-tilson/rebutting-seven-myths-abo_b_825437.html):

In an ideal world, the teachers in this country would go through a rigorous development program, as doctors do, that would look something like this:

1. Ed schools would be highly competitive (the nations with the highest achieving students like Finland and Singapore only take teachers from the top 10 percent of college graduates);

2. Ed schools would be rigorous and provide students with real preparation;

3. Graduates would have to pass a tough exam demonstrating that they'd mastered the content;

4. New teachers would enter a carefully controlled and monitored environment, with seasoned mentors by their side to make sure they learned (and did no harm);

5. Effective teachers would be rewarded and given more responsibility; and

6. Ineffective ones would be given additional support and, if that didn't work, counseled out.

In our dysfunctional, Alice-in-Wonderland education world, not one of these six things happens with any regularity.

Reforms in Florida

2012-01-04T13:16:00.001-05:00

The reforms in Florida since 1999 – and extraordinary improvements in the state's students' success – is the best large-scale example of the reform agenda – see: http://edreform.blogspot.com/2011/09/florida-reform-case-study.html. Here's the beginning of what I wrote in September:

STOP THE PRESSES! Here is a slide presentation (which I've posted at: www.tilsonfunds.com/FLEdReform-9-11.pdf) by Jeb Bush's Foundation for Excellence in Education (www.excelined.org) that I think is important enough (and long enough: 99 slides) to send out as its own email.

The reason I think this is so important is that Florida represents the best response to the frequent charge from the anti-reformers that there's no evidence that the reform agenda works. To quote Gary Rubenstein, "your solutions haven't been shown to work, even on a small scale except for some KIPPs."

I think this is wrong, but there's no doubt that reformers could use a compelling, large-scale case study in which a large fraction of the reform agenda was implemented and there is clear evidence of broad, dramatic success. I think Florida provides this.

The first half of the attached presentation show the enormous gains Florida has made, starting as reforms began to be implemented in 1999 and continuing to this day. The numbers really are SPECTACULAR: both NAEP and state FCAT scores skyrocketed, graduation rates jumped AND remediation rates fell, AP exams taken and passed soared, the number of schools rated A or B went up 4x while the number rated D or F fell 73% – and, best of all, the largest gains were among low-income, black and Hispanic students.

The second half of the presentation highlights all of the elements of the reform agenda that drove this change: grading schools; money to schools and directly to principals and teachers to reward success; allowing parents to opt out of chronically failing schools; ending social promotion after 3^rd grade; raising high school graduation requirements; setting up alternative routes to teacher certification; reforming teacher evaluations and tenure; tying evals to teacher pay; eliminating LIFO; requiring mutual content (i.e., principals must approve any teacher transfers into their school); pre-and finally, the full gamut of choice: various tax credit scholarships, charter schools, vouchers for pre-kindergarten, and virtual education.

NYC Police Department

2012-01-04T13:15:00.001-05:00

NYC police department, which just reported another incredible year of successfully fighting crime (see: http://professional.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970204720204577127092122364090.html). In my 2005 article (linked to above), I wrote:

I want to highlight another interesting model: the reform of the New York City police department over the past decade or so. I recognize that this might be a controversial example for some, given the horrifying stories of Amadou Diallo and Abner Louima, but the fact is that the NYPD, as a crime-fighting force, has transformed itself -- and this transformation is a major reason why New York City has gone from the murder capital of the country to being one of the safest cities in America. At the peak in 1990, 2,245 murders took place in the city; last year, the number had plunged 75% to only 571, the lowest level in 41 years. New York City's murder rate of 6.9 per 100,000 people is the lowest of any large U.S. city. As a Big Apple resident myself, this is indeed cause for celebration.

As recently as 1994, the NYPD was a politicized, patronage- and corruption-filled, unaccountable bureaucracy, with an enormous budget, tens of thousands of employees, and a powerful union representing them. What bureaucracy do these exact words describe today? Why, the public school system in most large cities. If the NYPD could be reformed so dramatically, I am convinced that public school or corporate bureaucracies can be as well. But how?

Here's what I wrote in September (http://edreform.blogspot.com/2011/09/lessons-from-compstat-for-our-schools.html):

I'm convinced that there's a tremendous amount that can be learned from the COMPSTAT approach to crime fighting that was pioneered in NYC (with astonishing success; murders, for example fell 76.3% from 1990-2010 and serious crimes fell 80.0%; see http://nyc.gov/html/nypd/downloads/pdf/crime_statistics/cscity.pdf) and then spread elsewhere. The description on Wikepedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CompStat) says, "CompStat is a management philosophy or organizational management tool for police departments, roughly equivalent to Six Sigma or TQM, and is not a computer system or software package." COMPSTAT has six core elements according to this 99-page report by the Police Foundation (www.policefoundation.org/pdf/compstatinpractice.pdf):

1. Mission clarification: Top management is responsible for clarifying and exalting the core features of the department's mission that serve as the overarching reason for the organization's existence. Mission clarification includes a demonstration of management's commitment and states its goals in specific terms for which the organization and its leaders can be held accountable—such as reducing crime by 10 percent in a year (Bratton 1998, 252).

2. Internal accountability: Operational commanders are held accountable for knowing their commands, being well acquainted with the problems in the command, and accomplishing measurable results in reducing those problems—or at least demonstrating a diligent effort to learn from that experience.

3. Geographic organization of operational command: Operational command is focused on the policing of territories, so central decision-making authority over police operations is delegated to commanders with territorial responsibility for districts. Functionally differentiated units and specialists—patrol, community-policing officers, detectives, narcotics, vice, juvenile, and traffic—are either placed under the command of the district commander, or arrangements are made to facilitate their responsiveness to the commander's needs.

4. Organizational flexibility: The organization develops the capacity and habit of changing established routines as needed to mobilize resources when and where they are needed for strategic application.

5. Data-driven analysis of problems and assessment of department's problem-solving efforts: Data are made available to identify and analyze problems and to track and assess the department's response. Data are made accessible to all relevant personnel on a timely basis and in a readily usable format.

6. Innovative problem-solving tactics: Police responses are selected because they offer the best prospects of success, not because they are "what we have always done." Innovation and experimentation are encouraged and use of the best available knowledge about practices is expected.

Let's substitute the words "below-basic readers" for "crime" and see what COMPSTAT would look like as implemented in our schools – I barely had to change a thing:

1. Mission clarification: Top management (the superintendent, mayor, school board, city council) is responsible for clarifying and exalting the core features of the department's mission that serve as the overarching reason for the organization's existence. Mission clarification includes a demonstration of management's commitment and states its goals in specific terms for which the organization and its leaders can be held accountable—such as reducing the number of below-basic readers by 10 percent per year.

2. Internal accountability: Operational commanders (principals) are held accountable for knowing their schools, being well acquainted with the problems in their schools, and accomplishing measurable results in reducing those problems—or at least demonstrating a diligent effort to learn from that experience.

3. Geographic organization of operational command: Operational command is focused on the running of high-quality, so central decision-making authority over school operations is delegated to principals with responsibility for their schools. Functionally differentiated units and specialists—assistant principals, regular teachers, reading specialists, social workers—are placed under the command of the principal.

5. Data-driven analysis of problems and assessment of department's problem-solving efforts: Data are made available to identify and analyze problems and to track and assess the school's response. Data are made accessible to all relevant personnel on a timely basis and in a readily usable format.

6. Innovative problem-solving tactics: Educators' responses are selected because they offer the best prospects of success, not because they are "what we have always done." Innovation and experimentation are encouraged and use of the best available knowledge about practices is expected.

This reinforces to me that the basics of reforming our schools aren't rocket science – it's Management 101 – but the devil is in the details. It's really hard to come up with a fair evaluation system for teachers and principals, for example. But I don't think that one of the key elements of COMPSTAT would be so hard to replicate: imagine in every city in this country that every week the superintendent would meet with all of the principals in the city (or a particular district). As part of these meetings, a few principals would present the data for their schools – put up on a screen behind them – and would not be allowed to say, "Hey, the fact that half of the children in my school can't read isn't my fault. They're poor kids from broken families, so how can we be expected to educate them?"

No, they would be expected to have a plan to reduce illiteracy (or violence, or whatever particularly acute problem the school faced) and EXECUTE on it! They key is that this isn't punitive and meant to embarrass anyone, but rather to create accountability, stimulate thinking and, importantly, share best practices. But let's be clear, there's a very punitive element of this: if a principal's school doesn't show progress after a reasonable amount of time, then a new principal is brought in (in the first two years of COMPSTAT, TWO-THIRDS of precinct commanders in NYC were replaced).

And here's what I wrote in another email in September (http://edreform.blogspot.com/2011/09/how-new-york-beat-crime.html):

I enjoyed this to-the-point article about "How New York Beat Crime" and include it here because, as I've written many times before, I think the best highly-successful road map for how to fix our schools isn't Finland, a tiny country that looks nothing like ours (though we can learn much from Finland, to be sure), but the revolutionary transformation of the NYC police department and the stunning drop in crime over the past two decades. Here's the conclusion to the article, and below is an email I sent out earlier this year:

Perhaps the most optimistic lesson to take from New York's experience is that high rates of homicides and muggings are not hardwired into a city's populations, cultures and institutions. The steady, significant and cumulatively overwhelming crime decline in New York is proof that cities as we know them need not be incubators of robbery, rape and mayhem. Moreover, it demonstrates that the environment in which people are raised does not doom them to a lifetime outside the law—and that neither do their genes. That result is a fundamental surprise to many students of the American city and is the most hopeful insight of criminological science in a century.

Here's my email:

Ravitch Article Response

http://edreform.blogspot.com/2011/07/ravitch-article-response.html

I want to comment on two things Ravitch said in this article. First:

…It's the argument Ravitch has been making for a year. "They're not shoe stores that you can close and move to a different mall," she said during a panel debate afterwards. "We don't close the firehouse if there are more fires in the neighborhood. We don't close the police station if there is more crime in the neighborhood." Instead, singing from the liberal hymnal, she argued for policies to address the poverty-related "root causes" of academic failure.

These are EXACTLY the same insanely stupid arguments that were used to excuse police departments when crime was rampant. It's hard to remember those days, but prevalent at that time was the now-discredited theory that crime was the inevitable consequence of poverty, our racist society, etc., and therefore the police could only be excepted to sit in their station houses and respond to 911 calls – mostly to come pick up the bodies.

Since then, in NYC (which I've studied most closely), the murder rate is down by an astonishing 80%. Yes, there have been some external factors that have contributed to this decline like the passing of the crack epidemic, but the overwhelming evidence is that more effective policing has made a HUGE impact. When Giuliani and Bratton set out to reform the NYC police department 17 years ago (which at the time was as bureaucratic, dysfunctional, and ineffective as wide swaths of NYC's school system remain today), they pushed power down to the precinct level and then held precinct commanders accountable. Guess what the turnover was within the first two years? TWO-THIRDS of the precinct commanders didn't cut it. But this was great news, as younger, more competent, go-getters were promoted. Concurrent with this was the greater use of data (Compstat) and range of other measures – plus a critical culture shift. Basically, the entire philosophy of policing was turned upside down: at every level of the police department, data was collected and the police were expected to impact it – namely, to REDUCE CRIME! It sounds so obvious, but it was revolutionary back then – and, of course, there were plenty of nay-sayers who said it couldn't be done, it wasn't fair to officers to hold them accountable when they couldn't do anything about poverty, there would be cheating (and there was some, to be sure), etc.

Under Bloomberg and Klein, the same philosophical and operational transformation was begun, but it still hasn't taken root throughout the system so much more work needs to be done…

Media: Reform Opponents Are Winning Online (For Now)

2012-01-04T13:10:00.001-05:00

Alexander Russo with a story that I think is largely correct – and I hope will be a call to action for those reformers in the trenches who read this email. You need to weigh in on this debate! You can set up your own Twitter account or blog, start writing on some of the sites Russo links to in his article, or send me your stories and I'm happy to blast them out and post them on my blog. With my schedule the way it is these days, I haven't had much time to visit schools and go to events where I'm hearing these stories, so email them to me!

Media: Reform Opponents Are Winning Online (For Now)

There's a strange dynamic going on inside the online education reform debate in which the well-funded reformers play the role of wimpy David and the scrappy traditional educators are Goliath. But the mismatch could change quickly in the new year, and if it does things will get noisier but also -- I hope -- a little more interesting.

As anyone who reads education sites or goes on Twitter knows, "reform critics" -- they're still working on a better term to describe their views -- have a slew of current teachers and veterans out there talking about their classroom experiences and opinions nearly every day. Nancy Flanagan, TeacherKen, Anthony Cody, and John Thompson to name just a few. It's not just that they're out there shouting randomly into the wind, either. At least some of them seem to be coordinated behind the scenes by SOS or PAA or Leonie's listserv, bird-dogging individual sites -- Caroline Grannan seems to have been (self-)assigned to this site -- and converging on a blog post or Twitter comment (as happened to me last week when I first posted on this topic). If past experience is any guideline, the comments here and Twitter RTs will come from them.

In contrast, reformy folks have lacked a SWAT team of feisty and prolific school-level champions defending articulating their message. The now middle-aged reform movement seems to have relied on institutional and organizational voices -- Arne Duncan, Michelle Rhee, Wendy Kopp, et al -- and mainstream news outlets, where they dominate. But these voices are neither coming from the classroom nor active in the online debate during the days and weeks between mainstream news stories, which are an increasingly large part of the education discussion. This leaves others - think tankers and crackpots and Whitney Tilsons and such -- to fill in the empty spaces. But those folks aren't numerous or prolific or tenacious or, ultimately, credible enough, either. They are too self-important to leave comments on other sites, and too professional to post on weekends or after hours when everyone else with a day job is most active.

This imbalance may be changing as more and more reform efforts focus on advocacy, teacher voices, and (so slowly!) embrace social media. StudentsFirst did a decent job digging up pink-slipped teachers of the year to tell their anti-LIFO story and calling on supporters to write into Congress when the Senate was considering that ridiculous Harkin replacement bill. Stand For Children could press a button that would encourage its supporters to write or email or tweet, and at some point soon will see fit to do so. The CTQ has a bunch of teacher bloggers out there, many of them on a group blog at EdWeek -- which looks a little bland and slow by current standards but it's a start. The folks at TeachPlus have a teacher evaluation post up at HuffPost here, which is again a start. There's a charter-positive TFA alumni named MathInAZ

over at Teach For Us.

I'm not taking sides here as to who's more right or more wrong (most everyone's wrong, far as I'm concerned). And perhaps there are bloggers and commenters out there I've missed in my looking and asking around. I put out a call for school-based reform-positive voices last week and am happy to continue to learn more.

Class Matters. Why Won’t We Admit It?

2012-01-04T13:02:00.001-05:00

Speaking of dopey NYT op eds, this one, Class Matters. Why Won't We Admit It?, perpetuates the worst and most widely held myth about reformers: that we don't think that poverty and family circumstances matter. This is complete and total rubbish, yet defenders of the status quo keep saying it.

But in the United States over the past decade, it became fashionable among supporters of the "no excuses" approach to school improvement to accuse anyone raising the poverty issue of letting schools off the hook — or what Mr. Bush famously called "the soft bigotry of low expectations."

Such accusations may afford the illusion of a moral high ground, but they stand in the way of serious efforts to improve education and, for that matter, go a long way toward explaining why No Child Left Behind has not worked.

Yes, we need to make sure that all children, and particularly disadvantaged children, have access to good schools, as defined by the quality of teachers and principals and of internal policies and practices.

But let's not pretend that family background does not matter and can be overlooked. Let's agree that we know a lot about how to address the ways in which poverty undermines student learning. Whether we choose to face up to that reality is ultimately a moral question.

In response, one friend commented:

Of course, poverty matters but this is a very slippery piece. Her analysis of beat the odds stuff is purely anecdotal, she shows no evidence that programs like the one in NC (based on HCZ) work and the conclusion that somehow we shouldn't "discredit" failing schools because of the kids they serve is a prescription for catastrophe.

And another responded:

Yes, and there is a third possible explanation they ignore when they ask "So why do presumably well-intentioned policy makers ignore, or deny, the correlations of family background and student achievement?"

Perhaps it's because that data are clear that all else equal we can do better so that even though poverty of course matters, we should also be dramatically raising our expectations.

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

December 11, 2011

Class Matters. Why Won't We Admit It?

By HELEN F. LADD and EDWARD B. FISKE

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/12/opinion/the-unaddressed-link-between-poverty-and-education.html

Profits and Questions at Online Charter Schools

2012-01-04T13:01:00.001-05:00

The NYT did a cover story a couple of weeks ago on for-profit online K-12 charter schools that made the sector look REALLY bad. I have very conflicted views. I have no doubt that online learning can work very well for some kids and, even if it doesn't work great, may well be the least-bad option for many other kids. I also tend to like anything that creates options for parents and competition for the status quo. Finally, I have no problem with for-profit schools. All that said, I have GRAVE reservations about the sector as it's currently operating right now. Based on many articles covering schools in many states, the industry – like the for-profit colleges – seems focused on growth and profits, which is leading to widespread shenanigans that screw kids – and taxpayers. Anytime you have an industry in which the government (read: we taxpayers) are footing the bill, providing 90% or more of the money to for-profit companies (it's especially dangerous when the company is public, as there's tremendous pressure from analysts and investors to hit quarterly growth, margin and profit targets), then it seems to always lead to widespread abuses and, often, outright fraud (in addition to for-profit schools, the entire subprime lending industry and the healthcare industry come to mind). Thus, it's imperative that there be careful regulation and oversight – which is, of course, fought tooth and nail by advocates of the industry, both for reasons of financial self-interest, but also because of political philosophy: the advocates tend to hate all government regulation and oversight, lessons from the housing bubble notwithstanding).

The business taps into a formidable coalition of private groups and officials promoting nontraditional forms of public education. The growth of for-profit online schools, one of the more overtly commercial segments of the school choice movement, is rooted in the theory that corporate efficiencies combined with the Internet can revolutionize public education, offering high quality at reduced cost.

The New York Times has spent several months examining this idea, focusing on K12 Inc. A look at the company's operations, based on interviews and a review of school finances and performance records, raises serious questions about whether K12 schools — and full-time online schools in general — benefit children or taxpayers, particularly as state education budgets are being slashed.

Instead, a portrait emerges of a company that tries to squeeze profits from public school dollars by raising enrollment, increasing teacher workload and lowering standards.

Current and former staff members of K12 Inc. schools say problems begin with intense recruitment efforts that fail to filter out students who are not suited for the program, which requires strong parental commitment and self-motivated students. Online schools typically are characterized by high rates of withdrawal.

Teachers have had to take on more and more students, relaxing rigor and achievement along the way, according to interviews. While teachers do not have the burden of a full day of classes, they field questions from families, monitor students' progress and review and grade schoolwork. Complaints about low pay and high class loads — with some high school teachers managing more than 250 students — have prompted a unionization battle at Agora, which has offices in Wayne, Pa.

A look at a forthcoming study by researchers at Western Michigan University and the National Education Policy Center shows that only a third of K12's schools achieved adequate yearly progress, the measurement mandated by federal No Child Left Behind legislation.

Profits and Questions at Online Charter Schools

Lance Murphey for The New York Times

Denita Alhammadi, center, works with her children, Romeo, left, and Yasmine, on their coursework for Tennessee Virtual Academy.

By STEPHANIE SAUL

Published: December 12, 2011

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/13/education/online-schools-score-better-on-wall-street-than-in-classrooms.html

Whitney Tilson's School Reform Blog

WELCOME TO MY BLOG

In education-packed speech, Bloomberg vows to bypass UFT

In education-packed speech, Bloomberg vows to bypass UFT

The Value of Teachers

The Value of Teachers

By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF

New Study Gauges Teachers Impact on Students' Lifetime Earnings

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

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

Diane Ravitch Blocked Me on Twitter

Diane Ravitch Blocked Me on Twitter

A Case Study in Bias

Saturday, January 07, 2012

A Case Study in Bias

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

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

Parents Rebel Against School

Parents Rebel Against School

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

By STEPHANIE BANCHERO

Charter Network Facing Closure

Charter Network Facing Closure

By LISA FLEISHER and ALISON FOX

Troubled Online Charter Schools

Troubled Online Charter Schools

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

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

By FERNANDA SANTOS

Published: January 10, 2012

New Urgency On Teacher Evaluations

New Urgency On Teacher Evaluations

By LISA FLEISHER

Cuomo's Slow Education

Cuomo's Slow Education

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

America’s Unlevel Field

America's Unlevel Field

By PAUL KRUGMAN

Thoughtful Response from Wendy Kopp

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

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

Longer School Day Begins Monday At Select Chicago Public Schools

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

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

Fatal Stampede in South Africa Points Up University Crisis

Fatal Stampede in South Africa Points Up University Crisis

By LYDIA POLGREEN

Published: January 10, 2012

What Works in Urban Schools

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

Big Study Links Good Teachers to Lasting Gain

Big Study Links Good Teachers to Lasting Gain

By ANNIE LOWREY

Published: January 6, 2012

The Central Falls Success

Teachers Resist High-Tech Push in Idaho Schools

Grading the Digital School

Teachers Resist High-Tech Push in Idaho Schools

By MATT RICHTEL

Published: January 3, 2012

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/04/technology/idaho-teachers-fight-a-reliance-on-computers.html

From the Fab Five to the Three Rs

From the Fab Five to the Three Rs

After 20 years of basketball fame and fortune, Jalen Rose returns home to Detroit to promote school reform and parental choice.

By STEPHEN MOORE

The Top Eight Books of 2011 That School Reformers Should Read

The Top Eight Books of 2011 That School Reformers Should Read

Harder for Americans to Rise From Lower Rungs

Harder for Americans to Rise From Lower Rungs

By JASON DePARLE

Published: January 4, 2012

Want a Job? Go to College, and Don’t Major in Architecture

Want a Job? Go to College, and Don't Major in Architecture

Charters Don't Have to Pay Rent, for Now

Charters Don't Have to Pay Rent, for Now

Two-Thirds of Public School Parents Believe New Orleans Schools are Better Than Before

Two-Thirds of Public School Parents BelieveNew Orleans Schools are Better Than Before

90% of parents also strongly agree that school choice is important

Two-Thirds of Public School Parents Believe
New Orleans Schools are Better Than Before