Alliance of White Anti-Racists Everywhere – Los Angeles
Education
For-Profit Colleges’ Mostly Black and Latino Students Face Higher Debt and Unemployment
01 month ago
Private for-profit institutions have been the fastest growing part of the U.S. higher education sector for decades now, but a new Harvard study finds students attending for-profit colleges end up with much higher student-loan debts, are less likely to be employed after graduation and generally earn less than similar students at public or private nonprofit schools.
The for-profit sector disproportionately serves older students, women, African-Americans, Latinos, and those with low incomes, according to the report “The For-Profit Postsecondary School Sector: Nimble Critters or Agile Predators?” published by Harvard’s National Bureau of Economic Research.
African Americans account for 13 percent of all students in higher education, but they are 22 percent of those in the for-profit sector. Latinos are 15 percent of those in the for-profit sector, yet 11.5 percent of all students. Women are 65 percent of those in the for-profit sector. For profit students are older, about 65 percent are 25 years and older, whereas just 31 percent of those at four-year public colleges are and 40 percent of those at two-year colleges are.
“[For-profit colleges] do better in terms of first-year retention and the completion of shorter certificate and degree programs,” according to the report. “But their first-time postsecondary students wind up with higher debt burdens, experience greater unemployment after leaving school and, if anything, have lower earnings six years after starting college than observationally similar students from public and non-profit institutions.
“Not surprisingly, for-profit students end up with higher student loan default rates and are less satisfied with their college experiences.”
The report also found for-profit students have substantially higher default rates even when comparing students across school types with similar cumulative debt burdens. For example, the default rate by 2009 for the BPS:04/09 students with $5,001 to $10,000 in cumulative federal student loans is 26 percent for students from for-profits versus 10 percent for those from community colleges and 7 percent for those from 4-year public and nonprofit schools, and for those with $10,001 to $20,000 in debt the default rate among for-profit students is 16 percent versus a 3 percent rate for community college students and 2 percent rate for other 4-year college students.
For-Profit Colleges’ Mostly Black and Latino Students Face Higher Debt and Unemployment
01 month ago
Private for-profit institutions have been the fastest growing part of the U.S. higher education sector for decades now, but a new Harvard study finds students attending for-profit colleges end up with much higher student-loan debts, are less likely to be employed after graduation and generally earn less than similar students at public or private nonprofit schools.
The for-profit sector disproportionately serves older students, women, African-Americans, Latinos, and those with low incomes, according to the report “The For-Profit Postsecondary School Sector: Nimble Critters or Agile Predators?” published by Harvard’s National Bureau of Economic Research.
African Americans account for 13 percent of all students in higher education, but they are 22 percent of those in the for-profit sector. Latinos are 15 percent of those in the for-profit sector, yet 11.5 percent of all students. Women are 65 percent of those in the for-profit sector. For profit students are older, about 65 percent are 25 years and older, whereas just 31 percent of those at four-year public colleges are and 40 percent of those at two-year colleges are.
“[For-profit colleges] do better in terms of first-year retention and the completion of shorter certificate and degree programs,” according to the report. “But their first-time postsecondary students wind up with higher debt burdens, experience greater unemployment after leaving school and, if anything, have lower earnings six years after starting college than observationally similar students from public and non-profit institutions.
“Not surprisingly, for-profit students end up with higher student loan default rates and are less satisfied with their college experiences.”
The report also found for-profit students have substantially higher default rates even when comparing students across school types with similar cumulative debt burdens. For example, the default rate by 2009 for the BPS:04/09 students with $5,001 to $10,000 in cumulative federal student loans is 26 percent for students from for-profits versus 10 percent for those from community colleges and 7 percent for those from 4-year public and nonprofit schools, and for those with $10,001 to $20,000 in debt the default rate among for-profit students is 16 percent versus a 3 percent rate for community college students and 2 percent rate for other 4-year college students.
Following ACLU Demands Pittsburgh Ditches Single-Sex School Plans
02 months ago
This week, the Pittsburgh Public School District agreed to drop sex-segregated classes at Westinghouse, a grades 6-12 public school, after the ACLU of Pennsylvania, the Women’s Law Project, and the ACLU Women’s Rights Project threatened to file a complaint with the Department of Education Office for Civil Rights.
Why would the ACLU be threatening to take legal action against this newly reformed and previously failing school? The answer is simpler than it seems: the school was based on an educational model that promotes harmful sex stereotypes.
Administrators explicitly planned that the school be entirely sex segregated in order to cater to the supposedly “separate needs of young women and young men,” claiming — completely incorrectly — that “research solidly indicates that boys and girls learn differently,” and aiming to provide students with “male-hood and female-hood defined space.” In case you are wondering what that might mean, school planners apparently believed it included emphasizing “characteristics of warrior, protector, and provider” for boys, and providing “space/time to explore things that young women like [including] writing, applying and doing make-up & hair, art.” We are not making this up: these quotes are from documents received in response to a records request by the ACLU of PA.
The School Superintendent acknowledged at a public meeting on Monday that gender stereotypes used in teacher trainings factored into the decision to drop the program. Indeed, planned teacher training materials included the book Why Gender Matters by Leonard Sax, the head of the National Association for Single Sex Public Education — a seminal text in new sex segregation movement that is permeated with broad stereotypes about the different talents and capacities of boys and girls.
Pittsburgh joins several other school districts that have recently abandoned single-sex education. The Vermillion Parish School Board also just settled an ACLU lawsuit challenging single-sex classes in a Louisiana middle school. More recently, as a result of successful advocacy by the ACLU of Wisconsin, backers of a proposed charter school in Madison have agreed to drop their initial plan to start the charter school only for boys and agreed to include girls; however, the proposal still calls for the school to be entirely sex-segregated. The ACLU is calling for the Board to condition its approval on the school being made entirely coed, pointing out that sex segregation will not fix the racial achievement gap.
The ACLU recognizes the critical need for better educational options — particularly for students of color. But we can’t accept sex stereotypes as part of the bargain. The Pittsburgh School District’s abandonment of this program should send a message that separating kids by sex will not turn a failing school around. Co-education is not the problem with our education system, and sex segregation is not the solution.
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Relief from No Child Left Behind for States That Adopt Obama’s Reforms
04 months ago
For embattled educators and students who’ve toiled for over a decade under the unrealistic expectations of the accountability-driven federal education law No Child Left Behind, relief may be on its way. But it won’t come without a price. On Friday President Obama formally announced that he will dispense waivers to states to allow them to escape the sanctions tied to No Child Left Behind if they show they’ve adopted key measures of his school reform agenda.
States that can prove that they plan to overhaul the bottom five percent of schools; adopt standards in reading and math so students are “college-ready,” and agree to tie teacher evaluations to their students’ test scores will be eligible for the waivers.
“To help states, districts and schools that are ready to move forward with education reform, our administration will provide flexibility from the law in exchange for a real commitment to undertake change,” Obama said in a statement released on Thursday.
The move has been called a “re-write” of the federal education law, but education watchers say the waivers, which come just a year before a major deadline attached to the law, are neither unexpected nor that dramatic.
Under No Child Left Behind, every K-12 student in the country is expected to be proficient in math and reading by 2013, a goal that 82 percent of schools will fail to meet next year, Secretary of Education Arne Duncan has said. The specter of the so-called “universal proficiency” provision has trailed educators for over a decade as many schools failed to meet their annual progress goals and faced ever harsher sanctions every year they failed to do so. With the deadline looming and Congress continually failing to take up the long overdue reauthorization of the law, regulatory relief of some sort became necessary.
“They are going to try to get as much bang for their buck for any concession they make around No Child Left Behind,” said John Yun, a professor of education at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Yun argues that reauthorization of No Child Left Behind is more a matter of when than if, and because the unpopular universal proficiency provision likely will not be included in the reauthorization, the waivers have little to do with the 2013 deadline.
“The president and Arne Duncan are trying to give flexibility back to the states,” said Bruce Fuller, a professor of education and public policy at the University of California, Berkeley. “But in return for flexibility given with the right hand, they’re using the left hand to advance a new federal set of reforms which they think are realistic and important.”
“They’re not always backed by evidence, but now there’s a new president, and he has a new set of remedies which he thinks are going to be effective.”
Obama also framed the move as a way to give states relief from the onerous and backwards provisions of No Child Left Behind. No Child Left Behind’s flaws are well-documented and its critics abound, and criticizing the law is something that’s long been easy to do. Obama did plenty of it on Friday.
“[E]xperience has taught us that, in it’s implementation, No Child Left Behind had some serious flaws that are hurting our children instead of helping them,” Obama said on Friday. “Teachers too often are being forced to teach to the test. Subjects like history and science have been squeezed out.”
Under No Child Left Behind, schools that fail to meet their yearly progress goals, or AYP, face tiered levels of sanctions, ranging from being forced to offer supplemental tutoring to being forced to let students transfer out of the school. Schools that fail to meet AYP for five consecutive years are forced to shut down and face takeover by a state or outside charter school organization.
The combination of No Child Left Behind sanctions and an allowance which let states set and define their own proficiency standards ended up encouraging states to lower standards in order to make their test scores look better. Obama criticized this as well.
“[States] don’t want to get penalized?” he said. “Let’s make sure that the standards are so low that we’re not going to be seen failing to meet them. That makes no sense.”
Yet to some education watchers, Obama’s reforms don’t necessarily mark a departure from the market-driven reform philosophy that fueled No Child Left Behind. “The Obama administration’s ideology is very consistent with the intent of No Child Left Behind as it began under the second George Bush administration,” said Yun.
Yun noted that charter schools, whose role in the reform landscape Obama has expanded, do no better on average than their traditional public school counterparts. Numerous studies have shown too that merit pay schemes which seek to attach teachers’ pay to their students’ test scores do not lead to measurable improvements in student performance.
“It’s as if they’ve said, ‘If we squeeze these schools in the right way and embarrass them sufficiently, that will solve the problem,’” said Gary Orfield, a professor of education at UCLA, of Obama’s reform ideas. Orfield said that Obama’s primary mechanisms driving school reform in the U.S., like those of his predecessors, have been “more accountability, more tests, and more sanctions.”
Orfield said that many of Obama’s demands for school turnaround and teacher accountability end up doing more harm than good in the poorest communities and communities of color, which historically are the lowest performing schools and therefore face the most political pressure to show improvement. What these students need, Orfield argues, is more of the comprehensive programs like anti-poverty and desegregation programs which acknowledge the social and economic realities of students’ lives.
For now, educators may breathe a sigh of relief as the Obama administration offers them and escape from the worst aspects of No Child Left Behind. What awaits them may be no less harsh.
Jad Abumrad, Economist Roland Fryer Among MacArthur Genius Fellows
04 months ago
On Tuesday, The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation named 22 new recipients of the $500,000 “genius awards.” The honorees, known as “fellows,” range from a sports medicine researcher to a cellist to a public historian. All were selected for their creativity and potential to make important contributions in the future.
The $500,000 award comes with no stipulations and fellows can do as they please with the cash prize. The award not only recognizes the fellows for their work but also offers them “the gift of time and the unfettered opportunity to explore, create, and contribute,” Daniel Socolow, director of the MacArthur Fellows Program said in a statement.
Perhaps the most recognized name on the list of honorees is Jad Abumrad, the co-host and producer of WNYC’s Radiolab, a weekly radio show that unravels complex scientific and philosophical questions. There’s also Harvard Economist Roland Fryer who studies racial discrimination, labor market inequalities, and educational underachievement.
Below you’ll find the complete list of winners with fellows of color highlighted with video.
Jad Abumrad
WNYC Radio
New York, NY
Age: 38
Radio Host and Producer engaging a new generation of listeners with audio explorations of scientific and philosophical questions that evoke a sense of adventure and recreate the thrill of discovery.
Marie-Therese Connolly
Appleseed, Washington, DC, Age: 54
Elder Rights Lawyer raising awareness about and seeking solutions to the largely hidden but immense problems of elder abuse and neglect.
Roland Fryer
Harvard University
Cambridge, MA
Age: 34
Economist offering new insight into such issues as racial discrimination, labor market inequalities, and educational underachievement and illuminating the causes and consequences of economic disparity in American society.
Jeanne Gang
Studio Gang, Chicago, IL, Age: 47
Architect integrating conventional materials, striking yet functional designs, and ecologically friendly technology in bold structures that challenge the aesthetic and technical possibilities of the art form.
Elodie Ghedin
University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine, Pittsburgh, PA, Age: 44
Parasitologist/ Virologist decoding the genomes of virulent human pathogens that cause such diseases as leishmaniasis, sleeping sickness, and river blindness and threaten the lives of millions in the developing world.
Shwetak Patel
University of Washington,
Seattle
Seattle, WA
Age: 29
Sensor Technologist and Computer Scientist inventing low-cost, easy-to-deploy sensor systems that leverage existing infrastructures to enable users to track household energy consumption and to make the buildings we live in more responsive to our needs.
Markus Greiner
Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, Age: 38
Condensed Matter Physicist improving our capacity to control the spatial organization of ultra-cold atoms and applying these advances to both fundamental inquiry and technology.
Kevin Guskiewicz
University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, Chapel Hill, NC, Age: 45
Sports Medicine Researcher combining laboratory and on-the-field investigations to advance the diagnosis, treatment, and prevention of sports-related brain injuries and to improve the safety of athletes of all ages.
Peter Hessler
Ridgway, CO, Age: 42
Long-Form Journalist crafting keenly observed accounts of ordinary people responding to the complexities of life in such rapidly changing societies as Reform Era China.
Tiya Miles
University of Michigan
Ann Arbor, MI
Age: 41
Public Historian reframing and reinterpreting the history of our diverse nation in works that illuminate the complex interrelationships between African and Cherokee peoples in colonial America.
Matthew Nock
Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, Age: 38
Clinical Psychologist deepening understanding of self-injury and suicide among adolescents and adults by combining epidemiology, laboratory experiments, and real-time psychological assessments in the interest of saving lives and influencing mental health care in our society.
Francisco Núñez
Young People’s Chorus of New York City
New York, NY
Age: 46
Choral Conductor and Composer shaping the future of choral singing for children by expanding access from inner-city to elite schools and redefining the artistic and expressive boundaries of the youth choir.
Sarah Otto
University of British Columbia Vancouver, BC, Age: 43
Evolutionary Geneticist addressing fundamental questions of population and evolutionary biology, such as why some species reproduce sexually and why some species carry more than one copy of each gene.
Dafnis Prieto
New York, NY
Age: 37
Jazz Percussionist and Composer electrifying audiences with dazzling technical abilities and rhythmically adventurous compositions while infusing Latin jazz with a bold new energy and sound.
Kay Ryan
Fairfax, CA, Age: 65
Poet composing deceptively simple verse of wisdom and elegance, grounded in explorations of familiar ideas and experiences, and surprising us with the possibilities of the medium.
Melanie Sanford
University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI, Age: 36
Organometallic Chemist reigniting research on an important chemical pathway and developing methods to enable modification of complex molecules with important implications for pharmaceuticals and other products we use everyday.
Yukiko Yamashita
University of Michigan Medical School
Ann Arbor, MI
Age: 39
Developmental Biologist unraveling the complex molecular choreography of stem cell division and investigating how factors such as aging affect the capacity of stem cells to replace specialized cells that are injured, infected, or wear out.
William Seeley
University of California, San Francisco, San Francisco, CA, Age: 39
Neuropathologist integrating microscopy, magnetic resonance imaging, and clinical examination to identify the mechanisms underlying frontotemporal dementia, track disease progression, and create effective therapeutic interventions.
Jacob Soll
Rutgers University, Camden, Camden, NJ, Age: 42
European Historian exploring the development of political thought and criticism in early modern Europe and shedding new light on the origins of the modern state.
A. E. Stallings
Athens, Greece, Age: 43
Poet and Translator mining the classical world and traditional poetic techniques to craft imaginative explorations of contemporary life that evoke startling insights about antiquity’s relevance for today.
Ubaldo Vitali
Ubaldo Vitali, Inc., Maplewood, NJ, Age: 67
Conservator and Silversmith drawing on deep knowledge of past and modern metalworking techniques and rigorous scholarship to restore historical masterworks and to create original works of art.
Alisa Weilerstein
New York, NY, Age: 29
Cellist combining technical precision with impassioned musicianship in performances of both traditional and contemporary music and expanding the cello repertoire through collaborations with leading composers.
Who’s Running Your School District?
04 months ago
Who’s running your school district? If you live in a big city or urban area, chances are decisions have been influenced by someone who’s been groomed with a specific ideology of education policy. In 2002 the Broad Foundation, one of the largest and most influential philanthropies dedicated to school reform, established the Broad Superintendents Academy, a ten-month program to provide corporate-level management and skills development to folks they hoped would go on to decision makers in school districts across the country.
The Broad philosophy has become mainstream in the school reform landscape. The foundation advocates shutting down schools whose test scores have designated them as “failing;” instituting accountability mechanisms for teachers that tie their job evaluations to their students’ test scores; and advocates for more school choices outside the traditional public school through charter schools and vouchers. Former graduates from the Broad Academy have gone on to do just that in the cities they’ve arrived in, and not without a storm of controversy often following in their wake.
We rounded up a handful of big-city superintendents and school officials who’ve been groomed by the Broad Foundation.
Kelley Williams-Bolar, Mom Charged with Stealing Kids’ Education, Denied Pardon
05 months ago
Kelley Williams-Bolar, an Ohio mother who was charged with larceny and record tampering earlier this year when she falsified her home address to get her daughters into a better public school, has been denied a request for pardon by an Ohio parole board, the AP reports.
Early this year Williams-Bolar spent ten days in jail when school officials found that she had used her father’s address in a neighboring school district to get her daughters into a better school. Her sentence included three years of probation and 80 hours of community service. While her theft charges were eventually dropped–school officials said she “stole” more than $30,000 worth of public education–she was convicted of records tampering. In her appeal, Williams-Bolar, who was close to getting her teaching certificate, said that the conviction threatened her career as an educator. Now, the board has ruled that the conviction will stand.
From the AP:
The board said Williams-Bolar could have solved her schooling situation legitimately and was dishonest before and after her conviction.
“Ms. Williams-Bolar was faced with a no more difficult situation than any other working parent who must ensure that their children are safe during, before and after school hours in their absence,” it said in its unanimous ruling. “Most parents find legitimate and legal options to address this issue. Ms. Williams-Bolar’s only response was to be deceitful.”
The board also rejected Williams-Bolar’s arguments that her conviction harmed her future plans, noting that she has hardly made the efforts necessary to obtain a degree to teach.
Williams-Bolar had told the parole board in July that she was remorseful for lying and would do things differently if given the chance.
“I love my kids and I would have done anything for my children,” an emotional Williams-Bolar told the board.
Williams-Bolar’s conviction is but one of a series of headline-grabbing harsh prosecutions of black moms this year. Like Williams-Bolar, these black moms, all of them poor, have just been trying to get by and raise their kids.
White Teacher Complains on Facebook that She’s a ‘Warden for Future Criminals’
05 months ago
Jennifer O’Brien, a first grade teacher in Paterson, N.J., posted remarks on Facebook that her class that’s made up of mostly black and Latino students were “future criminals.”
The post, intended for O’Brien’s 333 friends on Facebook read, “i’m not a teacher – i’m a warden for future criminals,” reports NorthJersey.com.
“They had a scared straight program in school–why couldn’t i bring 1st graders?” she went on to say in a post six hours later. O’Brien was referencing a school event that took place earlier that day that allowed sixth graders to talk to prison inmates about the consequences of crimes.
“I was speaking out of frustration to their behavior, just that build up of ‘I don’t know what else to do,’ and I’m actually scared for their futures, for some of them,” O’Brien told a state administrative judge saddled with deciding whether she should be able to keep her job or not. “If you’re hitting your teacher at 6 or 7 years old, that’s not a good path.”
Rev. Kenneth Clayton, the president of the local branch of the NAACP who was called to testify, called O’Brien’s comments stupid and said they “help us realize again that racism has not been erased from our country.”
“I know that children can be testy and tedious and all those things, but to say in first grade there that you’re a warden for them, that’s reprehensible … if a teacher or any adult leader could look at children like that in the first grade and think that, then the children are doomed,” Clayton went on to say.
Boyce Watkins, a Professor at Syracuse University and founder of the Your Black World coalition, says O’Brien’s frustrations are understandable but “it’s not difficult to see that her comments are rooted in the same racial bias that destroys so many black and brown children in America’s broken school system.”
“Although Ms. O’Brien would like to believe that these six year old children have already routed themselves to prison, the truth is that she herself has incarcerated her kids in the prison of low expectations. Instead of spending her time trying to elevate their minds to become doctors, lawyers and professors, Ms. O’Brien seems to believe that the most she can do for her six year olds is keep them out of jail.” Watkins wrote on YourBlackWorld.com
Cheating Atlanta Schools Received $500k in Bonuses, What Now?
05 months ago
This week, many Atlanta Public Schools will reopen their doors after a tumultuous summer spent managing the fallout from the confirmed news of the district’s massive teacher cheating scandal. Summer may be over, but cleaning up the mess has only begun.
This week, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution and Atlanta’s Channel 2 Action news reported that educators at 13 of the 44 schools implicated in the scandal had received just about $500,000 in bonuses since January 2009 through a district merit pay program. As the education world tries to suss out what could have compelled teachers to cheat so thoroughly, the scandal has also renewed debate about pay for performance teacher compensation schemes that tie educator salaries to the test scores of their students.
Nearly 180 educators and 38 principals were implicated in July in a widespread teacher cheating scandal to improve student test scores. It may not have been the carrot alone that motivated educators to engage in such egregious acts as filling in tests for students who actually never took the test, or holding test-score changing parties at teacher homes on weekends. Investigators with the Georgia Bureau of Investigations found cheating at 44 of the 56 public schools they examined, spurred in large part by a culture of “fear, intimidation and retaliation” that was pervasive throughout the district, and created by a top-down mandate to improve standardized test scores at any cost. Teachers reportedly faced public shaming sessions and sanctions if they did not cooperate with the cheating mandate. In the years that the scandal was devouring the district from within, its test scores appeared to be skyrocketing, and merit pay programs doled out bonuses yearly. Dr. Beverly Hall, former Atlanta Public Schools superintendent, received just over $580,000 over the course of her tenure.
Where high-stakes testing and pay for performance schemes go, the incentive to cheat seems to follow, merit pay critics argue.
“We’ve seen case after case where bonuses are used to incentivize test scores … and it incentivizes individuals to act in ways that further their own immediate self-interest,” said Tina Trujillo, an education professor at the University of California, Berkeley. “Merit pay actually serves these unintended consequences.”
In Houston the legendary “Texas Miracle,” a quick zip of rapidly improving test scores overseen by superintendent Rod Paige, actually turned out to be the result of widespread cheating that was uncovered in 2003. The city had instituted a merit pay program that promised bonuses educators whose students’ test scores improved. In Houston, struggling students were encouraged to stay home. Now, Washington, D.C. is facing allegations of similar cheating after a spate of testing irregularities was discovered in a USA Today investigation earlier this year.
Trujillo added that cheating scandals tend to pop up in the poorest schools that are concentrated with students of color because they face the most political pressure to raise their test scores. “You don’t see these cheating scandals take place in affluent districts because they’re removed from this debate.”
Merit pay at its heart is a question about what motivates teachers to do their jobs well, and how to incentivize effective and teacher behavior. Incentivize good teaching with bonuses, the thinking goes, and test scores will improve. Turns out that hasn’t been the case. A large and growing body of research on merit pay has not yet found a causal relationship between pay for performance schemes and cheating, but it has found, pretty universally, that they also have no effect on student achievement.
Two weeks ago New York scrapped a three-year pilot program that promised $3,000 per every unionized educator on staff if a school met progress report goals. The program was canceled the same day that RAND Corporation study commissioned by the city found that the program had had neither any effect on student achievement or on teacher behavior.
“We didn’t see any difference in test results across all three years,” said Julie Marsh, a lead researcher on the report. “We didn’t see any differences in reports of teachers in terms of their instructional practices, or in terms of aligning data with instruction standards, or in the amount of time they spent working outside the regular school day, or spent on professional development or spent collaborating.”
Marsh said that the failure of New York’s program was likely because many teachers were not fully informed about the program, and the bonus, after taxes, wasn’t significant enough to merit any big change in behavior. Many teachers reported to researchers though that they were unhappy that the promise of bonuses was so heavily tied to test score results, and that nevertheless, many teachers both participating in the pilot program and in the control group actually already took very seriously the goal of improving their students’ test scores.
“It’s not clear how much added motivation teachers get from a bonus tied to those measures they already are working toward,” Marsh said.
It’s a claim that Verdalia Turner, the president of the Atlanta Federation of Teachers, says is true for her members as well. “At the end of the day the bonuses were not that big, and it’s not worth it, either way,” she said. The Atlanta Federation of Teachers is defending 48 members who’ve been implicated in the cheating scandal, Turner said.
Following the news of the bonus payouts, district spokesman Keith Bromery told the Atlanta Journal-Constitution that the program is under review.
Merit pay programs continue to be popular measures of reform. Among other teacher compensation reform schemes it’s supported, the Obama administration has most vocally supported merit pay programs that tie teacher compensation to student test scores. The administration’s $4 billion competitive grants program Race to the Top rewards states that adopt the administration’s reform agenda, which includes a merit pay scheme.
While the strongest argument against merit pay may simply be their inefficacy, merit pay critics also argue that they’re part of a line of market-based reforms that focus too much on test scores, and students as test-score producing machines.
“Merit pay is fundamentally a market-based reform,” said Trujillo. “It’s grounded in principles of competition and driven by an attempt to compel teachers to work toward economic goals, in contrast to the social and academic goals that teachers are there to achieve.”
“There’s just a mismatch here, and that’s why you don’t get what you’re expecting.”
Top Arkansas Student Denied Sole Valedictorian Honors Because of Race
06 months ago
Kymberly Wimberly’s lowest grade at Arkansas’ McGehee High School was a B, and it only shows up on her transcript once. There were no other students at the school with marks as high as Kymberly’s, but she wasn’t the only one at graduation named valedictorian. Instead, she was forced to share the title and honor with another student whose grade point average was lower than her own. Why? According to supporters, it’s because Kymberly’s skin wasn’t the color McGehee administrators had in mind for their top student.
Wimberly is black, and though she had been informed by a school counselor that hers was the highest G.P.A. in the Class of 2011, the principal decided to name a white student with lower grades co-valedictorian. According to the racial discrimination suit filed against the school, Wimberly’s mother Molly Bratton, who works at McGehee, overheard other administrators talking about the “big mess” that would result from her daughter’s appointment as valedictorian. When Bratton tried to take up the matter with the school’s superintendent, Thomas Gathen, she was denied for not jumping through the correct bureaucratic hoops. Gathen told her that there was nothing he could do until at least a month after the school’s graduation.
According to Wimberly’s lawyer, there is a “pattern and practice of school administrators and personnel treating the African-American students less favorably than the Caucasian ones.” The school has a white majority, but not an overwhelming one. Forty six percent of McGehee’s students are black, yet there has not been a black valedictorian in the school district, located southeast of Little Rock, since 1989.
Wimberly took Advanced Placement and other honors courses at McGehee, and even gave birth to her daughter during Junior year, yet she still managed to maintain the school’s highest G.P.A. The 18-year-old, who plans to major in biology at the University of Arkansas this fall, says that school administrators have a practice of discouraging black students from taking honors and AP courses, which, in today’s competitive academic climate, are nearly-required for consideration into many four-year universities. “They tell them, among other things, that the work [is] too hard,” she explained.
Kymberly hopes her suit, which is pending federal review, will help the McGehee’s future students avoid the racial treatment she received. “My teachers thought I’d fall flat on my face, but I kept trying to succeed,” she said, adding, “This won’t be a repeat at my school.”