Alliance of White Anti-Racists Everywhere – Los Angeles
educationreform
News Corp. Will Save Our Schools, and Other Scarily Seductive Reforms
03 months ago
Banish the image of a classic American classroom from your mind–chalkboard, desks and all. The future of education has arrived, and next-era classrooms look like, well, call centers: students seated at individual corrals, some with headphones on, being taught and drilled on quadratic equations while a teacher monitors their progress from behind her own computer. With such individualized learning, students can absorb and master subjects “tailored to their pace and needs.”
That was the picture painted by billionaire businessman Rupert Murdoch when he spoke last week at a two-day conference in San Francisco hosted by former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush’s education reform outfit. Murdoch was there, he admitted upfront, as “a businessman” ready to move into the education market. Murdoch’s News Corp. has been quietly developing virtual-learning and technology-driven products for K through 12 schools, and with his address Murdoch made his first large public splash into an arena he’s valued at $500 billion. For entrepreneurs big and small, American public school reform has become a prime business opportunity.
And with help from lawmakers nurtured under Gov. Bush’s legislative guidance, it’ll soon be easier to pick up some of that cash. In an era of declining state budgets and in the face of an urgent educational crisis, Bush argued, now is the time for policy that allows schools to educate their students with cutting-edge digital programs that teach, test and track the progress of school kids for a fraction of the cost of traditional public schools. Bush urged the 750 attendees, most of them state and local school superintendents, education entrepreneurs and lawmakers from state legislatures, to pave the way for schools to adopt digital learning initiatives.
Conveniently, Murdoch and other businesspeople entering the education sector were on hand to sell their wares.
“Digital gives us the means to transform the dismal status quo–and to do it quickly,” Murdoch said during his address. “And it can give school districts a way to improve performance in the classroom while saving their taxpayers money.” Already, Murdoch noted, private companies like Rocketship Schools serving a predominantly low-income, student of color population in San Jose, Calif., have posted stellar test scores using this very model.
The day before, the local teachers union, United Educators of San Francisco, picketed outside the conference, the sidewalks simmering in the hot autumn sun, with signs that read: “Public education is a right, not a profit center!” and “What kind of country bails out banks and closes schools?”
But in the cool, air conditioned meeting rooms of the hotel–where teachers were noticeably absent–startups and the world’s largest corporations were pitched as the salvation of America’s schools. And in the hands of the nation’s most aggressive state lawmakers and reformers, it became an entirely seductive line of reasoning.
High school students at the privately run charter Carpe Diem School in Yuma, Ariz., for instance, have been able to exceed state standards for reading and math. And they’d done it at an average cost of $5,300 per student per year, a significant discount to the national average, which hovers around $10,000. The school’s “digigogy,” in the words of its founder Rick Ogston, involved what’s called blended learning, a mix of digital instruction and traditional in-person classroom instruction.
The head of Rocketship Education, whose schools Murdoch praised in his speech, said the organization of Rocketship classrooms is the foundation of its success in northern California schools. “We all know that when students learn things that are developmentally appropriate for where each of them are, they learn things much faster than if you teach to the middle,” said John Danner. Danner explained that digital learning–together with a flexible bell schedule, focused parent and community engagement and intensely focused professional development of its teaching staff–had allowed its predominantly low-income student body to post fantastic test scores.
These efficient startups operate without the expensive overhead and cumbersome bureaucracy that stifles change and innovation in traditional public schools, lawmakers argued. Teachers at most charters are neither unionized nor guaranteed tenure. Their leaders portrayed these privately run schools as lean, sharp education machines.
But it wasn’t until Sal Khan, the founder and sole faculty member of the rapidly expanding online education group Khan Academy, took the stage, that the seductive appeal of digital learning finally hit home for me. Khan narrated the story of the Academy’s genesis; what started out as long-distance tutoring for his cousin Nadia became a series of wildly popular YouTube lectures, which became a million-dollar startup being tested in wealthy northern California neighborhoods.
Khan explained that his programs, which allow students to learn “at their own pace, and on their own time,” have successfully taught algebra even to kids “from the other side of El Camino.” He is now developing education programs for broader adoption, with the backing of corporate-education philanthropists Bill and Melinda Gates.
Khan imagines upending the traditional classroom structure so that students watch videos at home, and do their homework at school where teachers can assess and zero in on their weaknesses. Computer programs drill students on one concept at a time, refusing to let them advance until they’ve mastered it. In the Los Altos schools that have been experimenting with this model, Khan swore kids didn’t want to leave math class when the recess bell rang.
And soon, I realized I was falling under Khan’s spell. He’s an excellent salesman–charismatic and witty and a wonderful storyteller. I started thinking I might want to take up calculus with his YouTube videos, the first surprise, and then quickly wandered into even more challenging territory. I began to wonder: Is there anything inherently wrong with corporations running schools? So we privatize the education system. If corporations are able to do it successfully, is anything wrong with it?
Perhaps the best weapon the market-based reform movement holds is that no one has yet articulated a broadly compelling response to these questions, one that speaks to the urgent desire of individual parents to get their individual kids educated and the equally urgent need of cash-strapped states to pay for it. So far, there’s only one organized group that’s explicitly countering the privatization of U.S. schools, and they’ve yet to craft a rebuke that can overcome both the rhetorical appeal of the pro-business approach and the anti-public sector worker climate that’s gripped the nation. Teachers unions–whose members face ever harsher sanctions under clumsy and testing-focused accountability measures, and who are losing collective bargaining rights and job stability–have been portrayed as selfish and unwilling to change. That may not be the truth, but it’s certainly the dominant narrative.
At the conference, the villains were named explicitly as public educators–or, when haranguing panelists wanted to be more nuanced, as the unions that represent educators. Teachers were consistently portrayed as simultaneously lazy in the classroom and extremely powerful outside of it, resistant to change and ill-equipped to handle the challenges of educating students in the 21st century. The assembled legislators, school chiefs and entrepreneurs often referred to teachers unions as “the other side,” and themselves as the underdogs.
But while teachers are not winning the messaging war, they and other critics of market-based education reform have got data on their side. New studies show that digital learning companies have inflated their claims of success. Charter schools on average do no better than their often comparatively underfunded traditional public school counterparts. Over and over, studies have found that pay-for-performance schemes do not, in fact, make teachers more effective in the classrooms. Critics of punitive teacher accountability measures and market-based reform argue that social factors–poverty, access to healthcare, family joblessness–have a significant influence on a student’s academic achievement, and that reforms that refuse to acknowledge that reality are doomed to fail.
But these days, the debate is not about any of these things. At its heart, it’s really about fundamental ideological differences over how traditionally public institutions ought to be run and who ought to be responsible for nurturing the nation’s students: publicly run schools accountable to voters and their communities, or private companies accountable primarily to their stockholders. As Indiana state superintendent Tony Bennett said on a panel with other state school chiefs, “We don’t believe we can run schools in the state. We develop contractual relationships with those who can.”
The previous afternoon, just steps away from the hotel ballroom, a protester held aloft a poster asking a question she likely never got an answer to: “The 1% ruined our economy. Why should we trust them with our schools?”
Feds: ESL and Black Students Get Inferior Educations in LAUSD
03 months ago
A 19-month investigation by the U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights found the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) is failing to provide an equal education to English-learners and black students. The school district has agreed to sweeping reforms that could become a model for other school districts around the country.
LAUSD is the nation’s second-largest school system and has more students learning English than any other district in the United States — about 195,000 students, or 29 percent of the district’s overall enrollment, according to the Los Angeles Times. Black students make up an estimated 10 percent of the district’s enrollment.
It’s precisely because of those demographics that the Obama Administration launched their investigation to determine if students who entered school speaking limited English, most of whom are Latino, were receiving adequate instruction.
The district’s English-language learning program has long been
criticized for allowing non-native speakers to remain in
English-learning programs for years, even when they don’t meet the criteria to be integrated.
Students often fall behind grade level and end up dropping out.
The Times provides details of the settlement between the LAUSD and the Department of Education:
Federal authorities do not accuse the district of intentional discrimination. But the settlement requires a top-to-bottom revision of the district’s Master Plan for English Learners, which is already well underway. The goal is to let the district develop the details, under continuing oversight from the Office for Civil Rights, a branch of the Education Department.
Under the settlement, the district for the first time will focus on the academic progress of students judged to have adequately learned English. Many of these students subsequently flounder academically. The district will also concentrate efforts on students who have reached high school without mastering the English skills necessary to enroll in a college-preparatory curriculum and who may be at risk of dropping out.
“What happens in L.A. really does set trends for across the nation. More and more school districts are dealing with this challenge,” Russlynn Ali, the assistant secretary of education for civil rights, told the LA Times.
Warren Fletcher, president of teachers union United Teachers Los
Angeles, praised the Education Department for shedding light on
longstanding disparities, but noted that the district has laid off more
than 1,200 teachers and closed libraries in many schools.
“It’s very general,” he said, regarding the settlement, to the AP. “We have to see how those services are going to be provided.”
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.
What Explains the Post-Katrina Success of New Orleans’ Schools?
05 months ago
New Orleans is in many ways not the same city it was before Hurricane Katrina touched down along the Gulf Coast six years ago. The landscape of the city was wholly changed by Katrina–and nowhere more than in its school system, which New Orleans rebuilt from scratch after the storm. Now, six years later and with the city’s school system all but remade, New Orleans is being cited as a prime example that aggressive reforms can lead to real progress in public schools.
Still, as New Orleans residents transition from discussing a city in recovery to a city that’s remade itself, they face many of the same hurdles as every other major reform-minded school district in the country–testing scandals, fights over school choice and the edging out of the most at-risk students. What no one contests is that Katrina ushered in an era of change. What’s still unclear is whether New Orleans’ school reforms have brought the city’s neediest kids along with everyone else.
This year New Orleans students showed marked improvement on the state’s english and math standardized tests and the state’s Graduation Exit Exam, which fourth and eighth graders must pass to move on to the next grade. New Orleans, which has always lagged behind the rest of Louisiana’s schools, is steadily closing the gap in math and reading test scores. In fact, say researchers at Tulane University’s Cowen Institute for Public Education Initiatives, if the rate of improvement in New Orleans schools stays steady, the city will surpass the state’s achievement on high-stakes tests.
What’s more, the achievement gap between New Orleans’ black and white students–which has always been stubbornly larger that the statewide achievement gap–is narrowing as well. This year’s data showed that the 56-point achievement gap that existed between New Orleans’ black and white students has narrowed to 42 percentage points.
There have been improvements all around. For the first time, 53 percent of the city’s black students performed at grade level on the state’s standardized tests, compared with 51 percent of the rest of the state’s black students, the New Orleans Times-Picayune reported. In 2006, 40 percent of the state’s black students were performing at grade level or better, but the same could be said for only 32 percent of New Orleans’ black students.
So the big question now in front of education experts is: to what does the city owe its test score gains?
Market-Based Reforms
Immediately after the storm, the state passed legislation that allowed the Louisiana Department of Education to take over 107 New Orleans schools that had been labeled failing and place them in a Recovery School District (RSD) that operated separately from the New Orleans Public Schools. The law forever changed the education landscape in New Orleans. Within months, the city had the largest percentage of charter schools of any city in the country; before the storm, just five New Orleans schools were housed in the RSD. Meanwhile, dramatic reforms were brought to schools that were still traditional, or so-called “direct run,” public schools.
That overhaul earned New Orleans a reputation as a testing ground for school reform, and it attracted the attention–and dollars–of education reformers and philanthropists. Last year, the Fordham Institute crowned New Orleans the “reform-friendliest” city in the country.
“These schools had the opportunity to create their own schedules, they extended the day so they could offer instruction for longer periods, schools were given more autonomy to make hiring decisions at the school level,” said Debra Vaughan, the research director of the Cowen Institute.
Teachers who came back to New Orleans, however, found that they didn’t have a job to return to–every New Orleans teacher, 75 percent of whom were black, had been laid off. Many had to start from scratch; the RSD does not operate on a system of tenure the same way that most public school systems do.
“If you were a veteran teacher before,” Vaughan said, “the storm wiped that out.”
The dramatic reforms invited a crop of new, young teachers to the city. The RSD runs in large part on the backs of brand new teachers and those recruited by the short-term teacher project Teach for America.
Was it choice and charter-school driven reform, then, that paved the way for dramatic change and allowed the city to make a fresh start in educating its students? It’s a tempting, but oversimplified, explanation that education experts say folks ought to resist.
“I don’t like comparing what we have now to what we had before the storm too much because we’re a completely different system,” said Andre Perry, an assistant professor of education at Loyola University.
New Schools–or New Students?
Indeed, it’s not just the system that’s changed. New Orleans today is whiter and more male and richer than it was before the storm. The median income in New Orleans has risen, according to the Greater New Orleans Community Data Center’s latest report on the state of the city. Data show that the level of poverty in New Orleans metro has declined from pre-storm rates, while more poor folks live along the periphery of the city, a trend the Community Data Center calls “the suburbanization of poverty.”
“We had a percentage of students who could not return, a significant number in fact who could not return,” Perry said.
Vaughan said she’s familiar with the argument that it’s brand new demographics that are responsible for New Orleans’ educational changes, but says that researchers still don’t have access to some key data. She notes that the number of New Orleans students who rely on free and reduced lunches is about the same as it was before the storm.
Meanwhile, the RSD, as large and as reform-minded as it is, still hasn’t escaped many of the struggles facing other school districts.
The RSD has been run on the idea of choice, a concept that remakes parents and students as consumers who can shop around for the school that best fits them. Parents and students can theoretically choose where they want to send their kids, but they must apply to schools. So whether the choice model holds up in reality is a hotly debated topic among parents of kids with the most needs, such as those who are poor or who have disabilities. The RSD has battled allegations that the choice model functions more as a selective application system, because the most successful schools have a limited number of seats and many parents have found themselves without the same level of access as other parents.
And like elsewhere, schools in the RSD also have been slammed with allegations of impropriety and even teacher cheating in the last year. The RSD conducted an investigation and concluded that some cheating had taken place, but the charter school in question’s own investigation found no wrongdoing–a discrepancy which has fostered much debate. In the wake of cheating scandals that have recurred around the country, reports of teacher cheating threaten to mar New Orleans’ new accomplishments.
“We see that scores are improving and schools are getting better … but there are still too many schools that are failing, even though they are improving,” Vaughan said.
Perry cautions against giving too much weight to the new test score gains when so many of the city’s students still face such great challenges. “Tests are just a proxy for performance,” he said. “They’re not the be-all and end-all. And when school leaders and the system have too much pressure to achieve based on a proxy, then you may miss the bigger picture.”
“Now that we’re seeing some baseline established, we have to concern ourselves with not just chasing the test,” Perry said.
States Debate, and Pass, More School Voucher Bills Than Ever in 2011
06 months ago
Legislators in at least 30 states introduced school voucher bills this year that would allow students to take the public money set aside for their public education and “spend” it in private schools. It’s the largest rush of such policy proposals ever, according to the National Conference on State Legislatures, the AP reported. The surge was enabled in part by new Republican majorities that have taken hold of state legislatures in the past year.
In 2010, just nine voucher bills were debated in state legislatures, less than a third of this year’s volume. As of July, 28 states had also considered offering tax breaks to students who enroll in private schools.
Indiana’s voucher law, passed this year, is the most notable–and it offers both vouchers and tax breaks for private education. Republican Gov. Mitch Daniels aggressively pushed for the law, which would allow families who qualify to receive up to $4,500 a year if they send their child to a private school. It will allow 7,500 students in its first year, 15,000 the second and an unlimited number of students in its third to take advantage of the program.
While school vouchers have been traditionally promoted as a tool for low-income students, Indiana’s new law enables students from middle class backgrounds to take advantage of the vouchers. The law is estimated to eventually allow 60 percent of Indiana families to spend public dollars on private education.
“What we’re seeing now is building momentum in preparation for the reauthorization of No Child Left Behind,” said Karen Hunter Quartz, an education professor at UCLA. The educational philosophy embedded within No Child Left Behind asserts that we can improve public education by expanding the role of private entities like charter schools and voucher-supported private schools.
“There’s an idea that something’s wrong with public schools and that they shouldn’t have a monopoly on young people’s education and therefore families should be able to opt out,” Quartz said. “This has been the larger political aim of NCLB all along.”
School vouchers are a reflection of a particular approach to thinking about education, in which parents and students are consumers and schools are marketplaces, and they’re just one of the many popular market-based policy options being pushed by the mainstream school reform movement. Vouchers are similar to policies that weaken teacher tenure and tie teachers’ job security to their students’ test scores and encourage the creation of charter schools in that they borrow ideas from the business world with the stated intent of bettering public education. With vouchers, the idea is that families can exercise their power as consumers by taking their cash to the best schools and that this competitiveness will force underperforming schools to improve.
“The metaphor is really flawed,” Quartz said. “School is a public institution. It’s a public good, so when we’re trying to figure out how to talk about improving public education, I don’t think the comparison to financial markets helps very well or very much.”
Still, Quartz acknowledged that school vouchers have a particular allure to them, especially for parents who’ve been taken in by education films like “Waiting for Superman,” which pitch a market-based reform philosophy as the solution to the U.S.’s struggling system.
“There’s a large majority of proponents for vouchers who are just at the end of their rope,” Quartz said. “They see these films, or see public media attention against teacher unions and the cultural dialogue against public schooling and they don’t know what to do.”
Still, school vouchers have been found to lead to no measurable improvement on student achievement when compared to students who don’t use vouchers. The most recent (roundup of research) was released by the Center for Education Policy in July. Part of the difficulty of measuring the impact of school vouchers comes from the difficulty of isolating variables when many of the schools and students that are impacted are also the target of other school reform efforts. Still, the CEP said there isn’t conclusive evidence that shows vouchers actually improve educational outcomes. The CEP highlighted a voucher program in Milwaukee for low-income students, where test score gains over the course of three years were about the same for those who used vouchers and for those who didn’t. And yet, states are increasingly pushing for these policies in their states.
Still Separate and Unequal, Generations After Brown v. Board
08 months ago
Today is the 57th anniversary of Brown v. Board of Education, the landmark Supreme Court decision that declared racial segregation in U.S. public schools unconstitutional. Also today, American schools are more segregated than they were four decades ago.
If eradicating racial segregation in education was the original civil rights battle, it continues to be the most enduring one. A court decision that called “separate but equal” schools unlawful led to a couple hopeful decades of racial integration. But today most U.S. kids go to schools that are both racially and socioeconomically homogenous.
Around 40 percent of black and Latino students in the U.S. are in schools than are over 90 percent black and Latino, according to a 2009 study by UCLA’s Civil Rights Project. The schools that black and Latino kids are concentrated in are very often high-poverty schools, too. The average black student goes to a school where 59 percent of their classmates live in poverty, while the average Latino student goes to a school that’s 57 percent poor.
And it’s not just blacks and Latinos who are racially isolated. White students go to schools that are 77 percent white, and 32 percent poor.
The Obama administration, which is leading an aggressive school reform agenda, knows what’s going on. In a major speech calling for the overhaul of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act in 2009, Secretary of Education Arne Duncan acknowledged in understated terms the re-segregation of U.S. schools, as well as the fatigue with everything that’s been attempted to address it.
“Most minorities were still isolated in their own classrooms,” Duncan said of students growing up in the civil rights era, adding, “Many still are today, and we must work together to change that.”
“We’ve had five decades of reforms, countless studies, watershed reports like ‘A Nation at Risk,’ and repeated affirmations and commitments from the body politic to finally make education a national priority,” Duncan said. “And yet we are still waiting for the day when every child in America has a high quality education that prepares him or her for the future.”
But the Obama administration has been otherwise silent on re-segregation in schools, even as its reform policies have targeted poor communities of color where the lowest-performing schools are located. Twenty-first century racial homogeneity in U.S. schools is a product of decades of regressive court decisions as well as residential segregation.
“There are no significant state or federal programs and little private philanthropy addressing policy to either produce better integrated schools with more racial and economic diversity or to train teachers and students about ways to more effectively run impoverished multiracial schools,” wrote the UCLA study’s author Gary Orfield.
Part of it comes from collective fatigue. The initial, post-Brown push for integrated classrooms gave way over the years to wars over busing and several Supreme Court decisions in the 1990s that forced schools to drop race as a consideration for dealing with school assignments. The Court’s 2007 decision limiting Seattle and Louisville school districts from implementing desegregation policies completed its long slide away from Brown v. Board. Meanwhile, education advocates shifted their calls from demands for integration to calls for equity. Alongside that shift, a numbers and testing obsession was taking hold, catalyzed by the 1983 “A Nation at Risk” report Duncan named. That obsession now dominates education reform.
Integrating schools is still a worthwhile goal. Researchers have found that desegregation, while always thorny politically, is one of the most direct methods for raising the education achievement of students of color, especially those that are poor. Columbia University researchers found that when they controlled for other outside socioeconomic factors, students in schools where black and Latino kids were isolated from kids of other races had fewer math and literacy skills–that their educational development was in effect limited by the racial composition of their schools.
And researchers at the University of Connecticut evaluated new strategies like those popularized by North Carolina’s Wake County school district. There, students in wealthier neighborhoods can attend magnet schools in poorer neighborhoods, while students in poorer neighborhoods attend schools in wealthier neighborhoods. Student achievement improved in the system. As an added bonus, researchers also found that allowing kids of different backgrounds to hang out with each other improved students’ racial attitudes about each other.
Still, courts and tea partier-dominated school boards, have continually hampered integration efforts.
Today, the major thrusts of education reform, echoed and pushed in Obama administration policy, are teacher accountability through testing and charter-school expansion. In this iteration of the school reform saga, race is everywhere–acknowledging the existence of the achievement gap is an uncontroversial statement these days. But actually naming, and addressing, the roots of educational inequities is passé.
As the Economic Policy Institute’s Richard Rothstein told me when I was researching the impacts of the recession on education in communities of color, “Everybody acknowledges differences in achievement but nobody wants to address the inequalities that produce them.”
Indeed, the discourse today is schizophrenic in many ways. Teachers, for instance, are singled out as both the ultimate solutions to and the biggest culprits for our nation’s education woes. Duncan and his colleagues, the celebrity school reformers like Michelle Rhee and Joel Klein, and the big-city mayors who’ve backed their reforms often laud and eviscerate teachers in the same breath.
The Obama administration has made adopting punitive teacher accountability policies that evaluate teachers based on their students’ test scores a requirement for states that want some federal education money. Through Race to the Top, Obama’s marquee education reform project, states have been asked to adopt merit-pay schemes that also tie teachers’ jobs to their students’ performance on standardized tests. States have also been asked to lift caps on charter schools and designate failing schools for takeover by, among other entities, outside charter groups.
States are not, however, rewarded for adopting the integration policies that education researchers have found to create such change.
“What’s missing from the debate is a recognition that teachers and schools alone are not the most important influence on a child’s achievement,” said Rothstein.
A coalition of race-conscious reformers are promoting a plan they’ve dubbed the Bolder, Broader Approach to Education, which pushes for a racially explicit and holistic approach to addressing education inequity. There’s noticeably no mention of teacher accountability schemes in the three-point version of that plan. It instead calls for high quality early education for all kids, starting from birth and going all the way up through pre-kindergarten. It also calls for high-quality and consistent after school and summer programs for kids, and routine and preventative health care for kids.
“Low-income children have 30 percent more absences than middle-class kids just due to health alone,” Rothstein said. The idea is to mimic the supports that middle-class kids have regular access to. “Unless we do something there’s still going to be something that’s much more important influencing kids’ education than the quality of their teachers.”
It’s not simply a matter of misplaced priorities. Where educational inequities are concerned, the diagnosis has always been easier than deciding on the course of treatment. Nearly 60 years after Brown v. Board of Education, we’ve yet to resolve the fundamental question of how to deliver high quality public education to kids of all races.
And after decades of wrangling over possible fixes, the de facto re-segregation of American schools is something that the education reform movement, including the Obama administration, have all but given up on addressing. If integrating public schools was once the answer to bringing equity to the classroom, these days, most people are too fatigued and frustrated to even try.
But now more than ever, mustering the energy to address, head-on, the roots of educational inequities is an issue of utmost urgency. Students of color are 44 percent, and growing, of the U.S. public school system. Racial segregation is a legacy we’ve yet to shake off, nowhere more than in American public schools, where students of color are educated in schools that are today both separate and unequal.
Fixing Schools in a Broken Economy Isn’t Easy Math
09 months ago
by Julianne Hing
in educationreform
Jose Pedraza is a gangly teen with a frizzy cloud of dusty brown hair. His soft voice slows as he describes what the initial months of his family’s recent financial crisis were like for him. ”At first I guess it was shocking,” he explains to Colorines’ Julianne Hing. “But then at school it was always in my head, that got in the way of me doing my work.” All he could think about was what his dad’s unemployment would mean for the family. His parents had lived in California for nearly 20 years after immigrating from Mexico. “Like, oh, are we going to have to move back to Mexico? Or what’s going to happen?” It wasn’t long before his grades plummeted and his academic future was in question.
Jose’s experience is not uncommon: With recession gripping black and Latino neighborhoods, researchers and educators believe long-standing educational disparities may be getting worse, not better. Yet, from the White House to pop culture, the increasingly heated debate over school reform has paid little attention to the hard realities families and teachers face. Rather, the latest fad is simplicity: Ignore complexities like race and poverty and focus on teacher accountability. Hing visited with families, students and educators in Los Angeles, one of the front lines in the school reform wars, to find out how they are navigating these perilous times.
FIXING PUBLIC EDUCATION INSIDE A BROKEN ECONOMY
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Julianne Hing spent the school year visiting with students, families and educators in Los Angeles. She found them navigating a reality that bore little resemblance to the simple solutions so hotly debated today. |
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Reporter Julianne Hing describes how one family comes together to get the best education for their son. |
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LEARNING IN A RECESSION [INFOGRAPHIC] Dealing with skyrocketing poverty, hunger and homelessness may now be among the unavoidable demands of education our kids. |
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The Education of Jose Pedraza: Why Fixing Schools Isn’t Simple Math
09 months ago
Last year in East LA, Jose Pedraza was struggling mightily in his classes and drifting listlessly through his days. It was worrying enough to his teachers at Oscar De La Hoya Animo Charter School, where he was then a junior, that the principal called his mother Pascuala Jaramillo and asked for an urgent meeting.
Jaramillo, a seasoned education activist who had organized other parents and made it a point to get to know her kids’ teachers, grabbed what she calls her “bible” and ran straight to the school. It’s actually not a holy book, but rather a binder of her kids’ education documents and information about her own parental rights–”everything I need to defend myself,” she explains. Her years of organizing other parents taught her that teachers and administrators are often too burdened by their work to be effective advocates for their students. She went ready to fight, if she had to.
“When I got to the school, I got notes telling me that my son wasn’t really working,” Jaramillo says. “The principal said, ‘His body is here, but his brain is not in the room.’ “
Jaramillo immediately understood what was going on. She told the principal what their family had been dealing with at home. Her husband, Guadalupe Pedraza, had been abruptly laid off from his maintenance job recently. After 12 years working there, he was told on a Wednesday that his last day would be that Friday.
Jose took it hard. He had always been a quiet kid, but he started pulling away from his parents even more. “He wouldn’t want to eat, he wouldn’t want to talk with us, he was very depressed,” Jaramillo says.
Jose is a gangly teen with a frizzy cloud of dusty brown hair. His soft voice slows as he describes what those initial months of financial crisis were like for him.
“At first I guess it was shocking,” he explains. “But then at school it was always in my head, that got in the way of me doing my work.” All he could think about was what his dad’s unemployment would mean for the family. His parents had lived in California for nearly 20 years after immigrating from Mexico. “Like, oh, are we going to have to move back to Mexico? Or what’s going to happen?”
It wasn’t just the family’s finances bothering Jose, though. Something deeper weighed on him, too. “I’d never seen him look so defeated and not wanting to do anything anymore,” Jose says of his dad, “like wanting to give up. That changed me a lot.”
Soon his grades were slipping. He’d struggled in his classes since ninth grade, but “the red flag for us was the D’s and the F’s,” says Sandra Ochoa, Pedraza’s AP Spanish language teacher, who gathered with all six of Jose’s teachers to discuss his sudden academic decline. None of them really knew why until the parent-teacher conference with his mother.
“In general, we’re not privy to that information,” says Ochoa, who has since forged strong relationships with the family. “We’re trying to get the content to the kids.”
That basic imperative–just get the content to the kids–has emerged as the dominant rallying cry for education reform today. For decades, at least since Brown vs. Board of Education, advocates inside and outside of government have fiercely debated ways to get everyone a fair shot at learning. They’ve fought over integration, busing, funding, parental choices in schools and, of course, teachers’ unions. Meanwhile, inequities have persisted. Almost 40 percent of black and Latino students don’t graduate high school on time, according to White House figures, compared to a quarter of students overall. According to the latest numbers from the National Assessment for Educational Purposes, only 12 percent of black eighth graders are proficient in reading, where 44 percent of white males are considered proficient.
So now a new perspective has risen above the din, pushed by the Obama administration and heavily influenced by celebrity do-gooders, often from the private sector. In a word, it is simplicity. The existing school systems are rotten from decades of political and bureaucratic warring, these reformers assert, and the solutions are clear. We needn’t concern ourselves with overwhelming, unwieldy discussions about race and poverty. Only one thing need matter: Results. And to get them, we need to hold someone accountable: Educators.
Many teachers like Ochoa are in fact more than ready to take up the charge. But as Jose’s story shows, caring, dedicated educators are just not enough on their own. It turns out that there are enormous structural factors at work in kids’ lives that supercede teacher accountability. Whether it’s protracted parental unemployment, sudden homelessness or expensive family illness, many students are facing daunting barriers to learning that the current education debate has ignored, and that the heroics of even city’s best teachers cannot overcome.
Learning to Get By
Across the country, families that were just holding on before the recession are struggling in brand new ways today. The number of those who are out of work or underemployed refuses to budge, and that has in turn created a separate set of housing woes. As much as parents try to shield their children from these stresses, they show up in the classroom, say educators and economists.
In 2009 economists at the University of California, Davis, found that a parent’s unplanned unemployment increased the likelihood that their child would have to repeat a grade by 17 percent. And long before that, a 1998 study published by researchers at the University of California, Santa Barbara, found that just one unplanned move for students between the eighth and twelfth grades can cause so much upheaval that it increases the likelihood they’ll drop out of high school by 50 percent.
In 2011, those are troubling findings for neighborhoods like Jose’s. While the national unemployment rate has edged down to 8 percent, 11.3 percent of Latinos and 15.5 percent of African-Americans report that they’re out of work and still looking. In 2009, more than a quarter of Latino and black families lived in poverty. If economic pain radiates into educational challenges, then inequities may be worsening by the day.
Those inequities will become increasingly consequential for the entire country, because students of color are also the future of schools. In 1980, white students were 74 percent of the nation’s schoolkids. Twenty years later they made up just 56 percent. Today, black and Latino students alone comprise 35 percent of the nation’s students.
Meanwhile, school reform has hit primetime in America. Last September, the film* “Waiting for Superman” helped usher the movement into American living rooms, cementing the celebrity status of crusading reformers like former Washington, D.C., schools chief Michelle Rhee. In September 2010, during a two-day education-themed extravaganza, Oprah Winfrey introduced Rhee and the film to America by posing a grave question to her audience: “So who’s most at fault for failing schools and for failing our children?” After a heavy pause, Winfrey explained, “Michelle Rhee says that she knows, and she has taken a very controversial stand.”
Namely, fire the teachers. As Rhee has repeated often, if we could fire the “bottom five to ten percent” of the nation’s educators, inequities would disappear and achievement would soar.
Rhee’s not alone in promoting that idea, and Jose’s hometown has become a hot spot for the battles that have ensued. In April, the Los Angeles Unified School District stepped into the fray by adopting a measurement called Academic Growth Over Time, or “value added” scoring, that links teachers’ job security with their students’ test scores. The move was spurred in part by the Los Angeles Times, which shocked the education world last year when it published a list of 6,000 third, fourth and fifth grade teachers’ names alongside the paper’s own calculations of their individual value-added scores. Since then other cities, and newspapers, have attempted to do similar things.
The Obama administration has both embraced and fueled these trends. Education Secretary Arne Duncan endorsed the Los Angeles Times’ decision to publicize teachers’ scores, saying, “What’s there to hide?”
In 2009, President Obama created Race to the Top, a $4.35 billion competitive state grants program that doles out money to states that adopt the president’s reform agenda. Under the program, struggling schools that do not post adequate progress face one of four overhaul options. In one of the most drastic, a school’s entire staff must be fired and asked to reapply. No more than half may be rehired. Thirty-nine states have responded to Race to the Top by overhauling their education laws. Eleven of them adopted laws that will make standardized test scores part of teacher evaluations.
President Obama called this all part of his plan for “winning the future” in his State of the Union address. He called on parents to do their part at home and for a greater focus on teacher performance, because “after parents, the biggest impact on a child’s success comes from the man or woman at the front of the classroom.”
Jose’s parents certainly agree that they carry the first responsibility for his future. “Rich people get inheritance,” says Guadalupe Pedraza, “but in our case we want the inheritance we leave our son to be his education, because he’ll never be able to spend it.”
It’s a moving sentiment. But Jose’s parents are no more rich in time than they are money. The past year has been demanding. Jaramillo picks up cleaning and cooking jobs when she can, and sells homemade jewelry at flea markets alongside her husband, who sells homemade carvings and paints to deal with his own depression. Jaramillo says she’s not sure how much longer they’ll be able to hold out this way, but she and her husband consider their kids’ education their top priority.
Every morning they split up: he’s in charge of rounding up enough money to pay the family’s $700 monthly rent, and she must find enough food for the family to eat by the time dinner rolls around. Jaramillo hasn’t given up her parent organizing either. She still goes to district meetings and workshops for her son’s financial aid application. It’s at these sorts of forums that they’ve come to realize they’re not alone.
“I think a lot of students are leaving school because of the economy,” Pedraza says. “There are a lot of desperate parents, and kids leaving school to work, or just dropping out.”
“What makes me very sad,” he adds, “and a lot of people feel this way, is our American dream became an American nightmare.”
The Power of Parents
As Obama’s reform initiatives sweep through the country, they move alongside an aggressive public relations campaign to, among other things, increase parental involvement in education. “It’s family that first instills the love of learning in a child,” Obama said in his State of the Union. “Only parents can make sure the TV is turned off and homework gets done.”
He’s repeated a version of the same message throughout his presidency–personal responsibility for parents in keeping kids focused on school, no excuses.
“There’s no doubt that Michelle and I have more resources and privileges compared with a lot of parents,” Obama told Essence magazine last year. “We understand that, but I don’t care how poor you are–you can turn off the television set during the week.”
For some parents, that’s unhelpful advice.
Not long after this school year began, Treese (a pseudonym) stopped moving long enough to scan the living room of her home in Los Angeles’ Mid-City. She was holding a bag of clothes in one hand and tapping her chin with the other, while she tried to remember where she’d packed away a DVD of her kids’ drill team competitions. “You cannot be raising children and be a wimp,” Treese said, weaving her way around the boxes on the floor of her house. She was trying to explain what it was like to have to tell her son and daughter that they had to leave the home they’d lived in for 16 years.
Treese, who had worked for years as a cafeteria aid in Los Angeles public schools, lost her full-time job four years ago, around the same time that they had to get on Section 8. Since then, she has made ends meet on short, scattered contracts with the district. She said her landlord stopped by her house in September and showed her a letter from the Housing Authority stating that his Section 8 contract was being revoked. She had 30 days to get out of the house, or else she would be responsible for the entirety of the next month’s rent.
Treese’s son Michael (also a pseudonym) had just started the 11th grade at Dorsey High School, after transferring. So her priority was to find housing in the neighborhood so that Micheal could stay at Dorsey, where her daughter had graduated and which felt like home to her kids.
“I may be moving, but I am not moving my son out of his school,” she insisted.
Back when Treese had more steadywork, she would volunteer at Dorsey in the day and help out during football games in the evening–where she also collected bottles and cans to scrape together some extra cash. Her last bundle of recyclables got her $27.15; she wanted it to go to Michael’s sports fees, but the money disappeared quickly.
“They just know that this is a temporary situation and we’re going to get through this,” she told me in the fall.
When I reconnected with Treese this winter, the problems that she’d hoped would be temporary seemed both more permanent and more dire. At the beginning of the year they were finally kicked out of their house. By February, they still hadn’t found a fixed place to stay.
And yet, she was still determined to give her kids every educational opportunity. She still asked her kids about their homework and got to know their teachers. She still spent her afternoons and weekends shuttling her kids to sports and drill team practice. If they watched a lot of TV, they did it on empty tanks.
All of Treese’s work has kept Michael in school, physically at least. When I spoke with him, he admitted school was not the center of his life. He wants to play football at University of Southern California one day, and that ambition is what Treese has used to motivate him to study. She is understandably protective of her son and Dorsey’s reputation, so it was difficult to find out how he was doing in school. Still, it was plain that as dedicated as Treese is to Michael’s education, the everyday fight to keep her family afloat dominated their lives.
“It’s kinda good,” Michael said about his family’s impending move. “We’ve been struggling in this house so long,” he said, pointing out mold in the carpets and cracks in the walls next to his bedroom window, where rain would seep in at night. Perhaps he just wanted to put a positive spin on the trajectory so many families have faced in recent years: the precipitous fall from bad to worse.
“Every day I am out there figuring out where we are going to stay at night,” Treese said the last time we talked. She hated most being a burden on others. “We’re with friends. But we never stay anywhere long enough so people notice.”
She still would not budge from her goal. “There’s no way he’s leaving Dorsey,” Treese insisted repeatedly. “He likes it here and everyone knows me. I do not want to move him around and do that to him now. He does not need more change right now.”
Treese’s apprehension is well-founded.
“When parents are losing their rent and having to move apartments two, three times, and two or three jobs are lost, it’s symptomatic of a more chronic instability,” says Russ Rumberger, an education professor at University of California, Santa Barbara, who authored the 1998 study on student mobility driving up the likelihood of dropping out. Rumberger adds that when students are forced to move around it also impacts the rest of the school, and even other students. He is certain that with the recession, more schools are experiencing destabilizing student turnover.
Indeed, student homelessness in Los Angeles is on the rise, according to Melissa Schoonmaker, the Homeless Education Unit coordinator for LAUSD. In the 2008-2009 academic year the district had 12,489 students who lacked a fixed home address. In the 2009-2010 school year, LAUSD’s homeless student population increased to 13,445.
The recession has meant many kids are showing up to school hungry, too. In 2010, more than half–55.9 percent–of California public school students qualified for free or reduced lunch, according to kidsdata.org, a project of the Lucile Packard Foundation for Children’s Health. In Los Angeles County, more than 65.5 percent of students qualified last year, up from just under 60 percent in 2008.
“Student mobility historically hasn’t been viewed as an educational concern because educators would say, ‘It has nothing to do with us,’ ” Rumberger explains. “‘They’re unstable, they lose their jobs. We don’t have much to contribute to it.’ ”
A Formula for Success
If the organizing idea of today’s most celebrated reformers is, as the president articulated, that aside from parents, teachers are the most crucial linchpin in the academic life of students like Michael and Jose Pedraza, it follows that they are the most at fault for those students’ failures. The solution, then, becomes simple: just eliminate the worst teachers. It’s a straightforward labor problem. The only question is how to identify the bad apples.
For answers, many districts have given themselves over to the seductive appeal of a numbers-based evaluation system that rests on standardized testing. The everyday heroics, the disasters averted, the relationships forged over time are all rendered invisible. It’s only the test scores that matter.
Adopting these sorts of numbers-based teacher evaluation schemes was one criteria the Obama administration set for winning Race to the Top money. Some states are already implementing their laws. In Colorado, the first state to implement its new teacher evaluation laws, 51 percent of yearly evaluations must come from students’ test score gains by 2013.
The corporate-style cleanups extend to schools themselves, too. The Obama administration has called on states to increase competition by lifting caps on the number of charter schools and forcing struggling schools to submit to hostile takeovers by outside entities, including charters. If public schools once functioned as the heart of their communities, serving as a place for not just education but civic engagement and community development, they’re increasingly more like competitive school-markets, which must post satisfactory test scores or be acquired by someone who can.
And amidst it all, Los Angeles is taking bold steps to be at the cutting edge. In April, Los Angeles Unified announced its tentative scheme to adopt “value-added” teacher evaluation measures, against vocal opposition from the district’s teachers union. The idea is that value-added is a reliable measurement of teacher effectiveness because it compares students against their own achievement from year to year. The system can therefore theoretically isolate a teacher’s impact on student achievement by controlling for factors like poverty and race that often skew test scores when teachers are compared across a school district. Just add math and the messy business of racial inequity goes away.
Of course, the simple-sounding idea masks a complex, dangerously fallible formula. Value-added uses an intricate algorithm with dozens of variables to predict test score gains a student should post based on that student’s past performance. The difference between the projected gains and their actual gains becomes the teacher’s score. A teacher’s score is comprised of her collective “value-added” marks over time.
The metrics have a certain allure to them. Numbers are clean. Numbers are supposed to be objective. Also, after decades of standardized testing, school districts have amassed a great deal of data that politicians are eager to force some meaning out of. Proponents acknowledge value-added scoring is an imperfect system that should never become the entire basis for evaluating teachers. Many critics argue, however, that that’s exactly what’s happening.
This past weekend the Los Angeles Times released value-added scores for 11,500 third through eighth grade teachers. It’s the second phase of a public shaming project the paper has taken on using their own value-added model to rate the district’s teachers. Along the way, the newspaper has published the stories of popular and well-respected teachers who actually turn out to be ineffective, by its measurements. Meanwhile, some teachers have complained that under value-added, their scores varied wildly from year to year.
Some critics also charge that test scores can improve even when actual learning stays flat. They have pointed out that states’ individual testing gains often are not matched by similar growth in the well-respected National Assessment of Educational Progress test, which is given to a sample of American students and often called “the nation’s report card.”
Others have more a fundamental disagreement: that there is no mathematical model that can truly capture the nuances of classroom dynamics or account for the challenges that students face in their lives or tabulate the myriad intangible things that make good teachers have impact.
One of those intangible factors is continuity, and the community it facilitates–the sort of thing that made Treese so insistent that Michael remain at Dorsey.
LAUSD is entering the third phase of an initiative called Public School Choice, in which struggling schools in the district are put on the auction block. Outside organizations are invited to submit overhaul plans, along with the struggling school itself. The organization with the winning plan takes control of the school. The idea is attractive–the problems in the education system seem so entrenched, why not wipe the slate clean?
The LAUSD teachers I spoke to approached PSC with skepticism.
“If it’s new teachers, with new staff, with new students, you have to build a core, you have to build roots, that public schools already have,” said German Gurrola, a teacher at West Adams High School, which is itself a new partnership between LAUSD and Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa’s education reform non-profit. “It’s like trying to do a reset button. … But we’re not VCRs. Communities don’t just reset. You’re destroying something.”
And the recession has taken its own toll on school communities in Los Angeles. In February, the district approved 5,000 layoff notices, including notices for more than 4,000 teachers. Kirti Baranwal, who teaches at Gompers Middle School in Compton, says that in the previous academic year, half of her school’s teachers were pink-slipped. At the immigrant-serving John Liechty Middle School, 72 percent of teachers were issued layoff notices. “I think it’s devastating for kids and for instruction,” Baranwal says.
“I feel like kids come back after summer and they ask, ‘Oh, is so and so here?’ And it’s a weird lack of continuity, where you’re always getting to know new teachers as opposed to teachers having a reputation and ties to a community and relationships with their students and families. Those are the things that make schools strong.”
Partial Victories
For all of the debate over charter schools and test scores and teacher evaluations, if you spend enough time talking to educators and students in struggling districts, it all starts to feel beside the point. There are in fact plenty of stories of students succeeding despite the upheavals of recession and reform in the Los Angeles school system. They often involve moments when teachers and families have made it their business not to ignore the broad structural factors that can derail an education. Jose Pedraza’s story is one of them, sort of.
Sandra Ochoa, the Spanish AP teacher who took a close interest in Jose, explains that the main priority of her school, which is part of the Green Dot charter school network, is to get kids to college. Jose’s academic decline meant that, without some kind of intervention, he was not prepared for that. But after they found out the root of his troubles, the school signed him up for weekly counseling and his teachers started checking in on him more frequently. The extra attention caught him off guard, but helped bring him back from the brink. By getting to know Jose’s family and making herself available to her students–Ochoa and Jose bonded over a mutual love of Iron Maiden–she did much more than just teach college-level Spanish.
Jaramillo credits Ochoa with helping refocus her son on his academics. Still, the story is difficult for her to retell. Jaramillo, who speaks with pride about her activism and her family, can’t stop her voice from shaking when she tries to explain how her husband’s unemployment has impacted her kids’ education.
“I want him to go to university. I want him to get his dreams,” Jaramillo says. “My biggest dream is to see him graduate from college.”
But for all that she and her son’s school have put into making that dream come true, it’s not at all clear any of them would be considered a success by the standards of today’s loudest voices on education reform. Jose barely recovered by the end of the year. Though he did pass his AP exam with a five, the highest score possible, he’s just getting by as his senior year comes to a close. This spring, he was passing his classes, but not acing any of them.
“Every day is difficult,” Jaramillo says of her struggles to motivate Jose and keep her family afloat at the same time. She hopes that his academic low point is behind him, but realizes, “We are still struggling with him.”
Watch Julianne Hing’s reporter’s notebook video of her time with Jose Pedraza’s family.
A previous version of this post incorrectly stated that “Waiting for Superman” was nominated for an Oscar.
Michigan to Investigate ‘Statistically Improbable’ Jump in Test Scores
011 months ago
The Michigan State Board of Education has launched an investigation into 34 schools in the state who reported test score improvements that a recent Detroit Free Press and USA Today investigation found to be “statistically improbable.”
The Detroit Free Press and USA Today examined scores from a three to seven-year span and focused on schools that posted test score gains higher than 99.9 percent of their peers around the state. They found that between 2008 and 2009, 34 Michigan schools–32 of which are in metro Detroit–posted gains that were too good to be true, which suggest that cheating of some kind may have taken place. At Crofoot Elementary School, which in 2006 was cited for cheating on standardized tests, state officials found that in 2003, fourth graders were 39 percent proficient in math. By the very next year fourth graders were 87 percent proficient, and by 2005 they were 100 percent proficient.
The newspapers examined changes between years in test scores and the investigation found similar questionable test score improvements in Arizona, California, Colorado, Florida and Ohio.
Test experts say that they are not proof of misconduct, and that students are capable of making personal achievement leaps, but that these sorts of gains in entire classrooms are improbable. In the most common scenarios teachers peek at the test questions and use them to drill their students, sometime even copying questions verbatim on study guides, so their students can be prepared.
Education experts say these sorts of scandals are symptoms of an education system that places an unhealthy emphasis on the importance of test scores. Under No Child Left Behind and provisions of the competitive education grants program Race to the Top, schools can be shut down and teachers and principals fired if they do not make adequate progress in raising student test scores.
Michigan applied for $400 million of the $4.3 billion pot of Race to the Top money available to states who adopted Obama administration reforms. In the run-up to the competition the state rewrote many education laws which allowed for the creation of more charter schools and adopted a system to overhaul schools that were deemed failing. Michigan also agreed to make student test scores a “significant” part of how teachers were evaluated. In two rounds of the competition Michigan hasn’t won anything in return for adopting its new policies.
Michigan public schools desperately needed the money–and that’s where the Department of Education is able to leverage its power to force states to adopt reforms. In 2010 Gov. Jennifer Granholm announced that the state school budget would be slashed by more than $200 million. The scandal-plagued and long-suffering Detroit Public Schools are also hundreds of millions of dollars in the red.
The race to the top, the race to “win the future” has run on a blind faith in standardized tests and unquestioning commitment to punitive teacher accountability measures. Michigan’s new test score woes show that the country may be using the wrong methods to chase its goals. That hasn’t stopped the state from pushing forward. In February the state board of education agreed to adopt a higher “cut-off” score for students to be considered proficient on the state standardized tests.
Six Los Angeles Charter Schools Shut Down
011 months ago
On Tuesday, the next wave of charter school closures arrived in Los Angeles when the city’s Board of Education moved to shut down six Crescendo charter schools that operate south of downtown L.A. after the chain’s president was accused of encouraging teachers to cheat in standardized test preparations. Crescendo’s executive director John Allen allegedly directed principals who ordered teachers to break open the seals of the prior year’s tests to use on drills with students for last year’s standardized tests, the Los Angeles Times reported.
Allen has since been demoted after teachers reported the misconduct. Incoming LAUSD superintendent John Deasy recommended that Crescendo renew the organization’s charter a year at a time with annual reviews. The Los Angeles Board of Education instead revoked their charter.
Charter school closures are not unusual. A 2009 report from the National Center for Education Reform, a charter school advocacy group, found that just over 12 percent of the 5,250 charter schools that had ever been opened in the country had been forced to close. NCER found that more than forty percent closed because of financial mismanagement and inadequate enrollment. Fourteen percent were shut down because of poor academic performance. Like Crescendo’s unfortunate demise, allegations of grade tampering and misconduct frequently swirl around their final days–the blog Charter School Scandals tracks these with gleeful thoroughness.
Charter school critics use such reports as proof that charters are untested, and therefore untrustworthy entities. Their supporters argue that frequent charter school closures are a testament to pro-reformers’ commitment to accountability. If it’s not working, shut them down, they proudly say.
Either way, school closures of any kind cause upheaval in kids’ lives as schools get shut down and reconstituted and kids get dispersed throughout the district. It all leads to more instability in kids’ education.
And it’s not just charter schools that are getting shut down these days. Under No Child Left Behind and in the frenzy surrounding Race to the Top, traditional public schools that can’t raise their performance adequately enough have seen mass firings, forced closures and, ironically, charter school takeovers.