Did the AFT Just Invalidate Paul Hill, Rick Hess, Mike Antonucci, Terry Moe, Peter Brimelow, Carolyn Hoxby, and a bunch of other folks?

Really interesting commentary in the December 13th Education Week by Antonia Cortese and F. Howard Nelson of the American Federation of Teachers about the reality of teacher transfers in urban school districts. The boogeyman for years has been that the transfer rights embodied in teacher contracts are alternately a) dooming students to failing schools or b) destroying the very fabric of America, but new research done by the AFT shows that the reality doesn’t at all match the perception. You can read more about it on the AFT’s website, here.

Read more here, if any.

BWAHAHAHAHAHAHA!

I’ve not really had an opinion on the NSTA/Inconvenient Truth kerfuffle that broke out last month. It burned up on the WSTA’s listserv, which was where I first heard of it, and the December 6th Education Week has it on their front page with one of the more hilarious endings that I’ve ever seen:

(Regarding the NSTA’s decision not to send the video to all their members) But Brad Shipp, the national field director for the advocacy group Students for Academic Freedom, said that if the NSTA had distributed Mr. Gore’s film it might have sent an implicit message of approval to teachers. His Los Angeles-based group’s goal is to remove bias—often targeting what is sees as liberal bias—from K-12 and college teaching.

Had the NSTA mailed out the DVDs, Mr. Shipp said, it is possible that policital conservatives would have accused the organization of partisanship, given Mr. Gore’s association with the film.

“He’s a politician,” Mr. Shipp said. “We should not have a politician dictating what we should be teaching.”

Shee-it, Shipp, teachers have been pounding that "Just let us teach!" drum for an eternity now. Hopefully you took the same dim view of the Kansas Board of Education’s stance on evolution, and I would expect that you would also support abolishing the Department of Education, like Reagan did.

Read more here, if any.

These Are the Stories That Drive Me Mad

From the December 6th Education Week:

Low doses of the drug Ritalin are effective in treating the symptoms of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder in preschool-age children, but young children are especially sensitive to the drug’s side effects and should be closely monitored, says a report published in the November issue of the Journal of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry.

Ritalin is the most commonly prescribed drug to treat children with ADHD, according to the National Institute of Mental Health, which paid for the study. However, the federal Food and Drug Administration has not approved its use for children under the age of 6.

Preschool kids identified with ADHD. Roll that around your head for a bit and see how it sounds to you. I find it horrifying that any pre-school child would be given a drug with powerful side effects based on an ADHD diagnosis, but maybe there is that one kid in a million.....

Also on the ADHD front, schools in Israel are using biofeedback to train kids how to overcome the condition, according to an article from Edutopia magazine. It’s also got the scary stat that in 2004 94% of ADHD drug sales worldwide were here in the United States; the other 6% was in Europe.

The question is, why?

Read more here, if any.

How Much Time Should Schools Allocate for Teaching Mathematics?

In the December issue of the NCTM News Bulletin, from the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics, they published the official NCTM position on the time that should be set aside every day for teaching math.

Today’s world demands a mathematically literate citizenry, well prepared for ever-changing technology and growing global competition, and led by a new generation of mathematics and science professionals. More challenging mathematical content is required at every grade level. Class time should be planned effectively to engage all students. However, learning important mathematics cannot be rushed; students need time to process what they are learning (Pezdek and Micheli 1982).

At every grade level, students must have time to become engaged in mathematics that promotes reasoning and fosters communication between teachers and students and among students. Students need time to develop and practice skills and procedures for solving a wide range of problems. Most important, developing the concepts and skills that ensure success in school and beyond requires a substantial investment of time. Students at every level should have at least one hour of mathematics instruction each day.

An hour of mathematics instruction each day gives students 50 percent more time with mathematics than 40-minute periods do. Students who have an hour of mathematics instruction each day receive nearly 180 hours of instruction a year.

It is essential that middle school not be a time of short-duration mathematics classes. What was once considered high school mathematics content is increasingly found in middle school, where courses in algebra and geometry are now commonplace. In addition, any version of semester block scheduling at the middle school or high school level should be implemented with great care. Students who go without studying mathematics for a semester or more may lose ground and be at a disadvantage in high school or college study.

Evidence supports the enrollment of high school students in a mathematics course every year, continuing beyond the equivalent of a second year of algebra and a year of geometry. Classes designed solely to help students pass state assessments or remediate deficiencies should supplement students’ primary mathematics classes, not replace them.

A couple of things to point out:

• The call to teach an hour of math at every level runs into a big stumbling block in pre-school and kindergarten, where the dictates of a 2.5 hour day often limit math instruction to 30 or 40 minutes.
  
• Our middle school in my district is doing a nice job of making sure that the remedial math is taught in conjunction with the traditional math, not to replace it. It’s the right thing to do.

Articles like this, combined with the recent release of the Curriculum Focal Points, show me that the NCTM is doing some great things. Hooray, math!

Read more here, if any.

When Playing Halo is Good Teaching, I’ll Be l33t

Interesting article in the December 6th edition of Education Week on the Serious Games Summit held in October. The upshot of the conference was that video games might not be such a bad thing, and the article lists some good examples of educational software:

History:

• Virtual History: Ancient Egypt from KnowledgeMatters.com
  
• Discover Babylon from the Federation of American Scientists

Math:

• Video Game Development (really, that’s the name of the game) from I Support Learning Inc.
  
• Hot Shot Business from Disney Online

Science:

• Hidden Agenda Games, written by college students with money from the Liemandt Foundation. There are games on chemistry, physics, algebra, and biololgy.
  
• Immune Attack, also from the Federation of American Scientists
  
• Uncharted Depths: The Game of Scientific Literacy from Filament Games. However, it hasn't been published yet.
  
• Wonderville, from the Science Alberta Foundation. This one doesn't really pass muster as a video game, to me, but all the same....

It makes one wonder why there isn’t a teaching simulation. Combine elements of Leisure Suit Larry with a dash of Phantasy Star and a little bit of Doom II thrown in for good measure, and you’d have it. Put it online and it could be a course requirement in ed schools around the country; the lazy/good professor’s best friend.

The conference is also mentioned in this month’s edition of Interactive Educator magazine.

Read more here, if any.

I Like Skip Fennell

He’s the president of the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics, and his “President’s Message” column this month on the importance of formative and summative assessments is another winner. You can read it off of the NCTM website, here.

Read more here, if any.

Washington State Math Council: We Love the WASL!

That’s what one could infer from the December/January issue of Washington Mathematics magazine:

As an affiliate of the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics (NCTM), the WSMC is encouraged by the state’s efforts to align Washington’s state standards with the NCTM standards. WSMC believes that the Washington Assessment of Student Learning (WASL) is an appropriate instrument with which to measure students’ mathematical proficiency and should continue to be maintained.

and (emphases theirs):

(Our recommendations include) Keeping in place the graduation requirement for passing the WASL, especially the mathematics portion, for the class of 2008. We do not favor postponing this requirement.

I wonder how many math teachers around the state would agree with that viewpoint?

I recommend reading the whole article, BTW. A good overview of what’s going on with math education here in the Evergreen State.

Read more here, if any.

Proficiency for All, Part II: 100% Happens 0% of the Time

The Campaign for Educational Equity at Columbia University held a conference last month about the 100% goal of NCLB being unattainable. Education Week wrote it up in their November 29th edition; it’s a companion piece to the article I previously highlighted here.

While some leaders in Washington may believe that the No Child Left Behind Act is almost perfect, researchers who took part in a recent conference here suggest it’s more like a rough draft of a term paper that needs major rewriting.

The nearly 5-year-old federal law sets unattainable goals that all students demonstrate proficiency in reading and mathematics by 2014, and it doesn’t give schools the support they need to reach those goals, according to education researchers who presented papers at the Nov. 13-14 gathering. The Campaign for Educational Equity, based at Teachers College, Columbia University, sponsored the event.

The law will be unworkable “unless we jettison the demand that all children be proficient,” said Richard Rothstein, a research associate for the Economic Policy Institute, a think tank based in Washington. “We can not have a single standard … that simultaneously challenges students” at all levels of achievement.

As a Rick Hess groupie perhaps the most interesting piece is his quote at the end:

Mr. Hess of the American Enterprise Institute said at the New York City event that the commitment to complete proficiency might wane as the deadline of 2014 nears. By then, the attitude might become that 100 percent proficiency “was a nice aspirational goal, but it needs to be revisited,” he said.

The entire article can be found at the link below.

Researchers Ask Whether NCLB’s Goals for Proficiency Are Realistic

By David J. Hoff

New York

While some leaders in Washington may believe that the No Child Left Behind Act is almost perfect, researchers who took part in a recent conference here suggest it’s more like a rough draft of a term paper that needs major rewriting.


The nearly 5-year-old federal law sets unattainable goals that all students demonstrate proficiency in reading and mathematics by 2014, and it doesn’t give schools the support they need to reach those goals, according to education researchers who presented papers at the Nov. 13-14 gathering. The Campaign for Educational Equity, based at Teachers College, Columbia University, sponsored the event.


The law will be unworkable “unless we jettison the demand that all children be proficient,” said Richard Rothstein, a research associate for the Economic Policy Institute, a think tank based in Washington. “We can not have a single standard … that simultaneously challenges students” at all levels of achievement.


While Mr. Rothstein said he would like to see the NCLB law repealed, others at the conference said many of its key elements could be retained as long as the law’s achievement goals are reachable, and the schools failing to reach them are given adequate support to meet them.


“If you are going to set targets, you have to look around and say, ‘How do we know this is achievable?’ ” said Robert L. Linn, a professor emeritus of education at the University of Colorado at Boulder and a co-director of the National Center for Research on Evaluation, Standards, and Student Testing.


The researchers’ beliefs are a marked contrast to the assumptions of top federal policymakers who will play a central role in the reauthorization of the No Child Left Behind Act, which Congress passed by overwhelming bipartisan majorities in 2001.


In a session with reporters in August, U.S. Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings described the law as “99.9 percent pure,” likening it to Ivory soap, whose longtime advertising pitch declared the product “99 and forty-four one-hundredths percent pure.”


Although the secretary has sought to make implementation of certain provisions of the law easier for states and districts, she has said she won’t bend on the goal of universal proficiency by 2014.


“It’s an absolute necessity that we achieve 100 percent proficiency,” David L. Dunn, Ms. Spellings’ chief of staff, said at a separate panel discussion, in Washington on Nov. 16.


The Democrats expected to lead the House and Senate education committees in the new Congress—Rep. George Miller of California and Sen. Edward M. Kennedy of Massachusetts, respectively—also are firmly behind the goal of universal proficiency in reading and mathematics.


“There’s absolutely no appetite … to revisit the 2014 target,” said Frederick M. Hess, the director of education policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute, a Washington think tank, who responded to the presentations of Mr. Rothstein and Mr. Linn at the Teachers College conference.

Mind the Gaps

Congress is scheduled to reauthorize the No Child Left Behind law next year. An overhaul of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, which encompasses a host of federal programs in K-12 education, the law set the goal of universal proficiency and created an accountability system that monitors schools and districts to ensure students are making adequate yearly progress—or AYP—toward reaching proficiency by 2014.


Instead of universal proficiency, participants at the Teachers College event said, lawmakers should consider focusing on one of the law’s other goals: closing the gaps in student achievement that exist between most racial and ethnic minority groups and whites.


“How do we provide a meaningful educational opportunity for [minority] kids?” said Michael A. Rebell, the executive director of the Campaign for Educational Equity, a project of Teachers College intended to analyze policies affecting poor and minority students. By doing so, the country would make progress toward 100 percent proficiency, he said.


Mr. Linn suggested that the law could set goals for AYP that are based on experiences of schools that demonstrate dramatic achievement gains. For example, such goals could be based on the achievement levels and growth in schools with the top 20 percent of achievement growth, he said.


The current AYP targets have “become increasingly unrealistic,” he said. “As we get closer to 2014, you’re going to have all schools failing to reach AYP targets.”


In addition to calling the law’s achievement goals unreasonable, another researcher said the law fails to address problems in schools where large percentages of students are failing to progress toward proficiency.


In requiring that AYP results for schools be published, the law assumes that schools with persistent academic problems are going to figure out a way to turn around, either on their own or with assistance from their districts or states, said Richard F. Elmore, a professor at Harvard University’s graduate school of education.


But education leaders at the local and state levels don’t have the tools they need to fix their academic programs, so whatever plan they devise “is the same thing [they’re currently doing] with a different name on it,” he said.


“You better have the ability to fix the worst cases, or the policy loses credibility,” Mr. Elmore said. “I think that’s where we are now.”


Mr. Hess of the American Enterprise Institute said at the New York City event that the commitment to complete proficiency might wane as the deadline of 2014 nears.


By then, the attitude might become that 100 percent proficiency “was a nice aspirational goal, but it needs to be revisited,” he said.

Read more here, if any.

The Christmas Post

I'll be off for a while enjoying my Christmas loot, and while I try not to stray into other political realms here I would like to leave you with some song lyrics that accurately sum up what I think about the situation in Iraq. Please keep our soldiers in your hearts and prayers during this Christmas season.

Happy Holidays!

If you love this land of the free
Bring 'em home, bring 'em home
Bring them back from overseas
Bring 'em home, bring 'em home

It will make the politicians sad, I know
Bring 'em home, bring 'em home
They wanna tangle with their foe
Bring 'em home, bring 'em home

They wanna test their grand theories
Bring 'em home, bring 'em home
With the blood of you and me
Bring 'em home, bring 'em home

Now we'll give no more brave young lives
Bring 'em home, bring 'em home
For the gleam in someone's eyes
Bring 'em home, bring 'em home

(Hooo-hooo hooo-hooo)
(Hooo-hooo hooo-hooo)

The men will cheer and the boys will shout
Bring 'em home, bring 'em home
Yeah and we will all turn out
Bring 'em home, bring 'em home

The church bells will ring with joy
Bring 'em home, bring 'em home
To welcome our darlin' girls and boys
Bring 'em home, bring 'em home

We willl lift their voice and sound
Bring 'em home, bring 'em home
Yeah, when Johnny comes marching home
Bring 'em home, bring 'em home

Bring 'em home, bring 'em home
Bring 'em home, bring 'em home
Bring 'em home, bring 'em home
Bring 'em home, bring 'em home

Bring 'em home, bring 'em home
Bring 'em home, bring 'em home
Bring 'em home, bring 'em home
Bring 'em home, bring 'em home

Bring 'em home, bring 'em home
Bring 'em home, bring 'em home
Bring them back from overseas
Bring 'em home, bring 'em home

If you love this land of the free
Bring 'em home, bring 'em home
Bring them back from overseas
Bring 'em home, bring 'em home

Bring 'em home, bring 'em home
Bring 'em home, bring 'em home
Bring 'em home, bring 'em home
Bring 'em home, bring 'em home

Read more here, if any.

Proficiency for All, Part I: A Brief History of the NAEP

I’ve talked before about how reaching 100% proficiency for all children in all subjects by 2014 is a mathematical impossibility, but this excellent article from the November 29th issue of Education Week does the best job I’ve seen of talking about both why it can’t happen and what that means for us all as we try to reform education in the United States. One of the pieces that’s the most interesting to me from it is this history that they give of the National Assessment of Education Progress (NAEP), which seems incredibly secretive for a test that is considered to be the “nation’s report card.” I’ve pasted that section below; the full article can be found in the follow-up link at the bottom of the post:

How did we get standards so divorced from reality, even for students in the middle of the distribution? Few Americans realize how unscientific the process for defining proficiency was—and must be. NAEP officials assembled some teachers, businesspeople, parents, and others, presented these judges with NAEP questions, and asked their opinions about whether students should get them right. No comparison with actual performance, even in the best schools, was required. Judges’ opinions were averaged to calculate how many NAEP questions proficient students should answer.


From the start, experts lambasted this process. When officials first contemplated defining proficiency, the NAEP board commissioned a 1982 study by Willard Wirtz, a former U.S. secretary of labor, and his colleague Archie Lapointe, a former executive director of NAEP. They reported that “setting levels of failure, mediocrity, or excellence in terms of NAEP percentages would be a serious mistake.” Indeed, they said, it would be “fatal” to NAEP’s credibility. Harold Howe II, a former U.S. commissioner of education responsible for NAEP’s early implementation, warned the assessment’s administrators that expecting all students to achieve proficiency “defies reality.”

In 1988, Congress ordered NAEP to determine the proficient score. Later, U.S. Sen. Edward M. Kennedy’s education aide, who wrote the bill’s language, testified that Congress’ demand was “deliberately ambiguous” because neither congressional staff members nor education experts could formulate it precisely. “There was not an enormous amount of introspection,” the aide acknowledged.

Others urged NAEP to wait. In 1991, Gregory Anrig, then the president of the Educational Testing Service, which administered NAEP, suggested delaying proficiency definitions until they could be properly established. Chester E. Finn Jr., an influential member of the NAEP governing board, responded that by delaying reports on how few students were proficient, “we may be sacrificing something else—the sense of urgency for national improvement.”

Once achievement levels were set, the government commissioned a series of evaluations. Each study denounced the process for defining proficiency, leading to calls for yet another evaluation that might generate a better answer.

The first such evaluation, conducted by three respected statisticians in 1991, concluded that “the technical difficulties are extremely serious.” To continue the process, they said, would be “ridiculous.” Their preliminary report said that NAEP’s willingness to proceed in this way reflected technical incompetence. NAEP fired the statisticians.

Congress then asked the U.S. General Accounting Office for its opinion. The GAO found NAEP’s approach “inherently flawed, both conceptually and procedurally.” “These weaknesses,” it said, “could have serious consequences.” The GAO recommended that NAEP results not be published using percentages of students who were allegedly basic, proficient, or advanced.

Proficiency for all, implying the elimination of variation within socioeconomic groups, is inconceivable. Closing achievement gaps, implying the elimination of variation between socioeconomic groups, is daunting but worth striving for.
In response, the U.S. Department of Education commissioned yet another study, this one by the National Academy of Education. The panel concluded that procedures for defining proficiency were “subject to large biases,” and that levels by which American students had been judged deficient were “unreasonably high.” Continued use of NAEP proficiency definitions could set back the cause of education reform because it would harm the credibility of NAEP itself, the panel warned.

Finally, the Education Department asked the National Academy of Sciences to weigh in. It concluded, in 1999, that the “process for setting NAEP achievement levels is fundamentally flawed” and “achievement-level results do not appear to be reasonable.”

I still don’t quite understand the credence that has been put into the NAEP as being the be-all and end-all of assessment in America. The NAEP scores always come back low, but they are given a weight that I don’t know that they deserve. The Fordham Foundation especially has used the NAEP to show that state standards stink and schools aren’t making progress, but what if the test itself is an inaccurate measure?

There’s always going to be a disconnect, too, between the results of the NAEP and the results on the myriad statewide assessments used across the country, because they test different things. You might view this as a reason to go to a national curriculum and national standards ($), and certaily the argument can be had, but the state's rights argument is equally as strong and still resonates with many people.


‘Proficiency for All’ Is an Oxymoron
Accountability should begin with realistic goals that recognize human variability.
By Richard Rothstein, Rebecca Jacobsen, & Tamara Wilder

The No Child Left Behind Act requires all students to be proficient by 2014. This is widely understood to be unattainable because 2014 is too soon. But there is no date by which all (or nearly all) students, even middle-class students, can achieve proficiency. “Proficiency for all” is an oxymoron.



—Peter Lui
The federal education legislation does not define proficiency, but refers to the National Assessment of Educational Progress. Although the Bush administration winks and nods when states require only low-level skills, the law says proficiency must be “challenging,” a term taken from NAEP’s definition. Democrats and Republicans stress that the No Child Left Behind law’s tough standards are a world apart from the minimum competency required by 1970s-style accountability programs.


But no goal can be both challenging to and achievable by all students across the achievement distribution. Standards can either be minimal and present little challenge to typical students, or challenging and unattainable by below-average students. No standard can simultaneously do both—hence the oxymoron—but that is what the No Child Left Behind law requires.


As the Harvard University professor Daniel Koretz, an expert on educational assessment and testing, has noted, typical variation in performance between those with lower and higher achievement is not primarily racial or ethnic; it is a gap within groups, including whites. Performance ranges in Japan and Korea, whose average math and science scores surpass ours, are similar to the U.S. range. If black-white gaps were eliminated in the United States, the standard deviation of test scores here would shrink by less than 10 percent. It would still be impossible to craft standards that simultaneously challenged students at the top, middle, and bottom.


The No Child Left Behind Act’s admirable goal of closing achievement gaps can only sensibly mean that achievement distributions for disadvantaged and middle-class children should be more alike. If gaps disappeared, similar proportions of whites and blacks would be “proficient”—but similar proportions would also fall below that level. Proficiency for all, implying the elimination of variation within socioeconomic groups, is inconceivable. Closing achievement gaps, implying the elimination of variation between socioeconomic groups, is daunting but worth striving for.



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


Not only is it logically impossible to have “proficiency for all” at a challenging level. The law and NAEP stumble further. Their expectations of proficiency are absurd, beyond challenging, even for students in the middle of the distribution. The highest-performing countries can’t come close to meeting the No Child Left Behind Act’s standard of proficiency for all. “First in the world,” a widely ridiculed U.S. goal from the 1990s that was supplanted by this federal legislation, is modest compared with the demand that all students be proficient.


States, no matter how well-intentioned, cannot perform psychometric miracles that are beyond the reach of federal experts.
We can compare performance in top-scoring countries with NAEP’s proficiency standard. Comparisons are inexact—all tests don’t cover identical curricula, define grades exactly the same, or have easily equated scales. But rough comparisons can serve policy purposes.


On a 1991 international math exam, Taiwan scored highest. But if Taiwanese students had taken the NAEP math exam, 60 percent would have scored below proficient, and 22 percent below basic. On the 2003 Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study, 25 percent of students in top-scoring Singapore were below NAEP proficiency in math, and 49 percent were below proficiency in science.


On a 2001 international reading test, Sweden was tops, but two-thirds of Swedish students were not proficient in reading, as NAEP defines it.



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


How did we get standards so divorced from reality, even for students in the middle of the distribution? Few Americans realize how unscientific the process for defining proficiency was—and must be. NAEP officials assembled some teachers, businesspeople, parents, and others, presented these judges with NAEP questions, and asked their opinions about whether students should get them right. No comparison with actual performance, even in the best schools, was required. Judges’ opinions were averaged to calculate how many NAEP questions proficient students should answer.


From the start, experts lambasted this process. When officials first contemplated defining proficiency, the NAEP board commissioned a 1982 study by Willard Wirtz, a former U.S. secretary of labor, and his colleague Archie Lapointe, a former executive director of NAEP. They reported that “setting levels of failure, mediocrity, or excellence in terms of NAEP percentages would be a serious mistake.” Indeed, they said, it would be “fatal” to NAEP’s credibility. Harold Howe II, a former U.S. commissioner of education responsible for NAEP’s early implementation, warned the assessment’s administrators that expecting all students to achieve proficiency “defies reality.”


TalkBack
Join the related discussion, “'Proficiency for All' Is an Oxymoron .”
In 1988, Congress ordered NAEP to determine the proficient score. Later, U.S. Sen. Edward M. Kennedy’s education aide, who wrote the bill’s language, testified that Congress’ demand was “deliberately ambiguous” because neither congressional staff members nor education experts could formulate it precisely. “There was not an enormous amount of introspection,” the aide acknowledged.


Others urged NAEP to wait. In 1991, Gregory Anrig, then the president of the Educational Testing Service, which administered NAEP, suggested delaying proficiency definitions until they could be properly established. Chester E. Finn Jr., an influential member of the NAEP governing board, responded that by delaying reports on how few students were proficient, “we may be sacrificing something else—the sense of urgency for national improvement.”


Once achievement levels were set, the government commissioned a series of evaluations. Each study denounced the process for defining proficiency, leading to calls for yet another evaluation that might generate a better answer.


The first such evaluation, conducted by three respected statisticians in 1991, concluded that “the technical difficulties are extremely serious.” To continue the process, they said, would be “ridiculous.” Their preliminary report said that NAEP’s willingness to proceed in this way reflected technical incompetence. NAEP fired the statisticians.


Congress then asked the U.S. General Accounting Office for its opinion. The GAO found NAEP’s approach “inherently flawed, both conceptually and procedurally.” “These weaknesses,” it said, “could have serious consequences.” The GAO recommended that NAEP results not be published using percentages of students who were allegedly basic, proficient, or advanced.


Proficiency for all, implying the elimination of variation within socioeconomic groups, is inconceivable. Closing achievement gaps, implying the elimination of variation between socioeconomic groups, is daunting but worth striving for.
In response, the U.S. Department of Education commissioned yet another study, this one by the National Academy of Education. The panel concluded that procedures for defining proficiency were “subject to large biases,” and that levels by which American students had been judged deficient were “unreasonably high.” Continued use of NAEP proficiency definitions could set back the cause of education reform because it would harm the credibility of NAEP itself, the panel warned.


Finally, the Education Department asked the National Academy of Sciences to weigh in. It concluded, in 1999, that the “process for setting NAEP achievement levels is fundamentally flawed” and “achievement-level results do not appear to be reasonable.”



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


All this advice has been ignored—although now, every NAEP report includes a congressionally mandated disclaimer, buried in the text: “Achievement levels are to be used on a trial basis and should be interpreted with caution.” The disclaimer adds that conclusions about changes in proficiency over time may have merit, but not about how many students are actually proficient. Yet the same reports highlight percentages of students deemed below proficient or basic, and these, not the disclaimer, are promoted in NAEP’s press releases.


A curiosity of the No Child Left Behind legislation is that while it imposes sanctions on schools where all students are not proficient, it also acknowledges that NAEP proficiency definitions should be used only on a “developmental basis,” until re-evaluated. No re-evaluation has been performed.


Although the legislation implies that proficiency is as NAEP defines it, the law permits states to set their own proficiency levels. States use their own judges to imagine how students should perform. Widely differing conclusions of judges in different states is proof enough of how fanciful the process must be. States, no matter how well-intentioned, cannot perform psychometric miracles that are beyond the reach of federal experts.


State definitions now result in many states’ reporting far higher percentages of proficient students than NAEP does. Some states define proficiency in NAEP’s below-basic range. More will do so if the No Child Left Behind law’s requirement of proficiency for all continues.


Even then, the demand for proficiency for all cannot be met because of the inevitable distribution of ability in any human population. The federal law exempts only 1 percent of all students. From what we know of normal cognitive distributions, this means that students with IQs as low as 65 must be proficient; these cognitively challenged young people must do better in math than 60 percent of students in top-scoring Taiwan. Were proficiency standards lowered to NAEP’s basic level, children with IQs as low as 65 would be expected to perform better than the 22 percent of Taiwanese students whose achievement is below NAEP’s basic score.


Discussions of reauthorizing the now almost 5-year-old law typically propose to “fix” it: by crediting gains as well as levels, extending deadlines past 2014, fiddling with minimum subgroup sizes, giving English-learners more time. None of these can save the law unless we jettison the incoherent demand that all students be proficient.


We could design accountability with realistic goals that recognize human variability. Although research and experimentation is needed to determine practical and ambitious goals, we can imagine the outlines.


We might, for example, expect students who today are at the 65th percentile of the test-score distribution to improve so that, at some future date, they perform similarly to students who are now at the 75th; students who today are at the 40th percentile to perform similarly to those who are now at the 50th; and students who are at the 15th percentile to perform similarly to those who are now at the 25th. Such goals create challenges for all students and express our intent that no child be left behind.


Such goals would perhaps have to vary for subpopulations, ages, regions, and schools. The system would be too complex to be reduced to simple sound bites and administered by the highly politicized federal Department of Education.


The No Child Left Behind Act cannot be “fixed.” It gives us a “sense of urgency for national improvement” at the price of our intellectual integrity, and an unjustified sense of failure and humiliation for educators and students. It’s time to return to the drawing board.

Read more here, if any.

Union Dues and Union Don’ts

Got a flyer in the mail last week from the Evergreen Freedom Foundation relating to the union dues lawsuit that will be argued before SCOTUS January 10th which I’ve previously blogged about here. It’s got quotes from newspapers around the country (DC, Detroit, Pittsburgh, Las Vegas) supporting the EFF’s position; I think it would perhaps be a more effective flyer for Washington State residents if they had quoted more Washington State papers. They did get the Seattle Times, but the Spokane Spokesman-Review, Tacoma News-Tribune, and Seattle Post-Intelligencer are notable omissions.

One area where the EFF is definitely outmaneuvering the WEA is in getting their case out on this issue. The EFF has set up a dedicated website and a blog to go with it; you have to do some mining to find anything on the WEA’s homepage about the issue. Advantage EFF, but it’s not the court of public opinion that matters here.

Read more here, if any.

Powerful Teaching and Learning

My district is one of the ones involved in the STAR Protocol training, developed by Duane Baker at the BERC Group and trumpeted throughout the state by Alison Olzendam. We spent one of our in-service days last year learning about the different dimensions from Alison, and I opened up my classroom so that they could bring in groups to watch me teach and evaluate my lessons.

It’s kind of fun, especially when the kids do something really off-the-wall. I had a superintendent from a neighboring district come by with some of his senior staff to watch my calendar lesson last year. It’s right at the beginning of the day when we get together to do our morning announcements and get in some practice with basic skills. One of the lessons I do with that is called “Amazing Equations,” where I ask the kids to give me a math sentence that would equal a particular number (in this case, 10). I called on J, one of my brightest, who thinks for a moment and says,

“1,000,010 minus 900,000 minus 100,000 minus 1 minus 2 minus 3 minus 4 plus the quantity 5 times 2, divided by 1.”

The Supes’ jaw hits the floor and I’m feverishly trying to get down everything J said. Meanwhile he’s sitting there with a you-know-what-eating grin because he KNOWS that he just did something pretty damned incredible. It’s nice when they make me look good.

Anyhow, last week I finally got to be on the other side of the observation as my school sent a team out to another elementary school in Spokane so that we could learn how to use the STAR protocol to evaluate our own teaching. Our first room was a 1st/2nd multiage classroom where they were doing reading groups, which was neat to see because my school might need to start doing combination classes. Afterwards we discussed it for a bit and then moved on to a third grade classroom, which was also doing reading groups. We went out to lunch at Azteca (try the arroz con pollo!), then went back to watch our third classroom, a first grade math lesson.

That’s where the problems cropped up. Under the PTL schemata you’re supposed to be looking at what the kids are doing more than the actions of the teacher. It’s not an evaluative tool for administrators to use on teachers (Allison did her best to drive that point home); instead, it’s a way to quantify the engagement of the kids. The trouble that I was having is that I don’t think you can segregate the actions of the kids from the actions of the teacher—it’s a dance, after all—and in this math lesson that I was watching the teacher was really struggling.

She was doing an activity with cubes where the kids needed to connect them to make two different groups, and then find out how many more cubes you would need to make the groups equal. One of my problems was with how it was presented; I think talking to the kids about how many more cubes were in the larger group would have made more sense. As is, maybe half the class understood what they were being asked to do, but man were they ever good at shoving blocks around. My other big problem was that we were in the room for about 25 minutes and only saw three problems get done, which is an inexcusable waste of instructional time. It was the perfect New Math storm: discovery where the students didn’t discover, combined with manipulatives that didn’t help and a guide on the side who didn’t lead anywhere.

Following that we went back to the principal’s office to discuss. Our group leader didn’t say much because she wanted us to use the protocol ourselves. I tried to talk about the kids but kept getting back to the teacher, which isn’t what it’s about.

The good in ending the day with a bad lesson was that it really helped me to think about what I do as I teach math. When you see something that doesn’t work you can try to look for it in your own practice, and it’s gratifying when you don’t find it. Looking at what the PTL people have identified as good practices was instructional, too. I’m not a big believer in group work (I think that with these very basic skills the kids need to have it on their own), but it’s what we’re to look for when we watch the rooms.

It’s a neat process, and I hope I get to go out and watch more teachers. It’s fun to do, and I think it makes me better. Anyone else out there participating?

Read more here, if any.

Where the Theory Meets the Practice

There was an excellent article in the Baltimore Sun on Saturday (thank you to whoever for the link) about the impossibility of applying NCLB to those schools that serve kids in jail. Turns out, their minds aren’t really on passing the test:

The Eager Street Academy is a Baltimore public school behind bars, with the most troubled student body in the city. Nonetheless, its staff has the impossible job of complying with the federal No Child Left Behind Act.

Located in the Baltimore City Detention Center, the school's approximately 130 students - ages 14 to 17 - are charged as adults in some of the city's most notorious killings and other crimes.

Many of them had dropped out of school before landing in prison, and about a quarter come in reading at a second-grade level.

No Child Left Behind requires schools to give annual standardized tests to all their students, and all students must demonstrate proficiency in reading and math by 2014.

.......

The state uses the scores of a handful of kids to calculate whether Eager Street has made adequate yearly progress. The calculation can be made using the scores of as few as five students, those who were enrolled early in the school year and are still around on testing day. Generally, that means they are the students facing the most severe criminal charges.

The test results for all students are posted online and printed in the newspaper: a failure rate of 100 percent this year in seventh- and eighth-grade math and high school algebra and government.

"It shows us at zero," said Scofield, a veteran city schools administrator. "It looks as if we're doing nothing."

Eager Street students, all but a handful of them boys, have had extraordinarily difficult lives, Scofield said: A "huge" number have been abandoned by parents. A 16-year-old who recently enrolled hadn't been to school since fourth grade, when his mother pulled him out to support the family by any means necessary, including selling drugs.

Students can leave Eager Street if a judge releases them or lessens the criminal charges and moves them to the Baltimore City Juvenile Justice Center. Otherwise, they stop school on the day they turn 18, when they are moved to the prison's adult wing.

"If I just got locked up, got my freedom taken away, if I'm facing 10 years and I'm 15 or 16 and I'm worried about turning 18 and going to the adult side and getting raped, I'm not thinking about a test," Scofield said.

No Child Left Behind requires schools to test all students in reading and math annually from third through eighth grades and once in high school. In addition, Maryland requires students to pass high school graduation exams in algebra, biology, English and government.

Eager Street is the only school of its kind in the state. Elsewhere in Maryland, the Department of Juvenile Services, not the public school system, educates incarcerated students. Most DJS facilities don't have enough students enrolled for multiple months to get an adequate yearly progress ranking.

..............


The school occupies two cramped but well-kept trailers in the prison parking lot, locked behind numerous fences and gates. Wearing camouflage pants or green jumpsuits that say "JUVENILE" across the back, students attend classes from 8:45 a.m. to 2:15 p.m. on weekdays, except for the dozen or so in protective custody. Teachers deliver their work to their cells. About six more who are involved in gangs have a separate classroom.

Opportunities for extracurricular activities are limited, though Dugger volunteers after school to teach yoga.

There are two social workers, and staff is lobbying to get a school nurse.

One day last month, Scofield pulled a boy out of class after learning that his mother had died that day.

"A lot of these children are emotionally scarred," Scofield said. "They're socially unprepared. They feel violence is the norm because that's what they've seen. We have to address their social and emotional needs first."

A couple of questions pop to mind:

1. Are the scores of these schools held against the districts that they are apart of? I’m guessing yes, but that seems terribly unfair.
   
2. Doesn’t it seem like the NCLB sanctions would be completely meaningless to a school like this? I can’t think of a single one that would make a difference.

Where I grew up, in Rochester, the Maple Lane School was a part of our district, just a quarter-mile away from the elementary school. When I was real little I thought it was weird that they had a big fence all around them and wondered why I didn’t know anyone who went there; later on I found out that Maple Lane is where kids went after they had been convicted of a crime. I actually knew a couple of teachers who worked there; it was a reasonably popular summer job for people in the district to go and do a couple of summer classes. Their 2006 WASL pass rates:

Reading: 32.8%
Math: 5.5%
Writing: 20.7%
Science: 5.5%

Then down the road in Chehalis you had Green Hill, which looked like a bad place to be. Ugly cinderblocks compared to Maple Lane’s rather nice campus, with a great view of I-5 and not a whole lot else going for it. Their pass rates:

Reading: 28.6%
Math: 2.4%
Writing: 21.1%
Science: 0.0%

I give all the credit in the world to the teachers who have the will to work with these kids; that's the very definition of a Sisyphian task.

Read more here, if any.

My Thoughts on the Math WASL

It isn’t that hard. God help me, it isn’t that hard.

This post might be more fun for you if you go over to WASL2006.com and download the practice test. I’d come across it before when Terry Bergeson mentioned it at the Summer Institute last year, and thought it was nice of OSPI to communicate with the parents like that.

Since then, though, the news on the math WASL has been bad, bad, bad. Thousands of kids failed their first attempt, thousands more failed their second try over the summer, and two weeks ago Bergeson and Gregoire were able to agree with stunning rapidity that making it a graduation requirement would be delayed for at least three years.

So this weekend I sat down and took the test. Printed it off at the school, brought it home, and worked on it in between bouts with the baby. There are 42 questions on the practice test (15 open ended, 27 multiple choice), and on the multiple-choice questions I nailed 24 out of 27. Two of the ones I missed were just carelessness (on #14, for example, I figured out the probability for area I instead of area II, while on 22 I put them in order from greatest to least instead of vice-versa), and one problem I didn’t even really attempt (#30) can be gotten to with some logical deduction. I haven’t scored myself on the open-ended questions yet, but I feel pretty good about them too. Some of them are multiple-step (#13 especially would require some good work with the calculator), but when it comes to higher-order mathematics the most complex formula that I can see that you would need to use is the volume of a cylinder. Many of them are simple addition and multiplication.

That’s just my take, and thus the question has to be asked: why is this test so hard for so many kids? Here are some of the reasons that have been thrown out:

1. Poor math standards. The Fordham Foundation blasted our math standards as being some of the worst in the nation. I can’t personally speak to what’s expected of our high school kids but I do know the elementary grade standards pretty well, and I think they’re fair. Further, I don’t think you can blame the standards for poor performance; that would most likely be a function of…
   
2. Poor curriculum. I know that the state has done curriculum reviews for reading, but have they done the big research study on math curriculum yet? If so, are those programs getting used and getting to the schools that need them?
   
3. Poor teaching in the elementary grades that leads to a cumulative deficit by the time they get to high school. After all, K-6 is seven years, 7-10 is only four years. I think this reasoning is crap, mainly because I teach in the elementary grades and I’ve seen the incredible things that they do in 6th grade at my school.
   
4. Poor teaching in the middle and high schools that doesn’t prepare the kids for the WASL in 10th grade. I can hear the hackles rising around the state, because the math teachers have been dumped on more than any other teachers in the state. Part of this is because you don’t have “reading” teachers per se in the secondary grades, so the math teachers have been the ones most closely identified with a specific WASL test. I have trouble with this because I believe in the math teachers I know, but it also has to be acknowledged that there are teachers out there who aren’t doing what they need to do.
   
5. Poor effort from the kids. Perhaps we’re getting somewhere now. Accountability sucks, but I’ve never heard such sturm und drang as I have about the math WASL. The part that really grates on me is that Bergeson has gotten us the money for the remedial classes, has been talking about this requirement coming down for years now, has been telling people that they need to be ready and has been giving them the resources, and apparently the kids (and their parents) didn’t listen. That’s not a failure of the system, that’s a failure of the consumer.

So where do we stand? I think that the alternatives Bergeson proposed last summer are so weak as to be meaningless, with the exception of using the SAT or ACT to substitute for the WASL. Comparing the grades of one student to others doesn’t really say a whole lot about the student being compared. Similarly, I can’t agree with using report card grades because grade inflation happens, as does the Gentleman’s C. I’m sad that this has been made to be solely the teachers’ fault, and I don’t really know what this three-year delay does. Are the kids going to finally accept responsibility in 2011 in a way that they haven’t up to this point? Is the curriculum going to make the strides that it must in such a short period of time? Is there some magic training that has been denied to our teachers up to this point that they’ll get now?

In short, the nattering nabobs have won a round, and I think we’re poorer as a state for it.

Read more here, if any.

Unforgivable

The must-read article of the week is the Seattle Times' in-depth article on Seattle's own John Marshall High School.

John Marshall's programs are supposed to help struggling students — from teen mothers, to dropouts, to kids returning from jail — either graduate or return to a regular school setting. But in a review of school and district documents, it's clear the Green Lake school has often fallen short:

• Only 24 percent of students graduated on time in 2004-05. By contrast, South Lake High School, which serves at-risk students across town, graduated 66 percent of its students on time. Last year was particularly dismal: Only one John Marshall student received a diploma on schedule.

• On any given day, John Marshall teachers are doing work normally reserved for the principal. Others lead classes they're not qualified to teach. Over three school years, one teacher was absent more than half the time.

• During a surprise head count last week, district officials found students watching movies, reading newspapers and listening to headphones. In one class, two of the three students were asleep, even though a teacher and an instructional assistant were in the room.

"There's no learning going on," said evaluation team leader Ramona Pierson.

At least two employees have called on the district to investigate the school's leadership in recent years. But if there was an investigation, the district has no record of it.

At the center of many complaints is longtime principal Joe Drake, described as visionary by supporters and incompetent by critics. Drake dismisses staff members' concerns as groundless. He also rejects the district's rationale that John Marshall should close because its building is underused and in poor condition.

He calls the closure an act of racism against the school's many students of color, and he has refused to meet with the evaluation team.

...............

[Regarding the principal] Drake, 65, said he has devoted his career to helping kids of color, who often lag behind in school. He took the post at John Marshall 12 years ago because that is where he felt he could do the most good.

Students at John Marshall often struggle with substance-abuse problems or behavioral disorders. Some read at a fourth-grade level.

"There's not two administrators in this state who would walk in here and work with these kids," Drake said.

There are no morale problems at John Marshall, he said — just a couple of disgruntled employees who don't want to work with troubled kids.

But Roma Holmes, a longtime reading specialist at the school, questioned how much Drake himself wants to work with them. At one point, Drake moved his belongings out of the main office — the hub of any school — and into a room down the hall.

His door was often closed. On several occasions, she said, students assumed the vice principal was, in fact, the principal.

"I felt he was separating himself from the nitty-gritty of the days," said Holmes, who retired last year, frustrated.

...................

That's why Graves began writing letters to her principal in fall 2004. Most days, she wrote, her parenting class watched videos. Sometimes they filled out the same worksheet two days in a row.

And that was when the teacher attended class. Graves had 24 different substitutes that year, district records show. Her teacher was absent 108 days of the 180-day school year. She was gone 60 days the year before, and at least 114 days the year before that.

The teacher's position was later cut.

But Graves had already wasted dozens of hours in that class. So when Drake referred to the closure of John Marshall as discrimination against its many students of color, she was not impressed. Graves is half-Hispanic, half-Native American herself.

"It's discrimination that I'm not getting an education," she said.

Do you want to know why people are interested in charter schools? Look to John Marshall High School for the answer. When a history of failure is rewarded by the chance to fail more, there is something wrong, wrong, wrong with the system. Don't you dare tell me that KIPP or Green Dot are the enemy, when articles like this make it eminently clear that the enemy is US.

This is a situation crying out for a response, but with a lame-duck superintendent, a divided school board, and a history of doing nothing, is there any reason to think that the kids at John Marshall will be served any better than they have been? Stories like this shame us all, but is the will there to do anything about it?

This is a sad piece about a sad school. Hopefully, the story can be a change agent.

Read more here, if any.

A Test That I Did Not Know About

Did you know that 8th graders take a test to measure what they know about technology? From the Spokane Spokesman-Review:

Greenacres Middle School student Jarod Maynes was a little apprehensive about taking yet another required test on Tuesday.

Maynes and all the other eighth-graders in the Central Valley School District took an online test this week to demonstrate how well they can use a computer.

"It's kind of stressful. It reminds me of the WASL. I would act differently on my own computer. I could figure it out, but not on a timed test," said Maynes.

One of the goals of the federal No Child Left Behind Act is to ensure that all students are technologically literate by the time they finish the eighth grade "regardless of the student's race, ethnicity, gender, family income, geographic location or disability."

It's up to each state to come up with its own definition of "technology literacy."

In Washington, each of the 296 school districts is required to assess and report its eighth-graders' level of technology literacy.

Now I’m curious as to what my district does.

The rest of the article can be found by following the “Read here” link below.



Students' computer skills tested
Educators want assessments followed up with funding

Greenacres Middle School student Jarod Maynes was a little apprehensive about taking yet another required test on Tuesday.

Maynes and all the other eighth-graders in the Central Valley School District took an online test this week to demonstrate how well they can use a computer.

"It's kind of stressful. It reminds me of the WASL. I would act differently on my own computer. I could figure it out, but not on a timed test," said Maynes.

One of the goals of the federal No Child Left Behind Act is to ensure that all students are technologically literate by the time they finish the eighth grade "regardless of the student's race, ethnicity, gender, family income, geographic location or disability."

It's up to each state to come up with its own definition of "technology literacy."

In Washington, each of the 296 school districts is required to assess and report its eighth-graders' level of technology literacy.

Dennis Small, educational technology program director for the Office of Superintendent of Public Instruction, said the state worked with school districts and regional administrators to come up with Washington's definition of technology literacy as well as the three "Tiers of 8th Grade Technology Literacy Indicators," or the degree that a student uses technology. For example, tier one is personal use and communication; tier two is the ability to access, collect, manage, integrate and evaluate information, and tier three is the ability to solve problems.


The state doesn't require districts to report individual scores, only the number of students in each tier. Dick Burrill, supervisor of instructional technology for Central Valley, said that even though it's another hoop to jump through, the assessment will be helpful.

"It gives the district good data. We'll be able to see how we're doing as a district and where our students need to improve," said Burrill.

The Central Valley district paid a $5 license fee for each of its 1,010 eighth-graders to take the online test. The money comes out of the district's technology budget.

Burrill said many variables can affect students' technology literacy, including influences at home, their teachers, which school they attend and which district they're in.

"Each school (in the CV district) does their own budgeting for technology; different buildings have different equipment," said Burrill.

Districts can use stand-alone assessments like Central Valley, or other means, such as observation logs, examination of portfolios, certification tests and student surveys.

Barb Gilbert, director of instructional technology for Spokane Public Schools, said in January they will have their eighth-graders answer a survey based on the three tiers.

The district has a subscription to a survey program, so there won't be any additional costs.

Dan Butler, Mead School District's executive director of technical education, said the district won't have to spend additional money on an assessment because the district will use a program it already has.

"Technology isn't about learning different programs. I don't really care if the students can use an Excel spreadsheet. It's a tool and it's a changing tool," said Butler. "You can teach a first-grader how to do a Power Point presentation, but they won't be using that program by the time they're in the 10th grade," said Butler.

Read more here, if any.

Irony!

Have you been following the story of the group who sent home a note inviting kids to attend their "pagan ritual" to learn more about the holidays?

Turns out, Reverend Jerry Falwell is the one who opened the door by insisting that Christian groups be allowed to send home mail with the kids, since the Boy Scouts and such were able to.

If you're an ed student doing research on just what it means for a school to be an open forum, this is a perfect case to demonstrate the point.

(Thanks, too, to Right Wing Nation for the information)

Read more here, if any.

Mayoral Control on the March!

There were a couple of interesting articles in the Seattle Times last week relating to the nascent effort towards mayoral control of the Seattle School District (which I’ve previously blogged about here). In the first Mayor Greg Nickels is calling for a summit to talk about the future of the district, and board member (and new board president!) Cheryl Chow has an odd quote:

“If the summit is going to be to educate and get some discussion on how the city can pull together and go to Olympia to state the case that we are being underfunded, that would be great,” she said.

The oddity of this is that the most recent round of troubles came about precisely because the board couldn’t get any traction on Raj Manhas’ plan to save money by closing schools. The bitter irony is that there’s every chance that the levy scheduled for February might flop precisely because of the bad press that the school board has generated, a result which would make Seattle’s recent round of budget difficulties look tame.

The second article, Nickels Urged to Take Some Control of Schools, is a good overview of what mayoral control could mean for Seattle and what the impact has been in other city districts around the country. A quote I’ll throw out for my friends from the Big Apple:

Rolland and several others are urging Nickels to follow the lead of Boston, Chicago and Philadelphia, where mayors gained power to abolish the elected school boards and appoint some or all-new board members, handling the mayors greater control over the public schools.

The notable omission there is New York City. See, even over here we know what Bloomberg is doing over there isn’t very good. ;-)

Read more here, if any.

Don't Mess With This Man

Congratulations to Jim Anderson over at 5/17 for the good work that he's doing with the debate team at Capital High School! Now that he's all bigtime I hope he can still find a spare moment or two to spend on the internet every now and again.

Read more here, if any.

School Choice Meets Rural Superintendents

A couple of weeks back I wrote about the problems that I could see when trying to bring school choice to rural areas, a post that was picked up and commented on by the folks over at EdSpresso. In the new issue of Education Week there’s a great article about how the choice movement is running into trouble in some states due to opposition from rural, and often Republican, superintendents. From the article ($):

In their quest to bring more private school options to parents, school choice advocates say they’ve run into a formidable and unexpected opponent: the rural school superintendent.

Private school choice—whether it comes in the form of vouchers, tax credits, or some other policy option—is becoming less of a Republican-vs.-Democrat issue, in which party affiliation tends to determine the level of state support for the issue, some experts say. Instead, they explain, school choice is increasingly becoming a rural-vs.-urban issue, with geography mattering more than political leaning.

.........

In those and some other states, choice proponents say, their biggest hurdle isn’t overcoming the teachers’ unions, which are traditionally powerful and vocal opponents of private school choice. “The states where we have strong Republican dominance and yet we’ve come up empty have a common denominator: a very strong influence by rural school superintendents,” Mr. Bolick said.

.........

Advocates are working to convince rural residents that their tax dollars are supporting a system of general education, and that failing urban schools cost all taxpayers in the state. School choice proponents say they also need to reach out to rural Republican legislators, who are often influenced by their local superintendents.

Later on there’s a quote that bothered me, from Clint Bollick of the Alliance for School Choice:

“These should be great states for us. But the rural superintendents have been the bane of our existence,” he continued. “We underestimated their power. Now we’re adjusting our playbook.”

Bane? Playbook? Are you starting new schools or fighting off the Huns?

Read more here, if any.

A Tough Day for Spokane Schools

A high school teacher is murdered by her son, who attends another school in the area. From the Spokesman-Review:

A Rogers High School teacher and her husband were found dead Wednesday, and their 18-year-old son has been booked into Spokane County Jail on two counts of second-degree murder.

The bodies are believed to be those of Teresa "Terri" Kim and her husband, Richard, Spokane County sheriff's Sgt. Dave Reagan said.

The bodies were discovered in an outbuilding on the couple's property in the 18500 block of East Eagle Ridge Lane during a welfare check.

Deputies went to the home, in a remote area on about 10 acres near Mount Spokane, after school officials at Rogers High School called to express concern because Teresa Kim had not arrived for work.

Deputy Mark Smoldt found a bloody cellular phone in the driveway and blood on the home's floors, which was visible from outside, Reagan said. Smoldt entered the residence and a shed, where he discovered the bodies.

The couple's son, Bryan Kim, was taken into custody at Mount Spokane High School, where he is a student. His red Chevrolet Sprint was taken into evidence, Reagan said.

A follow-up article says that the son has bi-polar disorder and was angry about being told he needed to move out of the family home by January. Our hearts go out to everyone who has been touched by this tragedy.

That was the morning at Rogers High and Mount Spokane High. Later, Lewis and Clark High was completely evacuated after a suspicious package was found:

An abandoned science experiment left inside a boy's bathroom Wednesday at Lewis and Clark High School on Wednesday triggered an immediate evacuation and police bomb squad response.

The science project was a problem-solving device in which PVC pipe and ropes were used, said Spokane police Cpl. Tom Lee. The item was found by some students who then contacted administration.

After faculty inspected it, police and fire officials were called to the school on Fourth Avenue near downtown.

The nearly 2,000 students were bused to the Spokane Arena while bomb technicians investigated the item found at the school and eventually destroyed the science experiment.

Two more similar devices were found in a science classroom, said Spokane Public Schools spokeswoman Terren Roloff. The foot-long cylindrical item looks much like a pipe bomb.

One wonders just what the science experiment was.

Read more here, if any.

It’s Easy to Comment on Social Promotion, It’s Hard to Live It

I stumbled across this post by Ken DeRosa over at D-Ed Reckoning on a topic near and dear to my heart, retaining kids.

It’s not very good, for a variety of reasons.

1. “Instead of focusing on outcomes, educators want to focus on the process of education.” Perhaps Ken has attached some sort of a sneer to the word that I didn’t get, but I know that at my school the outcomes are critical. We know who failed their initial screens—that’s how they get placed in the appropriate reading groups. We know who didn’t pass the WASL and in what section—that’s who gets the remediation this year.
   
2. “When there is no agreed upon outcome that can be reliably measured, there is no choice but to keep moving children ahead regardless of their skill level.” In talks that I’ve had with our veteran (read: old) staff members they’ve unanimously said that it is far more difficult to retain kids today than it was 20 years ago precisely because they are expected to show evidence of the child’s skill level. That’s a function of the research, which shows that retention almost never works, and the gauntlet thrown down by our school psychologists over the last 10 years has been to make the case overwhelmingly that retention is appropriate for this child.
   
3. “And it doesn’t help that there is some touch-feely junk science research out there claiming that kids are more likely to drop out if they are held back.” Blanket condemnation—the last refuge of the scoundrel. Dismissing the cumulative evidence that retention has negative consequences out of hand is intellectually dishonest and agenda driven; if retaining kids is a good thing, why can’t he cite the valid science that says so?
   
4. In the latter half of his post he does a nice job of explaining the importance of background knowledge, but fails to tie it to his central theme about social promotion convincingly. When you retain a student you’re taking away a year of their life—could they be better served by an extended school day, by full day Kindergarten, by lengthening the school year, by making sure they have access to quality pre-school? Why consider retaining a student only to expose them to the same variables that made retention necessary in the first place?

I’ve retained kids. The little boy I held back last year is taking off and has a great chance of being just fine in his academic career. A different boy from four years ago is floundering in special ed. It’s one of the hardest things I do; anyone who thinks it’s cut-and-dried hasn’t been there.

Read more here, if any.

I Say Tomato, You Say Something in Farsi

Ace ed reporter for the Spokesman Sara Leaming did an article on ESL instruction in District 81. The neat thing about it was the breakdown of the various native languages of the kids who participate in the district’s English Language Development program, represented in number of students:

• 332 Russian
  
• 147 Spanish
  
• 92 Marshallese
  
• 68 Vietnamese
  
• 42 Hmong
  
• 30 Bosnian
  
• 26 Ukrainian
  
• 19 Arabic
  
• 17 Moldovan
  
• 16 Chuukese (Micronesia)
  
• 13 Mandarin
  
• 11 Somali
  
• 10 Punjabi
  
• 9 Turkish
  
• 8 Pashto, Serbian
  
• 7 Amharic (Ethiopia), Farsi, Korean, and Swahili
  
• 6 Belarusian
  
• 5 Karen (Burmese), Tagalog (Phillippines), and Laotian
  
• 4 Albanian and Mandarin
  
• 3 Creole
  
• 2 Cantonese, Romanian, and Haitian
  
• 1 Anuak (Sudan/Ethiopia), Azerbaijani, Bisaya and Cebuano (Phillippines), Burmese, Ethiopian, German, Hebrew, Japanese, Kirghiz, Krahn (Liberia), Rwandan, Tamil (India), and Thai.

The big surprise on that list to me is that Russian is the number one language ahead of Spanish. Granted, Spokane doesn’t have the agricultural opportunities that Yakima or the Tri-Cities do, but to be outpaced by Russian at a great that 2:1 ratio is something that I wouldn’t have guessed. It’s also a neat surprise to me to see 16 Chuukee kids on the list; I had a native Chuuk speaker in my room a couple of years ago (his mom married into the Air Force), and he was the first we’d ever had in my district.

You can find the whole article below.


Connecting parents and teachers
With dozens of languages in district, translators are key

Ukrainian immigrant Ivanna Malko was glad to have an interpreter at her side Monday during her son's parent-teacher conference at Whitman Elementary School.

With the help of Vera Puzankova, a Russian bilingual specialist for Spokane Public Schools, Malko learned that her fifth-grader, Paul Malko, writes well, struggles a little with science, and ran a mile in seven minutes.

While Paul speaks English fluently, his mother speaks very little.

"At home I only speak Ukraine," Paul said.

The Malkos are among the families in Spokane schools whose first language is not English and who need help with translation during parent-teacher conferences, which began last week and continue this week.

There are 1,300 bilingual students in Spokane schools, speaking more than 44 languages, district officials said. Among those students are more than 900 still learning English.

Under federal law, the district must provide interpreters or other language help "to the extent practicable," said Howard De Leeuw, director of English Language Development for Spokane schools.

With so many cultural backgrounds and languages, officials said it can be a challenge to provide bilingual specialists for each one-on-one parent-teacher conference. Without an interpreter, non-English-speaking parents may feel left out of important decisions.


"No one knows the child better than the parent," said De Leeuw. "It's very difficult if the parent can't truly express concerns in their own language."

District interpreters, called bilingual specialists, work the twice-yearly parent conferences and help students throughout the school year. According to the recommended budget for the 2006-07 school years, the district will receive just over $900,000 in transitional bilingual and limited English proficiency funds from the state and federal governments, and will spend about $2.4 million.

This year the district subscribed to a telephone service that connects teachers with interpreters via teleconference, so teachers can tap into 170 languages. The state pays for the subscription, but the district pays for calls, at $1.10 a minute.

More often, the district seeks out bilingual individuals who may be able to speak uncommon dialects such as Chuukese, a language from Micronesia, or Marshallese, of the Marshall Islands.

One Marshallese language specialist now serves more than 90 children in Spokane schools, district officials said. That compares with 15 Russian-speaking bilingual specialists.

There are also small numbers of refugees and immigrants who speak languages including Azerbaijani; Krahn, a dialect from Liberia; and Kirghiz, the language of Kyrgyzstan.

In rare cases, family members bring their own interpreters – usually family or friends, though that is discouraged.

The district would rather have someone translating who understands education and can break down complex topics, such as the state standardized test known as the WASL, said Amy Berube, an English language development teacher at Whitman, who helps organize dozens of bilingual parent-teacher conferences twice each year.

"Academic language is so much different than social language," Berube said.

Schools also try to learn more about different cultures and what life was like in their native countries.

"We need to be sensitive to their culture, where they are coming from, and we need to help them understand the expectations from the American culture as well," said Linda Unseth, Northwest regional director of World Relief, a network of church-based groups that helps resettle refugees from around the world. The group sometimes helps locate interpreters for schools.

"It's empowering for the parent when they can express what they are thinking in their own language," De Leeuw said.

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The Spokesman-Review on Gregoire’s Priorities

A good article from the Spokane Spokesman-Review ($) on where the budgeting process might go once the legislature gets back to work in January:

Gov. Chris Gregoire said Thursday that she'll recommend "significant" spending on educational reforms over the next two years, but said she plans to do it without increasing taxes.

"I'm not into taxes," she told reporters. "I'm looking at what we have now and why we can't fund better … and use some of our new increased revenue that we have and invest it."

A state panel called "Washington Learns" on Monday recommended a wide-ranging list of education changes needed to make the state's students globally competitive. It's a good time for change – state budget experts now expect the state's healthy economy to dump an extra $1.5 billion into state coffers by 2009.


"It's up to me now, in crafting my budget, to make a down payment that's significant," Gregoire said. She didn't specify numbers, but listed several immediate priorities:

•Starting to phase in all-day kindergarten in areas of the state with well-developed early learning programs.

•Spending more on math and science learning.

•Shrinking class sizes, particularly in kindergarten through third grade.

•Improving teacher pay.

•Developing a statewide math curriculum, instead of the "296 or more" curricula now picked by local school officials.

"We've tried the local control there, and it has failed," she said. Among the evidence she cited: 40 percent of community- and technical college students need remedial math classes.

In Spokane, state Superintendent of Public Instruction Terry Bergeson laid out several of the same themes Thursday during her annual "state of education" address to more than 1,000 school board members and superintendents. Bergeson said the 56-page Washington Learns report found no "silver bullet" for schools. But she said it shows the state is moving in the right direction.

Gregoire, whose budget will be released in mid-December, said she can't yet be more specific about her proposed school spending.

"I met with my Cabinet a week ago Monday," she said. "And I said to all of them I respect your (budget) requests, but you need to understand my No. 1 priority is education."

School officials, gathered in Spokane for the annual Washington State School Directors' Association conference, said they're eager to see what "down payment" means.

"I think we have some tough choices to make," said Spokane Public Schools board member Christie Querna.

Gregoire said she'll also call for policy changes when lawmakers gather in Olympia in January. Likely proposals include:

•Creating a learning assessment for all incoming kindergarteners, to ensure that they don't fall behind.

•A 7 percent cap on college tuition increases.

•A new statewide science curriculum.

Bigger changes lie ahead, the governor said. Within a year, Washington Learns will recommend ways to measure which learning programs work best. And by December 2008, the group will suggest changes in educational funding. Critics have said the timeline is way too long, considering that children's futures are at stake. Gregoire's response is that taxpayers will only pay for a wise investment.

"Until they know where their dollar goes and that they're getting return on investment," she said, "they're highly unlikely to invest more money."

In Spokane, Bergeson laid out a four-step plan that includes solving the mathematics problem, creating a graduation policy that will not deny students diplomas because of struggles with math, more support for teachers including incentive pay and professional development, and increases in school funding.

"If we are serious about excellence, we need to reward excellence," Bergeson said. "If we are serious about personalizing education, we need to pay for it."

She said her budget request to Gregoire and lawmakers will include $35 million for a professional development system, where teachers would have access to training at nine education service districts.

The state superintendent also said more state money needs to be spent on math coaches, and providing teachers with pay incentives, like stipends for National Board certification.

Bergeson acknowledged one problem with the state's reform plans: No matter how fast math changes come, "it won't be fast enough for many of the kids in the Class of 2008."

Nearly half of this year's juniors failed the math portion of the Washington Assessment of Student Learning last spring. Passing the WASL is a requirement for graduation starting in 2008.

While WSSDA has said it supports delaying the math and science requirements, Bergeson said she does not.

Some thoughts:

• Washington Learns is a shotgun report with innumerable recommendations that all cost money, so the way they prioritize will be important.
  
• I don’t really understand what the point of having an assessment for the incoming kindergarteners would be. They’re pretty much assumed to be starting at zero anyway, and what are you going to do if a kid doesn’t pass the test? Further, there will be those people who spin this as “WASL for Kindergarteners!”, and that’s not good PR.
  
• A seven percent cap on college tuition increases still makes the GET program a hell of an investment.
  
• It's interesting to see Terry Bergeson, former president of the WEA, pushing for merit pay.
  
• We’re already sort of moving towards a statewide science curriculum with LASER taking hold.

Hooray education policy!

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What Can Grounds Do For You?

I teach at one of the best elementary schools in Washington State.

Our building is only three years old, and it’s still got that new-school smell going for it. Our old campus was four different buildings joined together by a series of breezeways, but now we’re all under one roof and it’s helped our cohesion as a staff. We have a lunchroom, where formerly we ate in the classrooms, along with beautiful, dedicated rooms for art, music, and band. The gymnasium would be the pride of many small towns, and we’re only a Pre-6 building. The library has a great open layout, 14 dedicated computers, and access to a courtyard where the kids can go and read.

Then there’s the technology. 2 networked computer labs with 30 computers each and a projector unit for whole-class demonstrations. One of the computer labs has a SmartBoard interactive whiteboard system, as does every classroom grades 3 through 6 and the library. Nearly every classroom K through 6 has at least 4 computers, but many have more thanks to the good work of our tech guy, a full-time employee who does nothing but take care of computer issues all day long. Also in every classroom is a video projector attached to an Elmo document display system, which is so much better than an overhead it’s not even funny. Just recently our principal put in a wireless network, which is nice because all the teachers also have laptops that they can use. The central printer in the office is also on the network, so if I make a work sheet on my computer I don’t have to print one copy then run down to make 30 more; I just send the number I need to the printer, walk down, and pick them up. It’s very nice.

The classrooms were thought out well, with ample storage space, whiteboards on multiple walls, and a dedicated teacher area. We’ve got a set of drawers in every room that’s oversized, for putting posters in, and most of the big storage units are on wheels so we can move them around as we (the teachers, who actually use the rooms) see fit. I’ve got a giant bank of windows in my room, important for a claustrophobe like myself, and we can also control the temperature in the room with controls that really work!

We also have room. Our contract holds the line at 26 in the upper grades (22 in first grade!) meaning that even when the rooms reach their cap there’s still plenty of space for centers, desks, the reading circle, computers, and everything else that makes elementary education what it is. At the beginning of the year our 5th grade classes were packed at 30 kids each, but then the district hired another teacher to get the average class size down to 20. There was finally room to breathe, and you better believe it’s making a difference.

I bring this all up because of a new report from the American Federation of Teachers called Building Minds and Minding Buildings on the importance of having a good building to teach the kids in (report here, dialogue from Let's Get It Right here). Anyone who doesn’t think the building makes a difference is deluded. It sets the tone for what’s going to happen inside, and when the first thing the kids see when they come in is an orderly, clean environment, that helps to start the day the right way.

I wish the AFT well on this project, and to my friends out there who are working in buildings that just aren’t suit for what education demands today—fight the good fight, and hopefully things change. Even “legacy” buildings can be renovated in a way that preserves their historical beauty (District 81 in Spokane has done a great job with this). Where there’s the will, there’s always a way. That makes the ultimate challenge a matter of finding the will.

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