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Wisconsin Taxpayer Supported K-12 School Report: Accountability under the “Every Student Succeeds Act”
Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction:
The Every Student Succeeds Act – a major federal education law – requires DPI to identify the lowest performing public schools and schools with low performing student groups in each state. Each state outlined their plans for this new federal accountability system, in which the state detailed their accountability indicators, and methodologies for scoring and reporting performance on the indicators, in plans submitted to the US Department of Education.
Wisconsin’s plan was approved by the US Department of Education in January 2018. The 2017-18 school year is the first year of ESSA Accountability Reports.
While the federal accountability system is intended to identify the schools most in need of support and improvement, DPI reports results for all public schools in the state (including those with no identifications) because providing data to educators working to close Wisconsin’s achievement gaps is critically important.
Unlike the state accountability system, ESSA only applies to public schools; it does not apply to private schools participating in the Parental Choice Programs. To compare the state and federal accountability systems, please refer to the Accountability Crosswalk.
Notes, via Chan Stroman:
“ESSA requires that report cards be concise, understandable and accessible to the public.”
On The Madison School District:
MMSD’s IDEA determination: “Needs assistance.” Disproportionality determination not available yet. MMSD’s ESSA determinations (52 schools): 16 schools ID’d for Targeted Support; 2 schools for Additional Targeted Support; 7 schools for Targeted and Additional Targeted Support.
Michigan’s annual education reports.
Iowa School Performance Reports.
Illinois’ Report Cards.
Minnesota Report Card.
Parents can’t use data/reports if they don’t know where to find them.
The Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction (DPI), lead for years by our current Governor, recently provided thousands of elementary teacher content knowledge requirement waivers (Foundations of Reading).
Madison has long tolerated disastrous reading results. This, despite spending far more than most taxpayer supported K-12 school districts; currently about $20,000 per student.
“The data clearly indicate that being able to read is not a requirement for graduation at (Madison) East, especially if you are black or Hispanic”
Wisconsin Accountability System Under the “Every Student Succeeds Act”
American Institutes for Research (AIR):
Wisconsin annually differentiates across all public schools based on scores for the individual federally-required accountability measures (not annual summative ratings for all schools/all students based on all indicators). Schools for comprehensive support and improvement, targeted support and improvement, and additional targeted support and improvement are identified using the following composite index (see also “School Improvement Categories”).
WI also proposes to maintain a “separate” state accountability system that incorporates additional accountability measures and generates an annual 1 to 5 star rating (see Appendix D of the Wisconsin ESSA State plan for additional details).
WI provides 3 composite index weighting schemes: schools in which English learners (ELs) make up at least 10% of the population, school in which ELs are less than 10% of the population but the minimum N size is met, and schools that do not meet the minimum EL N size.
Summary of State Accountability Snapshots.
Much more on the “Every Student Succeeds Act“.
The Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965, as amended by the Every Student Succeeds Act
Section 8302 of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965 (ESEA), as amended by the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA),1 requires the Secretary to establish procedures and criteria under which, after consultation with the Governor, a State educational agency (SEA) may submit a consolidated State plan designed to simplify the application requirements and reduce burden for SEAs. ESEA section 8302 also requires the Secretary to establish the descriptions, information, assurances, and other material required to be included in a consolidated State plan. Even though an SEA submits only the required information in its consolidated State plan, an SEA must still meet all ESEA requirements for each included program. In its consolidated State plan, each SEA may, but is not required to, include supplemental information such as its overall vision for improving outcomes for all students and its efforts to consult with and engage stakeholders when developing its consolidated State plan.
Wisconsin education officials wrongly label Black students as more ‘at-risk’ “We combed through the dropout prediction formulas for many states and fortunately Wisconsin was the only one where we found race was being considered”
Dan Lennington and Will Flanders
Encouraging high-school graduation is a policy that garners broad support, as it paves the way for higher wages and a better quality of life. In 2015, bipartisan majorities passed the Every Student Succeeds Act, a law aimed at reducing dropout rates. Since then, dropout rates have declined about 13%. But now a new twist: education bureaucrats in Wisconsin are taking a misguided approach by injecting race into dropout calculations. This new policy wrongly assumes that a student’s race is a dropout risk factor, perpetuating harmful stereotypes.
To identify students at-risk of dropping out, most school districts employ something called an “Early Warning System.” This tool is a relatively simple computer program that takes risk factors, weighs them, and then labels some students at-risk, which triggers personalized intervention strategies to help them graduate.
So, what is a dropout risk factor? It’s common sense: attendance, behavior, academic performance, and personal obstacles (homelessness and number of address changes, for example). Students ranking low in two or three of these are identified for extra support.
Simple enough. But commonsense isn’t enough for some schools. Wisconsin is adding another risk factor: race.
Wisconsin’s Dropout Early Warning System, or DEWS, uses race to predict how likely Wisconsin students are to graduate from high school. So if a student is Black, that’s a dropout risk in the same way as a student who is frequently absent.
In practice, however, adding race doesn’t really work. According to a recent investigation by Chalkbeat and The Markup, nonprofit, nonpartisan news organizations, DEWS generated highly inaccurate data, predicting many more Black and Hispanic students would drop out than actually did.
Wisconsin’s own internal validation test showed that the system was wrong almost 75% of the time. This leads to several negative consequences. Decades of education researchprove that students perceived as likely to be low achieving by teachers, even at random, learn less than students for whom expectations are higher. Moreover, distributing resources based on these wrong assumptions will invariably take those resources away from other students who actually do need the help.
Apart from wondering why Wisconsin would use a factor that led to inaccurate results, you may also wonder whether using race to predict drop-out risk is, well, a bit racist.
When asked about that, Wisconsin’s education spokeswoman Abigail Swetz explained, “The reality is that we live in a white supremacist society, and the education system is systemically racist.”
By artificially injecting “race” as a predictor, Wisconsin education officials are not actually measuring dropout risks. They are making a political statement about their belief in the theory of systemic racism. Adherents to this hold that all racial disparities are caused by racism. Therefore, if more Blacks than whites are dropping out of school, then the cause must be racism. So it makes perfect sense to add race as a dropout factor, since race is the real reason why kids are dropping out.
Taxpayer funded DPI:
“Well, it’s kind of too bad that we’ve got the smartest people at our universities, and yet we have to create a law to tell them how to teach.”
The data clearly indicate that being able to read is not a requirement for graduation at (Madison) East, especially if you are black or Hispanic”
My Question to Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers on Teacher Mulligans and our Disastrous Reading Results
2017: West High Reading Interventionist Teacher’s Remarks to the School Board on Madison’s Disastrous Reading Results
Madison’s taxpayer supported K-12 school district, despite spending far more than most, has long tolerated disastrous reading results.
“An emphasis on adult employment”
Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]
WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators
Friday Afternoon Veto: Governor Evers Rejects AB446/SB454; an effort to address our long term, disastrous reading results
Booked, but can’t read (Madison): functional literacy, National citizenship and the new face of Dred Scott in the age of mass incarceration.
When A Stands for Average: Students at the UW-Madison School of Education Receive Sky-High Grades. How Smart is That?
49% of Madison schools had at least one group of students identified as low-performing and needing at least one level of targeted support (8.3% statewide)
Almost half of the schools in the Madison School District need to provide additional support to certain groups of students, according to accountability reports compiled by the state earlier this year.
At schools that were identified in the reports, black students and students with disabilities were most commonly found to have poor outcomes compared to their peers — a trend mirrored by schools across the state. The reports were released publicly for the first time in March as part of the federal Every Student Succeeds Act.
and
Why are Madison’s Students Struggling to Read?
Yet, taxpayers spend far more than most K-12 school districts, between $18-20k per student depending on the documents one reviews.
How Can So Many Students Be Invisible? Large Percentages of American Students Perform Above Grade Level
America’s K-12 education systems place students in grade levels by age and set performance expectations accordingly, using historical, average grade-level performance rather than any specific content students are expected to master7. This should not surprise us. Nearly all aspects of America’s schools are built upon age-based grade levels and corresponding grade-level expectations: standards, instruction, curriculum, and assessment, among others. Indeed, the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA), like the No Child Left Behind Act before it, has a strong grade-level framework running throughout its nearly 400 pages. The stated importance of “getting students to grade level” reinforces the implicit message that doing so is the primary purpose of schooling. This emphasis ignores an important question: How many students already perform one or more years above grade level on their first day of school?
The answer to this question has profound implications for American education policy and for the organization of schools. If a mere 2% of students perform above grade level, the present obsession with grade-level proficiency might make sense. But what if it were a far larger proportion? If one in every five students has surpassed that criterion before the school year even starts, policymakers would need to re-think the merits of an age-based, grade-level focus.
The purpose of this policy brief is to answer the following foundational question, which should be considered by policymakers and school administrators well before adopting curricula or assessments: How many students perform above grade level?
Before investigating, we canvassed colleagues and friends for their estimates of the percentage of students performing above grade level. Our queries were generally met with bemused silence, followed by hesitant (and quite wide-ranging) estimates, and ended with comments such as, “That seems like a question we should be able to answer, but I just don’t know.”
Prior research in this area is limited. Two data points stand out: textbook and curriculum analyses suggest that intellectual rigor declined significantly over the last hundred years;8 the National Research Center on the Gifted and Talented found that teachers, using pre-testing strategies, could eliminate 40-50% of the existing curriculum for advanced elementary school students without causing achievement declines on out-of-level standardized tests.9 The authors noted, “Targeted students had mastered some material in all content areas prior to instruction; at a minimum, they demonstrated mastery of one-fourth of the curriculum for the year before it was taught” (p. 81). A few students in the same study had mastered three-quarters of the upcoming year’s curriculum. This research and related studies suggest that the regular classroom routinely under-challenges advanced students. This work does not, however, provide insight into the matter at hand: How many K-12 students perform above grade level?
A Guide to Implementing Student-Based Budgeting (SBB)
Introduction by Karen Hawley Miles (PDF):
School district leaders face an array of challenges that affect how they allocate scarce resources to schools—stubborn achievement gaps, changing and complex demographics, and shrinking federal and state support. As the range of need grows more complex, schools are growing as diverse as the students they serve. In this context, many leaders are actively seeking ways to ensure that all schools have flexibility to organize resources to match student and school needs, while also ensuring equity across school types.
Education Resource Strategies (ERS) leverages more than 15 years of experience helping district leaders strategically reallocate their resources to improve student performance. As part of this work, we’ve collaborated with some of the leading districts that have made bold changes to their funding systems and worked through the results of these changes. Our work on funding is part of our broader School System 20/20 vision—an action-oriented framework for urban school districts to ensure that every school succeeds for every child.
Our work on school funding is based on seven principles for effective school budgeting. We believe that all school funding systems need to rest on this foundation:
For now, the test everyone hates (WKCE) is sticking around
All across Wisconsin, schools received boxes and boxes of stuff they didn’t want last week.
Unfortunately, they were about the most important deliveries they’ll get this year: Hundreds of thousands of test booklets for the Wisconsin Knowledge and Concepts Exam, the state’s annual standardized test.
The testing window, one of the biggest events in every school year, is about to open. More than 400,000 students in third through eighth grade, as well as in 10th grade, will be tested in either two or five subjects in coming weeks, with a handful of schools starting this week and the large majority doing the testing in November.
It’s the test everyone loves to hate. It takes up large amounts of time and disrupts schedules for days on end. There are widespread complaints about what is actually tested. The test yields almost nothing that is useful to teachers in shaping the way they educate students. It’s often a public relations problem and sometimes a nightmare if a school’s scores are low or sometimes even just not better than the prior year.
Furthermore, the test is dying a slow death, and everyone knows it.
Just to be contrary, let’s say something good about the WKCE. For all its flaws, it’s the only broad scale accountability tool we’ve got in this state. It succeeds in putting a lot of heat on schools across the state, and many of them need it.
And the test scores are actually a pretty good reflection of student achievement in a school – which is to say, I’ve never heard of a school with low scores that could make a convincing case that the kids were actually doing well and the scores were off base.
But the state testing system is moving toward an overhaul, and for good reasons.
Future of Data in K-12 Education: A Comprehensive Analysis
US Chamber of Commerce Foundation:
The report asks: what can we learn from the last two decades of education policy, and what do we still not know? According to what Goldhaber and DeArmond identify as the most credible existing studies, the report highlights the following:
Disaggregated data shifted the focus from the average kid to every kid—including Black, Hispanic, low-income students, English learners, and students with special needs. No longer were school districts able to hide the performance of some students behind an average.
Student achievement increased due to NCLB-era assessment and accountability policies, especially in math and especially for Black, Hispanic, and low-income students, who the system had not been serving well.
There is now access to far more reliable, comparable education data than there would be available otherwise, though there has not been sufficient time dedicated to rigorous analysis.
Reforms in teacher evaluation and school turnaround initiatives did not consistently improve student outcomes at scale, in part due to significant variation in quality of implementation.
However, existing research and data has not answered other critical questions, including:
Did schools serving historically underserved students get more money to improve than they otherwise would have?
If identified schools did get more money, what did they do with it?
How many identified low-performing schools became successful?
Have states seen improvement in measures other than academics, such as chronic absenteeism or school climate, that the Every Student Succeeds Act was also intended to elevate?
Learn about how the last two decades of education policy can inform how we plan for our students’ futures.
Federal Data Reveals No Relationship Between Spending and Academic Outcomes in Wisconsin Schools
Flying under the radar amidst the continuing pandemic is the news that the Department of Public Instruction (DPI) finally released school-level spending data for Wisconsin’s public schools. Required by the federal Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA), DPI appears to have dragged its feet as long as possible before providing this information to families and taxpayers. The data shows us that contrary to popular belief, there is little correlation between spending and student outcomes.
The data is broken down into several bins. The most important are the federal and state/local bins. These show (appropriately enough) the amount of spending from each level of government that has been allocated to each school. The other bins are the same across schools. These are the amount of federal and state/local funds that are sent to the district office and the district’s Local Education Agency (LEA). An example of how this data looks from one Milwaukee School, the Milwaukee Sign Language Academy, is presented below.
2017: West High Reading Interventionist Teacher’s Remarks to the School Board on Madison’s Disastrous Reading Results
Madison’s taxpayer supported K-12 school district, despite spending far more than most, has long tolerated disastrous reading results.
My Question to Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers on Teacher Mulligans and our Disastrous Reading Results
“An emphasis on adult employment”
Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]
Booked, but can’t read (Madison): functional literacy, National citizenship and the new face of Dred Scott in the age of mass incarceration
Unions, political affiliation more predictive of virtual learning decision than COVID cases. The report.
Madison School District “needs Assistance” for the Second Year
ESSA designations disembargoed. MMSD: “Needs assistance” under IDEA for 2d year; ESSA determinations: 15 schools ID’d for Targeted Support; 4 schools for Additional Targeted Support; 5 schools for Targeted and Additional Targeted Support.
— Chan Stroman (@eduphilia) March 10, 2020
Every Student Succeeds Act Reports [Wisconsin] are now “disembargoed”. 1.9MB PDF.
Nine Area School Buildings Earn Commendable Or Better Rating On 2019 ESSA Report Card (a missing topic around Madison)
Last week, the Iowa Department of Education released the 2019 school ratings with nine of our area school buildings earning a “commendable” or better score. Each public school receives a score out of 100 based on standards laid out in the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA). South Central Calhoun High School was the only building in the region to earn a “high performing” classification, scoring 62.57. Audubon Middle and High School, Carroll Middle School, Coon-Rapids-Bayard Elementary, Ar-We-Va Junior and Senior High School, Greene County Middle School, Paton-Churdan Junior and Senior High School and the East Sac County Middle and High Schools all rated as commendable, scoring between 54.91 and 60.60. Only one school, Audubon Elementary, was identified as a priority under ESSA, meaning they will need to develop an improvement plan to address targeted issues. A full list of local school and their ratings can be found included with this story on our website.
ESSA is a topic rarely heard around the taxpayer supported Madison School District.
Madison’s taxpayer supported K-12 school district, despite spending far more than most, has long tolerated disastrous reading results.
In addition, Madison recently expanded its least diverse schools.
Notes and links on previous Superintendent searches.
2013; 2019 Jennifer Cheatham and the Madison experience.
Meanwhile, Madison’s taxpayer supported K-12 district continues to plan for a substantial tax & spending increase referendum this fall.
Accountability? Racine Unified one of two districts being reviewed by joint monitoring
This fall, the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction began joint monitoring of Racine Unified School District’s improvement efforts required under the Every Student Succeeds Act and the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act. According to DPI, joint monitoring is only used in districts that are identified as needing support in all aspects of the ESSA and IDEA. Both are federal laws.
“This work is about helping the district develop systems that provide all students an equitable opportunity for success,” said DPI Communications Officer Benson Gardner in a statement.
So far, Racine Unified is only one of two Wisconsin school districts that have been found to need support in all areas of ESSA and IDEA. The other is Milwaukee Public Schools.
Madison taxpayers spend far more than most K-12 school districts. Yet, we have long tolerated disastrousreading results.
Coalition alleges Taxpayer supported Racine school district ‘completely left out’ community in planning
A local education coalition is planning to file a complaint with the state alleging that the Racine Unified School District failed to include the community in its planning processes and didn’t follow federal requirements as a result.
Representatives of the group planning to file the complaint, the Racine Community Coalition for Public Schools — which is comprised of teachers, retired educators, the local teachers union, the National Education Association, parents and community members — said that the district is required to use community input when crafting its Every Student Succeeds Act-Local Educational Agency plan; that 24-page plan is essentially the outline of objectives and educational methodology intended to guide the whole district.
“We know best” is
evergreen.
How Many Schools Are Low-Performing Under ESSA? Here Are Some Answers
Much of the federal education law deals with schools struggling to meet expectations. And we have new information concerning just how many of them are being tagged as needing improvement in the Every Student Succeeds Act era. But the answers vary significantly by state.
A new report from the Center on Education Policy takes a state-by-state look at the number of schools that have been identified as needing comprehensive support and improvement, targeted support and improvement, or additional targeted support and improvement. Those are ESSA’s three school improvement categories.
The share of schools getting each one of those labels can vary dramatically from state to state. In Florida, for example, 69 percent of schools fell into one of those buckets, while in Maryland, just 3 percent of schools have recevied one of the labels so far. The same goes for the share of schools in each of those categories: In Arizona, 41 percent of schools need targeted support and improvement, while in Kansas, the corresponding figure is just 6 percent.
Need a reminder of which schools those labels apply to? You can go here. Basically, schools needing comprehensive support and improvement are Title I schools with very low overall performance, or high schools with low graduation rates, while the other two types of schools have some sort of chronic underperformance among student subgroups. These labels matter schools are supposed to get evidence-based interventions tailored to address their problem areas.
Wisconsin DPI loses an open records court round
In November, DPI provided some records but declined to fulfill parts of the request because it said WILL’s request wasn’t specific enough and was too burdensome, according to the lawsuit. WILL filed a narrower request in December but has not received additional records.
The lawsuit could be just one stage in a protracted fight. WILL believes DPI must get the approval of lawmakers to implement the Every Student Succeeds Act and believes the records it is seeking will show whether DPI has exceeded its authority.
“DPI has maliciously delayed responding to WILL’s record requests in order to mask the department’s illegal activities,” WILL attorney Thomas Kamenick wrote in the lawsuit.
WILL also took issue with DPI providing schools with reports this week that it said could not be made public until March 5. “No information is to be shared with anyone in the public until that date,” according to a DPI notification to schools.
The Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction, lead for years by current Governor Tony Evers, has granted thousands of waivers for teachers who cannot pass our one content knowledge requirement – elementary reading. Much more on the Foundations of Reading, here.
The Black Achievement Paradox Nobody’s Talking About
Why do black students whose parents serve in the military so significantly outperform their peers from black civilian families? This question has for years stumped researchers, but a new data-reporting requirement for military-connected students under the Every Student Succeeds Act could provide some insights for practitioners and policymakers serving America’s increasingly mobile students overall.
Moving just once for any student has the potential to derail the student’s academic trajectory.
And yet black military-connected students, who move on average six to nine times before they graduate high school, consistently perform on the National Assessment of Educational Progress and on state exams not only better than black students from civilian families, who on average rarely transfer schools, but also almost as high as their white civilian- and military-connected peers. That gap has only continued to narrow in recent years.
I first came across this emerging research about seven years ago. It was early on in my career as an education reporter, and I was writing frequently about how Minnesota’s schools—some of the best in the nation—had so dramatically left their black students behind.
In my personal life, I was grappling with the lingering effects of an academically and socially disjointed childhood.
Have we made progress on achievement gaps? Looking at evidence from the new NAEP results
Michael Hansen, Elizabeth Mann Levesque, Diana Quintero, and Jon Valant
:
Last week, the National Assessment Governing Board and National Center for Education Statistics released results from the 2017 National Assessment of Education Progress (NAEP). Often referred to as “the Nation’s Report Card,” these results provide a bi-annual barometer on how states and the country as a whole are performing in the classroom. This year’s results are particularly noteworthy because they are from the final NAEP administered before implementation of the new Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA), which replaced No Child Left Behind (NCLB). In this sense, these results reflect a boundary in the timeline of education policy, demarcating the end of the NCLB era and the beginning of the ESSA era.
The release itself and the early commentary on the results so far has largely highlighted the overall flat trend lines among the nation’s schoolchildren. Though the early NCLB era did see some improvements in student achievement, it appears that this progress has largely stalled during the latter half of the period. Moreover, a dip in performance in the 2015 assessment has persisted in the current results, suggesting it was no statistical anomaly.
Telated: Madison’s long term, disastrous reading results.
Checking In: Are Math Assignments Measuring Up?
Nearly every state includes measures of college- and career-readiness in their accountability plans under the Every Student Succeeds Act, and the quality of classroom assignments can help gauge whether students are being prepared for success beyond high school.
What is Equity In Motion?
In this series, we look at how issues or equity are playing out in the daily activities of schools and educators. Specifically, do classroom assignments reflect the more rigorous standards for college- and career-readiness?
Math Forum audio and video.
Is There Anything Common Core Gets Right?
Sandra Stotsky, via Will Fitzhugh:
Most books on public education in any country do not favor workforce preparation for all students in place of optional high school curricula or student-selected post-secondary goals. Nor have parents in the USA lauded Common Core’s effects on their children’s learning or the K-8 curriculum. Indeed, few observers see anything academically worthwhile in the standards funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and promoted by the organizations it has subsidized to promote them (e.g., the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, and Jeb Bush’s Foundation for Educational Excellence).
Joy Pullmann’s The Education Invasion: How Common Core Fights Parents for Control of American Kids (Encounter Books, 2017) is a recent addition to the critics’ side of the Common Core controversy. Her purpose is to explain what Common Core is and how it got to be implemented in almost every public classroom in almost every state in a remarkably short period of time (less than five years). She does so chiefly from the perspective of the many parents and teachers she quotes.
Organized in seven chapters, her book describes how the Gates Foundation promoted and continues to promote one extremely wealthy couple’s uninformed, unsupported, and unsupportable ideas on education for other people’s children while their own children are enrolled in a non-Common Cored private school. It explains how (but not exactly why) the Gates Foundation helped to centralize control of public education in the U.S. Department of Education. It also explains why parents, teachers, local school boards, and state legislators were the last to learn how the public schools their local and state taxes supported had been nationalized without Congressional knowledge or permission; and why they were expected to believe that their local public schools were now accountable for what and how they teach…not to the local and state taxpayers who fund them or to locally-elected school boards that by law are still supposed to set education policies not already determined by their state legislature…but to a distant bureaucracy in exchange for money to their state department of education to close “achievement gaps” between unspecified groups.
Overnight, teachers discovered they were accountable to anonymous bureaucrats for students’ scores on tests these teachers had not developed or reviewed, before or after their administration. Amazingly, state boards and governors believed all teachers were accountable to the federal education department despite the fact that the federal government pays for only about 8 to 10 percent of the costs of public education on average across states, and not for teachers’ or superintendents’ salaries.
The complex story of how sets of English language arts and mathematics standards (and, later, compatible science standards) created by non-experts selected chiefly (so far as we know) by Gates got adopted legally by mathematically- and scientifically-ignorant state boards of education is carefully told in a relatively short book. What we miss are analyses of four crucial topics: the academic quality of Common Core’s standards, why they were adopted by mathematically-illiterate state boards of education, why “school choice” doesn’t address the problems in Common Core’s standards, and how the peer review process for approving a “State Plan” under the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) ensures continuing federal control of a state’s public schools.
NEA President: There Will Be No Photo Ops With DeVos
The speech highlighted the different approaches the two national teachers’ unions have taken to this administration. AFT President Randi Weingarten, for example, went and visited a school with DeVos in April. While not exactly a photo op, it at least showed the two national education leaders could be civil to one another. (Weingarten has since said plenty of critical things about DeVos in other forums.)
The NEA, on the other hand, has resisted those steps. Eskelsen García said she’s still waiting on the answers to questions she posed in a letter to DeVos way back in February and won’t even consider meeting with her until they’re answered.
While the speech did a great job of riling up the delegates, it did not give much of an indication about how the union plans to resist DeVos’ education plans over the long haul.
That’s understandable on one front, since the administration’s education plans still seem kind of murky. Its proposed budget, which would cut numerous programs, including a $2 billion professional-development program, is unlikely to survive intact. But what happens when the union needs to engage on workaday matters—for example, the implementation of the new federal law, the Every Student Succeeds Act?
Teachers Are Now Performing Monthly Mental Health Exams on Your Child
On paper it reads like a not-so-vague attempt to socially engineer your child’s behavior. In reality, teacher-led mental health assessments coming to a growing number of public schools are a bureaucratic nightmare. One that will no doubt further clog our nation’s public education system with increased paperwork and administrative costs while putting your child’s future at serious risk.
Thanks to Dr. Aida Cerundolo’s piece in The Wall Street Journal, we are beginning to understand the real-life ramifications of these dangerous educational ideas. Want the Cliffs Notes version? Head over to the excellent summation by Emmett McGroarty and Jane Robbins, detailing the ramifications of the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA), a federal bill focused on the buzz-phrase “Social Emotional Learning” (SEL), the latest craze in public education. Schools in states that have ESSA legislation on the books can use the Devereux Student Strengths Assessment (DESSA) to fulfill ESSA paperwork requirements.
Wisconsin Lawmaker: Lack of rigorous goals contributed to state’s achievement gap (decades go by)
The huge gap in average academic achievement among racial groups in Wisconsin is likely a result of state education officials not setting rigorous goals to address the problem years ago, the chairman of the Senate Education Committee said Wednesday.
Sen. Luther Olsen, R-Ripon, said Wednesday that state lawmakers and education officials did not take seriously the charge of the 2001 federal law known as No Child Left Behind.
That law, which was replaced in 2015 by the Every Student Succeeds Act, required schools to show that students improved their learning year after year, including among racial, gender and ability groups. Those that didn’t meet federal standards for improvement after four or more years were subject to be placed into “corrective action,” which could have resulted in replacing teachers, converting a school into a charter school or closing it altogether.
Olsen said because the law required all students to be proficient in English and math by 2014, the state Department of Public Instruction set goals that were below what Wisconsin students were achieving already, instead of goals that would require students to show dramatic improvement.
Olsen made the comments during a legislative briefing by DPI officials on the state’s plan to implement a new federal education accountability law. He praised DPI’s new plan because it sets goals to cut the gap in average achievement between black and white students in half in six years — which would require black students to improve in proficiency in English and math by around 4 percent annually.
“These are goals that are completely different than NCLB, because those, in my estimation, were just a scam,” said Olsen.
The WKCE was an unfortunate waste of time and money. Wisconsin continues to lag many states and nations.
Parents need more information to hold schools accountable
This week, states begin submitting their implementation plans for the Every Student Succeeds Act and they find themselves in the driver’s seat to ensure that the public has access to clear and accurate information about schools in their community.
The challenge for states will be to find the political will to do the right thing when it comes to accountability. And to do the right thing for parents, especially as federal and state policymakers increasingly promote the expansion of school choice.
They’re all rich white kids and they’ll do just fine, NOT!
The Power of Persuasion: A Model for Effective Political Leadership by State Chiefs
State chiefs have new responsibilities under the Every Student Succeeds Act, but their formal powers are still limited. Despite these constraints, CRPE analysis finds that chiefs can make a difference by wielding their powers strategically, to build coalitions and persuade others. While turnover in the field is high, with 70% of current chiefs on the job less than two years, newcomers are taking their seats at a time of opportunity.
Drawing on interviews with current and former state chiefs, authors Hill and Jochim identify chiefs’ opportunities for influence in light of the ideas in Richard E. Neustadt’s 1960 book Presidential Power and the Modern Presidents: The Politics of Leadership. The analysis and concrete examples are intended to help current and aspiring chiefs understand how to use their authorities as the basis of bargaining, build their professional reputation, and approach decisionmaking.
Key takeaways include:
Chiefs should fully understand their own advantages and think hard about how to bargain effectively with others in the state capital and in school districts
New Johns Hopkins School of Education website grades K-12 reading, math programs
A new website launched by the Johns Hopkins University Center for Research and Reform in Education aims to help education leaders around the country evaluate K-12 reading and math programs, and to understand how those programs compare under a new federal education law.
The CRRE’s new website, Evidence for ESSA, examines academic programs through the lens of the Every Student Succeeds Act, President Barack Obama’s 2015 law that replaced No Child Left Behind. Evidence for ESSA uses the expertise and authority of the center’s faculty, as well as scholarly studies, to determine an academic program’s effectiveness under the new law.
Evidence for ESSA makes it easier for school leaders to determine which programs will comply with new federal regulations
The website functions as a kind of consumer report, says the School of Education’s Robert Slavin, director of the CRRE. The goal is to help judge how rigorously a program has been vetted, and to provide that information to the people who need it most.
Curriculum Is the Cure: The next phase of education reform must include restoring knowledge to the classroom.
“The existing K-12 school system (including most charters and private schools) has been transformed into a knowledge-free zone…Surveys conducted by NAEP and other testing agencies reveal an astonishing lack of historical and civic knowledge…Fifty-two percent chose Germany, Japan, or Italy as “U.S. Allies” in World War II.”
President-elect Donald Trump’s nomination of Betsy DeVos as secretary of education has set off a new round in America’s long-running education wars. Teachers’ unions and progressive activists are warning of impending disaster—that DeVos and other “billionaire privatizers” are out to dismantle America’s public schools, the pillars of our democracy. Pro-choice education reformers, on the other hand, are cheering the DeVos appointment, and see great opportunities ahead for their movement. DeVos is one of the nation’s most tenacious advocates for (and generous funders of) the market approach to education. She likes charter schools, but is a true believer in vouchers—the policy of giving parents of children stuck in failing public schools tax dollars to pay tuition at the private schools of their choice. Even more encouraging, DeVos will presumably have the backing of a president who pledged on the campaign trail to use $20 billion in federal education funds to boost voucher programs in the states.
Unfortunately, hyperbole seems to be trumping reality (pun not intended) in this latest dust-up over the schools. Both sides ought to consider a ceasefire in order to begin focusing on the major cause of bad schooling in America: a half-century of discredited instructional practices in the classroom.
Let’s dispose of a couple of canards. First, the Trump administration isn’t about to privatize the public schools—far from it. During the campaign, the Republican-dominated Congress passed the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) that includes provisions severely limiting the federal role in K-12 education. These restrictions make it exceedingly difficult for the new administration to launch any sort of national school-choice program or to do away with Common Core. For better or worse, the future of all such reforms will remain exactly where they began—in the states.
Second, neither side in the debate has been entirely candid on the issue of charters and vouchers. We’ve already had several decades of robust school-choice experiments in the states and localities, many of which have been thoroughly evaluated. The results provide little confirmation for either side’s argument on how best to improve the schools. Charters seem to have produced significant gains for students in some school districts, including New Orleans, Washington, D.C., and New York. On the other hand, the largest study of charter school effects nationally (conducted by Stanford University’s Center for Research on Education Outcomes) found that only 17 percent of all charters had higher academic gains than similar public schools, while 37 percent had worse performance. Forty-six percent of charters performed no better or worse than public schools in the same district.
The grade for voucher programs is also an Incomplete. The country’s largest voucher experiment was launched in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, 26 years ago. Today, more than 28,000 students are enrolled in the program, one-in-four of all the city’s students. Most minority parents are happy with their voucher schools—not a small point in its favor—but there has been no Milwaukee academic miracle. In fact, the city’s black children have recorded some of the worst test scores of any urban district in the country, as measured by National Association of Educational Progress (NAEP) tests.
On School Reform
IN 1983 the Reagan administration published “A Nation At Risk”, an apocalyptic report into the state of American schools. It ushered in 33 years of uneven yet enduring bipartisan support for presidents’ efforts to raise school standards. George W. Bush’s No Child Left Behind Act and its successor, the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA), share more than quixotic names. Both were backed by majorities of both parties in Congress. Unfamiliar with such harmony, Barack Obama called ESSA, signed into law last December, a “Christmas miracle”.
That sort of collaboration could soon become a rarity. On November 23rd Donald Trump, the president-elect, nominated Betsy DeVos, a philanthropist, as the next secretary of education. For three decades Mrs DeVos has used her family foundation and her leadership of conservative groups to lobby for “school choice”, a broad term that can divide Republicans even from moderate Democrats.
Measures of Last Resort: Assessing Strategies for State-Initiated Turnarounds
With enactment of the Every Student Succeeds Act, responsibility for improving student outcomes is back under states’ purview, empowering them to craft their own evidence-based turnaround strategies. Recent state-initiated turnarounds have taken many forms and all turnarounds aim to catalyze improvement in student outcomes. But the evidence base around these strategies is weak, and existing research provides little guidance to help states develop more effective strategies.
Using the most rigorous evaluations available, this report identifies various mechanisms states can use to intervene in schools and dives deep into nearly a dozen recent turnarounds in eight states. It maps the five common turnaround approaches: state support for local turnaround, state-authorized turnaround zone, mayoral control, school takeover, and district takeover. And it analyzes what is known about state-initiated turnaround in all its forms.
The report is designed to help states ensure their support is more targeted, better received, and, ultimately, more effective. Three core findings emerge from the evaluations:
What’s at Stake in the Ongoing Fight About School Spending Comparability?
On the surface, the current dispute about Title I comparability (the requirement that schools within a district must receive comparable resources from state and local sources for education of disadvantaged children before federal funds are added on) is all about money. On one side, Secretary of Education John King is pressing for regulations that would require districts to demonstrate real-dollar equality of state and local spending. On the other, Senate Education Committee Chair Lamar Alexander is insisting that the new Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) does not allow such a sharp definition of comparability, leaving states and localities free to interpret the comparability principle in various ways.
But the underlying issues go much deeper. They are about whether schools serving the most disadvantaged children will get a fair chance to improve, or will always be at a disadvantage in attracting and retaining good teachers and principals. Here’s why:
Driven by their collective bargaining agreements, the vast majority of big school districts ignore between-school differences in teacher salaries. This is so senior teachers can choose the schools they believe are the best workplaces—most often schools in nicer neighborhoods with students from higher-income families—while newer teachers with no seniority rights and fewer choices tend to work in more disadvantaged schools serving poorer students.
A New Era for the Battle Over Teacher Evaluations
The Obama administration has worked hard to strengthen public-school teaching—a $400 billion-plus workforce, and perhaps the single strongest lever in schools for raising student achievement. But just after Thanksgiving, the president signed a major new education law that largely abandoned the cornerstone of his teacher agenda: pressing states and school districts to take more seriously the task of identifying who in the profession was doing a good job, and who wasn’t.Two powerful forces at opposite ends of the political spectrum had attacked the president’s strategy—teacher unions wanting to end the new scrutiny of their members and Tea Party members targeting the Obama plan as part of a larger anti-Washington campaign. As a result, the new Every Student Succeeds Act terminates the Obama administration’s incentives for states and school districts to introduce tougher teacher-evaluation systems. And the law effectively bans the U.S. Secretary of Education from promoting teacher-performance measurements in the future.
Moving achievement goalposts? Brown says it’s time to abandon API to judge schools’ performance
Members of the State Board of Education who favor replacing the three-digit Academic Performance Index with a “dashboard” of measurements highlighting school performance can count on the backing of Gov. Jerry Brown.
The K-12 summary (pages 22-23) of Brown’s proposed 2016-17 state budget, released last week, stated, “The state system should include a concise set of performance measures, rather than a single index.” Brown said the new federal Every Student Succeeds Act creates the opportunity to design a “more accurate picture of school performance and progress” than in the past.
The Latest Battle Over When and Where Kids Can Walk to School
provision tucked deep within a gargantuan education bill passed in December clarifies the murky legal standing of free-range parenting—sort of. Advocates for the practice—that is, encouraging kids to build self-reliance skills by traveling their neighborhoods solo—are hailing the 101-word section as a victory, though the law still leaves parents and journeying kiddos subject to state and local guidelines.
The amendment is on page 857 of the Every Student Succeeds Act, and is the work of Mike Lee, the Republican senator from Utah who has become something of a political patron saint of anti-helicopter parenting. The provision declares that nothing will “prohibit a child from traveling to and from school on foot or by car, bus, or bike when the parents of the child have given permission.”(Note that the language does not specify how parents are to give legitimate permission.)
The Counterfeit High School Diploma
Teachers unions and other critics of federally required standardized tests have behaved in recent years as though killing the testing mandate would magically remedy everything that ails education in the United States. In reality, getting rid of the testing requirement in the early grades would make it impossible for the country to know what if anything children were learning from year to year.
Congress understood this fundamental point, and kept the testing requirement, when it reauthorized the No Child Left Behind Act — now called the Every Student Succeeds Act — last month. But lawmakers ducked the most important problem: the fact that most states still have weak curriculums and graduation requirements that make high school diplomas useless and that leave graduates unprepared for college, the job market or even meeting entry requirements for the Army.
The costs associated with this problem are demonstrated in a recent report by Motoko Rich in The Times, which focused on Berea High School in Greenville, S.C., where the graduation rate has risen to 80 percent, from under 65 percent just four years ago. But college entrance exams given to 11th graders last year showed that only one in 10 students was ready for college-level reading and only about one in 14 was prepared for entry-level college math. On a separate job skills test, only about half of students demonstrated the math proficiency needed to succeed at most jobs.
With results like that, it’s no wonder some South Carolina business leaders are worried that the state is producing high school graduates who are not qualified to compete for higher-skilled jobs at companies like Boeing, Volvo and BMW.
This is a national problem. A recent study from Achieve, a nonpartisan organization that works with the states to raise academic standards, showed that only 18 states and the District of Columbia required all graduates in the class of 2014 to meet the minimum preparation requirements for college — four years of English and math through Algebra II, or its equivalent.
Related:Young Americans cannot do tricky sums without a calculator and Madison’s long term, disastrous reading results.
On the education front, one way to move from anger to action would be to make sure all youngsters are proficient in reading
First, success in reaching proficiency in reading is shockingly low among students from low-income homes and those who are black or Hispanic. The Wisconsin gap between white kids and black kids has often been measured as the worst in the United States.
Only 13% of black fourth through eighth graders in Wisconsin were rated as proficient or better in reading in 2019. For Milwaukee, it was 10%. Same for Madison.
Second, this has not changed for at least two decades. I’ve gone over results on the National Assessment of Educational Progress going back to the 1990s. Same story, every time: Wisconsin at the bottom.
Despite some (but too few) very good early childhood programs, many thousands of children each year walk into kindergarten already behind their better-off peers. Many thousands walk out of third grade not really ready for what’s ahead.
Has anything been done to try to make reading outcomes better? Well, sort of.
In 2011 and 2012, a Wisconsin “Read to Lead” task force was created to figure out how to get more kids to proficiency in reading by the end of third grade. The chair was then-Gov. Scott Walker and the vice-chair was then-State Superintendent of Public Instruction Tony Evers. It was a tepid effort and it certainly didn’t lead to improving things.
Starting around then, the Greater Milwaukee Foundation launched Milwaukee Succeeds, an everyone-at-the-table effort of civic leaders. It made third grade reading a top priority. It moved slowly, backing a few modest, even if good, efforts. Overall, nothing changed.
Even as nothing improved, the reading education establishment in Wisconsin stuck pretty much to doing the same things. Maybe the philosophy is: If it’s not working, don’t try to fix it. There’s been some increase in teaching kids how to sound out letters and words (phonics), but it has hardly been a full and energized effort.
How important is reading? Very.
Consider a fresh voice: I read this past week an article in the New York University Review of Law and Social Change by McKenna Kohlenberg, a Milwaukee area native who is in the home stretch of getting both her law degree and a master’s degree in educational leadership and policy analysis from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
It uses Madison as a case study in what Kohlenberg calls the “illiteracy-to-incarceration pipeline.” She cites research that 70% of adults who are incarcerated and 85% of juveniles who have been involved with the juvenile justice system are functionally illiterate.
“Literacy strongly correlates with myriad social and economic outcomes, and children who are not proficient by the fourth grade are much more likely than their proficient peers to face a series of accumulating negative consequences,” Kohlenberg writes.
Madison’s taxpayer supported K-12 school district, despite spending far more than most, has long tolerated disastrous reading results.
My Question to Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers on Teacher Mulligans and our Disastrous Reading Results
“An emphasis on adult employment”
Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]
Booked, but can’t read (Madison): functional literacy, National citizenship and the new face of Dred Scott in the age of mass incarceration
Federalism And Education Governance
It is customary for federal agencies to issue detailed regulations on how new laws should be put into effect, and Mr. Obama’s Department of Education did so in November. But some lawmakers from both parties saw the regulations as unusually aggressive and far-reaching, and said they could subvert ESSA’s intent of re-establishing local control over education and decreasing the emphasis on testing.
Last month, the House of Representatives overturned a broad swath of the rules using the Congressional Review Act, which allows lawmakers to spike federal regulations. The Senate passed a similar resolution on Thursday, and President Trump has indicated that he will sign it. That would leave ESSA on the books, but Ms. DeVos would have more flexibility in how to apply it.
The Obama regulations pushed states to weight student achievement measures, such as test scores and graduation rates, more heavily than other factors in labeling schools as underperforming. The regulations also required schools to provide parents and the public with an annual report card detailing schoolwide student achievement data and other indicators of success.
Among the most contentious of the Obama rules was one that required schools to test at least 95 percent of their students.
There were some good reasons for such a policy. To avoid the sanctions that come with low scores, schools have sometimes pressured or forced low-performing students to stay home on testing days. But conservatives said the 95 percent rule was excessive federal intervention, while some on the left said it prevented parents and students from “opting out” of standardized tests — a popular protest tactic.
Reading and Curricular Suggestions & Links as the school year begins
Wisconsin Reading Coalition via a kind email:
With the beginning of a new school year, here is some timely information and inspiration.
You can make a difference: At WRC, we are often focused on top-down systemic change that can improve reading outcomes for students across our state. However, bottom-up, individual efforts are equally important. A letter from Colin Powell, Alma Powell, and Laysha Ward in the Washington Post reminds us that as individuals we can be part of the solution. “Imagine that you have an envelope beneath your chair, containing the name of a child in need and within your reach. He or she is heading back to school now but is at risk of not finishing. There are students like this in every community across the country, just waiting for someone to connect with them. This school year, we challenge you to find your Nico Rodriguez: Reach out directly to your local school, parent-teacher association or a relevant nonprofit with an offer to volunteer. . . Whatever path you choose, know that everybody can do something, starting today.” If you are in the Milwaukee area, please consider volunteering for one of the reading tutor pilots through Milwaukee Succeeds. We at WRC have a personal investment in programs at St. Catherine’s School at 51st and Center and Northwest Catholic School at 41st and Good Hope. With as little as an hour a week, you can participate in providing Orton-Gillingham-based intervention to struggling K5-2 students. Contact Audra Brennan at 414-336-7038, or abrennan@milwaukeesucceeds.org
Adult literacy issues: In his recent article, Time to knock out illiteracy, James Causey of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel highlighted the reading difficulties of boxing champion Floyd Mayweather, and suggested that Mayweather address his reading issues and become a “better role model for black boys across America, who have the worst reading scores of any group in the nation.” Rapper 50 Cent and disc jockey Charlamagne Tha God have publicly humiliated Mayweather by pointing out his reading difficulties. Causey states: “It’s hard to feel sorry for Mayweather because he loves playing the bad guy in the ring and he’s made enough money to afford the best tutors and educators in the world. Which begs the questions, why hasn’t he learned to read yet?” Mary McFadden, a Milwaukee adult basic education tutor, responded in an opinion comment: “I can think of a few reasons. Reading difficulties are not the result of a lack of intelligence or a lack of effort. Unfortunately, effective programs for adults with learning disabilities or learning challenges are available but not very prevalent. Also, seeking help means having to tell someone you have a problem, which is difficult for many people. . . . I believe that greater pressure should be applied to 50 Cent to become a role model by educating himself on learning disabilities, apologizing for his cruel behavior and encouraging people to celebrate each other’s strengths while showing empathy and compassion as we all struggle with our weaknesses.”
You can’t learn if you’re not there: Wisconsin Superintendent Tony Evers sent some important information to school principals concerning the importance of student attendance, particularly in the early years of school. Resources and strategies for improving attendance are included. “The evidence from Wisconsin is irrefutable: students with good attendance in Kindergarten through Grade 2 have higher rates of reading and math proficiency in later grades. Good attendance in the early years also predicts good attendance rates throughout a student’s K-12 education. Data reveal that repeated early absence has negative educational implications for children.”
Setting the bar on Smarter Balanced assessment: Anyone with opinions on appropriate and fair cut scores for the upcoming Smarter Balanced assessments may participate in the achievement level setting process. An online national panel requires just three hours over two days during a window from October 6 through 17. Don’t complain if you don’t participate. Click here to register.
A win for the good guys: The Federal Trade Commission recently announced a settlement of its action against Infant Learning, Inc. and its owner for false educational claims related to its “Your Baby Can Read” product. The final order in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of California imposes monetary judgements exceeding $185 million, which will be suspended after the owner pays $300,000. The Federal Trade Commission works for consumers to prevent fraudulent, deceptive, and unfair business practices and to provide information to help spot, stop, and avoid them. To file a complaint in English or Spanish, visit the FTC’s online Complaint Assistant or call 1-877-FTC-HELP (1-877-382-4357). The FTC enters complaints into Consumer Sentinel, a secure, online database available to more than 2,000 civil and criminal law enforcement agencies in the U.S. and abroad. The FTC’s website provides free information on a variety of consumer topics. Like the FTC on Facebook, follow us on Twitter, and subscribe to press releases for the latest FTC news and resources.
Focus on dyslexia: Wisconsin FACETS offers a free telephone workshop on September 24 from 12-1 PM. The program, titled “Red Flags of a Struggling Reader,” will be presented by Cheryl Ward. Register online at www.wifacets.org, or contact Sandra McFarland at 877-374-0511 or smcfarland@wifacets.org. Also, the National Center for Learning Disabilities (NCLD), has dyslexia basics, a free dyslexia toolkit, top 10 resources, and more on its website. A video on the dyslexic brain is also available.
It’s a big job: Lest we forget, effective reading intervention is not an easy or quick fix, particularly when begun at third grade or later. A recent New York Times article discusses the third-grade retention movement in multiple states, and the summer school programs that are seeking to avoid that outcome for students. It highlights the importance of teaching reading the right way from the start, and intervening early when problems surface. (Note: you may have to close numerous pop-up windows to read this article.)
Literate Nation Virtual Boot Camp: The Literate Nation organization will offer a free virtual boot camp on how to create literacy change in your community. This is a live webcast of a 1-1/2 day event in Denver, CO, that runs from Saturday, October 18 through Sunday, October 19. Participate individually or form your own group. Click here to register.
On Milwaukee (and Madison’s) Reading Crisis
Jean Maier says she now realizes two of the important qualities needed to make progress in dealing with Milwaukee’s reading crisis:
Humility and tenacity.
One piece of good news is that she has seen them in action in places such as Gwen T. Jackson School, 2121 W. Hadley St., a Milwaukee public school where improvement in reading achievement is an urgent need. (How urgent? Scores improved this year so only 84.7% of students were rated below proficient in reading in state test results released last week.)
Another — and I hope broader — piece of good news is that the carefully constructed (which can be read as “slow aborning”) efforts of Milwaukee Succeeds are entering the action stage. In recent weeks, I visited three pilot programs associated with the everyone-at-the-table campaign by civic leaders to improve the lot of children in the city.
I liked what I saw, in terms of the projects. I was sobered by the depth of the problem, both when I watched kids struggle with reading basics and when I looked at the new wave of test results. But I did feel like a lot of care, commitment and intelligence is going into finding more effective ways of helping kids with reading. That is one of several major focal points for the Milwaukee Succeeds effort.
Two of the Milwaukee Succeeds pilots I visited focused on tutoring. There are a lot of people who want to help kids improve their reading, including volunteers ranging from college students to retirees. But, frankly, there have been two big problems with tutoring efforts citywide.
One is that they focus too much on kids who are actually doing OK and too little on those who really need help. The Milwaukee Succeeds folks have put together compelling data to show this.
Change is the Only Path to Better Schools
Shortly after Madison schools superintendent Dan Nerad resigned last year, School Board member Ed Hughes told me that when it comes to the Madison School District, “People want improvement, but they don’t want change.”
I thought about Hughes’ words last weekend after the school district announced it had hired Chicago Public Schools chief of instruction Jennifer Cheatham as Nerad’s replacement.
Cheatham is seen as the best bet for improvement — specifically to the long history of low-income and minority student under-achievement.
The question now is: Will people tolerate her changes?
Hughes told me Sunday he was “optimistic” they would. “I think she will earn teachers’ trust and inspire them to do their best work,” he said. “If she succeeds at that, everything else will fall into place.”
I hope he’s right, but I don’t yet share his optimism.
Back in 2011, it was the district’s long-standing inability to do anything bold about the achievement gap that left it vulnerable to the Urban League of Greater Madison’s bid to open its own charter school for minority and low-income students.
Madison Preparatory Academy brought the issue of the achievement gap to the fore. But the school’s rejection — largely due to opposition from the teachers union — left notoriously progressive Madison doing some uncomfortable soul-searching.
Related: And so it continues…..
Can Rocketship Launch a Fleet of Successful, Mass-Produced Schools? (Opening in Milwaukee later in 2013)
JEFFREY BROWN: Now we look to a California education experiment called the Rocketship Model that involves teachers, kids and parents and aims to expand one day to serve a million students.
NewsHour’s special correspondent for education, John Merrow, has our report.
JOHN MERROW: The Model T was the first, the first innovative and affordable car available to the masses. Others had built good cars, but Henry Ford figured out how to build a lot of them. He and his moving assembly line proved that quality can be mass-produced.
Mass production is a problem the auto industry solved over 100 years ago, but it’s an issue our education system has yet to figure out. America has lots of terrific schools. People open great schools every year, but typically open just one. Nobody has figured out how to mass-produce high-quality, cost-effective schools.
John Danner is the latest to give it a shot. He created an innovative charter school model with replication in mind. Charter schools receive public funding, but are privately managed and operate outside of the traditional public system.
…..
JOHN MERROW: New Orleans, Nashville, Indianapolis, and Memphis have all approved charters for Rocketship schools to be built in their cities. Next year, two new schools will open in San Jose and one in Milwaukee. Danner plans to have 46 schools up and running in five years, with a vision of someday serving 50 cities and a million students. If he succeeds, Rocketship could become the Model T of education.
Notes and links on Rocketship’s arrival in Milwaukee.
The Ed School Disease, Part Two
I read Stanford University educational historian David F. Labaree’s new book, “The Trouble With Ed Schools,” shortly after last week’s column scorching those same education schools. You would think his wonderfully insightful book, which is even harder on ed schools than I was, would make me feel good. Here is a distinguished education school professor who knows that world so well, and he is validating my opinions.
Instead, the book made me ashamed of myself. It was similar to the feeling of loathsome guilt I had when I was eight years old and beat up a five-year-old with a lisp next door who had annoyed me for reasons I no longer recall. Labaree succeeds in making American education schools such objects of pity, suffering from decades of low status and professional abuse, that you want to give the next ed school professor you meet a big hug and promise to bake her a plate of cookies.
That is not the worst part. In last week’s online column, and in a column in The Washington Post Magazine Aug. 6, I fussed over the failure of education schools to pass on tips from the real world of expert teachers working in inner city schools. I cited several methods used by famous teachers who have raised student achievement significantly. I decried the response from many ed school people: We can’t teach that until we subject it to thorough research.
But Labaree has gone a long way toward convincing me that ed schools are doing no such thing. He concludes, after an exhaustive examination of the birth and evolution of teacher training in the United States, that education schools have about as much impact on what happens in U.S. classrooms as my beloved but woeful Washington Nationals are having this season on the pennant race.
Teachers in training, he shows, are far more influenced by their memories of how their own school teachers behaved, and by orders and advice they get from supervisors and colleagues in the schools that eventually employ them. Rookie teachers are happy for the credential they get from ed schools that allow them to start earning a paycheck, but they don’t use very much of what they learn there, Labaree says.
At the heart of the book is a Frankie and Johnnie romance between two losers, ed schools and child-centered progressive education. Labaree notes several books that have decried the effect on public schools of progressive education, including the thoughts of theorist John Dewey. Then he asks a simple question: What evidence is there that many classroom teachers are actually doing anything that Dewey would want them to do? As the faculty lounge saying goes, Dewey advocates are supposed to act like a guide on the side, letting each student follow his or her natural instincts and curiosity, rather than a sage on the stage, dispensing wisdom which everyone must write down and memorize.
More on Math
A reader forwarded this article: Jay Mathews, writing in the Washington Post:
So when I found a new attack on the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics (NCTM), the nation’s leading association for math teachers, by a group of smart advocates, I saw a chance to bring some clarity to what we call the Math Wars. For several years, loosely allied groups of activist teachers and parents with math backgrounds have argued that we are teaching math all wrong. We should make sure that children know their math facts — can multiply quickly in their heads and do long division without calculators, among other things — or algebra is going to kill them, they say. They blame the NCTM, based in Reston, Va., for encouraging loose teaching that leaves students to try to discover principles themselves and relies too much on calculators.
