SchoolFinance101, where have you been all my life? Start with Some statistical context for Central Falls and take a troll through the archives for instant classics like Why do states with the “best” data systems have the worst schools? You'll be glad you did!
Also for more RI school reform analysis, check out Bottom Up Education. I'm not sure who the author is, but with a handle like "antiarne," you know where he or she is coming from.
It would not be hard at all to make higher education completely free in the USA. It accounts for not quite 2% of GDP. The personal share, about 1% of GDP, is a third of the income of the richest 10,000 households in the U.S., or three months of Pentagon spending. It’s less than four months of what we waste on administrative costs by not having a single-payer health care finance system. But introduce such a proposal into an election campaign and you would be regarded as suicidally insane.
The larger questions raised by Urban Prep's success have to to do with test scores, the cornerstone of Arne Duncan's school closing and turnaround policies under RTTT. Urban Prep's are nothing to write home about (I don't think test score in general are anything to write home about, but that's me). According to the Sun-Times:The average ACT score of Urban Prep's all-black male student body -- 16.1 -- is below the Chicago Public Schools average of 17 but above the CPS black male average of 15.4. On state tests, Urban Prep kids fell below even the CPS black male average, with only 15.3 percent of juniors passing last year.It's interesting that the school's entire graduating class has been accepted to four-year universities even though only 12% of them met the college readiness benchmark in reading and on 36% met the benchmark in English on the ACT exam. And while UP's composite ACT score is a few (3) points higher than nearby high schools, it's important to remember that UP ISN'T a neighborhood school. It draws its students from 31 different zip-codes in the city.
If Urban Prep was a neighborhood school with scores like these, instead of being heralded by the mayor, Arne Duncan, and CEO Huberman, the school would likely be facing sanctions under NCLB or worse ones under RTTP. It's possible that King would be fired along with his entire dedicated faculty, and the school hit with turnaround, since current policy relies almost entirely on standardized test scores as an indicator of school success. And you can forget about so-called merit pay which is tied directly to student test scores.
If we ever achieve data nirvana where everyone is using the same "college and career ready standards" and aligned assessments, I'm afraid cross-school comparisons will be get even crazier as people try to explain and legislate away the inconsistencies (here's an idea: sanctioning colleges who don't retain officially "college ready" students, then using college retention rates to demonstrate the efficacy of "college ready" strategies).
Ze'ev Wurman and Sandra Stotsky:
National English language arts standards must be rooted in recognized literary, linguistic, and rhetorical scholarship and be compatible with the grade-by-grade progression of standards in the best sets of English language arts standards in this country. A document purporting to present a set of English language arts standards must do much more than claim it is based on research that supports its details on reading instruction. It also must indicate the linguistic, rhetorical, and literary scholarship that justifies its organization, its literature strands, and its composition strands. For example, the page on “Definitions of Key Writing Types,” close to the end of this Draft, has not one quotation or scholarly reference to support what this draft claims are the three “key writing types.” What body of scholarship in rhetoric suggests that Narrative, Informative/ Explanatory, and Argument are the three key writing types?
All English teachers care about the standards or benchmarks on which their state tests have been based. They are not apt to respect or teach to a document that shows no cognizance of the literary, rhetorical, and linguistic scholarship they studied as English majors, or offers as standards statements that read like caricatures of the English language.
Finally the CCSSI standards (math and ELA) get the rough treatment they deserve in a 30 page white paper. The new draft is out this week. I'm sure it will be the best one yet, but the foundation is rotten, so I'm not expecting much.
Cheaper than a motorcycle, and more useful while Vivian rides her tricycle around the basketball court.
Central Falls' 7% proficiency rate on the NECAP math test has now been widely quoted in the national media. What hasn't also been mentioned is how poorly low-income students do on the math portion of the NECAP overall. Here are some proficiency rates for economically disadvantaged students:
Classical boosts Providence's overall score. Central Falls actually outscores all of PPSD's open enrollment high schools.
Vermont and New Hampshire both do well on 8th grade NAEP math, including relatively well among low-income students. They're doing better than RI, but two out of ten is not that much better than one out of ten.
Perhaps most striking to me is that the Times2 Academy, a math/science oriented charter in Providence, which has had many if not most of its 35 11th graders since kindergarten, and sports a 94% pass rate in reading, only got 28% of its juniors over the bar.
So anyhow, I finally looked at the latest released items from the test, which is administered to 11th graders in October, and, um... it is pretty hard. I should just spare you the cliches, point out some more relevant info, and suggest that if my more math-oriented readers want to take a look and let me know what they think, I'm certainly curious at this point.
The one thing I was thinking was perhaps the curriculum is so mis-aligned that kids taking the test just haven't even been exposed to enough geometry. That's certainly possible, but the poor scores seem to be uniform across all topics, so it isn't only that.
AP:
U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan chose to fire teachers en masse when he headed Chicago's public school system.
He was confronted with lagging test scores at Sherman Elementary School in Chicago's South Side, where students are overwhelmingly poor and black. Before it was revamped, 29 percent of students were meeting academic expectations, according to statewide tests.
The city allowed the Academy for Urban School Leadership to take over the school in September 2006. It hired a new leadership team and installed a large number of AUSL teachers, mostly people who decided to become teachers after working in other fields. The school's original staff had to reapply for their jobs; many simply left.
Test scores have improved. During the last school year, 51 percent of Sherman students tested proficient on the same academic test, although they still lag students in the rest of the district. More recently, scores for students in some grades have slipped in reading and mathematics.
A spokeswoman for Duncan cites the school as an example of where replacing the staff — which he calls a turnaround — worked. It's one of four strategies that states can use to improve low-performing schools while competing for millions of dollars in stimulus funds.
So...:
- Duncan-approved successful turnaround, Sherman 2007 - 2009: 29% > 51%
- Duncan-rejected failing school, Central Falls 2007 - 2009 (reading, teaching year): 33% > 56%
Also:
Besides new staff and better leadership, (William Gunther, president of the Boston-based Mass Insight Education and Research Institute) said troubled schools generally need to partner with outside groups that can help them and create a cluster of elementary and middle schools that feed better-prepared students to high school.
In addition to all my other frustrations about this ongoing process, I'm disappointed about the lack of ambition and vision showed thus far concerning the five schools within a mile of my house subject to intervention. In her comments about Central Falls, Commissioner Gist has made it clear that the mode of turnaround is 100% the local superintendent's call, and while I can't comment on the quality of discussions going on around the individual schools (I simply don't know), I've heard not a peep about taking advantage of the opportunities for clustering or collaboration within this group of schools, which even includes an elementary, middle and high school within the same 1 block complex.
The Brady administration is probably completely incapable of doing anything interesting with these schools, since it has spent the last two years on a uniformity jihad and are still implementing their baseline reforms. They can't reform the reforms they've not even completely deployed yet. And they certainly aren't going to do anything that would create a stronger neighborhood power base in Elmwood. It is the one place they don't have to worry about organized opposition. They're not going to change that.
Randi Weingarten on PBS Newshour:
Where the president was wrong was that this is not the last resort. And, in fact, what we have seen in that school -- and this is unfortunate about the way in which the facts have been shut out there -- is that we have seen a real turn of the page starting last year.
Now, this is a school that's the only high school in this small little very, very poor city of Central Falls, Rhode Island. And it's a school where, in the last two years, we have started to see this increase in test scores significant in literacy and in writing, not in math, but yet the school that the president applauded had worse math test scores than this school.
At least she didn't name "the school that the president applauded." Since it is a non-union public school, the union really doesn't have any incentive to hold back on them.
And, for the record, I support The Met, glad its here, would send my kids there if they wanted to go. But it is a dramatic example of how very different schools can end up with the same test results as everyone else when confronted with a high needs, high poverty student population.
Rhee claims that her new principals are replacing ones who were allowing standardized test scores to go down. She also claims that her new principals are doing much better at raising those test scores than the veteran principals. Much of the media keeps repeating her claims, without actually doing any investigation to see whether these claims are true.
As usual, Rhee’s claims are NOT true.
Two blogs ago, I showed in detail that Rhee’s second claim – that schools under the new principals she has appointed are doing much better – is false. Today, I will show that even by her own criteria, the first claim is false: she’s not even replacing the right principals.
Many awesome charts follow, e.g.:
A teacher after my own heart.
I've got nothing profound to say atm about Liz Green's "Building a Better Teacher" piece in NYTimes Mag -- overall it is well written and researched. Typically in these stories about (or in this case, mostly set in) high performing charters, little lines like this jump out to me:
(Katie Bellucci) even sent a disobedient student to the dean’s office without a single turned head or giggle interrupting the flow of her lesson.
Umm... what? In the typical urban school sending a student to the office tends to go like this (I've been reading Filthy Teacher this evening...):
One of our discipline deans quit because she didn't feel she was able to do her job when every time she attempted to suspend a student, the admin told her that wasn't a possibility, even when students had committed violent acts. Our other discipline dean is no longer with us after participating in an incident I can't describe here. We received a notice from our principal Sunday night reminding us to take care of all discipline problems in the classroom, and to only ever refer a student after having taken the prescribed number of steps. Our stand-in discipline dean is a big red box that sits on the counter of the front office with a hole cut in the top and a sign on the front that says, "Discipline Referrals."
A classic example of our lack of discipline came for me on December 12th. A fourth-period student of mine, Star (see previous post on her), returned to class after having been absent for almost two months. The minute she walked into my well-run classroom, I'd lost 3/4 of the class to her jokes and side-comments. She likes to tell people she's bisexual, who she's slept with, what drugs she did the night before, and how bad of a bitch she is. After having asked my counselor to help me remove her from class, she began screaming, "FUCK WHITE PEOPLE! STUPID MOTHERFUCKERS!!!!" She proceeded to slam her stuff around and march out the door. My administrator brought her straight back to me and told me to keep her in class. I refused, explained the incident and went back to teaching.
Of course, if you're teaching at a school with a total student body of 76 students, six teachers and four administrators, it is probably a little easier for administration to help out with discipline issues.
Also, both those anecdotes come from schools considered on the cutting edge of reform.
I think my comment over at Mike Klonsky's got eaten, so I'll just write it here.
First, I was going to say that I thought Gist's timeline on submitting a turnaround plan had forced Gallo into a corner, but re-reading the timeline, Central Falls' deadline is March 16, so that's not the cause of the truncated negotiation, although it does give them some cover for re-starting the process and coming to a different conclusion.
One reason to regard this as a potential trend is that the whole process is driven by the conditions of receiving stimulus funding. It is not NCLB as usual. As the federal ED didn't release the guidelines for intervention in the lowest 5% of schools, required under ARRA, this until December 18. Rhode Island released its list of low-performing schools on January 11. Central Falls blew up February 12. We're just the first in line for this journey.
Related to that, I hadn't realized the extent to which the whole process, including the criteria for determining who is "lowest performing" was dictated by ED. Under those rules, you're eligible for intervention for low test scores or a graduation rate under 60%, so graduation rate must explain why the state chose schools that are by no means the lowest in achievement scores.
Looking forward to some... ambitious credit recovery programs springing up in RI's urban high schools.
Well, I have a proposal. Those 93 teachers, support staff and administrators should get together, pull the necessary strings (which are in their reach right now while the story is hot), and request a meeting with the president – all 93 of them. If Obama could have a beer with Henry Louis Gates and that cop whose name I’ve now forgotten, surely he’s willing to spend a little time hearing the viewpoint of 93 people whom he has essentially attacked sight unseen. While it would be hospitable for him to invite them to the White House, it would be a lot classier for him to have a soothing spot of tea catered in at Central Falls High School. (And he desperately needs to show a little class right now; his supply is perilously low.) I’m sure the cafeteria has enough room to seat the Central Falls 93, Obama and his entourage.
This year's (Philadelphia Young Playwrights) festival offerings include two monologues - Johnson's F.A.T., and Torn Between by Aimee Leong, a junior at the Science Leadership Academy - and a full-company play, Milk and Honey, by Emily Acker, a Baldwin School graduate. They were selected from among 1,000 submitted works by students at Philadelphia-area schools, said Glen Knapp, the festival's executive director. Months of refining and workshopping the scripts, followed by weeks of rehearsals, culminates in a series of professional performances at the theater today through Friday.
Leong's Torn Between, performed by Bi Jean Ngo, takes place on a crowded trolley carrying a young Asian woman to the home of her boyfriend, George, who is African American. Along the way, the girl questions whether dating him isn't somehow being disloyal to her family, and whether she should stay with him or exit the relationship like a passenger from the trolley.In Leong's case, the monologue didn't grow out of a personal experience, but writing it led her to confront and work through some very real and complicated issues. Previously, Leong said, she didn't even keep a journal, let alone publicly discuss issues of race, sexuality, and family loyalty.
"I was scared to 'go there,' in my writing and in the first couple of performances sitting in the audience and hearing the audience's reactions," Leong said. "I didn't know if they'd like it or they'd feel offended. The whole process, it kind of made me look at writing in a totally new perspective."
I look forward to Ken DeRosa's review.
President Obama says that Central Falls must close because only 7% of the students are proficient in math, and the graduation rate is only 48%. Sounds bad, right?
But the President has saluted a high school in Providence, Rhode Island, called "The Met" whose scores are no different from the scores at Central Falls High School. At Central Falls, 55 % of the kids are classified as "proficient readers," just like 55% at The Met. In math, only 7% of students at Central Falls are proficient in math, but at The Met--which the President lauds--only 4% are proficient in math. Ah, but The Met has one big advantage over Central Falls High Schools: Its graduation rate is 75.6%.
But figure this one out: How can a high school where only 4% of the students are proficient in math and only 55% are proficient readers produce a graduation rate of 75.6%? To this distant observer, it appears that the school with lower graduation standards rates higher in President Obama's eyes.
I've not literally tried to run the numbers, but it is pretty clear that RI's method of choosing the "lowest performing" high schools is heavily weighted toward graduation rates, and restricted by the federal government to only four year graduation rates. Of course, this is the easiest metric to manipulate.
I don't know how they could have a "beer summit" with all the teachers in Central Falls after the President spoke before learning all the facts (again) but it would be helpful.
Of course, the difference is that the remark which triggered the first "beer summit" was an ad-lib, correct in its analysis, and controversial among white conservatives. Obama's remark about Central Falls was intentional, if shallow. I don't expect Obama to sit down with teachers from Central Falls.
The firings by the Central Falls school trustees made big headlines, not because reconstituting a school is new, but perhaps because it is the only school in the state’s poorest and smallest city, and because it was not reported as being the consequence of years of calculated efforts to fix the school (even if it was).
I've probably written this before but I'll try to be more clear:
The existence of this city and school district is completely ill-conceived.
Let me put it this way: if you grew up in Rhode Island, Central Falls is just another local quirk; if you never lived in Rhode Island, you assume it is just a small city; if you moved to Rhode Island and live here, when you find out what Central Falls really is, it is a total wtf moment.
Public officials and educators have focused on the need for all high school students to graduate prepared for college or a career. Although the discussion has been intense over the past year about turning around the country's lowest-performing high schools, or dropout factories, no comparable buzz surrounds low-performing middle schools.
That's because we've solved the middle school problem over the past decade. With aligned standards, tests and curricula, we can raise the reading and math scores of middle school students to an acceptable level, or, if we want to go further, hire a middle school CMO and max out the scale.
The new "college and career ready" standards will properly align down high school to be more like extended middle school, and then early college, AP, dual-enrollment, etc. becomes the new high school.
Problem solved.
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