Ho-hum to the Guv on education

This morning on the Todd and Tom show on WRKO, Joe Battenfield (who was sitting in for Todd Feinburg) noted that the Governor’s office is claiming that Pioneer’s view of the national standards issue is a result of politics. What they are suggesting is that because Charlie Baker was Pioneer’s first executive director 20+ years ago, we are running defense for him. You can listen to the whole interview here (it’s not too long, clocking in at 10 minutes). My response was

Ho-Hum.

What I noted was that it’s hard to say that when on the day of the Board of Education’s vote to scrap the state standards, we did a press release with Tim Cahill — not Charlie Baker. Does that mean Pioneer is shilling for Tim Cahill? Of course not. No more than we were shilling for Governor Patrick when we helped him craft the Bridge Repair program a couple of summers ago.

Then there are the little details like four major papers undertaken on the topic of state and national standards from January 2010 to July 2010. Dozens of papers on standards in the past half dozen years. The Governor has not been able to respond to the facts so he attacks Pioneer? Man, that is a funny one.

The big picture here is that the Governor could have been a game-changer for education in Massachusetts, but instead he sided with the adults in the system, at the expense of the core business of teachers and schools:

Bringing high-quality academic experiences to kids.

He sacrificed our standards for 33 cents a day per student in Race to the Top funds. He hitched our wagon with places like Mississippi, West Virginia and Ohio, so that each time we want to improve our standards, we will have to negotiate it out with them.

That. Is. Not. Smart. And that is not leadership.

The Governor has no doubt some accomplishments to boast of, but he has not turned out to be the self-described “education governor.”

Add comment August 26th, 2010

Massachusetts gets Race to the Top grant

The Race to the Top grants have been made and Massachusetts will receive a total of $250 million, to be distributed over a four-year period.

That’s good for MA. Very good. Though we should remember at what cost the money came and also take the opportunity to ask a few meaty questions. Let’s start with the questions:

• Why the late August release? It’s not a great news cycle. And the decisions were supposed to be announced in mid-September — that would be perfect with the kids back at school and lots of parents thinking about education.
• How did Massachusetts get the highest score of all the states? After all, they had strong unions support (unlike Massachusetts, where the local chapter of the American Federation of Teachers declined to support Massachusetts’ application), and they passed a law to evaluate teachers and to use student performance as a portion of that evaluation (unlike Massachusetts where we outlined aspirations around teacher evals and employing student achievement data). (Like Massachusetts, New York passed a law to lift its charter school cap and they adopted the national standards.)
• How is it that so few western states got funding? One wonder what California will do now that it did not get the RTT funding: Will it decide to undo its decision to adopt the national standards?

On the benefits, we should keep all of this in context. We spend through state and local expenditures $9 billion every year on K-12 education. This grant totals $250 million in one-time money. It will come over four years. That works out to about 33 cents a student per day.

The money is going to help in a crisis, but it is not going to be enough to do a lot of good, especially because so much of it is going to go to professional development, textbooks, and adjusting all the districts to the new national standards. That’s going to cost tens of millions of dollars. So subtract all that out.

Which brings me to my basic point. We’ve spent well over $90 billion since the start of education reform in 1993 making hard decisions and putting into place a nation-leading reform based on (1) high academic standards, (2) accountability for students, teachers and schools, and (3) charter schools.

That reform took us out of the Minor Leagues (a competition with other states) and put us in the Majors (a race against the top performing nations). Since 2007

• The state has undone accountability, killing off the state’s independent school auditing office and the US History graduation exam. Then they introduced “soft skills” into the MCAS. Through this grant process they have committed Massachusetts to new tests that aren’t even defined yet.
• The state included many more strings on charter schools, even as they lifted the cap.
• The state, as part of the Race to the Top grant process, has ditched our nation-leading K-12 standards.

So, after $90-plus billion and many years of reform, and many years of success, what’s left of the edifice built in 1993? Was all that worth 33 cents a day per child?

So, for today, celebrate. But remember the cost of being penny-wise and pound foolish.

Crossposted at Boston.com’s Rock the Schoolhouse blog.

Add comment August 24th, 2010

Ed Commish “blatantly violated the law”

Patrick Anderson at the Gloucester Times reports today that Superior Court Judge Richard Welch III found that

the case presents “considerable evidence” that the state education commissioner and Board of Education “blatantly ignored and violated state law when granting the GCA charter for political reasons.”

And more:

While he dismissed the parents’ argument that the commissioner is legally bound to follow the recommendation of his Charter School Office, Welch — echoing state Sen. Bruce Tarr and state Inspector General Gregory Sullivan — said there is no evidence Chester made any attempt to independently judge the application against the established criteria.

“… There is a strong factual showing that the Commissioner, despite his affidavit to the contrary, did not perform his own independent evaluation of the GCA application but, to the contrary, ignored the state regulations and caved to political pressure to recommend the project to a Board eager to approve at least one charter application regardless of its merit,” Welch wrote.

Welch denied the bid by a group of local parents to keep the Gloucester Community Arts Charter School from opening, but the finding on the way Commissioner Chester acted may explain why personnel in the state’s charter school office, which provides technical assistance and provides recommendations to the Commissioner on new charter approval, is heading for the exits. Three people in the office have announced their departure in just the last three months.

Add comment August 24th, 2010

Day 11: Put virtue in virtual school regulations

For Aristotle, virtues required wisdom, the ability to find balance between extremes. So, famously, he noted that courage was neither cowardice nor charging ahead with a devil-may-care attitude. Regulations require that kind of balance even in a virtual age.

Virtual learning is a huge untapped opportunity in Massachusetts. Some people consider its potential to individualize instruction and address some portion of the ever-present classroom problem of kids learning at different paces as game-changing. The conversation sometimes feels like the conversation on stem cell research–perhaps overblown, perhaps not. The fact is we are early in finding out.

The issue of the pace at which kids learn is an important one. Many kids are bored because teachers have to adjust lessons to take into consideration the needs of all kids in the classroom. Other kids need a level of direct interaction that isn’t possible with a single teacher in a classroom, even with after-school hours and even with the addition of a teacher’s aide. Then there are many high school kids who need to work; without greater flexibility in the last two years of high school, they may consider dropping out.

Virtual learning, whether online supplements for traditional learning styles or outright “virtual schools”, is increasingly a way to ensure much more time on task, a flexible schedule, and new capacity without hiring an unsustainable number of teachers.

State Representative Will Brownsberger notes that even though Massachusetts “is a hot bed of educational innovation in its universities, it’s light years behind when it comes to online K-12 learning.” The January 2010 Act Relative to the Achievement Gap exorts the state to get a move on in pushing virtual learning in Massachusetts.

The Florida Virtual School is the example many people point to (full disclosure: Julie Young and FLVS won Pioneer’s 2008 Better Government Competition). FLVS is not a simple distance learning option, with correspondence-style courses and videoconferencing, as you can find in rural western US states, Alaska and parts of Canada. FLVS is a completely internet-based model that provides students in rural as well urban settings everything from AP classes, summer intensive work and remedial support to a full-fledged K-12 curriculum. FLVS is a statewide school system funded on a “pay for performance” basis. Rather than focusing on “seat time,” it aims for students’ mastery of their subjects.

The numbers show that it is working. FLVS’ course completion rate has consistently remained above 80%, with 80,000 students completing 100,000 course enrollments (each enrollment equivalent to one semester’s work). These students range in demographics and in terms of needs—from emotionally and physically handicapped students to the academically advanced. Minorities comprise about one third of FLVS’s population, exceeding the national online learning participation rate among minorities by about 20%. Among AP students, minority participation was at 39% in 2006-2007.

Given the fact that many high school students drop out because of a frustration with school work (too difficult or too boring) and the need to work, expanding. You can see some FLVS student activities here.

Paul Peterson and Harvard Business School’s “disruptive technology” guru Clayton Christensen are really impressed with FLVS but they note that there are many models out there and new ones to be developed. In Los Angeles there are charter schools experimenting with an “integrated” technology approach—which basically means that they know that improving their students’ study habits, knowledge, and skills will require intensive, even one-on-one, instruction over a longer day. Technology can help bridge the gap in resources and engage students in way that really takes hold, especially if coordinated with teacher activities in the school.

The fact is we have a lot to learn about online learning. And we need to let it develop, in much the same way we’ve let the internet thrive without a heavy hand of regulation.

Enter the proposal for a Massachusetts Virtual Academy at Greenfield. The district had looked at a number of virtual learning models, including the FLVS. It proposed setting up a statewide virtual high school. I can’t judge the merits of the proposal, but the immediate question became money. If students in Worcester or other districts enrolled in the Greenfield virtual school, they would have to divert $5,000 per child (well below the $13,400 statewide average for educating a child) from their local school budget.

The problem is that when money enters the picture, those with interest hold onto their wallets. The Department of Education’s response was to develop regulations–regulations that protected districts across the state. The Board of Education just approved these regulations, which require any particular virtual school attract a minimum of 25 percent of its students from within its local district, and that the virtual school enroll no more than 500 students. Any time a school wants to operate outside of those regulatory guideposts, proponents will need to step before the throne, kiss the Commissioner’s ring, and seek special dispensation.

These are some of the most restrictive regulations in the nation. Marty Walz, who was key in advancing the January 2010 school reform package, is not impressed. Speaking to the Globe, she noted that the regulations may contradict the spirit of the recent reform law:

These proposed regulations will certainly make it more difficult for some school districts to open a virtual school, and to me that is moving in the wrong direction.

The state bureaucracy has to stop protecting the status quo. At this early stage in the game, the state should allow more students to access a virtual school and it should not tether the virtual world to location. In addition, in the process of seeking high-performing charter school operators, the state should seek out several proposals that will integrate virtual tools into instruction. Given their flexibility, charters may be able to fashion new school-based uses of virtual learning that are more than simple add-ons.

Crossposted at Boston.com’s Rock the Schoolhouse.

Add comment July 27th, 2010

Day 10: Decentralize decisions in failing urban districts

Sometimes failure is not just in a handful of schools, but in the majority of a district’s schools. In those cases, a broader application of key principles of the 1993 Reform Act (empowering principals and teachers, clear measurement of student performance and accountability for performance, and competition for students) is needed. One way to do that is to pilot a fully decentralized network of schools that are given charter flexibility at the school level.

Angus McBeath, the former superintendent of the Edmonton Public School System, took a school system 30 percent larger than Boston’s and gave district schools the same freedoms and accountability that charters have. The so-called “Edmonton model” empowers principals, teachers and parents by decentralizing budgets to the school level, giving broader powers over hiring and firing, and allowing for schools to brand themselves on the basis of specific ethos and emphases (e.g., music, sports, theater, math and science, etc.).

Similar reforms were enacted in the Barnstable Public School system by then-superintendent Tom McDonald and Town Manager John Klimm in the early 2000s. In both cases,

• Authority over the schools and control of school budgets were brought closer to teachers and principals
• The district office was transformed so that principals could act more independently, presiding over the equivalent of “Horace Mann” charter schools, but without the burdensome layer of state approval and oversight
• The school department’s finance and human resources offices were merged into the municipal offices, reducing redundancy, bringing finances under control, and freeing up money for innovation and improvement
• At least 80 cents and 92 cents on the education dollar in Barnstable and Edmonton, respectively, were controlled by the schools
• Schools were allowed to keep savings gained on reforms rather than sending them back to the superintendent’s office.

In both cases the reforms generated impressive system-wide improvement. You can see articles on Barnstable here–1, 2, 3, and “A Civil Union: How a Town Government and Schools Consolidated Functions, With Benefits for Both” in the Massachusetts Municipal Association’s Advocate, 24/3.

In Edmonton, these reforms were paired with school choice across the entire public district, which importantly engaged parents across the Edmonton district. Edmonton allows parents to choose from among district schools, and the resulting innovations have been so successful that they prompted many area private schools to petition to join the public school system.

The DESE should pilot such a rigorous system-wide parental choice system in one or two districts that have demonstrated consistent failure. To get this right is no small task, as it is a sea change in the way districts operate, so DESE will need to focus some real technical assistance behind implementation of some aspects of the effort. Three big focuses come to mind:

• consolidation of its own finances with the city’s so that the superintendent’s office is focused on academics not dollars;
• the systems that would allow for the superintendent to allow schools to manage money and people without all the strings currently in place while maintaining accountability and fairness
• a system-wide parental choice system that is fair, but also allows people to vote with their feet within the district.

Start with one district. Implement methodically and learn how to do it. Only after learning lessons should the Department consider application to other districts.

Such a reform would be in marked contrast to the glacial pace to closing failing district schools in urban districts, which has led to apathy among parents. If there is any determinant of a student’s academic performance on a par with the student-teacher relationship, it is the involvement of his or her parents. And the reform has two additional benefits: It puts the control of money closer to and more money in the classrooms. With too little of the pie of education funding spent on teachers (translation: too much money is spent on the bureaucracy), that’s a good thing.

Crossposted at Boston.com’s Rock the Schoolhouse.

Add comment July 26th, 2010

Day 9 – Tested innovation for failing urban schools

For decades, urban parents have heard state leaders announce big improvements in their schools. The reality is most urban district schools still lag in student achievement and show, at best, progress that is tragically slow for parents and their children. Not only have urban districts resisted implementation of the state’s 1993 Education Reform Act (MERA) by not aligning local curricula with the state frameworks, but they have not taken advantage of important tools in MERA:

• Decentralized management to empower principals and teachers to make meaningful decisions about how to achieve results, and
• Clear accountability for student performance.

That may sound a lot like charter schools, but MERA’s provisions were also supposed to apply to district schools. Charters in Massachusetts have been extremely successful using these tools. Only five of the 67 charters approved by the state have been shut down for failing to live up to the promises in their “charter” contracts; and even the five closed by the state were often better than comparable district schools within their sending area.

Yet those district schools remain open for business. Imagine being a parent whose kid was in the Lynn Community Charter School. The state closes your school and now your child is forced back into a district school performing at an even lower level. The fact is we need to be vigilant about closing charters; but that also applies to district schools. Seventeen years into implementation of MERA, the double-standard is no longer tenable.

We can no longer let adults continue to talk about the need to wait for the adults to fix the “system.” We need to connect real accountability with innovation in urban districts, and we need to do that now. The January 2010 Achievement Gap legislation doubled the number of charters, so these innovative schools will have an even more significant place on the urban education landscape. So, the first order of business has to be attracting the best charter operators to establish or replicate here. So far, there is progress on that front. Given the politicization of the charter school approval process, we must also shore up the objectivity of charter approvals by insisting that the Secretary recuses himself from charter approvals (and closures).

But the new law also calls for “turnaround” options for so-called “innovation” district schools. These are latest “charter-lite” model proposed by state officials, after pilot schools (circa mid-90s), unionized Horace Mann charter schools (1997), and Commonwealth Pilot schools (2007). None of these models has performed at the level of the original charter school model (”Commonwealth” charters). Worse, turnaround models, when they continue under the aegis of school committees and superintendents, across the country have a checkered record. At most, a handful have worked.

We urge a specific focus on the 60,000 students attending the 100 lowest performing schools. For years, they have been denied their (Massachusetts) constitutional right to educational opportunity. Rather than having the Department of Education’s bureaucrats involved in local negotiations or having the Department prescribe in a top-down manner precisely how change should occur in the districts, the state should establish a menu of four “turnaround” options, from which failing districts and schools can select, according to their own deliberations.

• Commonwealth public charter schools
• University Partnerships, such as the University Park Campus School (UPCS) in Worcester
• Independent Regional Vocational-Technical Education (VTE) Schools. Existing VTEs in urban districts could be given status similar to regional VTEs, such as the Blackstone Valley Regional Vocational-Technical School and Assabet Valley Regional Vocational-Technical School, which have proven to be very effective at occupational and academic learning since embracing the MCAS.
• (Unionized) Horace Mann Public Charter Schools, Pilot Schools, or Commonwealth Pilot Schools

The good news is that Massachusetts already has a strong track record with these models. No theorizing, special collaboration to negotiate, or long lead time to implementation is needed. Rather, what we need most urgently is teacher engagement in choosing and supporting the school options chosen. And that will require a legislative change in the 2010 reform law allowing schools to be turned around with simple approval by a majority of teachers. Superintendents and school committees could be consulted but would not have a veto on the decision. If schools refrained from making a choice within a year, they would be put out for bid to private management. The Department of Education’s role should be limited to (1) setting the rules of the road and (2) evaluating the schools on whether they have delivered improvements in student achievement.

These truly independent school-based options all need to be on the table if we are to scale up and meet the challenge of effectively providing the rich liberal arts content called for in the state’s academic frameworks to our urban students.

Crossposted at Boston.com’s Rock the Schoolhouse.

2 comments July 23rd, 2010

Day 8: Give Urban Kids Access to a Rich Liberal Arts Curriculum

I wrote this blog entry a couple of days ago, before yesterday’s disastrous vote by the Massachusetts Board of Education to adopt national standards that are (1) in many ways very different from and (2) weaker than our now dead-letter state standards for what is taught in our schools. The punch line is at the bottom.

Since 1993, Springfield has received well over $2 billion, Worcester over $1.5 billion and Boston another $2 billion in state aid supplementing local education funding. The percentage of students passing the MCAS test varies greatly by subgroup, with critical challenges remaining to raise significantly academic achievement among African-American and Hispanic/Latino students, as well as students with disabilities.

DESE must actively ensure that local curricula in the state’s largest 25 districts are aligned with the state’s rich academic frameworks. The fact is that the districts should have long ago undertaken these reforms. But it is also true that these reforms may not be possible in the short term without money, which we would estimate to be around $10 million. The state should provide $200,000 a year for up to two years to the largest districts that have not yet aligned their curriculum with the state frameworks. Should the districts not complete this work, in year three the districts should face significant financial penalties.

All of this is, obviously, complicated enormously by the vote taken yesterday by the Massachusetts Board of Education. Now we are back to step one and have to start a new alignment process for all districts. The over 300 districts (and the many urban districts that still haven’t gotten this right) will have to dedicate lots of resources gathering the adults in any number of rooms who will first spend hours creating PowerPoints and many more hours debating them and making decisions, buying new textbooks, crafting and participating in new professional development. So much money (much more than I had suggested above) and so much time, and – one has to wonder – to what benefit?

Add comment July 22nd, 2010

Day 7: Strengthen STEM standards, instruction and assessments

While our student gains in math and science over the past decade and a half are impressive, we need to address the lower percentage of students who are “advanced” in these critical subjects. Yesterday, I noted what we can do to improve the quality of our math and science teaching corps. Today, I want to focus on a number of steps we can take to strengthen STEM standards, instructional practices and assessments.

Strengthen the K-12 Mathematics Standards. Well-structured academic standards logically progress from less difficult or complex topics to more difficult or complex topics, both within a grade and also from grade to grade. We could improve our already best-in-nation math and science standards by paying close attention to transitions across specific grade spans so as to avoid repetition of topics year after year, without the expectation of closure; specifically,

If you want the gory details, click here.

Strengthen Mathematics Instructional Practices. Basic teaching principles–e.g., regular formative assessments in the elementary grades to monitor student learning and individualize instruction–should always guide teachers. But high-quality research and the professional judgment of experienced and accomplished classroom teachers can help identify ways to improve, as well as practices to avoid.

In fact, high-quality students often don’t support some instructional practices currently promoted in mathematics education. For example, it’s hard to find high-quality research supporting either wholly student-centered or wholly teacher-directed approaches to mathematics learning. Nor does high-quality research support emphases on either small group work or problems contextualized in daily life (so-called “real-world” problems).

What do we know that improves instructional practices? Here are three actions:

• Ensure that students develop automatic and accurate execution of standard algorithms and use these competencies to solve problems. so, for example, overusing calculators might impede the development of automaticity (fluency in computation)
• Ensure that students with learning disabilities and other learning problems regularly receive explicit systematic instruction in order to learn mathematics.
• Let mathematically advanced students, who can learn mathematics faster than students proceeding at a normal pace, do so.

Finally, we need to strengthen the state’s K-12 math assessments. There are many ways to improve the MCAS math assessments, but let’s again stick to three:

• In PreK-6, assessments should give more prominence to immediate recall of number facts. Immediate recall frees the “working memory” for solving more complex problems; e.g., the times tables are needed to execute standard algorithms automatically. Such an emphasis will ensure that students gain the capacity for more complex mathematical concepts over time.
• In PreK-8, assessments should give prominence to patterns, including algebraic patterns.
• Keep math assessments mainly consisting of multiple-choice questions. Removing short-answer questions from the Mathematics MCAS at all grade levels would lead to modest cost savings and faster delivery of test results, but, more importantly it would provide greater objectivity in scoring. Contrary to frequent claims, constructed-response format questions, especially the short answer response, do not measure different aspects of mathematical competency (or more authentic mathematical skills). If we want to demonstrate knowledge acquisition in a broader context, we should retain the open-response portions of the tests.

Given the multi-year, $143 million commitment already in place to create MCAS tests for Massachusetts, this can be quite easily inserted into the future year tests. If we join the “national standards”, all of the actions noted above on standards and assessments will have to go through national committees and the federal bureaucracy. To the Governor and Commissioner and Secretary of Education: Thanks. We’ll have really good luck with that, I am sure.

Crossposted at Boston.com’s Rock the Schoolhouse.

Add comment July 21st, 2010

Day 6: Attract and Retain High-Quality Math and Science Teachers

Massachusetts’ students have made impressive gains in math and science over the past decade and a half. Consider that in 1992 Massachusetts stood below national averages on the SAT. Fast forward to this past year, when the state ranked among the highest performing nations on the Trends in International Math and Science Study (TIMSS). In fact, on the TIMSS, Massachusetts 4th graders ranked second and third worldwide in science and mathematics, respectively. Our 8th graders tied for first in science and ranked sixth in math.

But the 2007 TIMSS identified areas of particular weakness. Over 40 percent of 4th graders in Singapore were advanced in mathematics, compared to only 22 percent in Massachusetts. A similar pattern holds for 4th grade science, as well as 8th grade mathematics and science. Massachusetts needs to enhance mathematics and science achievement for all students but also train an eye on our highest performers. Tomorrow, we’ll delve into how to improve our STEM standards, instructional practices and assessments; today, I want to focus on improving the quality of our mathematics and science teachers.

Part of the answer lies in more rigorous teacher preparation and professional development (see Day 5). But that’s not enough. We also need a special effort in math and the hard sciences, subjects in which too many teachers have inadequate content mastery and in which those remaining in the teaching profession have disproportionately had lower levels of prior academic success. Data from the National Science Foundation’s annual Science and Engineering Indicators report provides a view of the problem: In high school math, 11% of teachers do not have a major in math or a related field; the number climbs to 15% in low-income schools. In middle school physical science, 29% of teachers don’t have a major in their or a related field. In middle school math, 43% of teachers lack a major in the field or a related content area.

To succeed we need to attract and retain the highest quality STEM teachers in our schools. Two actions will help enormously:

• Remove obstacles to attracting more academically able STEM teachers to the profession by eliminating (a) “program approval” and (b) the statutory requirement of a two-stage licensure process. Eliminating program approval will open up teacher recruitment beyond the narrow pipeline provided by our schools of education. A better option is to create a vendor-client relationship between higher education and school districts. Eliminating the statutory two-stage licensure process would mean that teachers would no longer be required to complete a master’s degree program in education or its equivalent to be fully certified. Prospective elementary teachers would be eligible for full licensure if they pass the state’s teacher tests and the Criminal Offender Record Information (CORI) check, and have three years of successful teaching experience. Alternative programs (e.g., Teach for America, Math for America, UTeach, and The New Teacher Project) should be encouraged and welcomed. Experienced teachers moving from private or parochial schools to public schools should not have to fulfill student teaching requirements after spending so many years in a classroom.

• Attract and retain high-quality STEM teachers by implementing differential pay for mathematics and science teachers (at a total cost of several million dollars). As noted above, a significant proportion of mathematics teachers do not possess a major or a minor in mathematics. The “wage gap” between salaries in the private sector and those of teachers in public education makes it extremely difficult to recruit and retain highly qualified math and science teachers. Initial wage enhancements of $3,000 to $4,000 for these subjects would be sensible, with revisions based on labor market research.

Add comment July 20th, 2010

Front Page

Did you see the Boston Herald this Sunday? Pioneer made the front page!

Check it out here.

What do you think about the state accepting the federal national education standards (which are lower than the current Massachusetts standards)?

Add comment July 19th, 2010