Last week, in reporting the national test results on how our public schools are doing, I noted that while
It is wonderful that Massachusetts has maintained its lead nationally, … [o]ur students are no longer improving at the rate they were and in fact their performance has largely flatlined.
On the scaled scores for the Commonwealth, the loss of momentum is very clear with no change on the 4th and 8th grade math scores, and a slight increase on the 4th and 8th grade reading scores (which amount to scores that are statistically unchanged).
While many students with disabilities are included in state exams in reading, math, and other subjects, in 2005, a Government Accountability Office report found that they are more likely to be excluded from the National Assessment of Educational Progress, often called the Nation’s Report Card.
Even before the GAO report, there were studies and questions about whether students with disabilities participated in the NAEP.
We are all accustomed to the MCAS, and therefore know how students are tested. But many readers are absolutely right to ask those of us who use performance statistics from the NAEP, the Trends in Math and Science Study (TIMSS), and the OECD’s Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA): How are students selected and is there any bias against underperforming or challenged students?
Sirvi goes on
A more recent study, done at least in part in response to the GAO report, takes another look at how many students with disabilities are included in NAEP and why others are not. The report, from the National Center for Education Statistics, which administers the NAEP, notes that a “student with disabilities is assumed to be able to participate in NAEP if he or she participated in the state assessment in the selected subject and can participate with accommodations allowed by NAEP.”
But reality hasn’t matched that ideal. For example, the study notes that in the 2009 4th grade math version of NAEP, 85.4 percent of students with disabilities took the test. On the 8th grade math test, 78.5 percent of students with disabilities were tested…
The NCES found that several factors affected students’ inclusion on the NAEP, including the type of disability they have, the severity of their disability, and whether an accommodation used in a state test was allowed on the NAEP. And while the percentage of students with disabilities included on the NAEP varies from state to state, a larger inclusion rate in one state doesn’t mean that state is more inclusive than another, the report says, because students aren’t spread uniformly through the country…
It also researched how those in the states administering the NAEP decide whether students should participate, put in place a specific process to determine if a student could take NAEP tests without the accommodations they use on state tests, and improved the training for NAEP administrators and staff to clarify the criteria for including students.
No reason for alarmism, but there are some indications in the “exclusion” data that suggest that the Commonwealth has been pretty generous in excluding or granting accommodations to students with disabilities and/or English language learners. For example, in 2009 we often excluded or allowed accommodations for a higher percentage of students with disabilities and ELL students than the nation as a whole.
There’s data on 4th- and 8th-grade students and the percentage of students excluded/accommodated on the reading NAEP here and on the math NAEP here. Just as an example, the 4th-grade math test data shows the percentages for Massachusetts and the nation as follows:
• US: Excluded 2, Assessed with accommodations 11
• MA: Excluded 4, Assessed with accommodations 13
What is the justification for the higher level of exclusions and accommodations?
Drill down to cities and the picture is interesting and one that would benefit from clarity from state and district officials as to why our numbers are what they are. Here is data for 8th-grade math, representing exclusions and accommodations in Larger US Cities as a whole, in Houston and in Boston in 2009:
• US Cities: Excluded 1, Assessed with accommodations 4
• Houston: Excluded 2, Assessed with accommodations 3
• Boston: Excluded 4, Assessed with accommodations 5
So, Boston is excluding a percentage of students four times higher than a representative basket of larger US cities. And if you look at the data from 2003-2009, Boston has consistently excluded higher percentages of students. This is a conversation worth looking into. What’s the view of state leaders?
It’s always struck me as odd that with all the talk about federal money coming from the federal Race to the Top effort to support state implementation of national standards (the so-called Common Core), no one has done a solid cost estimate for what it will cost. Let me say that again: We have at the state and federal level changed policies that are far-reaching for our states, districts and schools, and yet we have had no idea what it will cost to do so.
States and districts are unsure what the true cost of implementing Common Core will be and worry that the money needed will not be available in state or federal budgets. The recession and widespread budget cuts can adversely affect efforts to implement. States adopting these standards must be prepared to implement strategies and support as these will soon become the basis on which students are judged.
As the McGraw-Hill brief notes, each state will be working within the next three years to implement the standards, so that by 2014, the major changes will have taken place. But “ as states create implementation schedules, budget arises as the most mitigating factor.”
Yup. So who has done work on the costs of implementation the national standards and assessments? Not Washington, DC, and not Massachusetts. California has started that process. Taking from California’s draft implementation plan, again, the McGraw-Hill brief notes:
The California Department of Education (CDE) internally estimates that the average cost of developing and publishing a curriculum framework is approximately $1.2 million. The average cost of a major instructional materials adoption in mathematics or reading/language arts–English language development is approximately $2.1 million.
That’s $3.3 million per district. California had very strong state academic standards before it adopted the national standards, so it may be a good comparison on the materials and curricular planning side of the equation. There are of course other considerations, such as the IT and other needs associated with the development and implementation of new assessments, in our case, to replace the MCAS.
If the California numbers hold for Massachusetts (which is not known), the curricular and materials work associated with the adoption of the national standards will cost about $1 billion (over 300 districts multiplied by $3.3. million).
Massachusetts got $250 million over four years (works out to about $62.5 million a year over the period) to start the process, and few people actually believe there is any more federal money to support the implementation process. So in great part this is a matter that will be left for states and districts to pay for.
A new estimate from California’s Department of Education suggests that the costs will be far lower. On Monday, in a piece entitled “CDE estimates common core costs close to $800 million ,” Tom Chorneau reports that
New analysis from the California Department of Education sets the cost of providing instructional materials aligned to the common core at $487 million.
There is an additional $237 million related to professional development – getting teachers and administrators prepared – and at least $35 million more tied to the cost of the state’s participation in the national common core assessment consortium, which calls for implementation by the 2014-15 school year.
The new numbers come as the California State Board of Education is set this week to once again consider the next steps in implementing the common core standards in math and English language arts. The board and state school chief Tom Torlakson are required to provide a plan and a schedule to the Legislature and Gov. Jerry Brown for how to bring the new standards into the classroom – something that has been under development more than a year.
Although steps have been taken, the big issue clearly is money, as a memo from Torlakson to the board points out.
…
The big hurdle, however, will be finding the truly big dollars needed to bring the entire program into focus.
In recent months, many states hoped that the offer from US Secretary of Educaton Arne Duncan to waive provisions of the No Child Left Behind law to states that make reforms that he wants would save states money. That is not the case in California:
But one big parallel program – the Obama administration’s No Child Left Behind waiver offer – would appear to add costs rather than reduce them.
The CDE says overall the waiver will cost the state as much as $3.1 billion. Many of those costs would be incurred anyway, as a result of implementing common core – such as the updated instructional materials, added professional development and new testing.
But the CDE has also identified numerous other costs tied to the waiver such as the development of new support systems for low performing schools and the creation of an evaluation system for teachers and principals.
So what is Massachusetts’ estimate of the cost of implementation? We ought to know.
show that 4th and 8th graders have inched up in mathematics, but the results are more mixed in reading, with 4th grade scores flat compared with two years ago.
Former Massachusetts Commissioner of Education and current chairman of the national tests’ National Assessment Governing Board, David P. Driscoll, is paraphrased as saying that:
the nation has made major gains in math over the past two decades, but that in reading, the growth has been “quite small.” And he called the 4th grade reading scores “deeply disappointing,” noting that they have been flat since 2007…
Mr. Driscoll, a former commissioner of education in Massachusetts, highlighted “an interesting flip” over time in reading and math, noting that while in the early years the proportion of students achieving proficiency in math trailed reading, the situation is now reversed.
That’s the big national picture. Among the states, the takeaways, according to Robelen, are as follows:
The new NAEP results also highlight changes in state by state performance. Hawaii was the only state to see improvements in both subjects at both grade levels. Meanwhile, Maryland’s reading scores improved at both the 4th and 8th grades. In addition, the District of Columbia, New Mexico, and Rhode Island saw improved math scores at both grade levels.
Mr. Driscoll said that over the past eight years, during which all states have been required to participate in the NAEP in reading and math, the largest overall gains occurred in Maryland, Massachusetts, and the District of Columbia, when looking at the increase in the percent reaching “proficient” in both subjects. And yet several other states “stood virtually still,” including Iowa, New York, and West Virginia.
The picture is actually more mixed than that. It is wonderful that Massachusetts has maintained its lead nationally, but the image at the top of this post sums up where we are a bit better: Our students are no longer improving at the rate they were and in fact their performance has largely flatlined.
On Massachusetts’ scaled scores, this is how we look: Math
2011: 8th grade: 299 (Unchanged since 2007 at 298)
2011: 4th grade: 253 (Unchanged since 2007 at 252)
Reading
2011: 8th grade: 275 (Highest score ever but statistically unchanged from 2005 at 274.)
2011: 4th grade: 237 (Highest score ever but statistically unchanged from 2007 at 236; it dipped in 2009 to 234)
And on proficiency scores, this is how we look: Math
2011: Highest score at “basic and above” in 4th (93%) and 8th (86%) grades. The 4th grade mirrors the 2007 score. The 8th grade is a new high.
Reading
2011: Highest percentage at “basic and above” in 4th (83%) and 8th (84%) grades. The 4th grade score is a new high water mark. The 8th grade replicates the 2007 score.
(Meanwhile, just to the south, in li’l ol’ Rhode Island, Education Commissioner Deb Gist has provided leadership that has allowed her students to make the most sizable math gains in the country.)
In this season of ghosts and goblins, it seems only appropriate to think about the stories that for many generations served to frame our imagination of what Halloween should look like.
That list is a partial trajectory of the American spirit. On Halloween a different sort of literary spirit has grown around the holiday, with very visible markers in our literary past: Our fascination with the macabre in Edgar Allan Poe’s The Raven, the humorous, light-hearted yet richly crafted stories of Washington Irving such as The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, and tales formulated from the stark oppositions of American Puritanism, as evident in the stories by Nathaniel Hawthorne.
Ichabod Crane’s unlikely fascination for the beautiful Katrina has always been easy for a child to grasp, as was Crane’s obsession with terrible tales such as the one about the “Headless Horseman of Sleepy Hollow.” The amazing thing about the story is just how rich it is, and how it grows with us into adulthood. It helps that it makes us laugh.
Hawthorne doesn’t much go for laughter. The Scarlet Letter is of course his most famous story, but on Halloween, with its night-time rituals, goblins and devils all dancing and prancing in the dark along with SpongeBobs, nerds and this year Captain America and Angry Birds, I think Hawthorne’s Young Goodman Brown is the story that most comes to mind.
The Puritan Young Goodman Brown, is about to leave his Faith, his lovely bride, for a trip into the woods. Odd beginning already, given that Puritans didn’t much like the woods, having settled the land and carved out a space for the Elect in the New World. Brown, though, is headed for deep into the forest. .. at night. (Hawthorne’s and the Puritans’ woods were not those of Henry David Thoreau’s Walden; or, Life in the Woods.) On the way, he runs into all kinds of townspeople, including the Sunday School teacher and the Deacon. Brown also meets with a presence cloaked in black carrying a snake-like staff; this man traveled from old Boston to the woods in superhuman time, so, well, you know he’s talking to the Devil.
The Devil says he knows Brown’s Puritan ancestors. And he knows Brown’s wife, too; Brown sees her transported away (and her pink ribbon). They meet and are to be baptized before a great fire and a crowd of all the townspeople, the good and the bad who are all awake and in the depths of the woods. When he resists baptism, he awakens, as if from a dream. Dream or reality? No matter. Having lost his Faith (in all senses), he can never look at anyone without feeling they were with Devil; his remaining days are those of a gloomy old man.
I share these stories to mark the holiday, but also with some sadness at changes in the state’s curriculum and how too people in the K-12 world view literature. It was these foundational liberal arts readings and vocabulary in cultural literacy, along with math and science as its auxiliaries, which used to punctuate public education for democratic learning.
William Faulkner stressed literature’s transcendent value and continuity with our past in his famous 1950 Nobel Prize acceptance speech:
I believe that man will not merely endure: he will prevail. He is immortal, not because he alone among creatures has an inexhaustible voice, but because he has a soul, a spirit capable of compassion and sacrifice and endurance. The poet’s, the writer’s, duty is to write about these things. It is his privilege to help man endure by lifting his heart, by reminding him of the courage and honor and hope and pride and compassion and pity and sacrifice which have been the glory of his past.
If an unfriendly foreign power had attempted to impose on America the mediocre educational performance that exists today, we might well have viewed it as an act of war. As it stands, we have allowed this to happen to ourselves. We have even squandered the gains in student achievement made in the wake of the Sputnik challenge. Moreover, we have dismantled essential support systems which helped make those gains possible. We have, in effect, been committing an act of unthinking, unilateral educational disarmament.
Politicians, policymakers, and scholars like UVA English professor E.D. Hirsch, Jr., who in 1987 authored Cultural Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know, challenged public schooling and its school of education-centric culture to elevate the academic quality of the curricula and standards.
In 1988, Diane Ravitch and Chester Finn (decades before their late-career conversions back to support the EduBlob of trade groups — here and here, respectively) wrote What Do Our 17-Year Olds Know?: A Report on the First National Assessment of History and Literature, a book that laid bare the appallingly low level of understanding, appreciation, and performance that American schoolchildren demonstrated. I’ve always taken their book to be a cri de coeur on Americans’ paltry knowledge of their own literature and history.
In reality, over the last 25 years, very little has actually changed across the country in terms of the academic achievement and our schoolchildren’s knowledge and appreciation for American literature. By 2008, Mark Bauerlein, an English professor at Emory University, authored the book The Dumbest Generation: How the Digital Age Stupefies Young Americans and Jeopardizes Our Future.
Because in my limited experience as a teacher, I’ve noticed in the last 10 years that students are no less intelligent, no less ambitious but there are two big differences: Reading habits have slipped, along with general knowledge. You can quote me on this: You guys don’t know anything.
The notable exception—Massachusetts, which in 1993 embraced liberal arts-rich standards, high stakes MCAS testing, and teacher testing. Together with generous state funding, this elevated Massachusetts to number one in the country in NAEP reading in all grades tested in 2005, 2007, and 2009. Through reading better quality literature, the Bay State’s students have even done well on NAEP’s writing portion.
And in Massachusetts, our former state standards were heavily grounded (80% or more of reading texts) in the classic American literature I cited above, while even NAEP ELA tests are more (80% plus) focused on so-called “informational texts.” In the hands of ed-school types “informational texts” likely mean everything and nothing for students in the classrooms.
This illustrates once again that the Massachusetts model of high-quality academic standards, literature texts, and vocabulary gave children the building blocks in language and reading that correlated with huge academic gains on national and international testing. Nobody else in America can make this claim.
After all, in addition to our long and well known literary history our Commonwealth’s 1780 Constitution (drafted by John Adams) is explicit in its commitment to literature as the basis for learning:
Wisdom and knowledge, as well as virtue, diffused generally among the body of the people, being necessary for the preservation of their rights and liberties; and as these depend on spreading the opportunities and advantages of education in the various parts of the country, and among the different orders of the people, it shall be the duty of legislatures and magistrates, in all future periods of this commonwealth, to cherish the interests of literature…
In effect, the adoption of the national standards cut by over half the amount of classical American literature our schoolchildren will be reading in our schools. As my organization has noted repeatedly in the press (this one in the Lowell Sun):
[W]ith the adoption of national standards, the commonwealth’s English curriculum will spend less time on literature than it does on “informational texts.” Along with the move away from literature, the national standards also mark the return of educational gibberish. The now-defunct Massachusetts standards called for third- and fourth-graders to “identify subject and verb agreement in a single sentence.” The national standards call for teachers to “use modal auxiliaries to convey various conditions.”
Such a choice is odd for Governor Patrick, who clearly has a literary sensibility and has often spoken and written about his appreciation for literature while attending Milton Academy via a school choice program. In his book A Reason to Believe, he wrote:
My freshman English teacher, Albert Oliver Smith, was extraordinary. The other teachers called him “A.O.” …I struggled in the class, yet it was magic Mr. Smith spoke musically, with total command of the language. He remains the most fluent English speaker I have ever heard. He insisted one’s writing and speech be energetic and precise. Find just the right word. Shun pretense and ambiguity. Simple sentences are best, and when you finish writing them, read them aloud—which we did when we read Shakespeare, then other plays or prose…
This Halloween when your kids are heading out for trick or treating, read them Irving’s The Legend of Sleepy Hollow. It’s unlikely they’ll be reading it in school.
The Commonwealth’s Board and its Department of Elementary and Secondary Education sure have lots of task forces, committees, and extra-long board jawboning sessions. (Board meetings have almost doubled in length; I’ll let you decide if the same can be said on substance.) I certainly wish some of the words and time of these officials would go toward programs that have a record of bridging achievement gaps: in addition to charter schools, autonomous vocational-technical schools and METCO.
In a wondrous display of British understatement, Commissioner Mitch Chester and his staff have begin to observe and perhaps even start to think that the Lawrence Public Schools might have “a potential leadership gap” and that “[o]verall, the district is not yet where we expect it to be and want it to be.”
Hmm. Commissioner Chester was sworn in as commissioner of education on Monday, May 19, 2008, with a press release and an announcement by the governor that the former Ohio deputy was “known for his work in accountability and assessment.”
So, after serving in the Bay State for 3 ½ years, the commissioner is beginning to wonder if there’s a leadership problem in Lawrence? What, might I ask, gave the commissioner such an idea? What may have been the first sign of troubles in the Lawrence schools for our state officials?
Perhaps it was in 2003 when former Lawrence superintendent Wilfredo Laboy failed for the third time a basic English test required of school superintendents. As the Christian Science Monitor said:
For Wilfredo Laboy, the news that he had failed one of Massachusetts’ required literacy exams for educators – for the third year in a row – came at a particularly bad time.
By one of those weird confluences of events that give the news a tinge of humor, the state’s poorest-performing district learned of its superintendent’s failure the same summer the first Massachusetts seniors were denied diplomas for failing a high-stakes test. The same summer Mr. Laboy put 24 bilingual education teachers on unpaid leave for failing to pass an English fluency exam, while the Lawrence, Mass., school committee raised his salary to $156,560.
Or, maybe it was June 2009 (Globe) when superintendent Laboy took a medical leave just as it was revealed that his office seemed more focused on muckraking on political foes and playing politics than improving student achievement:
Laboy, 58, has been on medical leave for work-related stress since mid-May and had planned to return to work next week. His new leave followed mounting public anger over what locals have dubbed “Snoopgate,’’ in which Laboy’s special assistant resigned in the spring after police discovered that he had used school computers to conduct unauthorized background checks on more than 400 people.
or this:
The state’s Office of Campaign and Political Finance is also investigating whether School Committee members and other politicians who have supported Laboy have been allowed to print campaign literature for free on the district’s industrial printer.
Or, perhaps it was this 2010 Eagle-Tribune story that tipped off those perceptive state investigators at the MA DOE:
In April, Laboy was fired as superintendent of Lawrence public schools. Laboy, 59, made $200,000 there annually and was superintendent since 2000.
He was indicted in March, charged with eight counts of fraud and embezzlement and a single count of illegal possession of alcohol on school property.
He is accused of using school employees and resources for his own personal gain, including to work on his Methuen home and to drive his son and grandchildren.
Aside from the bad press that Lawrence’s educational “leadership” has received, since 2004 the state has done four separate reports (1, 2, 3, 4) on the maladministration and chronic under-performance in the Lawrence Public Schools.
Then there is the steady state of failure in the city: Isn’t that a sure sign of failed leadership? Lawrence is a district that serves approximately 12,000 students, 85 percent of whom are Hispanic and a vast majority of whom are poor. Dating back to the period between 2003 and 2007—approximately 80 percent of the students in Lawrence have been scoring in the “Needs Improvement” and “Warning/Failing” categories, the two lowest on the MCAS test. Under ed reform, Lawrence has easily received hundreds of millions of dollars in state aid, and it’s more likely well north of $1 billion.
Unless you believe that’s simply how these kids are made, you have to place a good part of the blame on the leadership of the city’s schools.
This is what happens when you, for all intents and purposes, mothball accountability. In 2007 the state’s independent state accountability agency had a budget of $3 million; by 2008, the Office of Educational Quality and Accountability was shuttered by the Patrick Administration and replaced by a watered down version. The new and improved accountability office has little to show: here’s a three-paragraph summary/report of its activities over the past year. With Massachusetts taxpayers spending over $9 billion annually (state and local) on public schools, we deserve more than three paragraphs accounting for progress in our schools.
The DOE accountability staff in Lawrence the other night made big discoveries. Later this month, Commissioner Mitch Chester and his staff are presenting to the state Board their accountability plans for Lawrence. If past is prologue, they might be better off sending this video around to the board of ed, as well as to the officials in Lawrence:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rolfj5MMBbA.
The Department of Elementary and Secondary Education’s lack of an accountability focus is in great part the reason why the state has done so little to advance student achievement in Lawrence. Like Clouseau tripping all over himself and landing on a mirror, the commissioner of education seems to have finally discovered “a potential leadership gap.”
SJ: I’m a very big believer in equal opportunity as opposed to equal outcome. I don’t believe in equal outcome because unfortunately life’s not like that. It would be a pretty boring place if it was. But I really believe in equal opportunity. Equal opportunity to me more than anything means a great education. Maybe even more important than a great family life, but I don’t know how to do that. Nobody knows how to do that.
But it pains me because we do know how to provide a great education. We really do. We could make sure that every young child in this country got a great education. We fall far short of that. I know from my own education that if I hadn’t encountered two or three individuals that spent extra time with me, I’m sure I would have been in jail. I’m 100% sure that if it hadn’t been for Mrs. Hill in fourth grade and a few others, I would have absolutely have ended up in jail.
…The problem there of course is the unions. The unions are the worst thing that ever happened to education because it’s not a meritocracy. It turns into a bureaucracy, which is exactly what has happened. The teachers can’t teach and administrators run the place and nobody can be fired. It’s terrible.
DM: Some people say that this new technology maybe a way to bypass that. Are you optimistic about that?
SJ: I absolutely don’t believe that. As you’ve pointed out I’ve helped with more computers in more schools than anybody else in the world and I absolutely convinced that is by no means the most important thing. The most important thing is a person. A person who incites your curiosity and feeds your curiosity; and machines cannot do that in the same way that people can.
And:
SJ: I’ve been a very strong believer in that what we need to do in education is to go to the full voucher system…One of the things I feel is that, right now, if you ask who are the customers of education, the customers of education are the society at large, the employers who hire people, things like that. But ultimately I think the customers are the parents. Not even the students but the parents. The problem that we have in this country is that the customers went away. The customers stopped paying attention to their schools, for the most part.
What happened was that mothers started working and they didn’t have time to spend at PTA meetings and watching their kids’ school. Schools became much more institutionalized and parents spent less and less and less time involved in their kids’ education. What happens when a customer goes away and a monopoly gets control, which is what happened in our country, is that the service level almost always goes down. I remember seeing a bumper sticker when the telephone company was all one. I remember seeing a bumper sticker with the Bell Logo on it and it said “We don’t care. We don’t have to.” And that’s what a monopoly is. That’s what IBM was in their day. And that’s certainly what the public school system is. They don’t have to care.
And:
SJ: I think the school situation has a parallel here when it comes to technology. It is so much more hopeful to think that technology can solve the problems that are more human and more organizational and more political in nature, and it ain’t so. We need to attack these things at the root, which is people and how much freedom we give people, the competition that will attract the best people. Unfortunately, there are side effects, like pushing out a lot of 46 year old teachers who lost their spirit fifteen years ago and shouldn’t be teaching anymore. I feel very strongly about this. I wish it was as simple as giving it over to the computer.
It’s in Apple’s DNA that technology alone is not enough—it’s technology married with liberal arts, married with the humanities, that yields us the result that makes our heart sing, and nowhere is that more true than in these post-PC devices.
That post closed with
File under: Who would you rather talk with, go to the museum with, go to a concert with, share books with…
On the day of his death, it’s useful to go back to Jobs’ reflections–his attempt to impart life lessons to the young. In his wonderful 2005 Stanford commencement speech, Jobs shares stories about his chance encounter with calligraphy after dropping out of Reed College and the key achievements that grew out of his getting bounced from Apple at the age of 30. He then wraps up the speech, which occurred soon after he had won his first bout with pancreatic cancer, with this reflection on death:
This was the closest I’ve been to facing death, and I hope it’s the closest I get for a few more decades. Having lived through it, I can now say this to you with a bit more certainty than when death was a useful but purely intellectual concept:
No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don’t want to die to get there. And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because Death is very likely the single best invention of Life. It is Life’s change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new. Right now the new is you, but someday not too long from now, you will gradually become the old and be cleared away. Sorry to be so dramatic, but it is quite true.
Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.
Brutally uncompromising, unafraid of failure, focused, and true to an inner self nurtured on the liberal arts, Steve Jobs today represents many things to many people. Certainly, he was a tough boss to work for. But those qualities allowed him to change our world dramatically, and along the way to share a number of important lessons; not least of which on how to live.
Educators have made only modest gains in narrowing the gulf in achievement between low-income students and those who are better off…
The percentage of [low-income] 10th graders who were proficient at English, for instance, rose from 48 in 2007 to 69 this year. In math, the figure climbed from 47 percent to 56 percent…
In third-grade English, 40 percent of low-income students were proficient, compared with 61 percent of all students…
The editorial board of the Worcester Telegram & Gazette gave a useful view of the data from the capital of Central Massachusetts. In a piece entitled Lagging behind, two big points jump off the page:
[O]verall scores for the city’s district public schools exhibited a general decline as compared to a year ago…
Comparing the 2011 scores with those of 2008, it is clear that progress over three years has been modest in some grades and subject areas, flat in many and even declining in a few.
To my mind, there are two points that frame the puzzle before Massachusetts—and they are both present in Schworm’s piece. First, Schworm cites Margaret Blood, president of Strategies for Children, as highlighting that
Research has shown that most students who struggle with reading in third-grade will continue to struggle in school, and are at much greater risk of dropping out.
Michelle Rhee, former Chancellor of the DC Public Schools and today the head of StudentsFirst, noted back in 2008 that she used to get queries from construction consultants for data on third grade reading scores. She noted that they were trying to understand the demand for prison cells.
I’ll let you think that through for a second without editorial comment on my part.
MCAS math scores in 2008 were up by just a single percentage point in three elementary grades, and early-grade MCAS English Language Arts (ELA) scores, which are the best predictors of future success, fell the most. In fact, ELA scores for 2008 were either down or flat in six out of seven grades.
The reply from the state’s education secretary was angry. He replied in a letter to Education Next, noting that our analysis was full of “errors purposefully made”:
They write, Results in September 2008 showed a sharp drop in MCAS pass rates and flat or declining scores in the elementary and middle school grades.
This is simply wrong. Pass rates improved or stayed steady on 12 of the 16 tests administered. Math results reached an all-time high, including improvement in every grade.
The authors praise the work of Massachusetts students in citing the recent results on TIMSS, pointing to this exceptional performance as an illustration of the influence of status quo reforms while later falsely condemning students’ MCAS results to suggest a downward slide in performance.
Students have demonstrated consistent improvement on the MCAS over the years, improvement that has continued since Governor Patrick took office in 2006.
Sorry, Mr. Secretary, but the facts are otherwise as this set of new MCAS results only serves to reinforce.
The second point that is necessary to make in understanding this can be seen in the subtitle of Schworm’s piece: Only scattered gains for poorest, despite huge effort. The fact is that there has been a lot of talk and a lot of bureaucratic moves by the Patrick administration, but not much that creates a real sense of urgency:
We’ve created a fourth iteration of the in-district charter-lite reform—so-called Innovation schools. This new category of schools follows its elder cousins: the unionized pilot, Horace Mann charter, and co-pilot schools. Each of these new types of district reform vehicles was to keep pace with the challenge posed by high-performance (Commonwealth) charter schools. For nearly 15 years, none has been able to keep up on a consistent basis to date in terms of improved student performance.
We’ve changed (ahem, watered down) the state’s audit system to hold districts and district schools accountable.
We’ve packed the Board of Education to give the Governor a direct voice in education policy, while weakening the commissioner’s position.
We’ve adopted new education standards that independent research (1, 2, 3, 4) shows are much weaker because they shave literature requirements by half and weakened the progression toward college math (e.g., Algebra I gets pushed back from 8th to 9th or even 10th grade).
We’ve ditched the US history MCAS requirement, which was slated to go live in 2009.
We’re in the process of developing new tests, the efficacy of which we do not know because the national tests (which are forbidden under federal law) are in fact not yet developed and being developed outside of public view.
We’ve sweted the development and promulgation of new regulations to promote virtual/digital learning options, but which do the exact opposite.
That’s a lot of huge, sweat-inducing churning in the central offices of the state education bureaucracy. But, in reality, it has little or no impact on the schools and the classrooms, except to signal to them that the sense of urgency of 1993 MERA is over.
What’s clear to anybody who has watched the education space for the past two decades is that the 1993 reform saw the board set clear policy and clearly measurable goals, and put into place an accountability system to make sure the goals were met by local professionals. The rest was providing funding to local professionals to get the job done.
Over the last few years, we have witnessed the resurrection of the pre-1993 mindset: Reform is to be driven by the central office experts. Lots of hand-waving and big announcements from the center. No pressure on the locals to show progress.
It is huge effort signifying I can’t say nothing but certainly nothing urgent. The latest MCAS data, taken together with NAEP data I’ll share over the next few days just confirms that it’s for the most part just a big churn.
You can agree or disagree on most bills in the State House. The merits of casino gambling bill? Is it a third-world job creation strategy or an opportunity we are missing? The upcoming pension reform? Reasonable incremental improvements or a half-fix after lawmakers added billions in future pension costs this summer to free up $1 billion in immediate program money?
But every so often you bump up against some really bad ideas—and unfortunately many of them happen to be in education. Whole language instruction, weakening academic standards, and weakening teacher tests are the usual sort of items you have to fight against. But even after the Wisconsin and Massachusetts collective bargaining changes, on Tuesday a hearing will be held on one of the more ludicrous expansions of collective bargaining rights I’ve seen in a long time.
It’s bad for the quality of care, it’s bad for anyone who seeks a more equitable society, and it’s terrible dilution of parental influence over the kind of child care their kids receive.
HB 1671 creates one single state-level bargaining unit for all childcare personnel, including in that bargaining unit directors, child care providers, custodians, drivers, part- and full-time employees. The 20,000 or so employees who would be impacted are likely to be a child-care center near you, for the bill encompasses any nursery school, kindergarten, preschool or program that has even one contract with the state’s early education office (subsidy, voucher, contract, etc.).
Moreover, the bill expands the definition of collective bargaining beyond salary; union fees; evaluations and grievances; professional development; and modes for giving raises to now include retirement and health benefits. Currently, state workers don’t bargain on the last two items; and legislation this summer essential made that in great part true for local employees as well.
Even a ragged edge Che Guevara T-shirtista, while s/he might like the unionization, would have to see that the bill’s call for turning the Department of Early Education and Care into the sole management party with bargaining power on the other side of the table is bad news. Are legislators really considering locking employers out of the collective bargaining process — and undermining management’s ability to keep costs in check, lessening the availability of affordable care; care centers will stop signing contracts with the state, leaving poorer kids with fewer options; subsidized kids would be consolidated (the correct word is segregated) in specific care centers that had contracts with the state; as state workers, these employees would now be subject to “card check” legislation… I could go on.
OK, I will. State taxpayers would foot a union rep fee, and child care employees would pay union dues. All this fiscal and management stuff is really dumb.
You have a problem with a teacher at your son’s or daughter’s community child care center. Naturally, you take your grievance to the center’s managers, but are told there’s nothing they can do. Even though you’re paying your own money to a private provider, it turns out the terms of the teacher’s employment are negotiated with the commonwealth, not the employer.
That’s exactly the situation parents would face under legislation currently pending on Beacon Hill.
I hope our paid representatives understand not only how dumb this bill is (that has not always proved a block to passing stuff), but how pernicious it is.
Tomorrow the state’s Joint Committee on Education will meet to discuss a raft of proposals to address Massachusetts’ inability to bring down its dropout rate. It’s about time. The problem is that few of the proposals actually do much more than beef up a cadre of coaches and support staff for at-risk kids. Perhaps that can help, but the data in reports like The Silent Epidemic are pretty clear in noting that kids drop out for two reasons:
- Nearly half (47 percent) said a major reason for dropping out was that classes were not interesting. These young people reported being bored and disengaged from high school. Almost as many (42 percent) spent time with people who were not interested in school. These were among the top reasons selected by those with high GPAs and by those who said they were motivated to work hard.
- Nearly 7 in 10 respondents (69 percent) said they were not motivated or inspired to work hard, 80 percent did one hour or less of homework each day in high school, two-thirds would have worked harder if more was demanded of them (higher academic standards and more studying and homework), and 70 percent were confident they could have graduated if they had tried. Even a majority of those with low GPAs thought they could have graduated.
So step back and ask yourself, why is it that Massachusetts, which has shown such progress in student achievement, cannot significantly reduce its dropout rate?
The Commonwealth has continued to experience high dropout rates, especially in large urban and poorer public school districts. The statewide average annual dropout rate is 2.9 percent–that’s annual, so it rolls up to about a 12 percent dropout rate over the four years of high school. Some of our urban and low-income districts have dropout rates above 30 percent over four years.
So, what should the members of the Joint Committee on Education do? They should start with what has been proven to work.
Urban vocational technical schools should be allowed to separate from the superintendencies and to function much like the 26 autonomous regional vocational-technical schools in Massachusetts. The dropout rate in regional vocational-technical schools is less than half the statewide average, at 0.9 percent (less than 4 percent cumulatively). The unique attributes that these schools offer, including close adult supervision, individualized instruction to recognized benchmarks, and student choice and commitment to their programs, combine for an effective model that should be expanded.
Policymakers should remove the unhelpful regulations promulgated by the Department of Elementary and Secondary Education in the summer of 2010 – against the will of many legislators – that placed geographical and other restrictions on digital learning options. Massachusetts should emulate the successful Florida Virtual School program, an alternative educational option that has helped thousands of students, including those at risk of dropping out, learn at their own pace.
So, while many of the bills being debated call for new funding, new structures, and new actions that will take educators’ attention away from the core academic work of schooling, we may not need to go and build a new solution.
I’d go one step further. Some of the bills go in the wrong direction. As the national research shows, in addition to economic need, students leave school early because they find it intellectually meaningless and disconnected to life in our democracy. If student “boredom” looms so large in the dropout puzzle, why not give them something to inspire, something meaningful to learn?
I believe that urban districts need to refocus on academics so that students understand that they are in school for an academic purpose. Many of the urban districts with the highest dropout rates have never developed local curricula aligned with Massachusetts’ once nation-leading standards. This speaks to the academic core of schools and the ongoing need for teachers and administrators to focus on English, mathematics, science and history as the foundation of students’ education. In particular, it highlights the urgent need for students of all backgrounds to access the liberal arts and the broad knowledge necessary to succeed in high school, college, and life.
The lack of curricular alignment at the local level means something worse than a less than coordinated set of learning goals. It means that kids get tested on materials in the MCAS that they may never have seen. And that is a very easy and sad way to disconnect kids from a sense of meaning to their day-to-day classroom learning.
More can be gleaned on this topic from national curricular expert E.D. Hirsch and former Massachusetts Senate President Thomas Birmingham. Hirsch offered policy recommendations during a recent guest lecture to an education policy class taught by President Birmingham. Click here for a link to the transcript of that class, which includes introductory remarks by Birmingham, chief architect of the Commonwealth’s landmark 1993 education reform law, which increased education funding for cities and towns in exchange for high-quality state curriculum frameworks and rigorous student and teacher assessments.
The reason Massachusetts is having such problems lowering its dropout rates may have something to do with policymakers not knowing how to learn — about what works.
