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.
Used to be that Massachusetts was the epicenter of most of the innovations occurring in education. We had the best standards in the nation. The best student tests, best teacher tests, a standout accountability office, the most advanced charter approval process and one of the most knowledgeable charter office staffs. We had a progressive funding formula that ensures a level of equity in what gets spent on children. As of 2014, we’ll have whittled that list down to the best teacher test in the nation (if it survives) and a progressive funding formula.
Massachusetts is no longer mentioned, whispered or even thought of as a national leader for its recent laws and policies. Compare Massachusetts’ agenda of “innovation schools” (which are basically a warmed-over version of pilot, co-pilot and Horace Mann charter school options) to Indiana’s reforms, which include strong accountability measures, an improved charter approval process, a total lift of the charter school cap, and robust private school choice, and more.
Yup, Massachusetts is still number one in the country on national assessments. But our rate of improvement on the NAEP tests, which was truly astounding through 2007, is pretty much flatlined. Whether we hold onto number one status in all grades and subjects tested in the next round of national assessments is without exaggeration an open question. And given our historic institutions, wealth and parental educational attainment levels, and business make-up, anything other than top state in the nation is unacceptable. Truth be told, we should lead the world.
A recent Globe report and editorial covered Massachusetts’ desire to seek a federal waiver from NCLB provisions. As the editorial suggested, this is evidence that the state does not have its feet on the accelerator. I would add — “another piece of evidence.”
Has Massachusetts gotten flaccid on reform? Compared to more focused efforts in dozens of states, ye. And, in terms of intellectual leadership on education reform, the same thing is true. There simply are essential conversations that are now tabu in Massachusetts—conversations that other states are having with energy (and, yes, controversy). We’ve become a consensus-at-all-costs state. Let me give you one example: California and 14 other states’ debates over the Parent Trigger.
Here’s the background: The Elementary and Secondary Education Act (dubbed by W and Teddy Kennedy “No Child Left Behind”) included a range of options for parents of students in failing schools, up to Supplemental Educational Services to be paid for by the school, school choice options and closure of the school in question. The law vests the district (and largely the school board) with the dissemination of information about these possibilities and the execution. Sad to say but unsurprisingly, the districts/boards have done little if anything to implement the federal law.
In addition to continuing to allow school boards to exercise the options included in No Child Left Behind, the Parent Trigger would allow “parents who could gather a majority at any persistently failing school to either fire the principal, fire 50% of the teachers, close the school or turn it into a charter school.”
The idea of the Parent Trigger did not originate from some crackpot hothead but rather Ben Austin, a former deputy mayor of Los Angeles and consultant to the unionized Green Dot charter school network. His experience in the urban school reform effort was that real progress would not occur without parent involvement.
The effort by hundreds of parents in the Compton Unified School District in South Los Angeles, to use the parent trigger on a school serving elementary students got bogged down in lawsuits… by the school board.
ban harassment and intimidation of parents organizing around Parent Trigger, and they ban the use of school resources to campaign for or against Parent Trigger;
create a model petition, so that no future Parent Trigger petition will ever be thrown out due to a technicality;
provide every parent at all 1300 Parent Trigger eligible schools in California with notice about the law and their rights under the law;
create common sense signature verification procedures and timelines, and mandate that no legitimate signature shall ever be thrown out based on a technicality;
empower parents to choose their charter or in-district reform partner through a transparent and public parent-led RFP process after the parents have won the organizing campaign, and;
reject CTA’s outrageous proposal that teachers be given veto power over Parent Trigger.
and the fact that all the work that was put into changing the law and getting the regulations seemed worth it.
hundreds of parents rode on a midnight parent bus, from Compton to Sacramento. Over and over and over again. These parents convinced the governor, along with key statewide education and legislative leaders, to stand with them instead of the most powerful and wealthy interest groups in the state. When they didn’t get the answer they wanted, they got right back on the bus to Sacramento. They refused to take ‘no’ for an answer and they ultimately forced the Sacramento establishment to listen. People throw around the term “parent involvement” a lot. But these brave parents define the term ‘parent empowerment.’
Again, NCLB already gives school districts the power to shut down “chronically underperforming” schools (= schools failing year in and year out). Notwithstanding that fact and the fact that the debate over whether parents should also have a similar ability to “vote out” their school operation is occurring in over a dozen states and even reported in the pages of “are-they-extinct-yet” Time and Newsweek magazines, the silence is deafening in Massachusetts.
However well the state overall is doing, there can be no doubt that districts like Lawrence, New Bedford and Fall River are not. The state could help rectify that by insisting on stronger alignment of the state’s academic standards with the local curriculum, as well as by quickly expanding vocational-technical, charter and METCO-style options for parents. The local district could shutter failing schools. Without any of that happening, whether you think it is the right approach or just another form of rough justice, I believe we can all agree that were we having a discussion about parent triggers, a number of urban districts would have a greater sense of urgency to get on a path of improvement.
But, no. Massachusetts has no time for this discussion. It is too busy busying itself with an effort to opt out of the accountability measures included in No Child Left Behind.
Last winter, two things clarified my views on the utility of the Gates Foundation in education policy. One was an opportunity I had to spend time at the Samuel Roberts Noble Foundation, an Oklahoma-based foundation that focuses primarily on plant and seed sciences. Their campus was intensely focused on experimentation and rewarding results in the field. Its buildings were not ostentatious but rather highly focused on their mission. They were also interested in investing in high-value ROI obtained from places like the Jonas Salk Institute for Biological Studies in California.
The other came in Sam Dillon’s December 2010 New York Times article on the Gates Foundation’s effort to scope out the perfect way to evaluate teachers. Using value-added statistical models, “scores of social scientists and some 3,000 teachers and their students,” the Foundation was studying “correlations between the value-added rankings and other measures of teacher effectiveness.” Vicki Phillips, director of Gates’ education program, underscored “one notable finding”:
teachers who incessantly drill their students to prepare for standardized tests tend to have lower value-added learning gains than those who simply work their way methodically through the key concepts of literacy and mathematics.
Teachers whose students agreed with the statement, “We spend a lot of time in this class practicing for the state test,” tended to make smaller gains on those exams than other teachers.
“Teaching to the test makes your students do worse on the tests,” Ms. Phillips said. “It turns out all that ‘drill and kill’ isn’t helpful.”
Education researcher Jay Greene has pointed out that not only did Ms. Phillips get the results of her own study wrong but she never bothered to correct the error publicly. Interest in the research or in winning the spin wars? Noble Foundation they are not.
The Gates Foundation is at an important pivot point in its development. It has built a strong brand in health care philanthropy and an education operation that is notable for how top-heavy and PR-driven it is. Worse, on results, its record is at best a mixed bag. As the Foundation creates an eerily Pentagon-esque campus that’s almost twice the size of the South Boston Convention Center in only its initial construction phase in Seattle, it would do well to ask if the culture it is building inside its World HQ walls is conducive to success.
As shovels hit the ground, Jay Greene has emerged as the most coherent critic of Gates’ education philanthropy. In a couple of must-read blog posts (1 and 2) exploring the state of the Foundation, Greene sums up his view:
1) they’ve realized that the focus of their efforts has to be on the political control of schools and 2) they are uninterested in using that political influence to advance market forces in education. Instead, the basic strategy of the Gates Foundation is to use science (or, more accurately, the appearance of science) to identify the “best” educational practices and then use political influence to create a system of national standards, curricular materials, and testing to impose those “best practices” on schools nationwide.
The Gates Foundation came to understand the necessity of political influence over schools with the failure of their previous small schools strategy. Under that strategy they tried to achieve reform by paying school districts to break-up larger high schools into smaller ones.
“[E]ven the Gates Foundation does not have nearly enough money to buy systemic reform one school at a time,” given that “all [philanthropic] giving, from the bake sale to the Gates Foundation, makes up less than one-third of 1% of total [education] spending.”
I find Jay’s analysis really interesting, especially in noting that there isn’t a single “scientific” way to deliver education. The success of Massachusetts’ reforms in part were due to policy clarity, with the state setting out broad stroke policy but leaving pedagogical and management approaches to districts and schools. One example to show you what I mean: Massachusetts’ department of education until recently limited its views on instructional method to insisting that a minimum of content mastery was attained by students; little top-down direction was given as to whether a teacher chose to teach by rote, hands-on learning, project method, etc.
With its top-down views on “scientific” educational policy, the Gates Foundation finds itself expanding fast and its own internal processes getting, well, Microsoft-like.
The scale of the political effort required by the Gates strategy of imposing “best” practices is forcing Gates to expand its staffing to levels where it is being paralyzed by its own administrative bloat[.]
Big bureaucracy command-and-control strategies rarely work. While I believe market-based solutions (with appropriate guardrails to preserve the public trust) have produced big and sustainable improvements in student achievement, I wouldn’t suggest that the Gates Foundation should unilaterally adopt my view of market-based solutions.
A foundation the size of Gates should be more nuanced in its view of the social sciences and public policy than to fake an exercise more suited to the physical sciences. In the physical sciences, big brains set out hypotheses and test them, looking for atemporal explanatory theories. Human societies don’t work that way. Our “solutions” set off different and multiple reactions that cannot be fully predicted in the amazing variety of social and cultural conditions, which is of course why keeping control of schools as close to states, if not to parents, is more conducive to successful schools.
So should the Gates Foundation just give up? No way. Philanthropy has always been a big part of the lives of educational institutions and policymaking. I think today’s Boston Globe editorial put it pithily in laying out a critical view of the Obama Administration’s abandonment of No Child Left Behind’s requirement that all students would be proficient in math and reading by 2014: Arne Duncan’s proposal misses the mark because it “measures reforms, not results.”
Unfortunately, the feds and the Gates Foundation (often together) are focused on process and compliance (national strategies on standards, tests, turnaround schools, and so on), not results. Instead of ramping up bureaucracies in DC and Seattle, both could simply focus on rewarding results–not compliance. How? I outlined the bold strokes of how in an interview on MSNBC this past Saturday.
They could take a page out of the X Prize Foundation’s handbook. Remember the X Prize—the foundation that
addresses the world’s Grand Challenges by creating and managing large-scale, high-profile, incentivized prize competitions that stimulate investment in research and development worth far more than the prize itself. It motivates and inspires brilliant innovators from all disciplines to leverage their intellectual and financial capital.
The X-Prize Foundation offered $10 million to the entrepreneur who could send a rocket 100 miles into space and within 10 days, send it back up 100 miles into space. That competition leveraged billions in investment. And it spawned a rocket industry in the Mojave Desert. Gates and the feds could get out of the business of devising the perfect mousetrap for 50 million schoolchildren and 100s of thousands of schools. Fact is, that is hubris—not policy. Instead, they could devise a policy as simple and capable of diverse pathways and experimentation to getting there that might be something like this
The [Gates Foundation or the federal Education Department] will award a World Class Schools Award to the three states that have made the most progress on private tests such as the ACT and SAT, the national assessments (so-called NAEP tests), and the international tests (TIMSS and PISA) amounting to a lump sum of $250 million. Winning states will have also to demonstrate a decrease in dropout rates of at least five percent and will have to show stronger improvement for minority students and socio-economically disadvantaged students.
That kind of experimentation would allow those in the field to figure out how to get there. People in power don’t have to be scared to say they don’t have all the answers–or at least answers that hold true for every inch of our intricate tapestry of cultures. And the nice thing about competitions is that you can focus on key issues, like STEM preparedness or whatever is viewed as an important national interest.
That’s what Race to the Top should have been: A race for results, not compliance.
Crossposted at Boston.com’s Rock the Schoolhouse blog. Follow me on twitter at @jimstergios, or visit Pioneer’s website.
When blogging, sometimes you shorthand — summarize too quickly. In yesterday’s blog, I suggested that Rick Hess, American Enterprise Institute scholar and EdWeek blogger,
has been straddling the fence on things like national standards and assessments, generally giving the US ED the benefit of the doubt on debates concerning whether the education department is overstepping its bounds, whether one-size-fits-all national education strategies actually work, whether the national standards were any good and whether the national assessments will be a qualitative step forward.
That’s pretty accurate on the national standards and assessments, where Rick is sympathetic to the case for common standards, but wonders if it is going to get bungled. He’s in wait-and-see mode.
Duncan has said that he plans to attach “strings” to those waivers, so that states will have to adopt his priorities in order to gain flexibility. He has clearly signaled that he regards this as a back-door opportunity to promote his preferred approach to teacher evaluation, the Common Core, and such with or without Congressional permission….
Duncan wrote yesterday in POLITICO, that, “Our children get only one shot at an education. They cannot wait any longer for reform…Our children…deserve a world-class education–not some day, but today.” Striking was the vaguely Trotskyite sentiment and the disdain for democratic process. Fact is, I agree more than I disagree with the agenda Duncan is itching to impose. But we are a nation of laws. And, however nifty Duncan may be, there’s a lot of reasons to resist giving Cabinet secretaries free rein to impose their will just because they think it’s the right thing to do….
[G]iven Duncan’s distressing suggestion that he’s too busy saving kids to worry about Constitutional niceties, it might be time for a quick refresher on American government.
First, as a general matter, the executive branch is not empowered to make laws. It’s empowered to execute the laws that the legislative branch writes (hence, the term “executive branch”). If Duncan doesn’t like that, or finds it too restrictive, he can take it up with Madison…or Montesquieu. But that’s the deal.
Second, the executive and the legislative branches are not co-equal. The American founders very explicitly embraced the logic of legislative supremacy, which is why Article I of the Constitution is devoted to the legislative branch and spells out all those cool powers, and why the legislative branch, and only the legislative branch, gets to write laws. Congress can sometimes choose to delegate rule-making and administrative authority to executive agencies (e.g. the SEC or FDA), but it has not done so in this case.
The executive branch has no authority to issue legislative timelines to Congress, and Cabinet secretaries have no authority to impose their will if Congress doesn’t behave as they’d like. In 2001, Congress passed the No Child Left Behind Act. Like it or not (and, as readers know, I’ve never been crazy about it), NCLB is the law of the land until Congress says otherwise. The law gives Duncan the authority to grant waivers, but not to use that authority to compel states to adopt other measures as a quid pro quo. This scheme for back-door legislating of which Duncan seems so proud, and to which it appears ED’s general counsel has (unbelievably) signed off, is as politically tone-deaf as it is Constitutionally offensive. I can only imagine how loudly (and reasonably) Obama partisans would scream if a Romney administration started using Heath Care Reform Act waivers as a strategy to compel states to accept legislative changes that Congress wouldn’t endorse.
After all, however convinced Duncan is of his rightness, there are many who may disagree. That’s right and honorable. The way we settle such disputes in a democratic nation, for better and worse, is through the slow, frustrating, and flawed democratic process–not via administrative fiat. If Duncan has a problem with that, I think he may be in the wrong line of work.
Yes, that would have made a good title for this post. At the risk of incurring the wrath of the Bad Pun Police, I would say that shorthanding is sometimes not cool and can lead to a failure to communicate.
Then came Secretary Duncan’s announcement that he would circumvent the legislative process needed to get the No Child Left Behind Act reauthorized and instead would dole out “waivers” to states that agreed to comply with things that he wanted them to do but that, importantly, he had no Congressional authority to advance in the states.
We’ll encourage all states to apply and each one should have a chance to succeed. But those that don’t will have to comply with No Child Left Behind’s requirements, until Congress enacts a law that will deliver change to all 50 states.
Now the Washington DC think tank crowd, which has been either observing from the sidelines or in full-throated support, is stirring—or more like stirred up. Rick Hess, in his EdWeek blog Straight Up, has been straddling the fence on things like national standards and assessments, generally giving the US ED the benefit of the doubt on debates concerning whether the education department is overstepping its bounds, whether one-size-fits-all national education strategies actually work, whether the national standards were any good and whether the national assessments will be a qualitative step forward.
But this past week, in a post entitled The Duncan Precedent, Hess gave a biting take on what the use of federal education power might look like in the event of a Republican victory in the presidential elections. In the place of Secretary Duncan leveraging waivers to corral states like Texas and Virginia into compliance with his wishes on standards, assessments and other current priorities in Washington, DC, we have a future Michele Bachmann serving as U.S. Secretary of Education. In a fictitious conversation of FoxNews’ Chris Wallace would-be Secretary Bachmann notes:
Happily, the Obama administration provided a path for driving educational change even when you don’t have the votes. That’s why we’ve promised that, come inauguration day, we’ll be ditching the Obama administration’s requirements for waivers from No Child Left Behind and substituting our own.
… We’ll be employing the Obama administration’s notion that we can provide states waivers from federal law so long as they promise to do stuff that we like. We’ll impose a few conditions for states seeking to maintain their NCLB waivers or obtain new ones.
Her boss, a president-elect by the name of Rick Perry (in the real world, the sitting Governor of Texas), would have her implement the five elements in a fictitious “Freedom Blueprint”:
States will need to institute a moment of silence in all “turnaround” schools, adopt a statewide school voucher plan for low-income students and those in failing schools, require abstinence education, restrict collective bargaining to wages and prohibit bargaining over benefits or policy, and ask states to revise their charter laws to ensure that for-profit operators are no longer discriminated against on the basis of tax status.
Unlike Hess,the Fordham Institute has long been a prominent member of the squad cheerleading the federal advance in education. And even they are beyond themselves trying to come to terms with the new and improved “Arnius Duncanus.” In a post entitled If you support Common Core, oppose Arne Duncan, Fordham’s Mike Petrilli (if not Fordham’s cheerleader in chief for the Common Core national standards and assessments effort, at least its trusty lieutenant) literally begs Duncan not to take the “waiver + extra-legislative requirement” path for fear that the whole enterprise will blow up in Congress.
Unmoved by pleas that he “first do no harm” when it comes to promising reforms like the Common Core State Standards Initiative, [Arnius Duncanus] seems compelled to attach mandates to his forthcoming NCLB waivers that will require adoption of the Common Core standards.
No, his team won’t mention the Common Core, but everybody knows that’s what he’s talking about when he calls for “college and career-ready standards.”
Of course, he is referring to the “voluntary” and “state-led” standards everyone in DC talked about. Those voluntary standards that President Obama said he might try to force states to adopt via Race to the Top and withholding Title I (largely urban district) funding. Petrilli and the Fordham/Achieve/Gates crowd liked to call anyone suggesting that greater centralized authority would actually be used “paranoid.” But now he is reduced to lines like these:
Walk away from this one, Mr. Secretary. Please, those of us who support the Common Core are begging you.
Yeesh. DC groupies for national standards have to understand how desperate those lines seem. Begging is not what citizens in a democracy do—that’s stuff more familiar to subjects in a monarchy or courtiers residing under princely rule.
In 2010, my research outfit commissioned four studies during the development phase of the national standards in 2010, and we found that they were sorely lacking. But my institute went into the research as neither a supporter nor an opponent, so some supporters of the Common Core effort took that as a prejudicial starting point (!). Dr. Porter began a vocal and articulate supporter, but his just released research
shows that the common-core standards do not represent a meaningful improvement over existing state standards. To be sure, when we consider state standards in the aggregate, the common-core standards present a somewhat greater emphasis on higher-order thinking. But the keyword here is somewhat; the difference is small, and some state standards exceed the common core in this respect. And, in terms of mathematics and English language arts curricula focus, the results are just as disappointing: The common core has a greater focus than certain state standards, and a lesser focus than others….The common core is not a new gold standard—it’s firmly in the middle of the pack of current curricula.”
That serious academic researchers would come to this conclusion after a period of calm and reflection is no shock: There are clear academic weaknesses in the English/Reading and math Common Core frameworks, there are experimental and nproven approaches, and the CC end goals are college and career readiness in name only. Given that the standards were developed and self-evaluated through funding from the Gates Foundation, reassessments were bound to take time. (As an aside, it should be noted that Bill Gates has not been a big champion of high-quality academic content and the liberal arts in our schools, instead focusing the gates Foundation on “small school” governance changes and teacher incentives.)
Dr. Porter’s evaluation is based (correctly) on a current analysis—and therefore it doesn’t factor in the likely impact of the “soft-skills” crowd on the future implementation and refinement of these already mediocre standards. Readers interested in academic content should know that the Partnership for 21st Century Skills is now housed within the Council of Chief State School Officers, which is, with Achieve, Inc., Fordham Institute and a few other organizations the drivers of the national standards and assessment effort. As the P21 crowd proudly announced in July, they are from within the CCSSO perch working to help states align their new national standards with 21st Century Skills.
In other P21 news, the organization will host a forum this Friday focused on sharing best practices, policies, and creative ideas for assessing 21st century teaching and learning. The forum will include representatives from the American Association of School Librarians, Council of Chief State School Officers, and various higher education institutions and state departments of education…
There is a range of reasons why the Secretary’s use of waivers is seen as problematic. From DC, the perception of political blowback makes the process in rolling out the waivers alarming. Yup, process is important. But I would like to think that two things trump the process/political calculations. In particular, the use of the waivers is likely illegal, as noted in yesterday’s blog post.
The national standards project is looking less and less like a reform built on lessons learned from successful reforming states like Massachusetts, which took the content-focused route to leadership in the nation on academic achievement; rather, it is increasingly what you might call “substance abuse.”
At its annual meeting in Chicago, The National Education Association’s Representative Assembly passed Saturday New Business Item C., a strongly worded piece that comprehensively lists the NEA’s grievances with Secretary of Education Arne Duncan
With a few minor amendments, the NEA’s Representative Assembly today passed New Business Item C, a.k.a. “13 Things We Hate About Arne Duncan.”
One of its sponsors said that unions are tired of being attacked, and they are “especially upset that the U.S. Department of Education and Secretary Duncan are part of the problems we face every single day.”
No one disagreed, and there wasn’t a whole lot of debate on the item, which is a pretty good indication of just how ticked off the union is right about now.
Let’s step back here and understand what this is. The pressure has been building among conservatives in Congress to oppose the Secretary of Education plans to effectively force states to adopt national standards and assessments. But the NEA is anything but a conservative organization. The NEA is the largest teachers organization in the country.
So, with the election campaign beginning to kick in, seeing the level of anger among the NEA’s membership toward the president’s education secretary is not only a policy problem. It is now a political problem. Under the New Business Items at the Chicago meeting of the Association was a resolution
ADOPTED AS AMENDED: The NEA Representative Assembly directs the NEA President to communicate aggressively, forcefully, and immediately to President Barack Obama and US Secretary of Education Arne Duncan that NEA is appalled with Secretary Duncan’s practice of…
Well, actually a lot of things. The resolution continues to list the NEA membership’s opposition to Duncan’s support for standardized tests attached to accountability, Race to the Top and other grant programs, support for charter schools, and disrespect for the professionalism of teachers. I am not so sure those criticisms have merit, but I do think that the NEA’s membership outlines four reasonable objections to Secretary Duncan’s efforts (items 1, 7, and 13):
(1.) Weighing in on local hiring decisions of school and school district personnel.
(7.) Forcing local school districts to choose from a pre-determined menu of school improvement models that are unproven and have been shown to be ineffective and bear little resemblance to the actual needs of the school that is struggling.
(13.) Perpetuating the myth that there are proven, top-down prescribed ’silver bullet’ solutions and models that actually will address the real problems that face public education today, rather than recognizing that what schools need is a visionary Secretary of Education that sets broad goals and tasks states, local schools districts, schools, educators, and communities with meeting those goals.
Now those who view progress in education as anything that is anti-union may feel like this just is a badge of honor for Duncan and his policies. I think that view of how to improve our schools misses the mark, by a wide margin. Not only because it suggests a reactionary mind-set, but also because it means you agree that the President’s education appointee should actually micro-manage districts and schools.
I’d also add to the NEA’s list that it is illegal for the US Department of Education to supervise, plan and organize national standards, curricula and tests. As Jay Greene has written, that is obviously what the Department is doing, and the Education Organization Act of 1979 clearly does not allow for that. The law states:
No provision of a program administered by the Secretary or by any other officer of the Department shall be construed to authorize the Secretary or any such officer to exercise any direction, supervision, or control over the curriculum, program of instruction, administration, or personnel of any educational institution, school, or school system, over any accrediting agency or association, or over the selection or content of library resources, textbooks, or other instructional materials by any educational institution or school system, except to the extent authorized by law.
The NEA, for its part, notes at the end of its list of grievances that:
Further, the NEA Representative Assembly directs the NEA Executive Committee to develop and implement an aggressive action plan in collaboration with state and local leaders that will address the issues above.
Starting November 2011, the NEA President will provide regular updates to the delegates on the progress of this plan throughout the year.
The Massachusetts department of education (DESE) is under way with a revision to the state’s science standards. Context here is that we have had strong science standards in place since 2006, which served as the basis for students preparing for 2010—the year in which the new MCAS Science test became a graduation requirement. There’s nothing wrong with a review—the state is supposed to update its standards every few years, and to improve them. I wish as it did, the state would also inch up the passing grade for the MCAS—deliberately but so that over a five-year window, the passing grade was more like 230 than 220. It would be more meaningful. And the kids can do it.
But it’s time to strap on your seat belts, or more like grab your popcorn, because here we go again: We are going to see the sequel to last year’s film about the importance of softer science-lite skills. As I noted yesterday, the DESE is revising the state’s science frameworks, which are among the best in the country, with an eye toward focusing more time on “science literacy.” I gave four reasons why that’s not a good idea.
But just what is a focus on “science literacy.” It just so happens—such coincidences—that one of the key documents that the DESE is using as a reference was released on July 19, almost to the day one year after Massachusetts dropped its nation-leading standards. Late last month, the National Research Council, issued its Science Frameworks, which it developed with—wait for it—Achieve Inc. The NRC/Achieve science framework is to “serve as the foundation for the creation of Next Generation Science Standards” and
will be used as the basis for a state-led effort to create new K-12 science standards. Achieve will manage the process for developing the new standards.
In the presser, Mike Cohen of Achieve, Inc. underscored how the framework prepares students for the economy:
In order to be scientifically literate and compete for the jobs of the future, our students must have a rigorous science education. This Framework is an important step in making sure all students have the opportunity to pursue postsecondary education and meaningful careers.
But will it? Or will it simply prepare Americans to be good little technology and science consumers? That’s the view of a source I trust—Ze’ev Wurman. Ze’ev is a Silicon Valley tech executive who has played a significant role in the math standards debates in California and around the country, and also served in 2010 on the California Academic Content Standards Commission that reviewed the adoption of Common Core for California. Importantly he scoured the entire 280-page framework document.
fewer and fewer American students are interested, or able, to enter demanding science and engineering programs. In 2006 the fraction of foreign undergraduate students in engineering reached 45%, in computer science 44%, and in physical sciences 40%. In 2007, the fraction of foreign students receiving doctorates in science and engineering was even larger: 62% in engineering overall, 73% in electrical engineering, and 57% in computer science. (NSF S&E Indicators, 2010)
Wurman “was excited when the National Research Council recently published its new Framework for K-12 Science Education,” the goal of which is to prepare students to
actively engage in science and engineering practices and apply crosscutting concepts to deepen their understanding of each fields’ disciplinary core ideas. [p. ES-2]
But as Wurman looked for the framework to live up to its claim that it would “capture students’ interest and provide them with the necessary foundational knowledge in the field” and thereby increase the nation’s competitiveness in the sciences, he noticed “something odd” in the document’s 280 pages of lefty prose”:
The framework does not expect students to use any kind of analytical mathematics while studying science.
…After singing paeans to the importance of mathematics, it only expects students by grade 12 to be competent in “recognizing,” “expressing,” and “using simple … mathematical expressions … to see if they make sense,” but not in actually solving science problems using mathematics…
One searches in vain for words like “algebra” in the text. Instead one finds only one (!) instance of something called algebraic symbolism, which allows taking “relationships [that] are expressed using equalities first in words” and changing them into “algebraic symbols—for example, shifting from distance traveled = velocity multiplied by time elapsed to s = vt.” Incidentally, this is the single equation in the whole 280 pages of the science framework. One should not even bother to search for mentions of calculus or trigonometry. Only statistics and computer applications seem to have a place in this strange document.
All of this made me think. Before Lavoisier’s quantitative approach there was no chemistry, only Alchemy. Before Newton’s invention of calculus, physics was more a craft than a science. Mathematics has been inseparable from science for the last 300 years, and has been largely responsible for the world we live in. Yet here we have a “21st century” science framework for our students that effectively ignores mathematics.
I went back and re-read the document to make sure I didn’t miss anything. And, indeed, I did not. Turns out it was staring at me right there on the first page:
“The overarching goal of our framework for K-12 science education is to ensure that by the end of 12th grade, all students have some appreciation of the beauty and wonder of science; possess sufficient knowledge of science and engineering to engage in public discussions on related issues; are careful consumers of scientific and technological information related to their everyday lives; are able to continue to learn about science outside school; and have the skills to enter careers of their choice, including (but not limited to) careers in science, engineering, and technology. [p. ES-1, emphasis added]“
The framework, like our state DESE’s effort to underscore “science literacy” is not aimed at “doing science.” It’s aimed at, as Wurman puts it, “science appreciation” and creating “good consumers of science and technology” rather than scientific inquiry.
“We’re more and more focused on what the literacy demands of science are,” Chester said, adding the basic math and reading foundations of science are “often taken for granted.”
The rapid progress true science now makes, occasions my regretting sometimes that I was born so soon: it is impossible to imagine the height to which may be carried, in a thousand years, the power of man over matter.
In a nicely timed alarm, the state’s department of education is noting that kids aren’t learning science as well as they are learning reading and math. You can never rest on your laurels, but this strikes me as alarmism of the worst kind. An article in the MetroWest Daily News notes,
On the 2010 MCAS, for example, 36 percent of 10th graders in the state scored below proficient on the science and technology exam, compared to only 24 percent on the math and 22 percent on English.
The problem is that in the next breath, MWD’s Scott O’Connell suggests that those results on the first science MCAS that counts as a graduation requirement constitutes a crisis:
Globally, American students are falling behind in the subject compared to their peers in other countries, based on the results of Trends in Mathematics and Science Study, an international assessment administered every four years. In the most recent results in 2007, the U.S. ranked 11th in science, a slip from its 9th-place showing in 2003.
The problem with that analysis is that there are many problems with that analysis. First, Massachusetts is not the United States. Massachusetts participated in the TIMSS as a country (as did Minnesota), and we placed in the top six countries in the world in math and science. Massachusetts actually tied for first in the world in 8th-grade science.
Yeah, I know. That’s good.
Next, O’Connell’s suggestion that
the government’s recent push for expanded science education in the state – highlighted by a move a year ago to make passing the science MCAS exam a graduation requirement – has yielded mixed results so far
is absolutely wrong-headed. It’s been in place for a year—and he cites the United States’ performance on the TIMSS in 2007 as evidence that the implementation of the MCAS isn’t working. Yikes.
Third, if past is prologue, the implementation of the science MCAS as a graduation requirement will make science instruction more of a priority. As happened with the implementation of the English and math MCAS requirements, performance will likely improve over the next few years.
Finally, the misdiagnosis by the department is even more egregious than what I have represented above. The international test of math and science (TIMSS) showed us that while the broad swath of Massachusetts students are performing pretty well, we are weak in advanced performers. Places like Singapore and South Korea have around double the percentage of advanced science students–and this is not something that a focus on science literacy will address.
So what’s this all about? In the MWD article, Massachusetts Education Commissioner Mitch Chester calls for greater emphasis on “science literacy.”
While students’ struggles on the science MCAS test may partly be due to unfamiliarity with a new test, Chester also acknowledged “there’s work to be done” to make sure students are getting stronger STEM instruction. A state panel is looking at ways of improving science standards, he said, including putting more emphasis on reading skills.
“We’re more and more focused on what the literacy demands of science are,” Chester said, adding the basic math and reading foundations of science are “often taken for granted.”
In short, the state wants to rewrite the science standards focusing on literacy rather than actual science. Tomorrow, I’ll share where this is likely to head—and it will be familiar territory, with the involvement of national trade organizations that are pushing a national science curriculum.
Here we go again. We are in the top six countries in math and science, we have finally implemented the science MCAS, and now we are considering a significant change in direction.
When will the state learn not to break what ain’t broken? Can’t our state officials redirect their focus toward issues where Massachusetts does not does not do well, such as dropout rates, and let what is working move forward?
Crossposted at Boston.com’s Rock the Schoolhouse blog. Follow me on twitter at @jimstergios, or visit Pioneer’s website.
Historically, many of Massachusetts’ political and economic leaders have built their success on the education received at the city’s historic exam schools—Boston Latin School, Boston Latin Academy and the John D. O’Bryant High School of Mathematics and Science, which in total enroll about 5,300 grade 7-12 students. They have received accolades from the usual sources of school rankings, and led other states to follow our example, with New York City building on its own historic grade 9-12 exam schools (Stuyvesant High School, Bronx High School of Science, and Brooklyn Technical High School) by establishing in 2002, the High School for Math, Science and Engineering at City College, the High School of American Studies at Lehman College, and Queens High School for the Sciences at York College. Mayor Bloomberg followed in 2005 and 2006 by changing the Staten Island Technical High School into an exam school, and opening the Brooklyn Latin School in clear imitation of the Boston Latin School, respectively.
Many of these schools, especially the historic exam schools regularly appear in the popular school rankings, such as those created by U.S. News & World Report, as top performers. But are they? It may strike you as a counterintuitive question, especially as so much ink has been spilled regarding whether Judge Garrity’s call for 35 percent of students admitted to Boston’s exam schools to be minority and the ensuing debates in the late 1990s. But the question is really interesting, because it gets at “peer effects” (whether kids do better studying with high-performing peers), the effects of class size, and much more.
Well, this is just what three researchers—Atila Abdulkadiroglu, Joshua D. Angrist, Parag A. Pathak—have done in their new National Bureau of Economic Research (Working Paper 17264) paper out entitled The Elite Illusion: Achievement Effects at Boston and New York Exam Schools that is sure to stoke lots of discussion.
These are surely highly competitive schools to get into and not simply because they “screen applicants on the basis of a competitive admissions test.” Their histories give them mystique—translated into the vernacular, the ivy on their walls only strengthens their appearance as Ivy League prep schools, with interwoven ties to these colleges for parents and students seeking to climb the socio-economic ladder.
Fewer than half of Boston applicants win a seat to one of three exam schools, and less than a sixth of exam school applicants are offered a seat at the three original exam schools in New York.
Students who enter have “pre-application Math and English scores… on the order of 0.5-0.7 standard deviations… higher than the scores of those who apply but not offered.”
Differences in baseline performance between applicants at the most competitive exam school and those in regular public schools are even more impressive, at over 1.5 [standard deviations] for Boston 7th graders…
The difference between the average pre-application achievement of students enrolled at the Boston Latin School and those enrolled at a traditional Boston school… is over two standard deviations for Math and about 1:75 for English.
Before getting to the authors’ central findings on whether exam schools add value to already high-performing students, a couple of notes on items of interest:
Boston Latin School has far fewer advanced placement (AP) courses than New York’s Stuvyesant (37 to 23). (What’s up with that?)
The average student-to-teacher ratio at the Boston Latin School is 22, compared to a district-wide average of 12 for middle schools and 15 for high schools. (What does that say about the old saw about class size mattering?)
But working from “registration and demographic information for Boston Public School (BPS) students from 1997-2009” (including MCAS Math English, Writing and Science testing data), the authors center the analysis of The Elite Illusion on the impact of attendance at an exam school on academic achievement. The authors further look at PSAT and SAT data as well as AP scores, to ensure that the state standardized tests do not skew their findings.
Exam school students do very well in school, but do they do better than they would elsewhere? Does an exam school education add value? The surprising answer is that in most grades exam schools offer little additional benefit in terms of student achievement. On the positive side of the ledger, minority students attending exam schools do see modest improvement in English testing scores.
Our results offer little evidence of an achievement gain for those admitted to an exam school; most of the estimates can be interpreted as reasonably precise zeros, with a smattering of significant effects, both positive and negative. In other words, in spite of their exposure to much higher-achieving peers and a more challenging curriculum, marginal students admitted to exam schools generally do no better on a variety of standardized tests.
The findings are very much in line whether you use the MCAS or the SATs. As the authors note in their conclusion:
It’s interesting to contrast the results reported here with those from recent studies of Boston and New York charter schools using quasi-experimental research designs. Abdulkadirofiglu, Angrist, Dynarski, Kane, and Pathak (2011) and Dobbie and Fryer (2011) show substantial gains from attendance at charter schools that embrace the No Excuses pedagogical model. Many of these schools serve exceptionally low achievers. Moreover, the relationship between baseline ability and treatment effects within the urban charter population appears to be negative (Angrist, Dynarski, Kane, Pathak, and Walters, 2010; Angrist, Pathak, and Walters, 2011). The results reported here, showing evidence of achievement gains for minorities, are therefore broadly consistent with the charter findings. The comparison between No Excuses charters and exam schools also suggests that the scope for improvement in learning may be wider at the low end of the ability distribution than at the top. Together, these findings weigh against the view expressed recently by Cunha and Heckman (2007), among others, that “… returns to adolescent education for the most disadvantaged and less able are lower than the returns for the more advantaged” (page 33).
This is one of those studies that makes you question conventional wisdom. Wow.
If Massachusetts has because of lack of leadership within the Board and the Department of Education, ground to a halt on digital learning, other states are moving fast. Let me give you two examples — one (Michigan) where the governor is particularly interested in digital learning and trying to make big changes fast; the other (Arizona) where “blended learning” is at the cutting edge.
A month or so ago, Michigan Governor Rick Snyder laid out his education agenda. Admittedly, Gov. Snyder comes to his new gig with a strong background in computer technology, having in the past helmed Gateway Computers. Drawing off research from a local think tank, he saw how digital learning programs could save money and increase student time on task.
Syder wants online learning to be an option available for students across the state, and not in a top-down structured manner. Instead, he wants to eliminate “seat-time” requirements for students and create something akin to what Florida did with its Virtual School (FLVS). (Snyder even stole FLVS’s slogan “Any Time, Any Place, Any Way, Any Pace.”) Unlike what we’ve seen in Massachusetts on this issue, Snyder calls for “leveraging technology” by giving
every child in Michigan who needs or wants up to two hours of daily online education must receive it. To help enable this policy, any enrollment caps or seat time requirements on virtual schools should be removed.
Michigan’s state foundation allowance should not be exclusively tied to the school district a child attends. Instead, funding needs to follow the student. This will help facilitate dual enrollment, blended learning, on-line education and early college attendance. Education opportunities should be available 24 hours a day, 365 days a year.
Snyder is introducing “proficiency-based funding” rather than funding for “seat time.” He is proposing legislation that “includes mandatory schools of choice for every public school district.” Essentially, he would do away with district boundaries and “resident students in every district [would] have first choice to enroll, but no longer [would] school districts be allowed to opt out from accepting out-of-district students.”
That’s significant stuff that Massachusetts couldn’t do because local taxes pay a significant portion of the overall school budget. Whether he gets there is a big question, but on online learning, he almost certainly will:
We must minimize all state and local barriers that hinder innovation at the local level, including seat time regulations, length of school year, length of school day and week, and the traditional configurations of classrooms and instruction. Blended learning models, where students receive instruction from high quality online educators, along with face-to-face instruction from high quality classroom teachers should be encouraged. School districts that embed technology into blended classroom instruction or embrace total online learning, project-based learning, and experiential learning models will make the system more cost-efficient, competitive, innovative, and effective in motivating student achievement.
When Snyder talks about digital learning and the opportunity to blend together classroom teaching and technologies, he ought to look to the Carpe Diem Collegiate High School and Middle School in Yuma (AZ), which is gaining a lot of attention as one avenue for real integration of technology into the curriculum and day-to-day classroom teaching. Carpe Diem is being visited by lawmakers, eight state superintendents, foundation officials and others interested in transforming education through technology. You get instead a brief look from your monitor in this 8-minute video.
a “hybrid” program consisting of on-site teacher-facilitators (coaches) and computer-assisted instruction (CAI) utilizing a computer-based learning and management system. Our program offers an extensive online library of interactive instructional courseware, providing learners and teachers with access to thousands of hours of self-paced, mastery-based instruction.
Our program considers individual differences in ability, knowledge, interests, goals, contexts and learning styles. Our instructional resources and strategies give our “coaches” the power to effectively tailor their instructional practices, accommodating the individual needs of the learner with the goal of achieving student mastery.
Carpe Diem is about course completion, but its real goals are “character and content proficiency (learning mastery)”—
Another CDCHS innovation has to do with our instructional philosophy: Teaching isn’t just about learning, it’s about connecting with our students and parents in order to form a true learning community. Courses are designed to maximize student-teacher-parent relationships and involvement, which is critical to every student’s success. Teachers at Carpe Diem actually enjoy their students, mentoring and “coaching” them one-on-one every day. But we aren’t just about teaching the mind, we are also about helping develop the whole person.
Our curriculum includes character education, the arts, languages and even physical education in order to help our students have balance and enrichment in their educational experiences. As you can see, education at Carpe Diem is far more than grades; it’s about life.
Virtually, Massachusetts is way behind states across the country – places not known for as sustained and comprehensive a commitment to reform as the Bay State. Let’s not rest on our laurels and think that the job is done. It isn’t. Colorado, Arizona and, if Governor Snyder gets his way, Michigan are moving ahead energetically.
Why then are placing all kinds of obstacles in the way of the provisions of the 2010 education reform law that was to expand digital learning in Massachusetts? Why insist on the status quo?
Crossposted at Boston.com’s Rock the Schoolhouse blog. Follow me on twitter at @jimstergios, or visit Pioneer’s website.
