Saturday
January 26, 2008
Chicago Public Schools announced Thursday that it will be completely restaffing eight underperforming schools. This is a model they’ve tried before, particularly at Sherman School. This time, though, they’re attempting to cluster the schools, reforming high schools along with their elementary feeders simultaneously. This will mean that hundreds of teachers, along with seven principals, will lose their jobs and be replaced.
The big question underlying all the news coverage on this is, where is CPS going to get hundreds of amazing teachers to replace the fired teachers? Feeder programs like AUSL, which will run one of the clusters, don’t turn out enough teachers each year to fill all the slots. CPS knows it can’t just put any teachers in there. They’re hoping for lots of Golden Apple teachers (know any?) and National Board Certified teachers.
WBEZ’s Jay Fields knows people are going to be asking “are they going to have to cherry pick the good teachers” out of other schools? And even if they wanted to, how would they find them, and how would they entice them to leave stable positions for the chaos of a turnaround school? The Trib article does mention a $10,000 performance bonus. I wonder what other strategies they’re planning to try.
UPDATE:
Here’s a CNN video featuring Arne Duncan and CTU Board President Marilyn Stewart having it out. I also heard they were on Chicago Tonight a few nights ago, but can’t track down the video.
Labels: News
Wednesday
October 03, 2007
With so much NCLB rhetoric flying around the newspapers and blogs this year (and last year, and the year before that), it’s refreshing to read something short, clear, and simple, that makes a little bit of sense. From Diane Ravitch in the New York Times:
No Child Left Behind can, however, be salvaged if policymakers recognize that they need to reverse the roles of the federal government and the states. In our federal system, each level of government should do what it does best…
Under current law, Congress now decides precisely which sanctions and penalties are needed to reform schools, which is way beyond its competence. The leaders of the House and Senate Education Committees are fine men, but they do not know how to fix the nation’s schools.
The obvious solution is to reverse roles. Washington should supply unbiased information about student academic performance to states and local districts. It should then be the responsibility of states and local districts to improve performance.
Diane and another eminent education thinker, Deborah Meier, discuss and debate ideas on their blog Bridging Differences. Definitely worth a visit.
Labels: News
Thursday
September 27, 2007
Is there really a single true interpretation of a set of education statistics? This week’s release of 4th and 8th grade NAEP scores certainly doesn’t make me think so. Here are the basics from the actual NAEP report, the Nation’s Report Card.
- At grade 4 the average mathematics and reading scores were higher in 2007 than in all previous assessment years. At grade 8, this was true for math.
- At both grades 4 and 8, the percentages of students performing at or above Basic and Proficient were higher in 2007 than in all previous assessment years in math, and higher than in 1992 and 2005 in reading.
- White, Black, and Hispanic students at both grades 4 and 8 scored higher in 2007 than in all previous assessment years in math, and higher in reading than in 1992.
See how those statistics have some interesting twists? Like, what happened to reading scores between 1992 and 2005?.
And while NCLB proponents count any increases in scores since 2003 as a success for NCLB, opponents, like anti-testing group FairTest point out that “Gains from 2000 to 2003, before NCLB went into effect, were significantly greater than they were from 2003 to 2007, when NCLB was the law.”
The report touts the narrowing achievement gap between minority and white students, but in Illinois, “while...minority and poor pupils made important gains on the tests, the gap also narrowed because the progress of white and more affluent pupils was minimal,” according to the Chicago Tribune.
Muddying the Illinois analysis even more is the stark difference between our extremely minimal upward progress in NAEP scores ("Illinois pupils showed slight improvements in math and reading last spring but did not keep pace with the rest of the nation,” says the Trib) and our rapidly increasing ISAT pass rates. The same Trib article points out:
On the national reading exam, for example, only 30 percent of the state’s 8th-graders scored at or above the proficient level, a drop from 35 percent in 2003.
But there has been an 18 percentage-point gain—from 64 percent to 82 percent passing—on the state 8th-grade reading exam in the same period.
It’s not the NAEP that determines AYP. It’s the ISAT. Which state officials tinkered with quite a bit in the last few years. See where we’re going with this?
So, as usual, a ton of statistics, but few clear answers to the question of how well students are learning.
Interested in reading more?
Alexander Russo rounds up a few of the main national stories here.
The actual statistics are here. There are one-page pdfs for each grade level by state, like this.
Wednesday
September 26, 2007
"In Chicago-area public schools, African-American students are five times as likely to be suspended and nearly eight times as likely to be expelled as white students,” reports the Chicago Tribune this week.
The Trib analyzed “little-noticed” 2004-2005 school year data from the US Department of Education and saw that “In every state but Idaho...black students are being suspended in numbers greater than would be expected from their proportion of the student population.”
These statistics aren’t particularly new; I feel like we heard this a few years ago, back when zero-tolerance discipline started making the news. The question is, what now?
Alexander Russo wonders if it isn’t time for “differentiated discipline” to go along with all that differentiated instruction we’re all doing.
The Trib article mentions a program called Positive Behavioral Interventions and Support (PBIS), which seems to be funded by the US Office of Special Education Programs. According to their website, “The purpose of school-wide PBS is to establish a climate in which appropriate behavior is the norm.” The system focuses on preventing issues rather than punishing students after the fact.
Thoughts about either of these solutions? Anyone’s school implementing PBIS?
Labels: Conversations, News
