our long-term success and our quality of life" divisive and far left-leaning."
I'll stop there.
-Patricia
Saturday, December 4, 2010
The Farmers Branch City Council intends to explore options on whether the city can form its own school district in the wake of criticism surrounding a LULAC mentoring program.
Mayor Tim O'Hare told WFAA-TV (Channel 8) on Friday that the intent is to explore whether the city can "remove itself from both the Carrollton-Farmers Branch and Dallas Independent School Districts and to form our own school district."
An executive session item on Tuesday's council meeting agenda lists discussion of potential litigation against public school districts within the boundaries of the city of Farmers Branch.
No one was available at City Hall to comment late Friday afternoon. But in O'Hare's statement to Channel 8, the mayor said that the council would meet with a lawyer who specializes in school district matters.
"We may also receive legal advice regarding legal and legislative options available to the city to address the concerns of residents, past and present, about the effect the current public school districts serving Farmers Branch have on our long-term success and our quality of life," he said
O'Hare has criticized the Carrollton-Farmers Branch school district for allowing a chapter of the League of United Latin American Citizens to mentor students at Carrollton's R.L. Turner High School, which is also attended by students in Farmers Branch.
LULAC activists were a fixture in protests in this suburb over a renters ordinance that sought to bar illegal immigrants from rental housing. The ordinance was ruled unconstitutional by a Dallas federal judge, but the city is appealing the ruling.
The mentoring program was started last September by LULAC Council 4782 to combat the dropout rate in public schools and to encourage students to advance their higher education. O'Hare and council member Michelle Holmes have questioned the involvement of LULAC, saying no political organization should be invited in the public school system to mentor schoolchildren.
O'Hare called LULAC "divisive and far left-leaning in their political view."
Victoria Neave, an attorney who runs the LULAC mentoring program, said the chapter would continue its work at R.L. Turner. It received a two-year, $20,000 grant for dropout prevention work from Ford Motor Co.
"We will continue to do what we are doing. Our program is successful. What is discussed in the media is going to continue to push our students to do better, and we'll proceed with our grant for the next two years," Neave said.
The Carrollton-Farmers Branch school board discussed the mentoring program and its value Thursday night but took no action. LULAC Council 4782 is a 5-year-old chapter headed by Gloria Levario, a health care consultant.
The city has spent nearly $4 million defending itself from litigation in the last four years.
Sunday, December 05, 2010
Saturday, December 04, 2010
UT students protest proposed budget cuts
Students chant in the University of Texas' Main Building to protest proposed budget cuts to programs within UT's College of Liberal Arts on Wednesday. About 150 students and faculty members participated in a 2 1/2-hour rally. See more photos of the protest with this story at statesman.com.
African American and Mexican American centers to get partial reprieve, officials say.
By Ralph K.M. Haurwitz | AMERICAN-STATESMAN STAFF
Updated: 10:55 p.m. Wednesday, Dec. 1, 2010
Students protesting proposed budget reductions for ethnic studies at the University of Texas waved signs, chanted slogans, delivered speeches and marched into two campus buildings Wednesday.
UT police officials estimated that 150 people participated in the rally. UT officials described the protesters, who included some faculty members, as peaceful. There were no arrests.
Still, protesters' feelings ran fairly hot on a campus where challenges to the administration tend to be low key, in contrast with some University of California schools, where rallies in recent months against tuition increases have turned violent, and in sharp contrast with Italy, where police in riot gear tangled Tuesday with students upset about tuition increases and education cutbacks.
Among the signs and chants at UT: "Let's just face it. These budget cuts are racist."
The protesters focused on proposed cuts for a dozen or so centers and institutes dealing with ethnic, women's and gender studies at UT's College of Liberal Arts. Jerome Bump, an English professor, said he was surprised when a college faculty panel recommended cuts for African American and Mexican American studies. He noted that the administration has pushed to increase diversity in student, faculty and staff ranks in recent years, and he said the budget proposals undercut that commitment.
Kaye Crawford, a senior majoring in African studies, agreed. "If you are recruiting these students and then you tell them that their heritage and the teaching of that heritage is not important, it sends all of us a mixed message," Crawford said.
Richard Flores, senior associate dean of academic affairs for the College of Liberal Arts , said officials plan to scale back the proposed cuts for the Center for African and African American Studies and the Center for Mexican American Studies. Flores said UT President William Powers Jr. had previously told college officials that the proposed cuts — 41 percent for each of those units — were too deep for programs that are priorities for UT.
The College of Liberal Arts, UT's largest academic unit, is in belt-tightening mode because state leaders have ordered universities and state agencies to trim spending by 5 percent in the current budget and submit plans for an additional 10 percent cut for the two-year budget period that begins in September 2011.
The college's portion of the spending reductions amounts to $3.3 million, Flores said. To allow for merit pay increases of 1 or 2 percent, officials want to reduce spending by $3.75 million.
African American and Mexican American centers to get partial reprieve, officials say.
By Ralph K.M. Haurwitz | AMERICAN-STATESMAN STAFF
Updated: 10:55 p.m. Wednesday, Dec. 1, 2010
Students protesting proposed budget reductions for ethnic studies at the University of Texas waved signs, chanted slogans, delivered speeches and marched into two campus buildings Wednesday.
UT police officials estimated that 150 people participated in the rally. UT officials described the protesters, who included some faculty members, as peaceful. There were no arrests.
Still, protesters' feelings ran fairly hot on a campus where challenges to the administration tend to be low key, in contrast with some University of California schools, where rallies in recent months against tuition increases have turned violent, and in sharp contrast with Italy, where police in riot gear tangled Tuesday with students upset about tuition increases and education cutbacks.
Among the signs and chants at UT: "Let's just face it. These budget cuts are racist."
The protesters focused on proposed cuts for a dozen or so centers and institutes dealing with ethnic, women's and gender studies at UT's College of Liberal Arts. Jerome Bump, an English professor, said he was surprised when a college faculty panel recommended cuts for African American and Mexican American studies. He noted that the administration has pushed to increase diversity in student, faculty and staff ranks in recent years, and he said the budget proposals undercut that commitment.
Kaye Crawford, a senior majoring in African studies, agreed. "If you are recruiting these students and then you tell them that their heritage and the teaching of that heritage is not important, it sends all of us a mixed message," Crawford said.
Richard Flores, senior associate dean of academic affairs for the College of Liberal Arts , said officials plan to scale back the proposed cuts for the Center for African and African American Studies and the Center for Mexican American Studies. Flores said UT President William Powers Jr. had previously told college officials that the proposed cuts — 41 percent for each of those units — were too deep for programs that are priorities for UT.
The College of Liberal Arts, UT's largest academic unit, is in belt-tightening mode because state leaders have ordered universities and state agencies to trim spending by 5 percent in the current budget and submit plans for an additional 10 percent cut for the two-year budget period that begins in September 2011.
The college's portion of the spending reductions amounts to $3.3 million, Flores said. To allow for merit pay increases of 1 or 2 percent, officials want to reduce spending by $3.75 million.
Reid moves forward on DREAM Act
Please check out the new links added to this blog on the right-hand sidebar. They were complied and provided by DREAM Act advocates hard at work to get out the word.
-Patricia
By SCOTT WONG | 11/30/10 5:16 PM EST
Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) said he would file a motion Tuesday so the Senate could take up the DREAM Act, setting up a showdown over the immigration bill that would provide some young, undocumented immigrants a path to citizenship.
Both House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and Reid vowed earlier this month to hold votes on the standalone immigration bill during the lame-duck session. But Reid has been unable to hold together his 58-member caucus, and it’s uncertain if he’ll be able to get the 60 votes needed to overcome a GOP filibuster.
Already, Democratic Sens. Ben Nelson of Nebraska and Mark Pryor of Arkansas said they will not vote for cloture on the bill. But Republican Sens. Dick Lugar of Indiana and Bob Bennett, who was defeated in his Utah primary race, have signaled they will vote for the DREAM Act.
At this point, pro-immigration activists, Reid and other Democrats are courting a handful of other moderate Republicans, including Sens. George Lemieux (Fla.), Kay Bailey Hutchison (Texas) and Scott Brown (Mass.).
Lemieux, who is retiring from the Senate, told POLITICO on Tuesday that Democrats couldn’t count on his vote until a deal is reached on extending Bush-era tax cuts and the border is secured.
“There are ways to stop illegal immigration,” said Lemieux, who recently toured the Arizona-Mexico border with Minority Whip Jon Kyl (R-Ariz.). “If we could do a significant border security measure, then I’d be willing to talk about the situation of these kids who are brought here through no fault of their own. But until we do that, I’m not supportive.”
Gail Gitcho, a spokeswoman for Brown, indicated his opposition: "Senator Brown is opposed to illegal immigration and is opposed to amnesty. The DREAM Act is backdoor amnesty. Senator Brown believes that reforms should be made to streamline the process for those who are seeking citizenship through the legal-and-proper channels."
The DREAM Act, sponsored by Majority Whip Dick Durbin (D-Ill.), would open up a channel for citizenship to immigrants who were illegally brought to the United States as children. To qualify for legalization, immigrants must have entered the U.S. before age 16, lived in the country at least five consecutive years before the bill’s enactment; been admitted to a college or earned a high-school diploma or GED certificate; and should have no serious criminal record.
Those who receive conditional resident status would need to attend college or serve in the military at least two years. More than 2.1 million illegal immigrants could be eligible to apply for legal status under the DREAM Act, but only about 825,000 would likely receive citizenship, according to an analysis by the nonpartisan Migration Policy Institute.
Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.), the ranking Republican on the Judiciary Committee, has been heading up GOP opposition to the bill, arguing that it offers “amnesty” to those who have broken the law and encourages more illegal immigration.
Reid’s cloture motion comes as the Obama administration, immigration advocates and some faith leaders engage in a full-court press to pass the bill. Cabinet members, including Education Secretary Arne Duncan and Labor Secretary Hilda Solis, have been lobbying lawmakers and speaking with reporters, urging passage of the DREAM Act. And Hispanic and immigration groups are targeting moderate and retiring senators.
“The issue is being taken seriously by both sides of the aisle,” said Ali Noorani, executive director of the National Immigration Forum, which backs the DREAM Act and advocates for immigrant rights. “This is really going to come down to: Are Republicans going to stand in the way of the DREAM Act? The ball is very much in their court, and the country’s fastest-growing electorate is watching them very closely.”
-Patricia
By SCOTT WONG | 11/30/10 5:16 PM EST
Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) said he would file a motion Tuesday so the Senate could take up the DREAM Act, setting up a showdown over the immigration bill that would provide some young, undocumented immigrants a path to citizenship.
Both House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and Reid vowed earlier this month to hold votes on the standalone immigration bill during the lame-duck session. But Reid has been unable to hold together his 58-member caucus, and it’s uncertain if he’ll be able to get the 60 votes needed to overcome a GOP filibuster.
Already, Democratic Sens. Ben Nelson of Nebraska and Mark Pryor of Arkansas said they will not vote for cloture on the bill. But Republican Sens. Dick Lugar of Indiana and Bob Bennett, who was defeated in his Utah primary race, have signaled they will vote for the DREAM Act.
At this point, pro-immigration activists, Reid and other Democrats are courting a handful of other moderate Republicans, including Sens. George Lemieux (Fla.), Kay Bailey Hutchison (Texas) and Scott Brown (Mass.).
Lemieux, who is retiring from the Senate, told POLITICO on Tuesday that Democrats couldn’t count on his vote until a deal is reached on extending Bush-era tax cuts and the border is secured.
“There are ways to stop illegal immigration,” said Lemieux, who recently toured the Arizona-Mexico border with Minority Whip Jon Kyl (R-Ariz.). “If we could do a significant border security measure, then I’d be willing to talk about the situation of these kids who are brought here through no fault of their own. But until we do that, I’m not supportive.”
Gail Gitcho, a spokeswoman for Brown, indicated his opposition: "Senator Brown is opposed to illegal immigration and is opposed to amnesty. The DREAM Act is backdoor amnesty. Senator Brown believes that reforms should be made to streamline the process for those who are seeking citizenship through the legal-and-proper channels."
The DREAM Act, sponsored by Majority Whip Dick Durbin (D-Ill.), would open up a channel for citizenship to immigrants who were illegally brought to the United States as children. To qualify for legalization, immigrants must have entered the U.S. before age 16, lived in the country at least five consecutive years before the bill’s enactment; been admitted to a college or earned a high-school diploma or GED certificate; and should have no serious criminal record.
Those who receive conditional resident status would need to attend college or serve in the military at least two years. More than 2.1 million illegal immigrants could be eligible to apply for legal status under the DREAM Act, but only about 825,000 would likely receive citizenship, according to an analysis by the nonpartisan Migration Policy Institute.
Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.), the ranking Republican on the Judiciary Committee, has been heading up GOP opposition to the bill, arguing that it offers “amnesty” to those who have broken the law and encourages more illegal immigration.
Reid’s cloture motion comes as the Obama administration, immigration advocates and some faith leaders engage in a full-court press to pass the bill. Cabinet members, including Education Secretary Arne Duncan and Labor Secretary Hilda Solis, have been lobbying lawmakers and speaking with reporters, urging passage of the DREAM Act. And Hispanic and immigration groups are targeting moderate and retiring senators.
“The issue is being taken seriously by both sides of the aisle,” said Ali Noorani, executive director of the National Immigration Forum, which backs the DREAM Act and advocates for immigrant rights. “This is really going to come down to: Are Republicans going to stand in the way of the DREAM Act? The ball is very much in their court, and the country’s fastest-growing electorate is watching them very closely.”
Keeping Obama to His Word
Rep. Luis Gutierrez is a hero to many Hispanics. He says he won't change his methods, no matter who gets irritated.
by Arian Campo-Flores
Newsweek (November 29, 2010)
(November 29, 2010) Once you've made a promise to U.S. Rep. Luis Gutierrez, it's a bad idea to break it. Because if you do, he'll call you on it, and then he'll broadcast your perfidy incessantly, with every megaphone he can get his hands on, to anyone who will listen. Just ask President Barack Obama, who failed to keep his word on tackling immigration reform in his first year in office. Though the two Chicago Democrats were once close, Gutierrez has spent much of the past two years badgering the president on the issue. "He was clear in his commitment to me," says Gutierrez. And yet "everything has been enforcement, enforcement, enforcement"-more deportations of undocumented immigrants, more troops |on the border.
"How," asks Gutierrez, "is this different from what George W. Bush did?" Gutierrez, 56, is the most passionate, tireless, and nettlesome voice in Congress on immigration matters. He's a constant presence at rallies and on TV, defending the undocumented and railing against xenophobia. It's no surprise that a recent Pew Hispanic Center survey ranked him the second-most-important Latino leader in the country, after Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor. "He's as close as the Latino community has to a Martin Luther King figure," says Frank Sharry, founder of the pro-immigrant group America's Voice. Yet Gutierrez's tactics are controversial. While many admire his tenacity and credit him with keeping immigration reform alive, others, including members of the Obama administration, believe his confrontational style can be counterproductive. He sees things more simply. "I have only one loyalty," he says, "and that's to the immigrant community."
Gutierrez has now embarked on his latest campaign: to secure quick passage of the DREAM Act, which would legalize undocumented youths who attend college or serve in the military. With a Republican takeover of the House imminent, the lame-duck session of Congress offers the last chance (for a while, at least) to get it done. It won't be easy, given the noxious atmosphere in Washington. Yet Gutierrez has already launched a nationwide tour of churches to rally immigrants and their supporters, and has begun rounding up votes in the House. Two weeks ago, he and a few other lawmakers met with Obama at the White House. "We want you to put everything you can behind this," he says they told the president. Obama agreed to help-by, among other things, placing personal calls to wavering lawmakers.
Gutierrez's first stop on his church tour was St. Brigid's in Brooklyn a week ago. Joined by Rep. Nydia Velázquez, chair of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus, and other elected officials, he was received with adulation by the hundreds of people packed in the pews. His speeches at events like these-delivered in a stentorian voice, despite his slight physique-resemble revivalist sermons. He started off softly, then crescendoed to ear-splitting decibels, jabbing his index finger toward the heavens. "The other side is waiting for us to get tired!" Gutierrez thundered in Spanish. "Is anyone here tired?" "No!" the audience roared back.
The son of Puerto Rican parents, Gutierrez has long had a fiery streak. He was a student leader and community organizer before entering politics, first as an alderman and then a congressman representing a majority-Latino district. Though he's about to start his 10th term, Gutierrez's activist roots still show. Within weeks of Obama's taking office, he set off on a 30-city tour to highlight the stories of families split apart by deportations and to pressure the administration to take on immigration reform. One year later, with things at a standstill, Gutierrez turned more adversarial. He said Hispanics were becoming angry and disillusioned, and were losing patience with the president.
In May of this year, he was arrested at an immigration protest in front of the White House. The following month, he threatened to urge Latinos to sit out the midterm elections if Democrats didn't act on immigration reform. "In any movement, you need agitators," says Simon Rosenberg, president of the New Democrat Network, which has pushed for reform. "I frankly admire him for having the courage to take on friends and allies." That sentiment isn't shared by many in the administration. Gutierrez clashed repeatedly with Rahm Emanuel, Obama's former chief of staff, whom he considered a prime impediment to an immigration overhaul.
Another administration official, who didn't want to be named to avoid exacerbating tensions, complains that Gutierrez "has contributed to the flawed impression that the president can do this by himself"-when, in fact, he depends on Congress to move legislation. "It saddens me ... that [the president] and I have had these very public differences," says Gutierrez. It's quite a turnaround for the two men. When Obama was a freshman U.S. senator, he used to call Gutierrez regularly for advice. When he decided to run for president, he sought Gutierrez's endorsement early on-and got it. "There was a time when I was the only elected Latino that was for him. They were all for Hillary [Clinton]," says Gutierrez. "I love him. I want him to do well ... But I have to be true to what I believe in." (Cecilia Muñoz, a White House point person on immigration, calls Gutierrez "an important moral voice" and says that he and the president "are on the same side of the issue.") Outside the administration, some backers of immigration reform also have misgivings about Gutierrez's approach. He "transformed what had been a narrow policy issue into a litmus-test identity issue for Hispanics, and that made the debate a whole different ball game," says
Tamar Jacoby, president of ImmigrationWorks USA, a coalition of business groups that rely on immigrant labor. Gutierrez is "incredibly effective at what he does ... [But] there's part of me that always gets a little worried about identity politics." Still, Gutierrez has a track record of pragmatism, too. He took flak from some advocates for including strict enforcement provisions in an immigration bill he crafted with Republican Rep. Jeff Flake in 2007 (it didn't pass). "He can go from being a bomb thrower to being a dealmaker," says Angela Kelley of the Center for American Progress. "That's a pretty important bilingual ability."
Gutierrez's promotion of the DREAM Act is itself a compromise. Pro-immigrant forces agonized over whether to abandon the fight for a comprehensive bill in favor of a narrower one that would benefit only a slice of the undocumented population. In the end, they concluded that only the DREAM Act had a real chance. Gutierrez thinks the measure can prevail in the House. The bigger challenge is in the Senate, where Majority Leader Harry Reid has pledged to bring the bill to the floor in the next few weeks.
Given the need for 60 votes to break a filibuster and the likely defection of a handful of Democrats, the measure's backers need to win over at least a half dozen Republicans-a tall order these days. But seven current Senate GOP members voted for the DREAM Act in 2007, and a few others who are retiring aren't considered hardliners. The immigrant movement will face a much more adverse climate in Congress next year. As a result, Gutierrez is trying to redirect its energy toward a different end: persuading Obama to use his executive powers to stop the deportation of law-abiding illegal immigrants.
To ratchet up the pressure, Gutierrez is encouraging acts of nonviolent civil disobedience. "We cannot be a slave to the legislative process," he says. "That's what we've done, and it hasn't served us very well." Given that some Republican lawmakers have made clear they plan to use their newfound power to crack down even more on illegal immigrants, "the next couple of years are going to be an extraordinary battle," says Rosenberg. Gutierrez's "voice will be needed more than ever." And you can be certain you'll hear it.
by Arian Campo-Flores
Newsweek (November 29, 2010)
(November 29, 2010) Once you've made a promise to U.S. Rep. Luis Gutierrez, it's a bad idea to break it. Because if you do, he'll call you on it, and then he'll broadcast your perfidy incessantly, with every megaphone he can get his hands on, to anyone who will listen. Just ask President Barack Obama, who failed to keep his word on tackling immigration reform in his first year in office. Though the two Chicago Democrats were once close, Gutierrez has spent much of the past two years badgering the president on the issue. "He was clear in his commitment to me," says Gutierrez. And yet "everything has been enforcement, enforcement, enforcement"-more deportations of undocumented immigrants, more troops |on the border.
"How," asks Gutierrez, "is this different from what George W. Bush did?" Gutierrez, 56, is the most passionate, tireless, and nettlesome voice in Congress on immigration matters. He's a constant presence at rallies and on TV, defending the undocumented and railing against xenophobia. It's no surprise that a recent Pew Hispanic Center survey ranked him the second-most-important Latino leader in the country, after Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor. "He's as close as the Latino community has to a Martin Luther King figure," says Frank Sharry, founder of the pro-immigrant group America's Voice. Yet Gutierrez's tactics are controversial. While many admire his tenacity and credit him with keeping immigration reform alive, others, including members of the Obama administration, believe his confrontational style can be counterproductive. He sees things more simply. "I have only one loyalty," he says, "and that's to the immigrant community."
Gutierrez has now embarked on his latest campaign: to secure quick passage of the DREAM Act, which would legalize undocumented youths who attend college or serve in the military. With a Republican takeover of the House imminent, the lame-duck session of Congress offers the last chance (for a while, at least) to get it done. It won't be easy, given the noxious atmosphere in Washington. Yet Gutierrez has already launched a nationwide tour of churches to rally immigrants and their supporters, and has begun rounding up votes in the House. Two weeks ago, he and a few other lawmakers met with Obama at the White House. "We want you to put everything you can behind this," he says they told the president. Obama agreed to help-by, among other things, placing personal calls to wavering lawmakers.
Gutierrez's first stop on his church tour was St. Brigid's in Brooklyn a week ago. Joined by Rep. Nydia Velázquez, chair of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus, and other elected officials, he was received with adulation by the hundreds of people packed in the pews. His speeches at events like these-delivered in a stentorian voice, despite his slight physique-resemble revivalist sermons. He started off softly, then crescendoed to ear-splitting decibels, jabbing his index finger toward the heavens. "The other side is waiting for us to get tired!" Gutierrez thundered in Spanish. "Is anyone here tired?" "No!" the audience roared back.
The son of Puerto Rican parents, Gutierrez has long had a fiery streak. He was a student leader and community organizer before entering politics, first as an alderman and then a congressman representing a majority-Latino district. Though he's about to start his 10th term, Gutierrez's activist roots still show. Within weeks of Obama's taking office, he set off on a 30-city tour to highlight the stories of families split apart by deportations and to pressure the administration to take on immigration reform. One year later, with things at a standstill, Gutierrez turned more adversarial. He said Hispanics were becoming angry and disillusioned, and were losing patience with the president.
In May of this year, he was arrested at an immigration protest in front of the White House. The following month, he threatened to urge Latinos to sit out the midterm elections if Democrats didn't act on immigration reform. "In any movement, you need agitators," says Simon Rosenberg, president of the New Democrat Network, which has pushed for reform. "I frankly admire him for having the courage to take on friends and allies." That sentiment isn't shared by many in the administration. Gutierrez clashed repeatedly with Rahm Emanuel, Obama's former chief of staff, whom he considered a prime impediment to an immigration overhaul.
Another administration official, who didn't want to be named to avoid exacerbating tensions, complains that Gutierrez "has contributed to the flawed impression that the president can do this by himself"-when, in fact, he depends on Congress to move legislation. "It saddens me ... that [the president] and I have had these very public differences," says Gutierrez. It's quite a turnaround for the two men. When Obama was a freshman U.S. senator, he used to call Gutierrez regularly for advice. When he decided to run for president, he sought Gutierrez's endorsement early on-and got it. "There was a time when I was the only elected Latino that was for him. They were all for Hillary [Clinton]," says Gutierrez. "I love him. I want him to do well ... But I have to be true to what I believe in." (Cecilia Muñoz, a White House point person on immigration, calls Gutierrez "an important moral voice" and says that he and the president "are on the same side of the issue.") Outside the administration, some backers of immigration reform also have misgivings about Gutierrez's approach. He "transformed what had been a narrow policy issue into a litmus-test identity issue for Hispanics, and that made the debate a whole different ball game," says
Tamar Jacoby, president of ImmigrationWorks USA, a coalition of business groups that rely on immigrant labor. Gutierrez is "incredibly effective at what he does ... [But] there's part of me that always gets a little worried about identity politics." Still, Gutierrez has a track record of pragmatism, too. He took flak from some advocates for including strict enforcement provisions in an immigration bill he crafted with Republican Rep. Jeff Flake in 2007 (it didn't pass). "He can go from being a bomb thrower to being a dealmaker," says Angela Kelley of the Center for American Progress. "That's a pretty important bilingual ability."
Gutierrez's promotion of the DREAM Act is itself a compromise. Pro-immigrant forces agonized over whether to abandon the fight for a comprehensive bill in favor of a narrower one that would benefit only a slice of the undocumented population. In the end, they concluded that only the DREAM Act had a real chance. Gutierrez thinks the measure can prevail in the House. The bigger challenge is in the Senate, where Majority Leader Harry Reid has pledged to bring the bill to the floor in the next few weeks.
Given the need for 60 votes to break a filibuster and the likely defection of a handful of Democrats, the measure's backers need to win over at least a half dozen Republicans-a tall order these days. But seven current Senate GOP members voted for the DREAM Act in 2007, and a few others who are retiring aren't considered hardliners. The immigrant movement will face a much more adverse climate in Congress next year. As a result, Gutierrez is trying to redirect its energy toward a different end: persuading Obama to use his executive powers to stop the deportation of law-abiding illegal immigrants.
To ratchet up the pressure, Gutierrez is encouraging acts of nonviolent civil disobedience. "We cannot be a slave to the legislative process," he says. "That's what we've done, and it hasn't served us very well." Given that some Republican lawmakers have made clear they plan to use their newfound power to crack down even more on illegal immigrants, "the next couple of years are going to be an extraordinary battle," says Rosenberg. Gutierrez's "voice will be needed more than ever." And you can be certain you'll hear it.
Education reform: Have business-savvy officials improved big-city schools?
Big-city mayors have been turning to leaders from the business world to push their agenda of education reform. Critics say schools need leadership from educators.
By Amanda Paulson, Staff writer / November 29, 2010
Chicago
New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg surprised many people in early November with his choice of successor to schools chancellor Joel Klein, who announced he was stepping down after an eight-year tenure in which he added charter schools, closed failing schools, and gave more power to principals.
Cathleen Black, chairwoman of Hearst Magazines, has no background in education – even less than Mr. Klein had in 2002, when Mayor Bloomberg had to make a case for his appointment – and is already encountering stiff opposition.
But in some ways, the selection of a businessperson with little in the way of education experience has become the expected path for big-city mayors trying to radically shake up systems struggling with high dropout rates and low test scores.
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Meanwhile, Washington and Chicago, two other high-profile cities closely identified with mayoral control of schools, are also losing their superintendents this fall.
The changing of the educational guard raises questions about both the future of the reforms in these cities and about the success of mayoral control, touted by some reformers as crucial to effecting major changes.
"These are cities where there's been really significant, and in many ways unprecedented, progress in improved schools and better achievement," says Jon Schnur, chief executive officer and cofounder of New Leaders for New Schools, which recruits and trains principals. "This is an important juncture for each of these cities to show that substantial progress under mayoral control can be followed by more progress under leadership change."
New York State law requires the chancellor to hold a certificate in educational leadership and have three years' experience in schools; the education commissioner, David Steiner, is threatening to deny Ms. Black a waiver unless an educator is appointed as her deputy.
Klein, who has both fervent admirers and fierce critics, previously was a lawyer and top Justice Department official. His education experience was limited to a very brief stint teaching math in a public school.
Ron Huberman, who is resigning as CEO of Chicago Public Schools, was president of Chicago's public transit system – and a former chief of staff to Mayor Richard Daley – when Mayor Daley appointed him in 2009. Even Arne Duncan, the CEO he replaced, had no classroom experience. He left to become US secretary of Education.
"The nontraditional has become traditional," says Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers. "It's almost as if educators need not apply." Ms. Weingarten says that she's open to noneducators – especially if paired with top deputies who do have strong education backgrounds – but that she worries that always looking to business leaders will hurt the profession.
Other critics are more blunt. "Yes, a superintendent should have a background in education," says Diane Ravitch, author of "The Death and Life of the Great American School System." "There are very specific issues ... having to do with curricula, instruction, pedagogy, relations.… Education is not a business."
The idea behind mayoral control of schools is that getting rid of an elected school board streamlines and speeds up the decisionmaking process and offers a clear line of accountability.
It was pioneered in Boston in the early 1990s under Mayor Thomas Menino, who was reelected a year ago to his fifth term. But there aren't many examples of how it will fare under transitioning mayors, as is happening in Washington and Chicago.
In Washington, Mayor Adrian Fenty was voted out at least in part over opposition to the controversial reforms of Chancellor Michelle Rhee, who resigned shortly after his primary loss. In Chicago, Daley, who will be replaced next year, is letting his successor name a permanent schools CEO to replace Mr. Huberman.
"People have in too facile a way interpreted mayoral control to mean stability," says Jeffrey Henig, an education professor at Columbia University's Teachers College. "What the D.C. case in particular demonstrates is that it's no guarantee."
Professor Henig emphasizes that mayoral control has often been so tied to powerful mayors that it's hard to imagine how it will fare as they leave.
"What proponents never thought much about is what happens when dealing with weaker mayors," says Frederick Hess, the American Enterprise Institute's director of education policy studies, citing Washington as an example.
Perhaps the biggest question facing these cities is whether the reforms will be retained under the new leadership.
Some of that, of course, will depend on the successors, but also on the reforms themselves.
In Washington, where Ms. Rhee fought hard to change the contract with the local teachers union (making it easier to fire teachers, among other things), "these changes are fairly deeply embedded now," says Mr. Hess.
In the meantime, the market-driven reforms popular with leaders like Klein and Rhee represent the direction in which much of education policy is moving, and most observers expect them to continue.
"Under these three mayors, the public saw big, irrefutable achievement gains," says Mr. Schnur, referring to Bloomberg, Daley, and Mr. Fenty. "I think there's a very strong foundation ... on which to build."
By Amanda Paulson, Staff writer / November 29, 2010
Chicago
New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg surprised many people in early November with his choice of successor to schools chancellor Joel Klein, who announced he was stepping down after an eight-year tenure in which he added charter schools, closed failing schools, and gave more power to principals.
Cathleen Black, chairwoman of Hearst Magazines, has no background in education – even less than Mr. Klein had in 2002, when Mayor Bloomberg had to make a case for his appointment – and is already encountering stiff opposition.
But in some ways, the selection of a businessperson with little in the way of education experience has become the expected path for big-city mayors trying to radically shake up systems struggling with high dropout rates and low test scores.
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Meanwhile, Washington and Chicago, two other high-profile cities closely identified with mayoral control of schools, are also losing their superintendents this fall.
The changing of the educational guard raises questions about both the future of the reforms in these cities and about the success of mayoral control, touted by some reformers as crucial to effecting major changes.
"These are cities where there's been really significant, and in many ways unprecedented, progress in improved schools and better achievement," says Jon Schnur, chief executive officer and cofounder of New Leaders for New Schools, which recruits and trains principals. "This is an important juncture for each of these cities to show that substantial progress under mayoral control can be followed by more progress under leadership change."
New York State law requires the chancellor to hold a certificate in educational leadership and have three years' experience in schools; the education commissioner, David Steiner, is threatening to deny Ms. Black a waiver unless an educator is appointed as her deputy.
Klein, who has both fervent admirers and fierce critics, previously was a lawyer and top Justice Department official. His education experience was limited to a very brief stint teaching math in a public school.
Ron Huberman, who is resigning as CEO of Chicago Public Schools, was president of Chicago's public transit system – and a former chief of staff to Mayor Richard Daley – when Mayor Daley appointed him in 2009. Even Arne Duncan, the CEO he replaced, had no classroom experience. He left to become US secretary of Education.
"The nontraditional has become traditional," says Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers. "It's almost as if educators need not apply." Ms. Weingarten says that she's open to noneducators – especially if paired with top deputies who do have strong education backgrounds – but that she worries that always looking to business leaders will hurt the profession.
Other critics are more blunt. "Yes, a superintendent should have a background in education," says Diane Ravitch, author of "The Death and Life of the Great American School System." "There are very specific issues ... having to do with curricula, instruction, pedagogy, relations.… Education is not a business."
The idea behind mayoral control of schools is that getting rid of an elected school board streamlines and speeds up the decisionmaking process and offers a clear line of accountability.
It was pioneered in Boston in the early 1990s under Mayor Thomas Menino, who was reelected a year ago to his fifth term. But there aren't many examples of how it will fare under transitioning mayors, as is happening in Washington and Chicago.
In Washington, Mayor Adrian Fenty was voted out at least in part over opposition to the controversial reforms of Chancellor Michelle Rhee, who resigned shortly after his primary loss. In Chicago, Daley, who will be replaced next year, is letting his successor name a permanent schools CEO to replace Mr. Huberman.
"People have in too facile a way interpreted mayoral control to mean stability," says Jeffrey Henig, an education professor at Columbia University's Teachers College. "What the D.C. case in particular demonstrates is that it's no guarantee."
Professor Henig emphasizes that mayoral control has often been so tied to powerful mayors that it's hard to imagine how it will fare as they leave.
"What proponents never thought much about is what happens when dealing with weaker mayors," says Frederick Hess, the American Enterprise Institute's director of education policy studies, citing Washington as an example.
Perhaps the biggest question facing these cities is whether the reforms will be retained under the new leadership.
Some of that, of course, will depend on the successors, but also on the reforms themselves.
In Washington, where Ms. Rhee fought hard to change the contract with the local teachers union (making it easier to fire teachers, among other things), "these changes are fairly deeply embedded now," says Mr. Hess.
In the meantime, the market-driven reforms popular with leaders like Klein and Rhee represent the direction in which much of education policy is moving, and most observers expect them to continue.
"Under these three mayors, the public saw big, irrefutable achievement gains," says Mr. Schnur, referring to Bloomberg, Daley, and Mr. Fenty. "I think there's a very strong foundation ... on which to build."
Ravitch answers Gates
Pretty interesting exchange between Gates and Ravich. Really shows what it means to challenge business interests' endeavors.
-Patricia
By Valerie Strauss | Washington Post
November 30, 3010
In a paean to Bill Gates, Newsweek's Jonathan Alter calls Diane Ravitch the Microsoft founder's "chief adversary."
It's the world's richest (or second richest) man vs. an education historian and New York University research professor.
Gates, through his philanthropic foundation, has invested billions of dollars in education experiments and now has a pivotal role in reform efforts. Ravitch, the author of the bestselling The Death and Life of the Great American School System, has become the most vocal opponent of the Obama administration's education policy. She says Gates is backing the wrong initiatives and harming public schools.
In the Newsweek piece, Gates poses some questions aimed at Ravitch. I asked her to answer them. Below are the questions Gates asked, in bold, and the answers, in italics, that Ravitch provided in an email.
Gates: “Does she like the status quo?"
Ravitch: "No, I certainly don't like the status quo. I don't like the attacks on teachers, I don't like the attacks on the educators who work in our schools day in and day out, I don't like the phony solutions that are now put forward that won't improve our schools at all. I am not at all content with the quality of American education in general, and I have expressed my criticisms over many years, long before Bill Gates decided to make education his project. I think American children need not only testing in basic skills, but an education that includes the arts, literature, the sciences, history, geography, civics, foreign languages, economics, and physical education.
"I don't hear any of the corporate reformers expressing concern about the way standardized testing narrows the curriculum, the way it rewards convergent thinking and punishes divergent thinking, the way it stamps out creativity and originality. I don't hear any of them worried that a generation will grow up ignorant of history and the workings of government. I don't hear any of them putting up $100 million to make sure that every child has the chance to learn to play a musical instrument. All I hear from them is a demand for higher test scores and a demand to tie teachers' evaluations to those test scores. That is not going to improve education."
Gates: "Is she sticking up for decline?"
Ravitch: "Of course not! If we follow Bill Gates' demand to judge teachers by test scores, we will see stagnation, and he will blame it on teachers. We will see stagnation because a relentless focus on test scores in reading and math will inevitably narrow the curriculum only to what is tested. This is not good education.
"Last week, he said in a speech that teachers should not be paid more for experience and graduate degrees. I wonder why a man of his vast wealth spends so much time trying to figure out how to cut teachers' pay. Does he truly believe that our nation's schools will get better if we have teachers with less education and less experience? Who does he listen to? He needs to get himself a smarter set of advisers.
"Of course, we need to make teaching a profession that attracts and retains wonderful teachers, but the current anti-teacher rhetoric emanating from him and his confreres demonizes and demoralizes even the best teachers. I have gotten letters from many teachers who tell me that they have had it, they have never felt such disrespect; and I have also met young people who tell me that the current poisonous atmosphere has persuaded them not to become teachers. Why doesn't he make speeches thanking the people who work so hard day after day, educating our nation's children, often in difficult working conditions, most of whom earn less than he pays his secretaries at Microsoft?"
Gates: "Does she really like 400-page [union] contracts?"
Ravitch: "Does Bill Gates realize that every contract is signed by two parties: management and labor? Why does management agree to 400-page contracts? I don't know how many pages should be in a union contract, but I do believe that teachers should be evaluated by competent supervisors before they receive tenure (i.e., the right to due process).
"Once they have due process rights, they have the right to a hearing when someone wants to fire them. The reason for due process rights is that teachers in the past have been fired because of their race, their religion, their sexual orientation, or because they did not make a political contribution to the right campaign, or for some other reason not related to their competence.
"Gates probably doesn't know this, but 50% of all those who enter teaching leave within the first five years. Our biggest problem is not getting rid of deadbeats, but recruiting, retaining, and supporting teachers. We have to replace 300,000 teachers (of nearly 4 million) every single year. What are his ideas about how to do this?"
Gates: "Does she think all those ‘dropout factories’ are lonely?"
Ravitch: "This may come as a surprise to Bill Gates, but the schools he refers to as "dropout factories" enroll large numbers of high-need students. Many of them don't speak or read English; many of them enter high school three and four grade levels behind. He assumes the schools created the problems the students have; but in many cases, the schools he calls "dropout factories" are filled with heroic teachers and administrators trying their best to help kids who have massive learning problems.
"Unless someone from the district or the state actually goes into the schools and does a diagnostic evaluation, it is unfair to stigmatize the schools with the largest numbers of students who are English-language learners, special-education, and far behind in their learning. That's like saying that an oncologist is not as good a doctor as a dermatologist because so many of his patients die. Mr. Gates, first establish the risk factor before throwing around the labels and closing down schools."
Gates: "If there’s some other magic way to reduce the dropout rate, we’re all ears.”
Ravitch: "Here's the sad truth: There is no magic way to reduce the dropout rate. It involves looking at the reasons students leave school, as well as the conditions in which they live. The single biggest correlate with low academic achievement (contrary to the film Waiting for Superman) is poverty. Children who grow up in poverty get less medical care. worse nutrition, less exposure to knowledge and vocabulary, and are more likely to be exposed to childhood diseases, violence, drugs, and abuse. They are more likely to have relatives who are incarcerated. They are more likely to live in economic insecurity, not knowing if there is enough money for a winter coat or food or housing. This affects their academic performance. They tend to have lower attendance and to be sick more than children whose parents are well-off.
"The United States today has a child poverty rate of over 20%, and it is rising. This is a national scandal. The film compares us to Finland, but doesn't mention that their child poverty rate is under 5%. Mr. Gates, why don't you address the root causes of low academic achievement, which is not 'bad teachers,' but poverty. It won't involve magic, but it would certainly require the best thinking that you can assemble. And if anyone can afford to do it, surely you can.
I don't mean to suggest that schools as they are now are just fine: They are not. Every school should have a rich and balanced curriculum; many don't. Every child should look forward to coming to school, for his or her favorite studies and activities, but those are the very studies and activities likely to lose out to endless test preparation. Schools need many things: Some need more resources and better conditions for teaching and learning; all need a stable, experienced staff. Teachers need opportunities for intellectual growth and colleagueship. Tests should be used diagnostically, to help students and teachers, not to allocate bonuses and punishments. Teachers, principals, administrators, parents, and local communities should collaborate to create caring communities, and that's happening in many places. I know that none of this is the "magic way" that you are looking for, Mr. Gates, but any educator will tell you that education is a slow, laborious process that requires good teachers, able leadership, willing students, a strong curriculum, and willing students. None of that happens magically."
I also asked Ravitch about her reaction to the strange comparison Alter made in calling her "the Whittaker Chambers of school reform." She wrote:
"I wondered if Alter knows much about history. Whittaker Chambers renounced Communism and embraced American patriotism. Was Alter suggesting that Bill Gates is the Alger Hiss of school reform? I thought it was a weird analogy.
-Patricia
By Valerie Strauss | Washington Post
November 30, 3010
In a paean to Bill Gates, Newsweek's Jonathan Alter calls Diane Ravitch the Microsoft founder's "chief adversary."
It's the world's richest (or second richest) man vs. an education historian and New York University research professor.
Gates, through his philanthropic foundation, has invested billions of dollars in education experiments and now has a pivotal role in reform efforts. Ravitch, the author of the bestselling The Death and Life of the Great American School System, has become the most vocal opponent of the Obama administration's education policy. She says Gates is backing the wrong initiatives and harming public schools.
In the Newsweek piece, Gates poses some questions aimed at Ravitch. I asked her to answer them. Below are the questions Gates asked, in bold, and the answers, in italics, that Ravitch provided in an email.
Gates: “Does she like the status quo?"
Ravitch: "No, I certainly don't like the status quo. I don't like the attacks on teachers, I don't like the attacks on the educators who work in our schools day in and day out, I don't like the phony solutions that are now put forward that won't improve our schools at all. I am not at all content with the quality of American education in general, and I have expressed my criticisms over many years, long before Bill Gates decided to make education his project. I think American children need not only testing in basic skills, but an education that includes the arts, literature, the sciences, history, geography, civics, foreign languages, economics, and physical education.
"I don't hear any of the corporate reformers expressing concern about the way standardized testing narrows the curriculum, the way it rewards convergent thinking and punishes divergent thinking, the way it stamps out creativity and originality. I don't hear any of them worried that a generation will grow up ignorant of history and the workings of government. I don't hear any of them putting up $100 million to make sure that every child has the chance to learn to play a musical instrument. All I hear from them is a demand for higher test scores and a demand to tie teachers' evaluations to those test scores. That is not going to improve education."
Gates: "Is she sticking up for decline?"
Ravitch: "Of course not! If we follow Bill Gates' demand to judge teachers by test scores, we will see stagnation, and he will blame it on teachers. We will see stagnation because a relentless focus on test scores in reading and math will inevitably narrow the curriculum only to what is tested. This is not good education.
"Last week, he said in a speech that teachers should not be paid more for experience and graduate degrees. I wonder why a man of his vast wealth spends so much time trying to figure out how to cut teachers' pay. Does he truly believe that our nation's schools will get better if we have teachers with less education and less experience? Who does he listen to? He needs to get himself a smarter set of advisers.
"Of course, we need to make teaching a profession that attracts and retains wonderful teachers, but the current anti-teacher rhetoric emanating from him and his confreres demonizes and demoralizes even the best teachers. I have gotten letters from many teachers who tell me that they have had it, they have never felt such disrespect; and I have also met young people who tell me that the current poisonous atmosphere has persuaded them not to become teachers. Why doesn't he make speeches thanking the people who work so hard day after day, educating our nation's children, often in difficult working conditions, most of whom earn less than he pays his secretaries at Microsoft?"
Gates: "Does she really like 400-page [union] contracts?"
Ravitch: "Does Bill Gates realize that every contract is signed by two parties: management and labor? Why does management agree to 400-page contracts? I don't know how many pages should be in a union contract, but I do believe that teachers should be evaluated by competent supervisors before they receive tenure (i.e., the right to due process).
"Once they have due process rights, they have the right to a hearing when someone wants to fire them. The reason for due process rights is that teachers in the past have been fired because of their race, their religion, their sexual orientation, or because they did not make a political contribution to the right campaign, or for some other reason not related to their competence.
"Gates probably doesn't know this, but 50% of all those who enter teaching leave within the first five years. Our biggest problem is not getting rid of deadbeats, but recruiting, retaining, and supporting teachers. We have to replace 300,000 teachers (of nearly 4 million) every single year. What are his ideas about how to do this?"
Gates: "Does she think all those ‘dropout factories’ are lonely?"
Ravitch: "This may come as a surprise to Bill Gates, but the schools he refers to as "dropout factories" enroll large numbers of high-need students. Many of them don't speak or read English; many of them enter high school three and four grade levels behind. He assumes the schools created the problems the students have; but in many cases, the schools he calls "dropout factories" are filled with heroic teachers and administrators trying their best to help kids who have massive learning problems.
"Unless someone from the district or the state actually goes into the schools and does a diagnostic evaluation, it is unfair to stigmatize the schools with the largest numbers of students who are English-language learners, special-education, and far behind in their learning. That's like saying that an oncologist is not as good a doctor as a dermatologist because so many of his patients die. Mr. Gates, first establish the risk factor before throwing around the labels and closing down schools."
Gates: "If there’s some other magic way to reduce the dropout rate, we’re all ears.”
Ravitch: "Here's the sad truth: There is no magic way to reduce the dropout rate. It involves looking at the reasons students leave school, as well as the conditions in which they live. The single biggest correlate with low academic achievement (contrary to the film Waiting for Superman) is poverty. Children who grow up in poverty get less medical care. worse nutrition, less exposure to knowledge and vocabulary, and are more likely to be exposed to childhood diseases, violence, drugs, and abuse. They are more likely to have relatives who are incarcerated. They are more likely to live in economic insecurity, not knowing if there is enough money for a winter coat or food or housing. This affects their academic performance. They tend to have lower attendance and to be sick more than children whose parents are well-off.
"The United States today has a child poverty rate of over 20%, and it is rising. This is a national scandal. The film compares us to Finland, but doesn't mention that their child poverty rate is under 5%. Mr. Gates, why don't you address the root causes of low academic achievement, which is not 'bad teachers,' but poverty. It won't involve magic, but it would certainly require the best thinking that you can assemble. And if anyone can afford to do it, surely you can.
I don't mean to suggest that schools as they are now are just fine: They are not. Every school should have a rich and balanced curriculum; many don't. Every child should look forward to coming to school, for his or her favorite studies and activities, but those are the very studies and activities likely to lose out to endless test preparation. Schools need many things: Some need more resources and better conditions for teaching and learning; all need a stable, experienced staff. Teachers need opportunities for intellectual growth and colleagueship. Tests should be used diagnostically, to help students and teachers, not to allocate bonuses and punishments. Teachers, principals, administrators, parents, and local communities should collaborate to create caring communities, and that's happening in many places. I know that none of this is the "magic way" that you are looking for, Mr. Gates, but any educator will tell you that education is a slow, laborious process that requires good teachers, able leadership, willing students, a strong curriculum, and willing students. None of that happens magically."
I also asked Ravitch about her reaction to the strange comparison Alter made in calling her "the Whittaker Chambers of school reform." She wrote:
"I wondered if Alter knows much about history. Whittaker Chambers renounced Communism and embraced American patriotism. Was Alter suggesting that Bill Gates is the Alger Hiss of school reform? I thought it was a weird analogy.
8th-grade retention rate is same as before law required passage of TAKS
Check out an earlier post to this blog titled "HISD considers easing the path to the next grade" on the same issue of retention and promotion policies.
-Patricia
By TERRENCE STUTZ / The Dallas Morning News
Saturday, November 27, 2010
AUSTIN – An education law that was designed to cause more eighth-graders who can't pass the TAKS test to be held back is actually having little impact on the percentage of students who are flunking.
Although the retention rate for eighth-graders jumped the first year they were required to pass the TAKS to be promoted to high school, the rate has now dropped back to what it was before the tough new standard was implemented to help stamp out social promotion in middle schools, new data from the Texas Education Agency shows.
The percentage of students retained for the 2009-10 school year – 1.5 percent of all eighth-graders – was identical to the figure from two years earlier when there was no state requirement for those students to pass the TAKS. In the first year of the testing mandate, nearly 2 percent – 6,323 pupils – were held back in the fall of 2008.
Nearly 40,000 eighth-graders failed the TAKS in 2009, but fewer than one in 10 was held back. Most of those promoted were beneficiaries of a waiver provision that allows a student to move to the next grade if the teacher, parents and principal agree that's best for the child.
State education officials had warned of a possible spike in the number of students flunking. But they said that millions of dollars in additional funding and required remedial classes targeting students who fail the TAKS eliminated the worst-case scenario for the new requirement, called the Student Success Initiative.
Other educators said the low retention rate also reflects how local schools are reluctant to keep low-performing eighth-graders in middle school for an extra year, partly because officials fear they might become more likely to drop out.
House Public Education Committee Chairman Rob Eissler, R-The Woodlands, said the requirement may have to be studied to see whether it is accomplishing what was intended – curtailing the number of students automatically promoted to the next grade regardless of what they achieve.
"It's important to see how effective this program is and to modify it if it's not," Eissler said. "You don't want to just flow students through the eighth grade and then make it worse when they get to ninth grade."
Last year, Texas spent about $44 million on extra classes, tutoring, summer school and teacher training as part of the Student Success Initiative program.
"The money may be better spent on other programs," Eissler said, noting that lawmakers will be looking at ways to improve middle school education during their next session that begins in January.
Dallas-area rates
Overall, 4 percent of all students in Texas schools – 177,701 pupils – were retained for the 2009-10 school year based on their grades and test scores in the spring of 2009. The highest retention rate in the elementary grades was 5.6 percent in the first grade, and the highest in secondary grades was 12.3 percent in the ninth grade.
Among Dallas-area school districts, overall retention rates ranged from half a percent in Highland Park to 6.2 percent in Duncanville. In the Dallas district, the rate across all grade levels was 5.1 percent, and for eighth-graders 2.5 percent.
Much of the attention in Texas has been on fifth- and eighth-graders because they are the only students required to pass the TAKS to gain promotion under a 1999 law passed by the Legislature to curtail the widespread practice of social promotion.
The law was originally proposed by former Gov. George W. Bush, who persuaded lawmakers to launch the Student Success Initiative program shortly before he became president. Third-graders also came under the original social promotion law, but the Legislature decided to drop them from the testing requirement last year.
For fifth-graders, the retention rate in 2009-10 was 1.7 percent. The vast majority of students who failed the math or reading sections of the TAKS – 87 percent – were promoted using the waiver provision or by giving them an alternative exam.
Dropout concerns
Debbie Ratcliffe of the TEA gave credit to tutoring and other remedial programs that are helping students who fail the Texas Assessment of Knowledge and Skills, but she acknowledged that some students are being promoted because of concerns that retention causes some students to drop out of school.
"When you have a student who is not successful at that age, he or she begins to give serious thought to dropping out, and one of the characteristics of a dropout is that they are over-age for their grade level after being retained," she said.
"A lot of schools will go ahead and promote those children [who fail the TAKS], especially if their grades have been fair to good. The idea is to keep them moving forward in the classes where they do well, while the schools try to improve their skills in classes where they have having problems," she said. "One of the strengths of the law is that it causes schools to focus on these struggling students and find ways to help them succeed."
But many educators still question the concept of requiring students to pass a standardized test to be promoted. And minority rights groups criticize the requirement because it has a disproportionate impact on minority students.
Retention rates for black and Hispanic students in Texas in 2009 were more than twice that for white students, as more than three-fourths of all students retained were black or Hispanic, according to TEA figures.
Proponents of the testing requirement say it is unsound to promote students who lack the necessary skills for the next grade level. Groups such as the National Center for Fair and Open Testing argue that retention – based on a test – hurts rather than helps the student.
"Students that have been retained once have a 40 percent higher chance of dropping out and a 60 percent higher chance if retained twice," the center said in a 2007 report. "This happens largely because being over-age in-grade damages students' self-confidence and leads them to disengage from school."
Check out the Dallas-Area Retention Rate Figures
-Patricia
By TERRENCE STUTZ / The Dallas Morning News
Saturday, November 27, 2010
AUSTIN – An education law that was designed to cause more eighth-graders who can't pass the TAKS test to be held back is actually having little impact on the percentage of students who are flunking.
Although the retention rate for eighth-graders jumped the first year they were required to pass the TAKS to be promoted to high school, the rate has now dropped back to what it was before the tough new standard was implemented to help stamp out social promotion in middle schools, new data from the Texas Education Agency shows.
The percentage of students retained for the 2009-10 school year – 1.5 percent of all eighth-graders – was identical to the figure from two years earlier when there was no state requirement for those students to pass the TAKS. In the first year of the testing mandate, nearly 2 percent – 6,323 pupils – were held back in the fall of 2008.
Nearly 40,000 eighth-graders failed the TAKS in 2009, but fewer than one in 10 was held back. Most of those promoted were beneficiaries of a waiver provision that allows a student to move to the next grade if the teacher, parents and principal agree that's best for the child.
State education officials had warned of a possible spike in the number of students flunking. But they said that millions of dollars in additional funding and required remedial classes targeting students who fail the TAKS eliminated the worst-case scenario for the new requirement, called the Student Success Initiative.
Other educators said the low retention rate also reflects how local schools are reluctant to keep low-performing eighth-graders in middle school for an extra year, partly because officials fear they might become more likely to drop out.
House Public Education Committee Chairman Rob Eissler, R-The Woodlands, said the requirement may have to be studied to see whether it is accomplishing what was intended – curtailing the number of students automatically promoted to the next grade regardless of what they achieve.
"It's important to see how effective this program is and to modify it if it's not," Eissler said. "You don't want to just flow students through the eighth grade and then make it worse when they get to ninth grade."
Last year, Texas spent about $44 million on extra classes, tutoring, summer school and teacher training as part of the Student Success Initiative program.
"The money may be better spent on other programs," Eissler said, noting that lawmakers will be looking at ways to improve middle school education during their next session that begins in January.
Dallas-area rates
Overall, 4 percent of all students in Texas schools – 177,701 pupils – were retained for the 2009-10 school year based on their grades and test scores in the spring of 2009. The highest retention rate in the elementary grades was 5.6 percent in the first grade, and the highest in secondary grades was 12.3 percent in the ninth grade.
Among Dallas-area school districts, overall retention rates ranged from half a percent in Highland Park to 6.2 percent in Duncanville. In the Dallas district, the rate across all grade levels was 5.1 percent, and for eighth-graders 2.5 percent.
Much of the attention in Texas has been on fifth- and eighth-graders because they are the only students required to pass the TAKS to gain promotion under a 1999 law passed by the Legislature to curtail the widespread practice of social promotion.
The law was originally proposed by former Gov. George W. Bush, who persuaded lawmakers to launch the Student Success Initiative program shortly before he became president. Third-graders also came under the original social promotion law, but the Legislature decided to drop them from the testing requirement last year.
For fifth-graders, the retention rate in 2009-10 was 1.7 percent. The vast majority of students who failed the math or reading sections of the TAKS – 87 percent – were promoted using the waiver provision or by giving them an alternative exam.
Dropout concerns
Debbie Ratcliffe of the TEA gave credit to tutoring and other remedial programs that are helping students who fail the Texas Assessment of Knowledge and Skills, but she acknowledged that some students are being promoted because of concerns that retention causes some students to drop out of school.
"When you have a student who is not successful at that age, he or she begins to give serious thought to dropping out, and one of the characteristics of a dropout is that they are over-age for their grade level after being retained," she said.
"A lot of schools will go ahead and promote those children [who fail the TAKS], especially if their grades have been fair to good. The idea is to keep them moving forward in the classes where they do well, while the schools try to improve their skills in classes where they have having problems," she said. "One of the strengths of the law is that it causes schools to focus on these struggling students and find ways to help them succeed."
But many educators still question the concept of requiring students to pass a standardized test to be promoted. And minority rights groups criticize the requirement because it has a disproportionate impact on minority students.
Retention rates for black and Hispanic students in Texas in 2009 were more than twice that for white students, as more than three-fourths of all students retained were black or Hispanic, according to TEA figures.
Proponents of the testing requirement say it is unsound to promote students who lack the necessary skills for the next grade level. Groups such as the National Center for Fair and Open Testing argue that retention – based on a test – hurts rather than helps the student.
"Students that have been retained once have a 40 percent higher chance of dropping out and a 60 percent higher chance if retained twice," the center said in a 2007 report. "This happens largely because being over-age in-grade damages students' self-confidence and leads them to disengage from school."
Check out the Dallas-Area Retention Rate Figures
Can a Publisher Run Schools? The Experts Debate
By ALISON LEIGH COWAN | NY Times
November 24, 2010
Michael R. Bloomberg, in his successful bid to become mayor, sold himself as an expert manager, a businessman who had made a fortune in private industry. He has now named Cathleen P. Black, a magazine executive, to be the next chancellor of New York City’s public schools. Why?
“Cathie Black is a superstar manager who has succeeded spectacularly in the private sector,” Mayor Bloomberg said this month. “She is brilliant, she is innovative, she is driven — and there is virtually nobody who knows more about the needs of the 21st-century work force for which we need to prepare our kids.”
Ms. Black also has virtually no professional experience in education — not at the head of a classroom, not in charge of a school district, certainly not responsible for 1.1 million children.
Is it, then, a sure thing that an expert manager in one field can succeed in another? The New York Times asked four prominent experts in business management what they made of the mayor’s choice, and his confidence in her transferable skills. As a group, they were not put off by the idea. They held up several examples of corporate chieftains who hopscotched successfully from industry to industry, people like Louis V. Gerstner Jr., who went from RJR Nabisco, a maker of food and cigarettes, to I.B.M, a maker of computer equipment.
But the management gurus stopped short of echoing Mr. Bloomberg’s view that Ms. Black was indeed the perfect choice.
•
Warren G. Bennis, a distinguished professor of business at the University of Southern California who has written about management for half a century.
Professor Bennis said he had concerns about the process by which Mr. Bloomberg made his pick, given how few people at the upper echelons of the school system appear to have been consulted before the public announcement. But he thought Ms. Black could still succeed.
“It was an unusual way of handling a major appointment,” said Professor Bennis, who has served as provost of the State University of New York in Buffalo and as president of the University of Cincinnati. “It does not mean she won’t be successful. But my point is, it’s not the way it usually is done and it will create some handicaps for her. The groups that she will be working most closely with have not been consulted about the appointment, and that, in my experience, is not an effective way to make a top appointment.”
Still, he was careful to say: “Based on what I know of her background and experience, chances are she has the stuff. She’ll get to know the territory. I think she has the emotional intelligence, and she’s had the habit of success in her career. That’s very important. But the process is highly unusual and is a handicap to anyone who takes the position under those conditions.”
•
Jeffrey A. Sonnenfeld, founder of the Chief Executive Leadership Institute at Yale University’s School of Management.
Professor Sonnenfeld said he appreciated the debate over Ms. Black’s prior credentials, but said it was not fair.
“I don’t know if it’s a gender issue,” he said. “That she’s not an educator is obvious. Skills and temperament, that should be the debate, not the résumé issues.”
From what he has seen of Ms. Black over the years, he said, she has done well managing across difficult constituencies and in times of scarce resources.
“She’s also had to deal with strong and difficult personalities. She’s the one who said quite proudly before other newspapers woke up to this, ‘We’re going to have women on the front page, not just in the style section, and we’re going to have African-Americans on our front, not ghettoized in the sports pages.’ It’s that same kind of inspirational entrepreneurial thinking that can make a difference here.
“The truth is, I’ve often been skeptical about general managers being interchangeable regardless of the industry, but it’s possible to overcome that. But it’s not beyond her skill set. She listens well and intelligently and does find common ground, but she will have to assiduously build the case for why she has something to add here and a different way to get the job done.”
•
Michael Useem, director of the Center for Leadership and Change Management at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania.
“Gifted managers from outside an industry,” Professor Useem said, “can indeed come in and perform extremely well if they bring an underlying skill set that the enterprise needs at the moment.”
As for Ms. Black, he said, her “history at Hearst was extraordinary in terms of making difficult decisions, building the enterprise up and keeping costs down.”
“She was put in charge of various magazines that by my recollection, under her leadership did indeed prosper,” he added. “Keep in mind, these were well within her comfort zone. So it was a natural fit. School superintendent is a big stretch, of course.”
He ticked off several wrinkles that might pose fresh challenges for her: “For starters, the number of stakeholders is much greater in public education than in the private sector: regulators, the city, the union, teachers, parents. So you’ve got to be a very fast study in who the major stakeholders are and what they want.
“She is walking into an extremely difficult crucible — maybe fishbowl is a better way to put it — where these forces that are putting demands on you and resistance against what you’d like to achieve are probably as big as she’s ever experienced in her career. In the private sector, investors want total shareholder return and employees want higher pay and pensions and customers want the cheapest products, and her track record in adjudicating between these extremely conflicting pressures is very good.”
•
Todd Jick, professor of management at Columbia Business School, who has written a book, “Managing Change.”
“The question always comes up,” Professor Jick said. “Are leaders who come from inside more likely to succeed and more effective at making change than people brought in from outside? That’s the question and there is usually a split opinion. Insiders better understand the culture. Outsiders are dispassionate, objective and less indebted to people.”
In general, he said, outsiders who have some familiarity with the industry they are entering fare better, but that is not a prerequisite.
“By choosing an outsider, the likelihood is there’s some expectation for new thinking and new approaches.”
Examining a two-page job description of the chancellor’s role that the school system has made available, Professor Jick said he was struck by the use of verbs like “ensure,” “control” and “promulgate.”
The verbs do not evoke big change. “It sounds,” he said, “more like continuous improvement. But she will have to determine if that is sufficient.”
“She needs to make her agenda and assessment process transparent to the organization. This can’t be enshrouded in secrecy as she takes on the job. She can set out to do a listening tour that can be made transparent. She can talk about how no major decisions will be made in the first three months. She can set out the main areas she wants to learn about and examine. She can set out her own ambitions and aspirations for the school system. She can take some of the mystery out of her being unknown to most people in the school system.”
November 24, 2010
Michael R. Bloomberg, in his successful bid to become mayor, sold himself as an expert manager, a businessman who had made a fortune in private industry. He has now named Cathleen P. Black, a magazine executive, to be the next chancellor of New York City’s public schools. Why?
“Cathie Black is a superstar manager who has succeeded spectacularly in the private sector,” Mayor Bloomberg said this month. “She is brilliant, she is innovative, she is driven — and there is virtually nobody who knows more about the needs of the 21st-century work force for which we need to prepare our kids.”
Ms. Black also has virtually no professional experience in education — not at the head of a classroom, not in charge of a school district, certainly not responsible for 1.1 million children.
Is it, then, a sure thing that an expert manager in one field can succeed in another? The New York Times asked four prominent experts in business management what they made of the mayor’s choice, and his confidence in her transferable skills. As a group, they were not put off by the idea. They held up several examples of corporate chieftains who hopscotched successfully from industry to industry, people like Louis V. Gerstner Jr., who went from RJR Nabisco, a maker of food and cigarettes, to I.B.M, a maker of computer equipment.
But the management gurus stopped short of echoing Mr. Bloomberg’s view that Ms. Black was indeed the perfect choice.
•
Warren G. Bennis, a distinguished professor of business at the University of Southern California who has written about management for half a century.
Professor Bennis said he had concerns about the process by which Mr. Bloomberg made his pick, given how few people at the upper echelons of the school system appear to have been consulted before the public announcement. But he thought Ms. Black could still succeed.
“It was an unusual way of handling a major appointment,” said Professor Bennis, who has served as provost of the State University of New York in Buffalo and as president of the University of Cincinnati. “It does not mean she won’t be successful. But my point is, it’s not the way it usually is done and it will create some handicaps for her. The groups that she will be working most closely with have not been consulted about the appointment, and that, in my experience, is not an effective way to make a top appointment.”
Still, he was careful to say: “Based on what I know of her background and experience, chances are she has the stuff. She’ll get to know the territory. I think she has the emotional intelligence, and she’s had the habit of success in her career. That’s very important. But the process is highly unusual and is a handicap to anyone who takes the position under those conditions.”
•
Jeffrey A. Sonnenfeld, founder of the Chief Executive Leadership Institute at Yale University’s School of Management.
Professor Sonnenfeld said he appreciated the debate over Ms. Black’s prior credentials, but said it was not fair.
“I don’t know if it’s a gender issue,” he said. “That she’s not an educator is obvious. Skills and temperament, that should be the debate, not the résumé issues.”
From what he has seen of Ms. Black over the years, he said, she has done well managing across difficult constituencies and in times of scarce resources.
“She’s also had to deal with strong and difficult personalities. She’s the one who said quite proudly before other newspapers woke up to this, ‘We’re going to have women on the front page, not just in the style section, and we’re going to have African-Americans on our front, not ghettoized in the sports pages.’ It’s that same kind of inspirational entrepreneurial thinking that can make a difference here.
“The truth is, I’ve often been skeptical about general managers being interchangeable regardless of the industry, but it’s possible to overcome that. But it’s not beyond her skill set. She listens well and intelligently and does find common ground, but she will have to assiduously build the case for why she has something to add here and a different way to get the job done.”
•
Michael Useem, director of the Center for Leadership and Change Management at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania.
“Gifted managers from outside an industry,” Professor Useem said, “can indeed come in and perform extremely well if they bring an underlying skill set that the enterprise needs at the moment.”
As for Ms. Black, he said, her “history at Hearst was extraordinary in terms of making difficult decisions, building the enterprise up and keeping costs down.”
“She was put in charge of various magazines that by my recollection, under her leadership did indeed prosper,” he added. “Keep in mind, these were well within her comfort zone. So it was a natural fit. School superintendent is a big stretch, of course.”
He ticked off several wrinkles that might pose fresh challenges for her: “For starters, the number of stakeholders is much greater in public education than in the private sector: regulators, the city, the union, teachers, parents. So you’ve got to be a very fast study in who the major stakeholders are and what they want.
“She is walking into an extremely difficult crucible — maybe fishbowl is a better way to put it — where these forces that are putting demands on you and resistance against what you’d like to achieve are probably as big as she’s ever experienced in her career. In the private sector, investors want total shareholder return and employees want higher pay and pensions and customers want the cheapest products, and her track record in adjudicating between these extremely conflicting pressures is very good.”
•
Todd Jick, professor of management at Columbia Business School, who has written a book, “Managing Change.”
“The question always comes up,” Professor Jick said. “Are leaders who come from inside more likely to succeed and more effective at making change than people brought in from outside? That’s the question and there is usually a split opinion. Insiders better understand the culture. Outsiders are dispassionate, objective and less indebted to people.”
In general, he said, outsiders who have some familiarity with the industry they are entering fare better, but that is not a prerequisite.
“By choosing an outsider, the likelihood is there’s some expectation for new thinking and new approaches.”
Examining a two-page job description of the chancellor’s role that the school system has made available, Professor Jick said he was struck by the use of verbs like “ensure,” “control” and “promulgate.”
The verbs do not evoke big change. “It sounds,” he said, “more like continuous improvement. But she will have to determine if that is sufficient.”
“She needs to make her agenda and assessment process transparent to the organization. This can’t be enshrouded in secrecy as she takes on the job. She can set out to do a listening tour that can be made transparent. She can talk about how no major decisions will be made in the first three months. She can set out the main areas she wants to learn about and examine. She can set out her own ambitions and aspirations for the school system. She can take some of the mystery out of her being unknown to most people in the school system.”
Class Sizes Show Signs of Growing
By Sarah D. Sparks | Ed Week
December 1, 2010
After dropping for decades, average class sizes in American schools may be growing again as schools cope with budget shortfalls.
Although some educators see the rising numbers as a worrisome trend, others see an opportunity for innovation.
“Yes, small class sizes do help, but it’s not the only way. What we need to focus on is how schools are becoming more flexible to meet the different needs of kids,” said Thomas Starratt, the principal of Boynton Middle School in New Ipswich, N.H., where the average class size at the school has crept up from 18 to 22 since the recent economic recession took its toll.
The national ratio of students to their teachers fell between 1980 and 2008, from 17.6 to 15.8 students per public school teacher, according to the National Center for Education Statistics. Because the statistics count special education and other specialized teachers who normally have much smaller classes than regular teachers do, the U.S. Department of Education estimates the current average class size at more like 25 students. That number is likely to rise, given states’ and districts’ financial constraints, Secretary of Education Arne Duncan said last month at a Washington forum.
Nearly all the states that have changed their class-size laws since 2008 have relaxed restrictions, in many cases specifically to ease districts’ budget burdens, according to the Denver-based Education Commission of the States.
“I anticipate that a number of districts may be asked next year to weigh targeted class-size increases against the loss of music, arts, and after-school programming,” Mr. Duncan said at the Washington-based American Enterprise Institute meeting. “It’s difficult to talk about class size, … but we owe it to the country’s children to have those conversations. … We support shifting away from class-size-based reduction that is not evidence-based.”
Read on...
December 1, 2010
After dropping for decades, average class sizes in American schools may be growing again as schools cope with budget shortfalls.
Although some educators see the rising numbers as a worrisome trend, others see an opportunity for innovation.
“Yes, small class sizes do help, but it’s not the only way. What we need to focus on is how schools are becoming more flexible to meet the different needs of kids,” said Thomas Starratt, the principal of Boynton Middle School in New Ipswich, N.H., where the average class size at the school has crept up from 18 to 22 since the recent economic recession took its toll.
The national ratio of students to their teachers fell between 1980 and 2008, from 17.6 to 15.8 students per public school teacher, according to the National Center for Education Statistics. Because the statistics count special education and other specialized teachers who normally have much smaller classes than regular teachers do, the U.S. Department of Education estimates the current average class size at more like 25 students. That number is likely to rise, given states’ and districts’ financial constraints, Secretary of Education Arne Duncan said last month at a Washington forum.
Nearly all the states that have changed their class-size laws since 2008 have relaxed restrictions, in many cases specifically to ease districts’ budget burdens, according to the Denver-based Education Commission of the States.
“I anticipate that a number of districts may be asked next year to weigh targeted class-size increases against the loss of music, arts, and after-school programming,” Mr. Duncan said at the Washington-based American Enterprise Institute meeting. “It’s difficult to talk about class size, … but we owe it to the country’s children to have those conversations. … We support shifting away from class-size-based reduction that is not evidence-based.”
Read on...
HISD considers easing the path to the next grade
What research shows is that the best thing you can do for a student is to promote them with resources. What we too often see is students retained with no resources, other than perhaps test-preparation.
Extending the multiple criteria assessment that was passed last session in House Bill 3 is one of the best things that HISD can do for its students. What's concerning though is that the policy to evaluate teachers based on student test scores is coming into opposition to this because (as the article shows) teachers are explicitly expressing their perception that promoted students are a liability and potential threat to their jobs.
It's clear that multiple criteria assessment for students is also necessary for teachers. This shouldn't be a problem since we now do it for schools under the new accountability system.
-Patricia
Draft proposal suggests reversing policy of promotion through tests, but Grier questions lowering standard
By ERICKA MELLON | HOUSTON CHRONICLE
Nov. 19, 2010
Houston school district officials are debating whether to make it easier for students to be promoted to the next grade level, reversing a decade-old policy touted as one of the toughest in Texas.
A draft proposal from Superintendent Terry Grier's administration, delivered to the school board Thursday, suggests that students should no longer be automatically retained if they fail the state TAKS test or the national Stanford exam.
The change would bring HISD in line with most other districts, which don't require the testing for promotion, but some board members — and Grier himself — questioned whether lowering the standards was the right move.
HISD implemented the stricter rules in the late 1990s under then-Superintendent Rod Paige in an effort to end social promotion - which is the practice of advancing children based on their age, not their academic ability.
"I'm not a fan of social promotion," Grier said. "I worry about the rigor that's in our district right now, and I certainly don't want it to be easier to promote students who don't have the skills they need to be successful at the next grade level."
But, Grier added, research shows that students who are at least two years older than their classmates - generally because they were retained - are more likely to drop out.
Grier said he plans to make a formal recommendation on new promotion standards in coming months, and it could differ from the proposal made by Chuck Morris, his chief academic officer, and Carla Stevens, the assistant superintendent of research.
Whatever HISD decides, fifth- and eighth-graders still would have to pass the Texas Assessment of Knowledge and Skills under state law.
Scores good, but . . .
Stevens said the tougher promotion standards have not pushed student performance above other districts that follow the state guidelines.
"If all of that had worked," she said, "then our test scores should have skyrocketed and our graduation rates should have skyrocketed. Our TAKS scores are good. Our SAT and ACT scores are good, but they're not really where we want them to be."
Former HISD board member Don McAdams, who supported the stricter promotion standards at the time, expressed concern.
"The whole point about promotion standards is to make sure that every kid meets the standard," said McAdams, who now works as a consultant to school boards. "If the promotion standard is what the teachers say, there is a tendency statistically for students to be promoted who aren't ready for the next grade level."
Paige, who left his job running HISD to become the U.S. secretary of education, said he didn't want to second-guess the current administration and board.
"In general, high standards are the way to go, but they have information that I don't have access to," he said.
Stevens suggested that holding students back a grade because they failed the TAKS or the Stanford in one subject doesn't always make sense.
"It may be one piece of something they're not getting, maybe a component of math," she said. "That doesn't mean they should repeat the entire grade and repeat science and social studies and everything. We want them to be receiving on-grade instruction and then receive interventions and assistance in areas where they are deficient."
Last year, nearly 26,000 students in HISD - about 13 percent of the district - didn't meet the promotion standards. But the majority didn't end up being retained because they passed their courses in summer school or a campus committee gave them a waiver.
Above-average retention
Still, HISD retains a higher percentage of students than the state average, according to data from the Texas Education Agency.
Gayle Fallon, the president of the Houston Federation of Teachers, said it wouldn't be fair to hold teachers accountable for the students' TAKS and Stanford scores if they are no longer part of the promotion requirements. The district gives bonuses to teachers based on student test scores and is working to incorporate them into teachers' formal job evaluations.
"You can't measure teachers on a standard that every child in the room knows doesn't count," she said.
Extending the multiple criteria assessment that was passed last session in House Bill 3 is one of the best things that HISD can do for its students. What's concerning though is that the policy to evaluate teachers based on student test scores is coming into opposition to this because (as the article shows) teachers are explicitly expressing their perception that promoted students are a liability and potential threat to their jobs.
It's clear that multiple criteria assessment for students is also necessary for teachers. This shouldn't be a problem since we now do it for schools under the new accountability system.
-Patricia
Draft proposal suggests reversing policy of promotion through tests, but Grier questions lowering standard
By ERICKA MELLON | HOUSTON CHRONICLE
Nov. 19, 2010
Houston school district officials are debating whether to make it easier for students to be promoted to the next grade level, reversing a decade-old policy touted as one of the toughest in Texas.
A draft proposal from Superintendent Terry Grier's administration, delivered to the school board Thursday, suggests that students should no longer be automatically retained if they fail the state TAKS test or the national Stanford exam.
The change would bring HISD in line with most other districts, which don't require the testing for promotion, but some board members — and Grier himself — questioned whether lowering the standards was the right move.
HISD implemented the stricter rules in the late 1990s under then-Superintendent Rod Paige in an effort to end social promotion - which is the practice of advancing children based on their age, not their academic ability.
"I'm not a fan of social promotion," Grier said. "I worry about the rigor that's in our district right now, and I certainly don't want it to be easier to promote students who don't have the skills they need to be successful at the next grade level."
But, Grier added, research shows that students who are at least two years older than their classmates - generally because they were retained - are more likely to drop out.
Grier said he plans to make a formal recommendation on new promotion standards in coming months, and it could differ from the proposal made by Chuck Morris, his chief academic officer, and Carla Stevens, the assistant superintendent of research.
Whatever HISD decides, fifth- and eighth-graders still would have to pass the Texas Assessment of Knowledge and Skills under state law.
Scores good, but . . .
Stevens said the tougher promotion standards have not pushed student performance above other districts that follow the state guidelines.
"If all of that had worked," she said, "then our test scores should have skyrocketed and our graduation rates should have skyrocketed. Our TAKS scores are good. Our SAT and ACT scores are good, but they're not really where we want them to be."
Former HISD board member Don McAdams, who supported the stricter promotion standards at the time, expressed concern.
"The whole point about promotion standards is to make sure that every kid meets the standard," said McAdams, who now works as a consultant to school boards. "If the promotion standard is what the teachers say, there is a tendency statistically for students to be promoted who aren't ready for the next grade level."
Paige, who left his job running HISD to become the U.S. secretary of education, said he didn't want to second-guess the current administration and board.
"In general, high standards are the way to go, but they have information that I don't have access to," he said.
Stevens suggested that holding students back a grade because they failed the TAKS or the Stanford in one subject doesn't always make sense.
"It may be one piece of something they're not getting, maybe a component of math," she said. "That doesn't mean they should repeat the entire grade and repeat science and social studies and everything. We want them to be receiving on-grade instruction and then receive interventions and assistance in areas where they are deficient."
Last year, nearly 26,000 students in HISD - about 13 percent of the district - didn't meet the promotion standards. But the majority didn't end up being retained because they passed their courses in summer school or a campus committee gave them a waiver.
Above-average retention
Still, HISD retains a higher percentage of students than the state average, according to data from the Texas Education Agency.
Gayle Fallon, the president of the Houston Federation of Teachers, said it wouldn't be fair to hold teachers accountable for the students' TAKS and Stanford scores if they are no longer part of the promotion requirements. The district gives bonuses to teachers based on student test scores and is working to incorporate them into teachers' formal job evaluations.
"You can't measure teachers on a standard that every child in the room knows doesn't count," she said.
As governor, Rick Scott likely to push big changes for schools
This is a pretty troubling statement: "...much of Scott's education agenda focuses on doing away with what he calls an "outdated system" that relies too heavily on traditional schools. Technological advances mean students don't need to be in school buildings to take classes..."
While this may be the solution for certain privileged students, this approach is very problematic for poor, minority first-generation college students because it removes opportunities to gain the number one factor that leads to further opportunity: social capital (i.e., PEOPLE)!
The notion of offering parent choice is completely void of responding to many parent's choice to have equitable schools in their communities. Not all families and communities advocate for individualistic approaches to education reform.
Love thy neighbor, right?
You can check out Bush's "Foundation for Florida's Future" campaign, which includes their legislative agenda.
-Patricia
Republicans tell critics to stop worrying. But they also promise major reforms, including merit pay.
By Leslie Postal and Dave Weber, Orlando Sentinel
November 13, 2010
Former Gov. Jeb Bush shook up Florida's education establishment and sparked major reforms during his eight years in office.
Now, Gov.-elect Rick Scott is ready to take the baton and finish what Bush began.
While Republicans are energized, critics are worried that Florida's new governor is preparing to dismantle public education.
"Everyone has deep, deep concerns," said Gay Parker head of the Seminole Education Association. "He has made his education platform fairly clear, and it is privatizing education."
But GOP lawmakers insist that public schools won't be going away, just changing.
They agree that Scott — a former health care executive who won his first bid for elected office — will try to expand the Bush era reforms. But they also point out that similar reforms, such as merit pay for teachers, are happening across the country and are now embraced in large part by President Barack Obama.
'Outdated system'
Bush, first elected in 1998, ushered in what he called an education "renaissance" in his first year in office, passing laws to grade public schools, expand standardized testing such as the FCAT and offer private-school tuition vouchers to students. I
Scott pledges to embrace those goals. And it's no coincidence that the Foundation for Florida's Future, a group created by Bush, is involved in developing Scott's education policies.
"We are very excited about the incoming team as far as the commitment to education reform," said Jaryn Emhof, spokesman for the foundation. "You have an entire focus on education right now."
Although Scott has not announced specific proposals for his first legislative session, he advocates "the right learning environment for each student, not the bureaucracy."
That means more choices for students outside traditional schools. It also means new ways to evaluate and pay teachers that are based on student success, not years on the job. And it means continued focus on school performance and accountability and a continued push to make sure students leave high school ready for college or work.
But much of Scott's education agenda focuses on doing away with what he calls an "outdated system" that relies too heavily on traditional schools. Technological advances mean students don't need to be in school buildings to take classes, he said, and parents should have more choices about how their children are educated.
To that end, lawmakers and educators expect a push to expand charter schools, online learning through virtual schools and taxpayer-financed tuition vouchers for private schools.
All of which will chip away at the traditional public schools, which could end up with less money, fewer students and reduced program offerings, critics say.
"I am concerned about the dismantling of public education brick by brick," said Sen. Frederica Wilson, D- Miami Gardens, a staunch opponent of the direction Republicans have been taking Florida's schools.
Merit pay revisited
Other Democrats and plenty of educators share Wilson's fears. They are particularly nervous about a new push toward a merit-pay law for teachers.
The Legislature passed a controversial merit-pay bill last spring that was derided by many teachers and then vetoed by Gov. Charlie Crist. Under that proposal, teacher pay and job-security were based in large part on student test scores.
A new version is expected to be debated when the next legislative session starts in March. Lawmakers feel confident they can get a law passed, but they also say they will look at tamer versions devised with more participation from educators.
"We found out in this past session that you can't push something through so quickly that has such an impact on the educational system and not bring everyone to the table and allow them a voice," said Sen. Mike Fasano, R-New Port Richey.
Fasano said in his district the bill passed by the Legislature was criticized even by members of his local Republican executive committee.
The Florida Education Association, which backed Scott's opponent, Alex Sink, welcomes a chance to help shape legislation, though the union isn't confident it will be included.
"If you are going to make a radical change in a profession, you certainly ought to talk to those in the profession and get their thoughts on it," said Mark Pudlow, the union's spokesman.
Central Florida school board members hope merit pay isn't taken up in Scott's first year in office, though they concede a delay isn't likely. They want a chance to work out their federal Race to the Top grant program proposals, which also includes merit-pay provisions, before details are muddied by a new state law.
"Race to the Top needs to be looked at as R & D, research and development," said Candace Lankford, chairman of the Volusia County School Board and the president of the Florida School Boards Association. "We need to be allowed to take the time to work through these complicated issues and not do it in one legislative session."
Despite campaign promises, Scott's education agenda could be slowed by Florida's still sputtering economy that next year is expected to mean a state budget shortfall of $2.5 billion or more. And although education is important, Scott has said job creation is his number one goal.
"We'll try to live within our means and at the same time try to assure education is given a top priority," said Senator–elect David Simmons, a Longwood Republican who previously served in the House of Representatives.
Scott wants to change how schools are funded, reducing school property taxes by up to 19 percent and filling the gap with other state funds.
Sen. Evelyn Lynn, R-Ormond Beach, a former Volusia school administrator heavily involved in education issues during her stint in the Legislature, said that plan worries her.
"Certainly we want to reduce taxes, but we don't want to hurt education," Lynn said, adding that Scott may have to temper some of his camping promises once in office.
"He may change his thinking on some things when he sees how the process works."
Leslie Postal can be reached at lpostal@orlandosentinel.com or 407-420-5273. Dave Weber can be reached at dweber@orlandosentinel.com or 407-883-7885.
While this may be the solution for certain privileged students, this approach is very problematic for poor, minority first-generation college students because it removes opportunities to gain the number one factor that leads to further opportunity: social capital (i.e., PEOPLE)!
The notion of offering parent choice is completely void of responding to many parent's choice to have equitable schools in their communities. Not all families and communities advocate for individualistic approaches to education reform.
Love thy neighbor, right?
You can check out Bush's "Foundation for Florida's Future" campaign, which includes their legislative agenda.
-Patricia
Republicans tell critics to stop worrying. But they also promise major reforms, including merit pay.
By Leslie Postal and Dave Weber, Orlando Sentinel
November 13, 2010
Former Gov. Jeb Bush shook up Florida's education establishment and sparked major reforms during his eight years in office.
Now, Gov.-elect Rick Scott is ready to take the baton and finish what Bush began.
While Republicans are energized, critics are worried that Florida's new governor is preparing to dismantle public education.
"Everyone has deep, deep concerns," said Gay Parker head of the Seminole Education Association. "He has made his education platform fairly clear, and it is privatizing education."
But GOP lawmakers insist that public schools won't be going away, just changing.
They agree that Scott — a former health care executive who won his first bid for elected office — will try to expand the Bush era reforms. But they also point out that similar reforms, such as merit pay for teachers, are happening across the country and are now embraced in large part by President Barack Obama.
'Outdated system'
Bush, first elected in 1998, ushered in what he called an education "renaissance" in his first year in office, passing laws to grade public schools, expand standardized testing such as the FCAT and offer private-school tuition vouchers to students. I
Scott pledges to embrace those goals. And it's no coincidence that the Foundation for Florida's Future, a group created by Bush, is involved in developing Scott's education policies.
"We are very excited about the incoming team as far as the commitment to education reform," said Jaryn Emhof, spokesman for the foundation. "You have an entire focus on education right now."
Although Scott has not announced specific proposals for his first legislative session, he advocates "the right learning environment for each student, not the bureaucracy."
That means more choices for students outside traditional schools. It also means new ways to evaluate and pay teachers that are based on student success, not years on the job. And it means continued focus on school performance and accountability and a continued push to make sure students leave high school ready for college or work.
But much of Scott's education agenda focuses on doing away with what he calls an "outdated system" that relies too heavily on traditional schools. Technological advances mean students don't need to be in school buildings to take classes, he said, and parents should have more choices about how their children are educated.
To that end, lawmakers and educators expect a push to expand charter schools, online learning through virtual schools and taxpayer-financed tuition vouchers for private schools.
All of which will chip away at the traditional public schools, which could end up with less money, fewer students and reduced program offerings, critics say.
"I am concerned about the dismantling of public education brick by brick," said Sen. Frederica Wilson, D- Miami Gardens, a staunch opponent of the direction Republicans have been taking Florida's schools.
Merit pay revisited
Other Democrats and plenty of educators share Wilson's fears. They are particularly nervous about a new push toward a merit-pay law for teachers.
The Legislature passed a controversial merit-pay bill last spring that was derided by many teachers and then vetoed by Gov. Charlie Crist. Under that proposal, teacher pay and job-security were based in large part on student test scores.
A new version is expected to be debated when the next legislative session starts in March. Lawmakers feel confident they can get a law passed, but they also say they will look at tamer versions devised with more participation from educators.
"We found out in this past session that you can't push something through so quickly that has such an impact on the educational system and not bring everyone to the table and allow them a voice," said Sen. Mike Fasano, R-New Port Richey.
Fasano said in his district the bill passed by the Legislature was criticized even by members of his local Republican executive committee.
The Florida Education Association, which backed Scott's opponent, Alex Sink, welcomes a chance to help shape legislation, though the union isn't confident it will be included.
"If you are going to make a radical change in a profession, you certainly ought to talk to those in the profession and get their thoughts on it," said Mark Pudlow, the union's spokesman.
Central Florida school board members hope merit pay isn't taken up in Scott's first year in office, though they concede a delay isn't likely. They want a chance to work out their federal Race to the Top grant program proposals, which also includes merit-pay provisions, before details are muddied by a new state law.
"Race to the Top needs to be looked at as R & D, research and development," said Candace Lankford, chairman of the Volusia County School Board and the president of the Florida School Boards Association. "We need to be allowed to take the time to work through these complicated issues and not do it in one legislative session."
Despite campaign promises, Scott's education agenda could be slowed by Florida's still sputtering economy that next year is expected to mean a state budget shortfall of $2.5 billion or more. And although education is important, Scott has said job creation is his number one goal.
"We'll try to live within our means and at the same time try to assure education is given a top priority," said Senator–elect David Simmons, a Longwood Republican who previously served in the House of Representatives.
Scott wants to change how schools are funded, reducing school property taxes by up to 19 percent and filling the gap with other state funds.
Sen. Evelyn Lynn, R-Ormond Beach, a former Volusia school administrator heavily involved in education issues during her stint in the Legislature, said that plan worries her.
"Certainly we want to reduce taxes, but we don't want to hurt education," Lynn said, adding that Scott may have to temper some of his camping promises once in office.
"He may change his thinking on some things when he sees how the process works."
Leslie Postal can be reached at lpostal@orlandosentinel.com or 407-420-5273. Dave Weber can be reached at dweber@orlandosentinel.com or 407-883-7885.
For L.A., possible lessons in D.C.'s controversial teacher evaluation system
In school districts including Washington's, New York's and Houston's, officials are using a method called 'value-added' to bring a measure of objectivity to the process. But virtually no one endorses it as the sole gauge of an instructor.
By Teresa Watanabe, Los Angeles Times
November 14, 2010
Reporting from Washington —
Roxanne Brummell has thrived in what many consider the toughest new testing ground for teachers in the nation.
The fifth-grade teacher in Washington, D.C., earned a "highly effective" rating under the district's controversial system that rewards — and sometimes fires — teachers based in part on their students' progress on standardized tests. In just seven months, she helped boost her students' reading scores by an average of 24%.
Brummell's reward: a $20,000 bonus and recognition at district award ceremonies.
Brummell, a Guyana native, likes the acknowledgment and the data-driven feedback. But she frets that the district is relying too heavily on standardized tests and isn't doing enough to help teachers who are struggling.
As for the bonus, she almost didn't accept it. One condition was that she give up various rights if laid off in a budget crunch.
"I love it, but it has its flaws," she said of the district's evaluation system, as she recovered from a busy day of explaining improper fractions.
Her complex feelings reflect the nationwide ambivalence toward the growing movement to hold teachers more accountable for what their students actually learn. Until now, evaluations typically have involved a school administrator making a quick, pre-announced visit to a teacher's classroom. But in major districts including Washington's, New York's and Houston's — and perhaps soon, Los Angeles' — officials are using a method called "value-added" to bring a measure of objectivity to the process.
Value-added assesses a teacher's effectiveness at raising students' performance on standardized tests compared with how they did in previous years. Virtually no one endorses the method as the sole measure of an instructor.
For states to qualify for certain federal grants, the Obama administration is requiring that they link teacher evaluations to student performance. At least 27 states have passed or are considering legislation to meet that requirement.
"There is an absolute laser focus on teacher evaluation in this country now — I've never seen anything like it," said Rob Weil of the American Federation of Teachers, which represents 2,200 school districts.
But the trend has stirred opposition. Some educational experts and union leaders say that value-added is not reliable enough for high-stakes decisions on firing, tenure or pay; that it is a narrow gauge of teaching; and that it pressures instructors to "teach to the test."
Supporters say it is one important tool to be used in combination with others, perhaps including end-of-course tests or reviews of student work. How much weight to give it, what stakes to attach, how many years of data to consider and even how to calculate the scores are not settled questions, leaving much room for discussion and debate.
At the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, which is studying many of these questions, senior program officer Steve Cantrell said concerns that the method may inaccurately assess some teachers must be balanced against the likelihood that it will improve the chances for children to have an effective instructor. "If you shift the perspective from what is best for adults to what is best for students, then it's super clear that value-added can improve the system over time," he said.
In Los Angeles, the teachers union has adamantly opposed using value-added in teacher evaluations — but a school district panel named by the superintendent has recommended that it go forward. The debate erupted in August, when The Times published a database of the value-added scores of about 6,000 elementary school teachers based on seven years of testing data, prompting union protests and vows by the district to raise the issue during contract negotiations. It was the first time in the nation such information had been made public.
In New York, the city school district's recent announcement that it would release value-added scores to the media drew an immediate court challenge from the teachers union. Underscoring warring perspectives within the district, a Brooklyn public school on Friday sent a notice to parents urging them to protest the release, saying: "OUR STUDENTS AND TEACHERS ARE NOT TEST SCORES!!"
Perhaps nowhere has the approach drawn more attention — and outrage — than in Washington, which has probably taken value-added further than any other district in the country.
Former Chancellor Michelle Rhee said she came to the nation's capital three years ago knowing her changes would wreak political havoc. But she said she was willing to take on a system that was giving passing evaluations to 95% of teachers even as only 8% of students were performing at grade level in mathematics.
"How can you have a system where you're that misaligned?" Rhee asked in a recent interview. "For me, it's always about putting this in the lens of children and families ... as opposed to making this a fight between groups of adults."
She rolled out value-added analysis last year for a group of teachers in fourth through eighth grades. This year, administrators fired 75 of those teachers with poor appraisals and gave more than 700 others rated minimally effective one year to improve. The district also rewarded more than 630 "highly effective" educators with bonuses ranging from $3,000 to $25,000.
Value-added scores counted for half of a teacher's evaluation — on the high end of what most other districts have endorsed — and judgments were made on a year's worth of data, which some experts say is questionable. The rest of the review was based on five classroom observations and other measures.
Although Rhee was often favorably profiled in the national media as an outspoken reformer, her aggressive approach became an issue in the campaign for mayor, and she resigned after her ally, Mayor Adrian Fenty, was defeated in the Democratic primary in September. Whether Washington retains the system now that Fenty and Rhee are out is an open question.
"Value-added is not ready for prime time," said George Parker, president of the Washington Teachers Union.
He said the system should have been tried first in a small number of schools. He also said Rhee did not adequately involve instructors in the planning after Congress gave administrators the right to impose it without collective bargaining. (Rhee and others said they involved more than 1,000 teachers through focus groups and feedback sessions.)
Vincent Gray, Washington's mayor-elect who defeated Fenty with strong backing from teachers, said he supports value-added but wanted to review the weight the test data have and "give people a chance to improve and rebut their evaluations."
Among teachers, the verdict was mixed.
Eric Bethel, who taught fifth-grade math and social studies until this year, when the district appointed him as a master educator to evaluate teachers, said he was initially wary. "I knew there was potential job loss if you were ineffective," he said.
But Bethel said he saw immediate advantages. By focusing on the individual progress of students year after year, value-added put aside factors that contribute to achievement disparities, such as family income, educational levels and English fluency, he said. His students, many of them poor children of immigrants, could not have matched the test scores of more privileged children but clearly improved their performance over last year, earning him a high value-added rating.
Bethel said he also liked another aspect of the new evaluation system: Teachers knew what was expected of them. A "blueprint" for teaching laid out specific teaching standards they would be judged on, such as providing positive reinforcement to students and using various instructional methods to accommodate different learning styles.
And then there were the rewards. Bethel received a $20,000 bonus — a "game changer" that will provide the down payment for a home. He also won professional opportunities, such as his master educator job and a district fellowship to help shape teaching strategies.
"I don't think teachers need to be fearful about value-added," Bethel said. "They'll get more credit for what they're doing."
Brummell, however, remains perturbed that the fired teachers were not given enough help to improve. One was a friend.
"I believe in second chances," she said, noting that Rhee herself recounts her first year of teaching as a disaster.
She also said she wished other measures could be used besides standardized tests. Some of her students are weak test takers who break down in tears on testing day, she said.
As Los Angeles moves to revamp its own teacher evaluation system, Rhee offered two lessons gleaned from Washington's experience. First, effectively explain what value-added is to alleviate fears about it. Second, involve teachers early in the process.
On that point, union leaders agree. "Teachers must be included in the reform process to bring about lasting change. I have never seen successful reform imposed from the top down, with a my-way-or-the-highway approach," said Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers.
Jason Kamras, a chief architect of the D.C. system, urged Los Angeles to "stick to your guns" in crafting a rigorous system in the face of political pressure.
"Kids' lives are at stake," he said.
By Teresa Watanabe, Los Angeles Times
November 14, 2010
Reporting from Washington —
Roxanne Brummell has thrived in what many consider the toughest new testing ground for teachers in the nation.
The fifth-grade teacher in Washington, D.C., earned a "highly effective" rating under the district's controversial system that rewards — and sometimes fires — teachers based in part on their students' progress on standardized tests. In just seven months, she helped boost her students' reading scores by an average of 24%.
Brummell's reward: a $20,000 bonus and recognition at district award ceremonies.
Brummell, a Guyana native, likes the acknowledgment and the data-driven feedback. But she frets that the district is relying too heavily on standardized tests and isn't doing enough to help teachers who are struggling.
As for the bonus, she almost didn't accept it. One condition was that she give up various rights if laid off in a budget crunch.
"I love it, but it has its flaws," she said of the district's evaluation system, as she recovered from a busy day of explaining improper fractions.
Her complex feelings reflect the nationwide ambivalence toward the growing movement to hold teachers more accountable for what their students actually learn. Until now, evaluations typically have involved a school administrator making a quick, pre-announced visit to a teacher's classroom. But in major districts including Washington's, New York's and Houston's — and perhaps soon, Los Angeles' — officials are using a method called "value-added" to bring a measure of objectivity to the process.
Value-added assesses a teacher's effectiveness at raising students' performance on standardized tests compared with how they did in previous years. Virtually no one endorses the method as the sole measure of an instructor.
For states to qualify for certain federal grants, the Obama administration is requiring that they link teacher evaluations to student performance. At least 27 states have passed or are considering legislation to meet that requirement.
"There is an absolute laser focus on teacher evaluation in this country now — I've never seen anything like it," said Rob Weil of the American Federation of Teachers, which represents 2,200 school districts.
But the trend has stirred opposition. Some educational experts and union leaders say that value-added is not reliable enough for high-stakes decisions on firing, tenure or pay; that it is a narrow gauge of teaching; and that it pressures instructors to "teach to the test."
Supporters say it is one important tool to be used in combination with others, perhaps including end-of-course tests or reviews of student work. How much weight to give it, what stakes to attach, how many years of data to consider and even how to calculate the scores are not settled questions, leaving much room for discussion and debate.
At the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, which is studying many of these questions, senior program officer Steve Cantrell said concerns that the method may inaccurately assess some teachers must be balanced against the likelihood that it will improve the chances for children to have an effective instructor. "If you shift the perspective from what is best for adults to what is best for students, then it's super clear that value-added can improve the system over time," he said.
In Los Angeles, the teachers union has adamantly opposed using value-added in teacher evaluations — but a school district panel named by the superintendent has recommended that it go forward. The debate erupted in August, when The Times published a database of the value-added scores of about 6,000 elementary school teachers based on seven years of testing data, prompting union protests and vows by the district to raise the issue during contract negotiations. It was the first time in the nation such information had been made public.
In New York, the city school district's recent announcement that it would release value-added scores to the media drew an immediate court challenge from the teachers union. Underscoring warring perspectives within the district, a Brooklyn public school on Friday sent a notice to parents urging them to protest the release, saying: "OUR STUDENTS AND TEACHERS ARE NOT TEST SCORES!!"
Perhaps nowhere has the approach drawn more attention — and outrage — than in Washington, which has probably taken value-added further than any other district in the country.
Former Chancellor Michelle Rhee said she came to the nation's capital three years ago knowing her changes would wreak political havoc. But she said she was willing to take on a system that was giving passing evaluations to 95% of teachers even as only 8% of students were performing at grade level in mathematics.
"How can you have a system where you're that misaligned?" Rhee asked in a recent interview. "For me, it's always about putting this in the lens of children and families ... as opposed to making this a fight between groups of adults."
She rolled out value-added analysis last year for a group of teachers in fourth through eighth grades. This year, administrators fired 75 of those teachers with poor appraisals and gave more than 700 others rated minimally effective one year to improve. The district also rewarded more than 630 "highly effective" educators with bonuses ranging from $3,000 to $25,000.
Value-added scores counted for half of a teacher's evaluation — on the high end of what most other districts have endorsed — and judgments were made on a year's worth of data, which some experts say is questionable. The rest of the review was based on five classroom observations and other measures.
Although Rhee was often favorably profiled in the national media as an outspoken reformer, her aggressive approach became an issue in the campaign for mayor, and she resigned after her ally, Mayor Adrian Fenty, was defeated in the Democratic primary in September. Whether Washington retains the system now that Fenty and Rhee are out is an open question.
"Value-added is not ready for prime time," said George Parker, president of the Washington Teachers Union.
He said the system should have been tried first in a small number of schools. He also said Rhee did not adequately involve instructors in the planning after Congress gave administrators the right to impose it without collective bargaining. (Rhee and others said they involved more than 1,000 teachers through focus groups and feedback sessions.)
Vincent Gray, Washington's mayor-elect who defeated Fenty with strong backing from teachers, said he supports value-added but wanted to review the weight the test data have and "give people a chance to improve and rebut their evaluations."
Among teachers, the verdict was mixed.
Eric Bethel, who taught fifth-grade math and social studies until this year, when the district appointed him as a master educator to evaluate teachers, said he was initially wary. "I knew there was potential job loss if you were ineffective," he said.
But Bethel said he saw immediate advantages. By focusing on the individual progress of students year after year, value-added put aside factors that contribute to achievement disparities, such as family income, educational levels and English fluency, he said. His students, many of them poor children of immigrants, could not have matched the test scores of more privileged children but clearly improved their performance over last year, earning him a high value-added rating.
Bethel said he also liked another aspect of the new evaluation system: Teachers knew what was expected of them. A "blueprint" for teaching laid out specific teaching standards they would be judged on, such as providing positive reinforcement to students and using various instructional methods to accommodate different learning styles.
And then there were the rewards. Bethel received a $20,000 bonus — a "game changer" that will provide the down payment for a home. He also won professional opportunities, such as his master educator job and a district fellowship to help shape teaching strategies.
"I don't think teachers need to be fearful about value-added," Bethel said. "They'll get more credit for what they're doing."
Brummell, however, remains perturbed that the fired teachers were not given enough help to improve. One was a friend.
"I believe in second chances," she said, noting that Rhee herself recounts her first year of teaching as a disaster.
She also said she wished other measures could be used besides standardized tests. Some of her students are weak test takers who break down in tears on testing day, she said.
As Los Angeles moves to revamp its own teacher evaluation system, Rhee offered two lessons gleaned from Washington's experience. First, effectively explain what value-added is to alleviate fears about it. Second, involve teachers early in the process.
On that point, union leaders agree. "Teachers must be included in the reform process to bring about lasting change. I have never seen successful reform imposed from the top down, with a my-way-or-the-highway approach," said Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers.
Jason Kamras, a chief architect of the D.C. system, urged Los Angeles to "stick to your guns" in crafting a rigorous system in the face of political pressure.
"Kids' lives are at stake," he said.
Grading teachers is no easy assignment
School districts wrestle with effective ways to judge instructors' performance
By Erin Richards of the Journal Sentinel
Nov. 14, 2010
Norma Mortimer moves about her high school classroom with confidence born of 41 years' experience.
Directions to students are clear; she knows when to push for an answer and when to let a question hang.
The English teacher formerly taught music, composed and arranged marching band music, and performed at the Bristol Renaissance Faire.
"It all adds into what I bring to the classroom," she said.
Once every three years as a tenured teacher, performance evaluations provide her with feedback, something she looks forward to even though she knows she's not slipping.
Still, evaluations never flag what she considers her weakest area - teaching effectively when the class is in small groups. Last year, she never received her post-evaluation conference with the principal.
In the growing national debate on how to raise the quality of public school teaching in America, performance evaluations have become both a lightning rod and a sticking point.
Most evaluation systems in public schools provide little information to properly assess teachers' strengths and weaknesses. And because teachers are rarely dismissed over their performance, formal evaluations seldom carry much weight.
In the push to create more great teachers and raise student achievement, President Barack Obama's administration has championed stronger performance evaluations, tied to student test scores, and bonus pay systems to better place, support and reward excellent educators. The administration also wants school districts to justify the dismissal of those who are ineffective.
There's wide agreement that current evaluations don't accomplish much; there's little agreement between reformers and unions on how best to improve them.
In Milwaukee Public Schools, veteran teachers complain about being asked to sign off on evaluations when their principals never observed them. Principals can be overwhelmed with so many teachers to evaluate, and nonacademic matters to worry about, that it's difficult to do fair and complete analyses.
Mortimer, who teaches at Samuel Morse-John Marshall School for the Gifted and Talented, was rated exemplary in her last performance evaluation. MPS rates teachers as either unsatisfactory, in need of improvement, satisfactory or exemplary. Last year, more than 95% of 2,424 teachers evaluated received favorable reviews.
The number rated unsatisfactory in the state's lowest performing district: five.
A national discussion
Across the country, leaders in both the education and political arenas are increasingly focused on strengthening teacher evaluations by basing them in part on student test scores. Critics argue that tests - even ones that measure growth from the beginning to the end of the year - don't reveal everything about teacher quality.
"We're seeing different models now (for teacher evaluations) partly because we know that evaluations are generally bad and that teaching really matters," said Elena Silva, research director at Education Sector, a nonpartisan Washington, D.C., education policy think tank.
The urgency for change is rooted in research. Studies show the most important school-based factor determining student success is the quality of the child's teacher, and that low-performing students benefit from highly effective teachers even more.
Eric Hanushek, a Stanford University education and economics researcher, has popularized studying teacher effectiveness by looking at how much academic growth teachers' students make over the course of a year. As early as 1992, based on results of his research in Gary Ind., Hanushek reported "the difference in student performance in a single academic year from having a good as opposed to a bad teacher can be more than one full year of standardized achievement."
Critics of using test scores to evaluate teachers, or value-added measurements that isolate the impact of a teacher's effect on student learning, often worry that too much emphasis on scores may overlook the intangibles that may contribute to good teaching, such as motivation and presentation skills. Also, test scores may not pick up other nuances of the school environment.
Still, student achievement data is the best information researchers have to measure gains in performance, the ultimate goal.
Sabrina Laine, director of the National Comprehensive Center for Teacher Quality, said no state has yet perfected a model evaluation system. But efforts are under way, including:
• Tennessee and Delaware, which were rewarded in the first round of the Obama administration's $4 billion Race to the Top competition for offering teacher merit pay and factoring student test scores into evaluations. The competition offered millions of dollars in federal schools money to states with the best plans to improve education.
• Florida, Georgia, Hawaii, Maryland, Massachusetts, New York, North Carolina, Ohio, Rhode Island and Washington, D.C. - the winners in the second round of Race to the Top - all have instituted rewards for effective teachers and principals.
• Louisiana, where a new law requires half of a teacher's evaluation by 2012-'13 to be based on growth in student test scores.
• Colorado, which passed legislation this year that ties teacher and principal evaluations to student growth and makes it tougher for teachers to get tenure.
• Thirteen states with districts implementing TAP: The System for Teacher and Student Advancement, a model that defines and measures effective teaching, links evaluations to professional development, and allows teachers to earn bonuses based on growth in student test scores.
State's approach
Wisconsin, for the most part, has been on the sidelines of the reform movement - and it has cost the state.
During the first phase of Race to the Top, U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan singled out as "ridiculous" a provision in Wisconsin state law that banned the use of student assessment data in teacher performance evaluations. According to the rules, states with such a ban would be disqualified from the competition.
Wisconsin lawmakers subsequently altered the language and dropped the firewall. But the new language specified that any changes to teacher evaluation plans would need to be bargained with the teachers unions.
Rep. Brett Davis (R-Oregon) said the watered-down legislation eliminated one firewall and added 426 more - one for every district in Wisconsin that would have to negotiate changes to evaluations.
Still, Deborah Mahaffey, assistant state superintendent for academic excellence, says the prospects for change in Wisconsin are good.
"We all understand that the move is toward teacher effectiveness, and that there will be some measure of student achievement in determining teacher effectiveness," she said.
Obstacles to fair systems
Creating more fair, comprehensive and useful evaluation systems faces roadblocks from the start.
First, involved parties have to agree on a definition of quality teaching. Then they have to decide what factors to use to measure it.
If student achievement is to be a factor in the evaluation, what tests or student work should be considered? How much of that should count toward the total evaluation score?
"Test scores can only be used for certain teachers because not all teachers teach in tested subjects and grades," Silva said. "You get into this debate where people say, let's use test scores for 42% of the evaluation, or 62% of the evaluation. There's no real rationale for any particular percentage, whether it's half, 51% or 49%."
In Wisconsin, state law requires districts to conduct a personnel evaluation in the first year of employment and at least one every three years after that, Mahaffey said. Individual districts are left to determine the characteristics of their formal teacher evaluations.
Most are based primarily on principal observations, and practices vary.
Some go further than others. In the Cedarburg School District, principals submit three different assessments: a standards rating for each teacher based on how well he or she implements the state's 10 teaching standards, another score based on education consultant Charlotte Danielson's Framework for Teaching and a narrative on the teacher's performance.
Superintendent Daryl Herrick and his administrative staff read all the evaluations and require principals to defend the rankings. Principals are evaluated on how well they evaluate their teachers.
"The process serves as a clearinghouse for performance concerns," Herrick said. "Mediocrity has become a tough challenge in schools."
Herrick said he doesn't have scientific proof that changes to the evaluation system have caused better academic results, but achievement in the district based on ACT and SAT scores, as well as the annual state tests and district assessments, has been at its highest in recent years.
"That was about when we started to focus much more on teacher quality," Herrick said.
In the Hamilton School District, teachers may undertake a voluntary research project as part of their evaluation. The project allows them to experiment with different teaching techniques in class, under the guidance of their principal, and then reflect on their research as an addendum to their evaluation.
In MPS, principals use a formal evaluation tool that outlines 11 teacher expectations, such as knowledge, classroom management and attitude. MPS is working with the Milwaukee Teachers' Education Association to revise that tool and provide better information about teacher quality, Human Resources Director Karen Jackson said.
"The motivation up to this point in MPS has not been about how we have a professional dialogue about how to improve teaching and learning," said Dan Lotesto, a teacher at Rufus King High School who has been on both the teaching and administrative side of the evaluation process.
Sid Hatch, deputy executive director of the MTEA, said the union was obligated to work with the district and create a new evaluation system for schools receiving federal grant money for improvements. But the evaluation committee realized the system should be taken districtwide to be effective, he said.
Hatch said the evaluation committee is "kicking around" the idea of using growth in student test scores as a component of the evaluation.
"There are some things you can't measure in teaching," Hatch said. "Student performance cannot be the sole factor in teacher evaluations or I'm not interested in putting my name on it."
For Mortimer, who has taught in four districts in three states, the issues surrounding teacher quality and performance haven't changed much over the years. If she could wave a magic wand, the evaluation process would be conducted by principals who spend lots of time in classrooms, have experience as high-quality teachers themselves and offer ongoing, constructive feedback.
"I feel passionately that our kids need teachers who want to be in the classroom, who want to be with kids and all their issues, foibles and delights," she said.
But will desire still be a measure of teacher effectiveness in the new world of education reform? Some teachers are great with kids but can't move the needle on test scores. Others may be unimaginative but adept at raising proficiency levels.
Silva, from Education Sector, said she believes stronger evaluation systems will do a lot to better distinguish between educators, and to improve the quality of teaching.
"Principals will tell you, 'I know the good teachers,' " Silva said. "But that doesn't make an evaluation system. That's not enough."
Justin Snider of The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, nonpartisan education news outlet affiliated with the Hechinger Institute on Education and the Media at Columbia University, contributed to this report
By Erin Richards of the Journal Sentinel
Nov. 14, 2010
Norma Mortimer moves about her high school classroom with confidence born of 41 years' experience.
Directions to students are clear; she knows when to push for an answer and when to let a question hang.
The English teacher formerly taught music, composed and arranged marching band music, and performed at the Bristol Renaissance Faire.
"It all adds into what I bring to the classroom," she said.
Once every three years as a tenured teacher, performance evaluations provide her with feedback, something she looks forward to even though she knows she's not slipping.
Still, evaluations never flag what she considers her weakest area - teaching effectively when the class is in small groups. Last year, she never received her post-evaluation conference with the principal.
In the growing national debate on how to raise the quality of public school teaching in America, performance evaluations have become both a lightning rod and a sticking point.
Most evaluation systems in public schools provide little information to properly assess teachers' strengths and weaknesses. And because teachers are rarely dismissed over their performance, formal evaluations seldom carry much weight.
In the push to create more great teachers and raise student achievement, President Barack Obama's administration has championed stronger performance evaluations, tied to student test scores, and bonus pay systems to better place, support and reward excellent educators. The administration also wants school districts to justify the dismissal of those who are ineffective.
There's wide agreement that current evaluations don't accomplish much; there's little agreement between reformers and unions on how best to improve them.
In Milwaukee Public Schools, veteran teachers complain about being asked to sign off on evaluations when their principals never observed them. Principals can be overwhelmed with so many teachers to evaluate, and nonacademic matters to worry about, that it's difficult to do fair and complete analyses.
Mortimer, who teaches at Samuel Morse-John Marshall School for the Gifted and Talented, was rated exemplary in her last performance evaluation. MPS rates teachers as either unsatisfactory, in need of improvement, satisfactory or exemplary. Last year, more than 95% of 2,424 teachers evaluated received favorable reviews.
The number rated unsatisfactory in the state's lowest performing district: five.
A national discussion
Across the country, leaders in both the education and political arenas are increasingly focused on strengthening teacher evaluations by basing them in part on student test scores. Critics argue that tests - even ones that measure growth from the beginning to the end of the year - don't reveal everything about teacher quality.
"We're seeing different models now (for teacher evaluations) partly because we know that evaluations are generally bad and that teaching really matters," said Elena Silva, research director at Education Sector, a nonpartisan Washington, D.C., education policy think tank.
The urgency for change is rooted in research. Studies show the most important school-based factor determining student success is the quality of the child's teacher, and that low-performing students benefit from highly effective teachers even more.
Eric Hanushek, a Stanford University education and economics researcher, has popularized studying teacher effectiveness by looking at how much academic growth teachers' students make over the course of a year. As early as 1992, based on results of his research in Gary Ind., Hanushek reported "the difference in student performance in a single academic year from having a good as opposed to a bad teacher can be more than one full year of standardized achievement."
Critics of using test scores to evaluate teachers, or value-added measurements that isolate the impact of a teacher's effect on student learning, often worry that too much emphasis on scores may overlook the intangibles that may contribute to good teaching, such as motivation and presentation skills. Also, test scores may not pick up other nuances of the school environment.
Still, student achievement data is the best information researchers have to measure gains in performance, the ultimate goal.
Sabrina Laine, director of the National Comprehensive Center for Teacher Quality, said no state has yet perfected a model evaluation system. But efforts are under way, including:
• Tennessee and Delaware, which were rewarded in the first round of the Obama administration's $4 billion Race to the Top competition for offering teacher merit pay and factoring student test scores into evaluations. The competition offered millions of dollars in federal schools money to states with the best plans to improve education.
• Florida, Georgia, Hawaii, Maryland, Massachusetts, New York, North Carolina, Ohio, Rhode Island and Washington, D.C. - the winners in the second round of Race to the Top - all have instituted rewards for effective teachers and principals.
• Louisiana, where a new law requires half of a teacher's evaluation by 2012-'13 to be based on growth in student test scores.
• Colorado, which passed legislation this year that ties teacher and principal evaluations to student growth and makes it tougher for teachers to get tenure.
• Thirteen states with districts implementing TAP: The System for Teacher and Student Advancement, a model that defines and measures effective teaching, links evaluations to professional development, and allows teachers to earn bonuses based on growth in student test scores.
State's approach
Wisconsin, for the most part, has been on the sidelines of the reform movement - and it has cost the state.
During the first phase of Race to the Top, U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan singled out as "ridiculous" a provision in Wisconsin state law that banned the use of student assessment data in teacher performance evaluations. According to the rules, states with such a ban would be disqualified from the competition.
Wisconsin lawmakers subsequently altered the language and dropped the firewall. But the new language specified that any changes to teacher evaluation plans would need to be bargained with the teachers unions.
Rep. Brett Davis (R-Oregon) said the watered-down legislation eliminated one firewall and added 426 more - one for every district in Wisconsin that would have to negotiate changes to evaluations.
Still, Deborah Mahaffey, assistant state superintendent for academic excellence, says the prospects for change in Wisconsin are good.
"We all understand that the move is toward teacher effectiveness, and that there will be some measure of student achievement in determining teacher effectiveness," she said.
Obstacles to fair systems
Creating more fair, comprehensive and useful evaluation systems faces roadblocks from the start.
First, involved parties have to agree on a definition of quality teaching. Then they have to decide what factors to use to measure it.
If student achievement is to be a factor in the evaluation, what tests or student work should be considered? How much of that should count toward the total evaluation score?
"Test scores can only be used for certain teachers because not all teachers teach in tested subjects and grades," Silva said. "You get into this debate where people say, let's use test scores for 42% of the evaluation, or 62% of the evaluation. There's no real rationale for any particular percentage, whether it's half, 51% or 49%."
In Wisconsin, state law requires districts to conduct a personnel evaluation in the first year of employment and at least one every three years after that, Mahaffey said. Individual districts are left to determine the characteristics of their formal teacher evaluations.
Most are based primarily on principal observations, and practices vary.
Some go further than others. In the Cedarburg School District, principals submit three different assessments: a standards rating for each teacher based on how well he or she implements the state's 10 teaching standards, another score based on education consultant Charlotte Danielson's Framework for Teaching and a narrative on the teacher's performance.
Superintendent Daryl Herrick and his administrative staff read all the evaluations and require principals to defend the rankings. Principals are evaluated on how well they evaluate their teachers.
"The process serves as a clearinghouse for performance concerns," Herrick said. "Mediocrity has become a tough challenge in schools."
Herrick said he doesn't have scientific proof that changes to the evaluation system have caused better academic results, but achievement in the district based on ACT and SAT scores, as well as the annual state tests and district assessments, has been at its highest in recent years.
"That was about when we started to focus much more on teacher quality," Herrick said.
In the Hamilton School District, teachers may undertake a voluntary research project as part of their evaluation. The project allows them to experiment with different teaching techniques in class, under the guidance of their principal, and then reflect on their research as an addendum to their evaluation.
In MPS, principals use a formal evaluation tool that outlines 11 teacher expectations, such as knowledge, classroom management and attitude. MPS is working with the Milwaukee Teachers' Education Association to revise that tool and provide better information about teacher quality, Human Resources Director Karen Jackson said.
"The motivation up to this point in MPS has not been about how we have a professional dialogue about how to improve teaching and learning," said Dan Lotesto, a teacher at Rufus King High School who has been on both the teaching and administrative side of the evaluation process.
Sid Hatch, deputy executive director of the MTEA, said the union was obligated to work with the district and create a new evaluation system for schools receiving federal grant money for improvements. But the evaluation committee realized the system should be taken districtwide to be effective, he said.
Hatch said the evaluation committee is "kicking around" the idea of using growth in student test scores as a component of the evaluation.
"There are some things you can't measure in teaching," Hatch said. "Student performance cannot be the sole factor in teacher evaluations or I'm not interested in putting my name on it."
For Mortimer, who has taught in four districts in three states, the issues surrounding teacher quality and performance haven't changed much over the years. If she could wave a magic wand, the evaluation process would be conducted by principals who spend lots of time in classrooms, have experience as high-quality teachers themselves and offer ongoing, constructive feedback.
"I feel passionately that our kids need teachers who want to be in the classroom, who want to be with kids and all their issues, foibles and delights," she said.
But will desire still be a measure of teacher effectiveness in the new world of education reform? Some teachers are great with kids but can't move the needle on test scores. Others may be unimaginative but adept at raising proficiency levels.
Silva, from Education Sector, said she believes stronger evaluation systems will do a lot to better distinguish between educators, and to improve the quality of teaching.
"Principals will tell you, 'I know the good teachers,' " Silva said. "But that doesn't make an evaluation system. That's not enough."
Justin Snider of The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, nonpartisan education news outlet affiliated with the Hechinger Institute on Education and the Media at Columbia University, contributed to this report
Wednesday, December 01, 2010
America's Promise Alliance takes a look at dropout rates
Interesting Texas-based exchange on the recent dropout report.
Also check out an earlier post on this blog titled: "Colin Powell, Educators Focus on High School Dropout Epidemic" that includes access to the full report.
-Patricia
America's Promise Alliance released a major report yesterday about dropout rates across the country. The Education Front exchanged emails Tuesday with Joanna Hornig Fox, one of the authors of the report. She serves as deputy director of Everyone Graduates Center at the Center for Social Organization of Schools at The Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore. Here is the exchange, which includes a specific look at Texas:
From 2002 - 2008, your report claims, "more than half the states - 29 in total --increased high school graduation rates." That's impressive. What happened?
In the last eight to 10 years, significant national and state-level initiatives occurred that in aggregate built a foundation for raising graduation rates in districts and schools that took advantage of the opportunities afforded by the initiatives -- rather than fighting them.
First, No Child Left Behind legislation (NCLB) and its reporting requirements unarguably required schools to disaggregate student data. An 80 percent graduation rate can mask the fact that some groups are graduating at 90 percent, and others at 60 and 70. NCLB brought granularity to school improvement. Once one disaggregates data, one knows better where one has to target improvement efforts.
Second, the National Governors Association and almost all of the governors endorsed a uniform way to calculate graduation rates. This has two components -- governors (and legislatures) provided leadership in many states, and states began counting in similar ways.
Many folks don't realize that until recently, reported "graduation rates" were based on different sets of numbers, sometimes counted at different times of year, for different sets of students, sometimes including students who received a GED rather than a diploma and sometimes based on grades 7 to 12 student cohorts -- among many others. Some schools and districts depended on the students who left school to report themselves as dropouts, and if they did not do so they were counted as transfers. Thus, there were non-uniform ways of counting. The NGA compact changed this, and led to the U.S. Department of Education convening panels of experts who examined the best methods of calculating graduation rates and began to require this of the states. A uniform method consistent across states is now used, and it depends on the grade-level enrollment data reported, according to consistent standards, by each state, district and school to the Common Core of Data of the U. S. Department of Education. Even better methods will begin shortly.
Third, there was recognition that we had to go beyond the ideas that had begun in the 1980s -- A Nation at Risk, then the national science and mathematics voluntary standards in the 1990s, then Goals 2000 -- and really put them into action. States and districts began strengthening their graduation requirements, then their standards and assessments.
And fourth, states, districts and schools began trying innovative ways to reconfigure their schools to get better results, often with the help of community partners and other collaborators and funders. There are many other factors that play into the school improvement efforts -- hopefully this will be a second question.
You also found that Texas saw a decline in "dropout factories." Something like 77 Texas high schools moved off the dropout factory list. Do you have any theories?
The Texas declines in dropout factories were distributed across urban areas, suburban areas, towns and rural areas -- it was one of only four states to show this type of distribution -- and this suggests that statewide policy leadership was instrumental, both in creating expectations and frameworks for change, and providing competitive funding opportunties for those districts and schools which had solid visions and good, results-oriented and practical ideas about how to try them and document whether they worked or not, how they could be improved, etc.
It also seems to me, from afar in Baltimore, and something that I would very much like to explore further, that the Texas regional structure and empowerment of the 20 educational service agencies to provide guidance, technical assistance and professional development, with some of the ESC's having developed special expertise in certain areas, is a tremendous support structure.
My understanding is that participation in these offerings is also voluntary on the part of districts and, coupled with the competitive funding opportunities, this becomes a powerful incentivization for districts and schools.
And last, Texas has had tremendous investment and recognition by outside collaborators that supports courageous districts and schools in trying to take school improvement that benefits many more students to the next level.
You all are calling for a Civic Marshall Plan for our schools. What would that entail?
Here are some of the elements that we think are likely to be important:
Target actions with low graduation rate communities
-- Start with early reading success in 3rd grade -- enable students to move to comprehension, beyond phonics
-- Focus on middle schools
-- Turn around or replace dropout factories
-- Harness non-profits and volunteer associations to support schools
-- Link local researchers to policy and practice
Build capacity to improve graduation and college readiness
-- Build early warning data systems
-- Create multi-sector and cross-community based efforts
-- Develop new education systems (by this we mean alternative education environments) that are based on community needs and interests
-- Get good high school and graduation rate data, and keep on improving it
-- Develop parent engagement strategies
-- Listen to students, parents and educators
Strengthen the public education system-- Build data systems that talk across "silos" and that link multiple sectors
-- Set high expectations for teachers and administrators, for high effectiveness and high accountability
-- Connect high school graduation and postsecondary completion
To make this concrete, we are working on assembling a Leadership Council by March 1, 2011. It will help us set directions and actions to accomplish the 2020 goals.
The organizing partners for the Civic Marshall Plan are Everyone Graduates Center, Civic Enterprises and Americas Promise Alliance. The Civic Marshall Plan is anticipated to be the "crown jewel" in the America's Promise Alliance's "Grad Nation " campaign.
Also check out an earlier post on this blog titled: "Colin Powell, Educators Focus on High School Dropout Epidemic" that includes access to the full report.
-Patricia
America's Promise Alliance released a major report yesterday about dropout rates across the country. The Education Front exchanged emails Tuesday with Joanna Hornig Fox, one of the authors of the report. She serves as deputy director of Everyone Graduates Center at the Center for Social Organization of Schools at The Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore. Here is the exchange, which includes a specific look at Texas:
From 2002 - 2008, your report claims, "more than half the states - 29 in total --increased high school graduation rates." That's impressive. What happened?
In the last eight to 10 years, significant national and state-level initiatives occurred that in aggregate built a foundation for raising graduation rates in districts and schools that took advantage of the opportunities afforded by the initiatives -- rather than fighting them.
First, No Child Left Behind legislation (NCLB) and its reporting requirements unarguably required schools to disaggregate student data. An 80 percent graduation rate can mask the fact that some groups are graduating at 90 percent, and others at 60 and 70. NCLB brought granularity to school improvement. Once one disaggregates data, one knows better where one has to target improvement efforts.
Second, the National Governors Association and almost all of the governors endorsed a uniform way to calculate graduation rates. This has two components -- governors (and legislatures) provided leadership in many states, and states began counting in similar ways.
Many folks don't realize that until recently, reported "graduation rates" were based on different sets of numbers, sometimes counted at different times of year, for different sets of students, sometimes including students who received a GED rather than a diploma and sometimes based on grades 7 to 12 student cohorts -- among many others. Some schools and districts depended on the students who left school to report themselves as dropouts, and if they did not do so they were counted as transfers. Thus, there were non-uniform ways of counting. The NGA compact changed this, and led to the U.S. Department of Education convening panels of experts who examined the best methods of calculating graduation rates and began to require this of the states. A uniform method consistent across states is now used, and it depends on the grade-level enrollment data reported, according to consistent standards, by each state, district and school to the Common Core of Data of the U. S. Department of Education. Even better methods will begin shortly.
Third, there was recognition that we had to go beyond the ideas that had begun in the 1980s -- A Nation at Risk, then the national science and mathematics voluntary standards in the 1990s, then Goals 2000 -- and really put them into action. States and districts began strengthening their graduation requirements, then their standards and assessments.
And fourth, states, districts and schools began trying innovative ways to reconfigure their schools to get better results, often with the help of community partners and other collaborators and funders. There are many other factors that play into the school improvement efforts -- hopefully this will be a second question.
You also found that Texas saw a decline in "dropout factories." Something like 77 Texas high schools moved off the dropout factory list. Do you have any theories?
The Texas declines in dropout factories were distributed across urban areas, suburban areas, towns and rural areas -- it was one of only four states to show this type of distribution -- and this suggests that statewide policy leadership was instrumental, both in creating expectations and frameworks for change, and providing competitive funding opportunties for those districts and schools which had solid visions and good, results-oriented and practical ideas about how to try them and document whether they worked or not, how they could be improved, etc.
It also seems to me, from afar in Baltimore, and something that I would very much like to explore further, that the Texas regional structure and empowerment of the 20 educational service agencies to provide guidance, technical assistance and professional development, with some of the ESC's having developed special expertise in certain areas, is a tremendous support structure.
My understanding is that participation in these offerings is also voluntary on the part of districts and, coupled with the competitive funding opportunities, this becomes a powerful incentivization for districts and schools.
And last, Texas has had tremendous investment and recognition by outside collaborators that supports courageous districts and schools in trying to take school improvement that benefits many more students to the next level.
You all are calling for a Civic Marshall Plan for our schools. What would that entail?
Here are some of the elements that we think are likely to be important:
Target actions with low graduation rate communities
-- Start with early reading success in 3rd grade -- enable students to move to comprehension, beyond phonics
-- Focus on middle schools
-- Turn around or replace dropout factories
-- Harness non-profits and volunteer associations to support schools
-- Link local researchers to policy and practice
Build capacity to improve graduation and college readiness
-- Build early warning data systems
-- Create multi-sector and cross-community based efforts
-- Develop new education systems (by this we mean alternative education environments) that are based on community needs and interests
-- Get good high school and graduation rate data, and keep on improving it
-- Develop parent engagement strategies
-- Listen to students, parents and educators
Strengthen the public education system-- Build data systems that talk across "silos" and that link multiple sectors
-- Set high expectations for teachers and administrators, for high effectiveness and high accountability
-- Connect high school graduation and postsecondary completion
To make this concrete, we are working on assembling a Leadership Council by March 1, 2011. It will help us set directions and actions to accomplish the 2020 goals.
The organizing partners for the Civic Marshall Plan are Everyone Graduates Center, Civic Enterprises and Americas Promise Alliance. The Civic Marshall Plan is anticipated to be the "crown jewel" in the America's Promise Alliance's "Grad Nation " campaign.
Colin Powell, Educators Focus on High School Dropout Epidemic
Check out the full report "Building a Grad Nation: Progress and Challenge in Ending the HS Dropout Epidemic"
-Patricia
by Jamaal Abdul-Alim , December 1, 2010
WASHINGTON— If America’s high school dropout problem is a patient in critical condition, his situation has improved in recent years but still not enough to move him out of intensive care.
That’s one of the messages conveyed by a new report released Tuesday by America’s Promise Alliance, the Washington-based national youth advocacy group founded by retired U.S. Army Gen. Colin Powell.
The report — titled Building a Grad Nation: Progress and Challenge in Ending the High School Dropout Epidemic — found that the number of dropout factories — the phrase used to describe high schools where 40 percent or more of the students fail to graduate — has dropped from 2,007 in 2002 to 1,746 in 2008.
Powell said the report shows that “there’s still a long way to go.”
“We should not underestimate the difficulties that are ahead,” Powell said at the report’s official release, held at the Gallup World Headquarters in Washington.
Education officials, advocates and experts at the event sounded similar themes, pointing out that despite the progress made in curtailing the number of dropout factories in the nation, the dropout problem continues to persist most in high-poverty urban school districts.
“We still don’t have one high poverty urban school district with a graduation rate over 75 percent,” said report co-author Robert Balfanz, director of the Everyone Graduates Center at Johns Hopkins University. “They’re still not even at the C-plus level.”
The report, which U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan described as “required reading,” provides insight regarding some of the obstacles facing the Obama Administration’s college-completion agenda, particularly its quest to restore America to its former position as the most college-educated nation in the world.
The report found that success in lowering the dropout rate was uneven across the nation, with most of the decline in dropout factory schools — 216 of the 261 fewer dropout factories — taking place in the South, led by Texas and Georgia. Further, most of the decline in dropout factory schools — 205 — took place in suburbs and towns, whereas school districts in or near cities experienced only a net decline of 38 dropout factory schools.
Among the strategies and tactics the report credits with improving the graduation rate were strong leadership, clear graduation goals, multisector collaboration, innovation and support and technical assistance for research-based solutions.
The report also calls for greater emphasis on “early warning” systems to provide more community-based supports for off-track students, raising expectations and standards and better parent engagement.
Some at the America’s Promise event said that while the focus on getting more students to graduate from high school is crucial, the bigger issue is making sure that students graduate with a high school diploma that signifies they are ready for college.
“Even kids graduating from high school, somewhere upwards of 40 to 50 percent of kids in urban areas need remediation when they go to college,” said Chad Wick, CEO of KnowledgeWorks, an education company that works with schools throughout the nation to implement innovation and reform.
“They’re essentially taking high school courses in college,” Wick said. “And so we need to really look at the fact that a high school diploma alone is not necessarily going to change things unless we make that stand for something that means kids are really ready to go to college and succeed in college.”
The event featured an array of heavy hitters on America’s education landscape. Among them was outgoing New York City Public Schools Chancellor Joel Klein, who said America’s dropout problem will persist until each school in the nation has been reformed to the point where society’s more fortunate would find them suitable for their own children.
“This is a collective issue,” Klein said. “The future of our country depends on it.”
The lone youth panelist at the event recounted the role that an administrator at a Boys & Girls Club in Cleveland played in her decision to stay in school and ultimately go on to college.
While working several jobs to help her single mother make ends meet for her and her four siblings, Maria Hernandez said she often felt like giving up on high school. But when she started learning more about financial aid for college and the Boys & Girls Club administrator related her plight to a teacher who agreed to pay her tuition, Hernandez decided to stay in school.
She is now a freshman at East Tennessee State University double-majoring in biochemistry and Spanish.
“Because of that,” Hernandez said of the help she got from the Boys & Girls Club and one of her teachers, “I’m a student making my dreams come true.”
-Patricia
by Jamaal Abdul-Alim , December 1, 2010
WASHINGTON— If America’s high school dropout problem is a patient in critical condition, his situation has improved in recent years but still not enough to move him out of intensive care.
That’s one of the messages conveyed by a new report released Tuesday by America’s Promise Alliance, the Washington-based national youth advocacy group founded by retired U.S. Army Gen. Colin Powell.
The report — titled Building a Grad Nation: Progress and Challenge in Ending the High School Dropout Epidemic — found that the number of dropout factories — the phrase used to describe high schools where 40 percent or more of the students fail to graduate — has dropped from 2,007 in 2002 to 1,746 in 2008.
Powell said the report shows that “there’s still a long way to go.”
“We should not underestimate the difficulties that are ahead,” Powell said at the report’s official release, held at the Gallup World Headquarters in Washington.
Education officials, advocates and experts at the event sounded similar themes, pointing out that despite the progress made in curtailing the number of dropout factories in the nation, the dropout problem continues to persist most in high-poverty urban school districts.
“We still don’t have one high poverty urban school district with a graduation rate over 75 percent,” said report co-author Robert Balfanz, director of the Everyone Graduates Center at Johns Hopkins University. “They’re still not even at the C-plus level.”
The report, which U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan described as “required reading,” provides insight regarding some of the obstacles facing the Obama Administration’s college-completion agenda, particularly its quest to restore America to its former position as the most college-educated nation in the world.
The report found that success in lowering the dropout rate was uneven across the nation, with most of the decline in dropout factory schools — 216 of the 261 fewer dropout factories — taking place in the South, led by Texas and Georgia. Further, most of the decline in dropout factory schools — 205 — took place in suburbs and towns, whereas school districts in or near cities experienced only a net decline of 38 dropout factory schools.
Among the strategies and tactics the report credits with improving the graduation rate were strong leadership, clear graduation goals, multisector collaboration, innovation and support and technical assistance for research-based solutions.
The report also calls for greater emphasis on “early warning” systems to provide more community-based supports for off-track students, raising expectations and standards and better parent engagement.
Some at the America’s Promise event said that while the focus on getting more students to graduate from high school is crucial, the bigger issue is making sure that students graduate with a high school diploma that signifies they are ready for college.
“Even kids graduating from high school, somewhere upwards of 40 to 50 percent of kids in urban areas need remediation when they go to college,” said Chad Wick, CEO of KnowledgeWorks, an education company that works with schools throughout the nation to implement innovation and reform.
“They’re essentially taking high school courses in college,” Wick said. “And so we need to really look at the fact that a high school diploma alone is not necessarily going to change things unless we make that stand for something that means kids are really ready to go to college and succeed in college.”
The event featured an array of heavy hitters on America’s education landscape. Among them was outgoing New York City Public Schools Chancellor Joel Klein, who said America’s dropout problem will persist until each school in the nation has been reformed to the point where society’s more fortunate would find them suitable for their own children.
“This is a collective issue,” Klein said. “The future of our country depends on it.”
The lone youth panelist at the event recounted the role that an administrator at a Boys & Girls Club in Cleveland played in her decision to stay in school and ultimately go on to college.
While working several jobs to help her single mother make ends meet for her and her four siblings, Maria Hernandez said she often felt like giving up on high school. But when she started learning more about financial aid for college and the Boys & Girls Club administrator related her plight to a teacher who agreed to pay her tuition, Hernandez decided to stay in school.
She is now a freshman at East Tennessee State University double-majoring in biochemistry and Spanish.
“Because of that,” Hernandez said of the help she got from the Boys & Girls Club and one of her teachers, “I’m a student making my dreams come true.”
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