Taking Note

Firing Teachers in Rhode Island

Last week, the school board in Rhode Island’s poorest city, Central Falls, made national news by firing all 74 teachers and 19 staff members at Central Falls High. The move was part of a “turnaround” plan of the type being pushed by the Obama Administration.  Education Secretary Arne Duncan applauded the action, arguing “the status quo needs to change.”  The local school board and Duncan may get political points for being seen as “tough,” and “demanding action,” but is it fair to blame the teachers in Central Falls, and, more importantly, will the effort work to help students?

Raleigh's Innovative Economic Diversity Plan

On Sunday, The New York Times outlined the growing threat to Wake County (Raleigh), North Carolina’s innovative and successful plan to integrate schools by economic status.  The program, which was lauded in the Times five years ago for its ability to increase minority achievement, while maintaining high achievement for whites, seeks to ensure that no school has more than 40% of students eligible for subsidized lunches.  This past October, however, the plan came under attack in the ostensibly nonpartisan school board election, where opponents of the diversity plan were heavily funded by the Republican Party.

Obama's No Child Left Behind Revisions

According to today’s New York Times, President Obama will propose a number of important changes to the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, which under the Bush Administration was known as No Child Left Behind.  The good news is that Obama plans to eliminate some of the most problematic features of NCLB.  The bad news is that he may introduce some new problems, drawing on the administration’s current “Race to the Top” education program.

What Educators Should Learn from ER

Educators could learn a thing or two from the craft of medicine, even medicine practiced on television. Doctors on the popular television series ER, for example, are not surprised to learn that mortality rates are higher at County General Hospital than at Pleasant Valley Community Hospital. Doctors at County see a lot more drug abusers, gunshot victims, obese diabetics, alcoholics, and the homeless, not to mention heart attacks, strokes, and concussions. Pleasant Valley might see more lawn mower and hockey injuries, to go along with heart and cancer problems. Its patients arrive in better overall health, have regular check-ups, and better insurance coverage. These factors make a difference—a huge difference—in outcomes between the two hospitals.

It is easy to see how the characteristics of the patient population plays a huge role in determining results. Yet policymakers and commentators tend to ignore the parallels between large, public, urban hospitals and their counterparts in the field of education: large, public, urban high schools. Little allowance is made for the make-up of the high school student body or the “pre-existing” conditions that make a Chicago high school very different from, say, the esteemed New Trier high school in nearby Winnetka. Instead, many of the big Chicago schools have been labeled as “dropout factories” and ordered to reform. The break-up of big city schools into “small learning communities” has created a new industry, driven by consultants and foundation incentives. The Obama administration now expects states and districts to turn around the lowest-performing, bottom 5 percent of their schools, which in the case of high schools means those with drop-out rates of 50 percent or more.

SOTU and Education

On the education front, President Obama's State of the Union address was notable in three respects.

 

First, he adroitly tied his reforms in higher education to his larger message about holding banks accountable.  Currently, the government subsidizes banks to make low interest student loans for college.  Cutting the banks out and making loans directly will save billions of dollars that Obama directs to increasing Pell Grants and other education programs, such as better pre-K.  This change has always made sense and Obama is smart to link this reform to public anger over the role of banks in the financial crisis.

Charter vs. Magnet Schools

For many years, educators and policymakers who wanted better opportunities for low-income and minority students stuck in bad schools backed an innovative alternative: magnet schools, with specialized themes (such as the arts) or pedagogical approaches (such as Montessori) that would draw children of different economic and racial groups to come and learn together.  A wide body of research found that low-income and minority students learn more in these magnet schools than in segregated high poverty schools.

In more recent years, conservatives, allied with some liberals, have backed a different alternative – charter schools, which generally do not actively seek racial or economic integration, and whose chief distinguishing feature from regular public schools is usually the absence of union representation for teachers.  The line, taken up by people such as RiShawn Biddle in a piece in yesterday’s National Review Online, is that charter schools are eclipsing magnet schools because minority parents believe “quality of education is more important than integration.”  What matters, Biddle and others suggest, are the “quality of teaching,” and “rigor of instruction,” not “the racial makeup” of a school.

The Best and Worst in Education of 2009

Looking back on 2009 in the education world, I’ve gained a new appreciation of the virtues of our largely decentralized education system.  In the past year, the bad news is that federal policies have been mostly underwhelming, with a focus on charter schools and merit pay for teachers, which some are calling a “Bush III” agenda.  By contrast, good news comes from a few local districts that have taken important steps on their own to address what research suggests matters most in education – reducing the separation of rich and poor children. 

Bloomberg’s Flawed Teacher Evaluation Mandate

Better a mayor or governor willing to fight for improved teaching and learning than one trapped by the status quo. However, New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s newly proposed policies seem destined to out-run the capacity of educators to implement the fair and workable system of teacher evaluation he promises.

In a recent appearance with education secretary Arne Duncan, Bloomberg hailed the Obama Administration’s Race to the Top fund, emphasizing its drive to use standardized test results to evaluate teachers and principals.  Bloomberg announced that he had directed schools chancellor Joel Klein to “ensure that principals actually use student achievement data to help evaluate teachers who are up for tenure this year.”  This sounds so sensible that that it receives little argument from anyone other than education industry insiders.

Does Obama Believe in School Integration?

Over the past 10 months, we’ve heard a great deal about the Obama Administration’s support for charter schools, education standards, and performance pay for teachers.  But what does the Administration think of racial and socioeconomic school integration?

On Friday, a slew of major civil rights organizations held a national conference at Howard University Law School and invited several key Obama Administration officials to speak, including Carmel Martin, Assistant Secretary for Planning, Evaluation and Policy Development at the Department of Education;  Russlynn Ali, the Education Department’s Assistant Secretary for Civil Rights; and Derek Douglas, Special Assistant to the President for Urban Affairs in the Domestic Policy Council.  The event, a portion of which was broadcast on C-SPAN, was marked by “respectful tension,” as Ohio State University’s john powell noted.

Kristof’s Misplaced War on Teacher Unions

For years, conservatives have routinely denounced teacher unions as the biggest problem in education.  Not poverty or segregation, which four decades of research have consistently found to be the number one and number two predictors of low performance.  Instead, the democratically-elected representatives of America’s teachers are to blame.  For the right wing, these attacks have been wrong-headed but politically rational: teacher unions forcefully oppose the right’s pet ideas (including publicly funded private school vouchers), and work hard to elect liberal candidates who pledge to devote greater resources to public education.  More recently, however, we’ve seen the rise of the liberal critic, who oddly regurgitates right wing talking points on teacher unions.  Nicholas Kristof’s column in this morning’s New York Times  is a prime example.