February 28, 2006

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NEA Locals can charter with the AFL-CIO

Filed under: Labor by Kombiz Lavasany @ 5:11 pm

Some pretty important news out of the AFL-CIO. The NEA, which has been outside of the AFL-CIO, came to an agreement with the AFL-CIO which allows NEA locals to join solidarity partnerships.

The AFL-CIO’s blog has a statement from AFT president Ed McElroy and AFL-CIO president John Sweeney, as well as more news about the agreement.

The AFT and NEA have become partners on many education endeavors. Having the support of NEA affiliates inside the AFL-CIO’s local and state labor bodies will give educators an even stronger voice inside the labor movement and will help our unions become more powerful advocates for quality education and for an economy that works for all Americans.

February 23, 2006

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How the DoE Misuses Statistics to Deceive About Small Schools

Filed under: Small Schools by jd2718 @ 11:29 am

Jonathan Halabi is a chapter leader in a small high school in the Bronx.

In a February 1 press release the DoE announced that they are creating three dozen more small schools next year. This will make 185 small schools created in New York City from September 2002 - September 2006. Most of these have been high schools, while others are middle schools or 6 - 12.

The DoE includes numbers to support the claim that small high schools are better than large ones. Their numbers are intended to deceive. Here they are:

 

New Small Schools

2004-05 Average

Citywide 2004-05 Average

Attendance Rate

89%

81%

Promotion Rate (9th Grade)

87%

72%

Student Demographics (9th Grade)

(% African-American and Hispanic)

92%

72%

Percentage of students performing below grade level in math and English

(9th Grade)

67%

60%

Source: Data from DOE student statistics

1. Is attendance really better?

None of the new small schools in 2004-05 had a 12th grade. Many did not have an 11th grade. And the ones that were new last year did not have a 10th grade. So they are comparing a mix that is probably 50% 9th graders, 33% 10th graders, 17% 11th graders and 0% 12th graders (50/33/17/0) to a mix that is 25/25/25/25 (by age, not credits).

I know, you know, and the people who made this chart know (they have to know, don’t they?) that attendance for 9th graders is always higher than attendance for older students. In fact, if all they can find is an 8 point jump in attendance, there probably is no real improvement at all. Let them compare 9th graders to 9th graders and tell us the truth.

Am I really claiming that small school attendance is not better than large school attendance? No. Small schools throughout the country have shown improved attendance over large schools But there is something screwy in NYC. In NYC there is no evidence for better attendance in the new small schools. It is a wonder they don’t hide this data. NYC might be the only school system in the country that has failed to increase attendance through moving to smaller schools.

2. But the promotion rates, aren’t they better?

It might look that way; they are only comparing 9th graders to 9th graders. Shouldn’t these be more honest numbers?

Not really. If a school has 125 students, all 9th graders, and no one else, they will concentrate on promoting those kids. Administration resources are not directed to graduation requirements, not to passing regents, not to working papers, not to drop outs, GEDs, alternative programs. The school’s business in its first year is to move kids from grade 9 to grade 10.

Why not compare small schools with all four grades to larger schools? Because the gap will disappear, and the purpose of this chart is to promote the idea that new small schools are better, whether or not the evidence supports that idea.

3. At least the small schools are directing services to minority kids, right?

This distortion is especially disgusting. They foisted small schools, mostly, on minority populations. New schools don’t reach out to minority kids - minority kids are the ones whose high schools have been attacked, overcrowded, and now broken up by Klein. They have no choice. If new small schools are so great, so much better than large schools, how come they are not breaking up….[fill in the blank with a majority white school] ?

—-

The emergence of such a large number of schools in such a short period raises many serious issues for teachers and students. Too many schools set up too rapidly, in conditions of overcrowding, have set school against school and teacher against teacher; instead of collaboration we are forced to compete for scant resources, especially space.

There is room in our system for a variety of kinds of schools. There is a need for a mix of small and large schools. But there is also a need for care as we institute changes which affect children. The DoE has not shown the necessary attention to detail, the necessary level of care. Instead, they continue to open new small schools without evaluating how effective their models have been. They do not collect and analyze meaningful data about their own performance.

Teachers, both in large schools and in small, through our union, the UFT, should together join with parents and students in holding the DoE accountable for the policies it implements. If their policy today is to open as many small schools as possible as quickly as possible, without regard to their long-term viability, to the effect on the remaining large schools, or their overall impact on the quality of education in New York, then someone has to tell the truth. We must tell the DoE that they are wrong. We must tell parents and students what is being done to them. And if the DoE tries to use statistics to deceive, we must not look away. Someone must tell the truth.

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It’s Not Large v. Small Schools, It’s the Survival of Public Education.

Filed under: NYC DOE Small Schools by Peter Goodman @ 11:29 am

Remember when an automobile worker was a great union job? The UAW was a powerful union: when anyone complained about the quality of American cars the union averred, “We don’t design them, we simply build them.” And, besides, what option did car buyers have? They would never buy foreign cars?A few decades later General Motors and Ford struggle for their very existence and foreign owned non-union car factories expand in the south. Who would have “thunk it?”

At least half the kids who enter high schools in New York City drop out, we can argue about the exact numbers or definitions of drop outs but the numbers are staggering.

Will public high schools still exist in a decade or two? We point our finger at Tweed and their predecessors and say, “We don’t design schools, we just teach.

Are we heading down the same road as the UAW?

The creation of small high schools may offer a guide to creating more effective schools.

The current wave of the small school movement began with the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation providing hundreds of millions of dollars nationwide to create small schools. The New York City initiative is called the New Century High School program. The Board of Education decided to place the initiative in the Bronx high School superintendency and rapidly “closed” large schools and created small high schools. In some instances they phased out the schools, in others they created small schools within existing larger schools. In the Bronx there are only a few large high schools remaining. In Brooklyn and Manhattan the closing of large high schools “deflected” students and created overcrowding in other large schools.

The UFT Small High School Task Force Report, the product of a committee made up of both large and small school teachers is sharply critical of the Department lapses and creates a path for small high schools within the union.

The Gates folk require detailed evaluations of their funding efforts. The question of how well small schools work is closely scrutinized. An outside evaluator found fifteen percent higher daily attendance, lower suspension rates and higher retention rates. Only time will tell whether these gains are transitory or permanent. This June the first cohort of New Century schools will graduate: we anxiously await the data.

We are a large and diverse school system with space for large and small high schools as long as they produce graduates.

The rapid scaling to almost two hundred small schools created within a few years is an overwhelming burden. The new small schools receive external funding and support during their first four years: can they sustain themselves over the long run?

We hope the DOE isn’t creating small failing schools?

Finger pointing and scapegoating is not going to create effective schools. Unless we, the union, figure out how to create effective high schools, and effective is measured by graduation rates, we may not have schools in which to teach.

The State Education Department has redesigned, i.e., closed, almost twenty high schools, schools that were graduating only a handful of students each year. Unfortunately other large high schools continue to stumble. According to the SED the primary reason is poor leadership.

The public school system in New Orleans is gone: to be replaced by vouchers and charter schools. Katrina created an experiment that could be replicated in other cities. Pataki has introduced a private school voucher proposal; Kleinberg wants to create endless unregulated charter schools. We will fight back these proposals; ultimately, the answer is creating schools that work, work for their consumers, the students.

The battle is not over what type of school is “better,” small and large school teachers within the union must be allies in a battle for the very survival of public education.

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No Child Left Behind in the Cross Hairs

Filed under: NCLB by JColletti @ 11:00 am

Otto Von Bismarck, the First Chancellor of the German Empire said, ” Laws are like sausages; it is better not to see them being made.” Very few parents, students or teachers saw the Congress of the United States making No Child Left Behind, but like digesting a badly made sausage, they are currently feeling the effects of a flawed piece of legislation.

Using a single test to measure school quality is a guiding principle of NCLB. Another one is that all students should be held to the same standards, including those with disabilities. The 37th Annual Phi Delta Kappa/Gallup Poll released during November of last year found that more than two thirds of the public think the single test is a pretty bad idea. Fifty seven percent think students with disabilities should be evaluated differently from other students. Speaking about the results, the poll’s director said, “…the public wants the achievement gap closed [90% of them--about the same number who approve of apple pie and motherhood, I would bet] but does not approve of the strategies used in No Child Left Behind.” Q.E.D.

Some other results:

81% are worried that the emphasis on math and English (The Test Subjects) means less emphasis on art, music, foreign languages and other subjects. Some art, music and foreign language teachers, especially in our middle schools, who have seen their programs eliminated would concur, I’m sure.

79% prefer extra efforts to improve current schools rather than “choice” (a.k.a. transfer) options. We heard this from parents going back to the first year of the law. Fix my child’s school; don’t force me to send him across town to get a quality education. Or, as one wag said at the time, it’s like depriving a starving patient of food in order to compel him to get better.

55% would prefer that teachers in a child’s school, not an outside provider, should provide “supplemental educational services.” That’s tutoring to those of you who are NCLB linguistically challenged, a subgroup whose data is currently not disaggregated in determinations of AYP.

21% think lack of financial support is the major problem facing our public schools. No other problem, including discipline and overcrowding got more than ten percent. Charges that this Republican White House and Congress have failed to fund NCLB adequately have dogged the Bush administration since the law’s enactment. Which reminds me of another Bismarck quote: “When a man says he approves of something in principle, it means he hasn’t the slightest intention of putting it into practice.”

NCLB is up for reauthorization in 2007. No matter what the experience does to their insides, I’m certain many folks will be watching the process this time around.

Update: The post originally noted that the poll was the 36th Annual Phi Delta Kappa/Gallup Poll, thanks to reader M for pointing out that it’s actually the 37th Annual poll.

February 21, 2006

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AFL-CIO Now

Filed under: Labor by Edwize Admin @ 1:20 pm

The AFL-CIO has launched a new blog.

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“The Wizard of Charterland,” Or, The Hidden Story Behnd the Campaign to Raise the Cap on Charter Schools in New York

Filed under: Charter School by Leo Casey @ 10:04 am

Scholars of American literature are fascinated by the idea that the Wizard of Oz is an elaborate allegory for turn of the 20th century American populism. [See accounts of the debate here and here.] The character of the wizard is a metaphor for the entire tale, many argue, as there is an elaborate set of meanings lurking below the surface of the text, much like the wizened old man hiding behind the curtain of the seemingly omnipotent wizard.

The public story now being woven around the campaign to lift the cap on charter schools in New York has begun to rival the Wizard of Oz for a narrative where the most interesting developments are hidden from all but the reader with inside knowledge of an esoteric code. In the interests of the democratization of such knowledge, we will decipher the latest chapter in this saga, the proposal Governor Pataki put in his budget recommendations earlier this month [$]. [One can not, however, rely solely on media accounts of these proposals, for reasons I will outline below. The actual proposed legislation can be accessed here, with the pertinent sections beginning on page 31. A crucial last minute amendment to the proposed legislation can be accessed here.]

Let’s take a look at the specifics of the Pataki proposal: (more…)

February 15, 2006

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What’s up with special ed graduation rates??

Filed under: NYC DOE by Maisie @ 12:51 pm

The State Education Department just published a new report on graduation rates, which the New York Times and Daily News, and others, all picked up on. The most startling finding, on first blush, is the 10-point difference between what the state and the city call the four-year graduation rate for New York City. The state says that 43.5 percent of the NYC Class of 2005 graduated on time, while the city (in its new Mayor’s Management Report) says the figure is 53.2 percent.

But that is at least partly explained by different counting methods. For one, the city includes four-year GEDs which the state does not. For another, the city counts its graduates in August, after summer school, while the state counts in June.

More troubling, though, is the story for special education students. SED finds that of students with disabilities who entered New York City high schools in 2001, only 17 percent graduated in four years with a Regents or local diploma, compared with 45 percent of similar students in the rest of the state. What’s worse, 30 percent dropped out, twice the 15 percent rate for students with disabilities in the rest of the state. (Another 18 percent of NYC students with disabilities received IEP diplomas, slightly higher than the 13 percent in the rest of the state.)

These are very stark contrasts. They are also wildly different than the city’s claims. The city says only 18 percent of the 2001 group of special education students dropped out, and (oddly) that only 10 percent graduated.

What’s up with the numbers? Probably the definitions of “special ed” vary. But what’s going on with high school special ed? This is a vast terrain. Taking on the numbers, let alone the reality underneath the numbers, is more than one blog post can address. But SED has hoisted a red flag.

The first place to turn is the incomparable Advocates for Children, which last year published a 70-page report finding that the majority of students receiving special education services in New York City leave school witout a high school diploma, and that they are graduating with regular diplomas at rates far far below such students in the rest of the state and the nation as a whole. They also break down the rates by disability type (learning, behavioral, physical, etc.).

Not surprisingly, Advocates called for a special focus on this problem and posed a series of potential solutions. To my knowledge none of this has happened. Instead, the city has not even published its graduation report that the MMR number must have come from. And the Chancellor told the Daily News, “I think their [SED's] numbers are aligned with ours.” No they’re not.

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Why Do Schools Succeed?

Filed under: NYC DOE by Peter Goodman @ 9:33 am

We are quick to place tags on failing schools, we call them SURR or SINI, or whatever is the negative acronym du jour. Unfortunately we ignore successful schools. Oftentimes alongside struggling schools we find schools that are doing an excellent job. In spite of overbearing poverty and the pathology of the inner city: crime, single parent homes, foster care, AIDs and incarceration, schools succeed.

What about these schools is different? Why do some schools succeed?

Distributive Leadership. Successful schools are characterized by teams. Teams created by a school leader who has the confidence to rely on staff members to create a learning organization. Leadership that is distributed among the entire school community. Schools were the synergy created by teams creates a whole that is greater than the sum of the parts.

The mirage of charismatic principals driving instruction is nonsense. The more a chancellor or a regional superintendent or a principal issues ukases the more teachers retreat into their classrooms, the more they imagine themselves as factory workers teaching widgets, not children.

Teacher Driven, Focused, Student Centered Professional Development. In spite of all we know school systems still seem to believe there is a magic bullet, some wonderful package that they can buy with millions of taxpayer dollars and suddenly all the children will become “above average.” Regions don’t ask the teachers, and rarely even ask the principals, they simply buy a “package,” textbooks, teacher guides and consultants, a continuing attempt to make schools teacher-proof.

In successful schools professional development is driven by the needs of teachers and it centers on the work being produced by the students. Common planning time by grade or subject area, sometimes facilitated by a Teacher Center person or staff member is the most successful form of professional development. Looking at a teacher assignment and the work it produces informs the teacher both on the effectiveness of the assignment and student learning outcomes. In too many schools we sit in auditoriums after a long day’s work as some “expert” tells us how to teach and we worry about the traffic on the way home.

An Interim System of Assessment of Student Work. In too many schools assessment means the student grade on the Regents Exam or Standardized Test. In effective schools teachers assess students work on an ongoing basis and adjust the model to fit the needs of the student. A talk private talk with a student, a visit to a counselor, a narrowly targeted after school program or special class, staff at each school site must have the flexibility to craft a system that best serves the students they teach.

Celebrating Success, aka Morale. At the end of the school day the race to teacher cars resembles a start at Le Mans, and no wonder when staff is treated so poorly. Do principals learn to say, “thank you?” On snowy Monday as you dragged into school was the principal at the front door thanking you? A congratulatory note or buying a round of drinks on an after school Friday night denotes an effective school leader.

There are no secrets. There is no reading program that guarantees success. Press releases from Tweed only alienate an already suspicious teaching force. It is only in schools were colleagues honor and respect each other and are honored and respected by the school leader that we can hope to create students that we can be proud of.

February 12, 2006

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Hard Work Is No Replacement for Skill and Experience [Updated]

Filed under: Education by Leo Casey @ 11:18 pm

Here at Edwize we are often fascinated with the reactions those two little words — teacher union — produce in some edu-quarters. It’s almost Pavlovian.

The entrance of the AFT’s NCLB: Let’s Get It Right into the education blogosphere set off our friends at Eduwonk and Chalkboard on a series of exchanges that somehow led to riffs on Brokeback Mountain. Don’t ask us to explain it: there were enough free associations in their posts to keep a small army of psychoanalysts busy for a year.

But they did finally manage to touch upon a few subjects about which we do know something. Chalkboard’s Joe Williams took issue with the AFT’s blogger Michele, complaining that she had a “lackluster work ethic” because she had the temerity to suggest that the KIPP schools might overdo their teachers’ work day, not to mention the work week and work year. According to Williams, what’s some extra work and being on call 24 hours a day when it comes to helping poor kids get the education which opens doors of opportunity to them?

Here’s where some real experience in front of an inner city classroom makes all the difference in one’s understanding of this question. Most teachers go above and beyond the call of duty for their neediest students, as anyone who has taught in these schools knows. As our experience with the Chancellors District here in New York City shows, a moderately longer day can provide important help for at-risk students, provided that it combined with lower class size, strong curriculum and good professional development for teachers. But it does not follow that if something works well in moderation, it will work even better when employed in an extreme fashion.

Accomplished educators learn early in their careers that teaching is a marathon, and that it is essential to establish the personal and professional balance necessary to run the whole race. As Andy Hargreaves has pointed out so well, teaching is the kind of work where one could always do something more, and ‘burn out’ is a very real danger.

And ‘burn out’ is the rule of the day in charter schools which employ the work intensification model of 10+ hour days, 6 day weeks and 50 week years, resulting in dramatically high rates of teacher turnovers.

The result is a self-perpetuating cycle. The school hires energetic and well-meaning, but young and completely novice teachers. It then has to employ ‘teacher proof’ curricula and extend the ‘on time’ into the evening in order to compensate for the lack of teaching skill and experience. Teaching needs to be reinforced by a school culture which leans toward the authoritarian. By the time a teacher would ordinarily have begun to acquire the knowledge and skills that allow her and her students to work smart as well as hard, she has burnt out, and is unable to maintain the intensity of work. It is also impossible to start a family with such a work load. So the school is constantly replacing inexperienced, novice teachers with more inexperienced, novice teachers.

There are a number of issues raised by this model of work intensification schools, two of which we will raise here. First, how can this model be widely replicated and scaled up, given its reliance upon a continuous pool of novice, inexperienced teachers willing to work without limit? Second, when measured against comparable schools, are novice teachers using ‘teacher proof’ curricula and working for much longer hours able to match the work of skilled, accomplished teachers using more demanding curricula and working a shorter day?

Not to worry, says Eduwonk. The new paradigm of school organization is pluralist, and so there is no need for the work intensification model of charter schools like KIPP to be broadly replicable, with a capacity to scale up. Whether or not this is true, the argument made by these schools – that they succeed in closing the achievement gap that district public schools do not – suggests that their model is broadly replicable. And certainly those who promote this model in New York would insist that it is broadly replicable. Moreover, while we at Edwize are convinced of the value of educational pluralism in school size, method of governance, pedagogy and curricular themes, we do not believe that a convincing case has been made for pluralism around teacher quality. Rather, educational research indicates that teacher experience and skill are the most important factor in the quality of education.

UPDATE:
Chalkboard’s Joe Williams responds here. At the risk of harming Joe’s credentials with his allies on the ideological right, it must be said that a great deal of what Joe says is sensible.

A moderately lengthened school day for at risk students who need homework help and tutoring can be one useful part of an academic program to serve them. That’s not just something we agreed to in the late Chancellor’s District. When we designed our UFT secondary charter school, we created just such a day. We staffed it by putting teachers on overlapping schedules – some early, some late – to keep their workday reasonable and within the contractual limits. Our elementary charter school creates an extended day by having an after school program staffed by an outside CBO. Those arrangements put the lie to the claims that the contract prevented a longer day for at risk students at the same time that it treated teachers as professionals who have personal and family lives as well as a commitment to the students they teach. [Joe is right that the UFT charter schools were attacked on this point, even though our application made clear what our plans were, but it was one of those “why let the facts get in the way of an ideological prejudice” moments.]

Nor is there anything wrong with parents and students contacting a teacher by e-mail, where the teacher has some control over the pace and timing of the communications. That is rather different from the notion that the teacher should have a cell phone that makes them available 24 hours a day. Joe does go off the deep end, however, when he writes that according to the comments here, “most NYC parents are so busy smoking crack and ignoring their kids that they would never in a million years pick up the phone and call/email them anyway, so what is the problem?” Come on, Joe, you’re better than this sort of puerile New York Post rhetoric. A couple of commentators given to excess in all that they write are best ignored. On the question of teacher-parent relations, it is far more telling that the Chancellor’s own parental taskforce is boycotting the Department of Education’s lobbying of the state legislature, and joining with the UFT’s effort instead.

The point is simply that there can be too much of a ‘good thing,’ and that reasonable steps, applied in an extreme fashion, can become counterproductive.

Where Chalkboard and Edwize continue to disagree is on this issue: It is not the fact that teachers in work intensive charter schools work hard that keeps them from becoming accomplished, high qualified educators. Rather, it is the fact that these teachers are hired as inexperienced novices, that the opportunities for meaningful professional development given to them are limited, and that by the time they have begun to acquire the skills and pedagogical tools which would make them into truly excellent teachers, they are burnt out and leaving. It is the high turnover rate of teachers in work intensive charter schools, with inexperienced, novice teacher replacing inexperienced novice teacher that produces a teaching staff that is less than accomplished and highly qualified. Under a different set of circumstances, in a school which respects them as a professional with the potential to become highly skilled, those same individuals might be beginning a fruitful, life long career.

February 10, 2006

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Dr. Martin Luther King’s 1964 Speech

Filed under: Other Topics by Kombiz Lavasany @ 12:30 pm

Dr. Martin Luther King, March 14, 1964 in New York accepting the John Dewey Award. (MP3)

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