July 31, 2006

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Previewing the Next Big Ed Report

Filed under: Charter School by Kombiz Lavasany @ 3:50 pm

John at the AFT’s NCLBlog previews the next big report the US Department of Education is expected to release, belatedly, that will compare the performance of public schools and charter schools.

July 28, 2006

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A Plea for Educational Common Sense, With An Example Of How NCLB Defies Common Sense

Filed under: NCLB by Leo Casey @ 7:12 pm

In recent days and months, there has been a raging debate in education circles over high school graduation rates. At the core of controversy is the question of how widespread and how deep a crisis American education is facing over its failure to graduate significant numbers of high school students, especially young people living in poverty and young people of color. No one denies that there is a serious problem, but one school of thought believes that the other school is exaggerating the sheer extent of the crisis. Those arguing for a problem of more modest dimensions, with graduation rates even incrementally improving over recent years, are best represented by Larry Mishel and Joydeep Roy at the Economic Policy Institute. Those arguing for a crisis of maximum proportions range from Jay Greene and Marcus Winters of the Manhattan Institute on the right to Christopher Swanson of the Urban Institute on the center to Dan Losen and Gary Orfield of Harvard’s Civil Rights Project on the left.

It is all too easy to get lost in the forest of details in this debate, and to see the differences as largely ones of a technical nature. One crucial point of difference, for example, is whether or not the Swanson and Losen overestimate the numbers of the new ninth grade cohort each year by including in that figure students repeating the grade. They do make that mistake, and the resultant overestimate of the size of the annual ninth grade cohort leads to an overestimate of the numbers not graduating on time four years later. The more general problem is that while it may seem at first blush that calculating a graduation rate is a very straightforward exercise, it is actually a complex statistical exercise, especially when one is measuring the graduation rate of students living in poverty. The crux of the problem lies here: as a function of the economic conditions in which they live, students living in poverty experience a great deal of transience, far more than students from the middle class and well-to-do. Beyond the immense educational problems this transience poses [problems that those who minimize the effects of poverty on a student’s education would do well to consider], it also makes it difficult to know when a student is just moving to another school district and when a student is dropping out. Sometimes a student even ‘drops out’ as a result of moving: he or she decides that starting anew in another school is just too difficult, and fails to register in a high school in his or her new place of residence.

How does one measure this moving target, and how does decide which school district and which school should be accountable for a particular student’s failure to graduate? It is not an impossible task, but it is clearly more difficult than many assume. If you are interested in the statistical details of this particular issue, there is no better place to go than the wealth of posts on Sherman Dorn’s blog. In particular, check out the tag team debate in the comments section to this post between the Mishel-Roy team and the Swanson-Losen team, and this subsequent post. If you are an auditory learner, listen to this debate between Larry Mishel and Jay Greene.

Buried underneath all of the technical detail in this debate is a very real, very important educational issue which has not received the attention it deserves, an issue directly connected to the implementation of NCLB.

This issue arises in the debate as a dry definitional issue of how to define ‘graduation,’ and so its practical policy consequences are lost on most readers. The crisis maximalists, such as Greene and Swanson, want to use the NCLB definition, one of “on time graduation” in four years. When a student takes longer than four years to graduate high school, he or she is counted among those who have failed to graduate. As well, students who earn equivalency diplomas are counted among the failures. The crisis minimalists, such as Mishel, argue that any student who graduates high school, regardless of how long it takes or how the student obtains a diploma, should be counted as a high school graduate.

In the debate on Sherman Dorn’s blog, Dan Losen defends the definition of graduation used by crisis maximalists this way:

We should agree that the vast majority of high schools are designed (and budget their resources) so that successful students will take four years, from grade 9-12 to earn the credits they need to graduate high school with a real diploma. If we accept that premise, then schools and districts should calculate and report the “on time” graduation rate. As Congress required in No Child Left Behind, the graduation rate is the percentage of students that graduate in the “standard number of years with a diploma.”

Unfortunately, we could only agree with Losen if we forgot much of what we know about the real world of today’s urban schools, and relied only upon the language of the NCLB law and the definitional abstractions of academia. An invariable ‘four year’ course of high school study is an artifact of the old factory model schooling, in which all schools were fundamentally the same in their academic course of study and their structure. In the emergent world of knowledge economy schooling, secondary schools are of different sizes, combining different grades, with different academic themes, programs, curricula and pedagogies. It may have been possible in the world of yore to insist upon rigid standardization, in which a four year course of study was an invariable rule; in today’s educational world, it is essential to have standards that are rigorous and exacting, but which can be met in different ways and at different paces.

Here are the problems with an inflexible definition of ‘graduation’ based on a four year graduation rate.

First, depending upon the curricula in use, the course of study at high schools ranges from two or three years to five or six years of high school work. On the one hand, ‘early college’ high schools, such as Bard High School for Early College, has gifted students finishing high school requirements in as few as two years, and moving on to college level work immediately, during their last years of high school. On the other hand, schools with extensive career-technical and vocational courses of study that are in addition to the regular high school academic course of study can easily take five years of study. Some of the very best programs in New York City schools, such as those that graduate academically high performing students with certification as a Practical Nurse and as a Federal Aviation Administrator, simply can not be completed in a standard four year course of study. Other career technical programs serving students who are not academically inclined face the challenge of having those students both meet academic graduation requirements and acquire marketable vocational skills, and this combination often requires more than four years. Many schools with more innovative academic programs are no longer even organized around grades, but rather around the standards, or proficiencies, that students must actively demonstrate they have met to graduate. The understanding in these schools is that different students will meet these standards at different times and at different paces.

Second, there are very significant numbers of immigrant students who do not know a single word of the English language when, in the course of their high school years, they first enter public schools in New York City and other major urban centers across the United States. It is entirely unreasonable to expect that those students could graduate, meeting the same standards as native English speakers, in the same four year time frame. One of the issues of NCLB implementation now in contention between New York State and the U.S. Department of Education is the refusal of the feds to allow New York’s English Language Learners to take a different English Language Arts exit exam: Spellings and Co. insist that immigrant English Language Learners must be able to perform at the same literacy level as 18 year old native speakers after a year or two of learning to speak, read and write English.

Thirdly, for a whole host of reasons, all too many students – especially students living in poverty – do not arrive in high school able to do high school level work. If the school which enrolls them is to do its job, it must have additional time to prepare those students to meet high school graduation standards. This problem has been compounded in recent years, as graduation course requirements and standards have been raised in state after state. Elective courses are a now a thing of the past in most urban high schools, simply because so much of the day is taken up with required and mandated courses. Just as there is no longer any space in a student’s program for electives, there is also no space for remedial courses that address deficits in basic literacy and numeracy skills. More time is required.

What distinguishes an excellent urban secondary school serving a population with many immigrant students and many English Language Learners, and an excellent urban secondary school serving a population with many at risk students living in poverty, is NOT that it graduates its students in an arbitrary four year time frame. Rather, what distinguishes an excellent urban secondary school is that it never gives up on those students who take longer to meet standards, that it works and struggles with all of its students until they graduate.

Take the International Schools, a network of high schools across New York City [now extending across the US] which are dedicated to serving recent immigrants for whom English is not their native language. A team of researchers led by Michelle Fine of the urban education program at the graduate school of the City University of New York published a study in June 2005 on the graduation rate at the oldest International Schools [those schools which had already graduated a number of classes]. Take a moment to read that study, The Internationals Network for Public Schools: A Quantitative and Qualitative Cohort Analysis of Graduation and Dropout Rates. Fine and her colleagues demonstrate how the International Schools beat the odds for graduating English Language Learners. The International Schools have a 63.4% graduation rate in four years – much better than the average four year graduation rate for English Language Learners in New York City and nationally, and even better than the four year graduation rate for non-ELL students in New York City. But what is most impressive is how that rate consistently goes up after the fourth year: at the end of the fifth year, the graduation rate is over 80%; by the end of the seventh year, the graduation rate is over 90%.

By insisting upon a ‘four year’ graduation rate, NCLB – and the researchers who insist upon using its prescriptions in their work – give the International Schools no credit for having graduated an additional 25% of students, the most academically challenging students they have. As far as NCLB is concerned, the International Schools are no different than the high school with a drop out rate of 36%. What is worse, by using this arbitrary definition, NCLB creates a massive disincentive for the hard work that the International Schools – and hundreds of other excellent schools serving immigrant students and students living in poverty – do. It treats their most powerful successes as statistical failures, and penalizes them for refusing to give up on their students.

There is a moral here to this story, on the danger of turning over educational research and policy making to men and women who lack a solid grounding in the real world of schools. Whatever motives one would want to impute to the elected representatives who passed NCLB, and the federal educrats who administer it, there can be no question that the academics at the Civil Rights Project at Harvard are among the most tireless and most committed advocates of students of color in the United States. Yet by insisting upon the NCLB definition of graduation as a four year rate, they do a profound disservice to many of the very students they set out to aid – simply because they do not understand some very important things about schools in the real world.

So, by all means, American secondary schools need to address the failure to graduate all too many students, especially students living in poverty and students of color. But let’s use some educational common sense here. There is no need to overstate the crisis, because even the most parsimonious of estimates tell us there is a real problem for millions of Americans youth. We must address the real problem, and support the real solution – working with students until they meet standards and graduate, however long it takes.

July 27, 2006

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Klein in the Rockies : Klein Fibs to the Glitterati

Filed under: NYC DOE by Kombiz Lavasany @ 5:23 pm

Joel Klein flew into Aspen, Colorado to sell his anti-union gospel to an audience unaware of the dissatisfaction of parents and educators back in NYC. Conservative Fox News commentator Mort Kondracke, wrote a glowing piece about Klein’s remarks. We’ve included two responses to the article below. (more…)

July 26, 2006

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Beware of Enemies of Your Enemy

Filed under: NYC DOE by Leo Casey @ 10:51 pm

Charles Murray, co-author of the infamous Bell Curve with Richard Hernstein, appeared on the op-ed page of Tuesday’s Wall Street Journal, attacking NCLB. For those who may have forgotten, or who are too young to remember, Murray’s Bell Curve stirred a major controversy when it was first published in 1994. At the center of the debate was its racist argument that the ‘achievement gap’ was a function of the innate intellectual inferiority of people of color.

Now, Murray is writing polemics against NCLB, arguing that the agenda of bringing all students to levels of proficiency in English Language Arts and Mathematics defies the iron law of the ‘bell curve,’ along which students must be distributed in neat intervals.

And, distressingly, Murray’s op-ed is being favorably cited on anti-NCLB and anti-testing Internet list serves.

It is worth taking note of this development, and of reminding ourselves that while there is much in the NCLB fully deserving of all the criticism educators can muster, there are also parts – especially the disaggregation of achievement statistics by race and ethnicity – which are just as deserving of our support. It is absolutely vital that school districts be accountable for what they are and are not doing to bridge the achievement gap, and the disaggregation requirements of NCLB have been pivotal in this regard. No wonder that Murray would be finding fault with these parts of NCLB.

What requires more explanation is why ostensibly progressive educators would be willing to enter into an alliance with the likes of Murray.

Sometimes the ‘enemy of your enemy’ is… also your enemy.

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Scott Elliot Makes A Great Catch

Filed under: Education by Kombiz Lavasany @ 4:05 pm

Scott Elliot, the writer at the big media Dayton Daily News Education blog, Get on the Bus, provides more background information about John Tierney’s recent op-ed in the New York Times. For background, the Department of Education waited till Friday evening to release a report that showed public schools match or outperform private schools students when socio-economic background is factored in to NAEP scores. Tierney wrote a furiously anti-public school/union op-ed citing two studies funded by a voucher friendly right-wing institute.

Elliot dissects some of the problems with one of the studies:

It just so happened that both studies involved Paul Peterson, whom Tierney neglected to mention is often funded by the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation, a Washington, D.C.-based school choice advocacy group with roots here in Dayton.

Most surprising to me was that Tierney reached way back seven years to cite this 1999 study:

……..

Don’t remember this study? Since it included Dayton, I remembered it. Let me help refresh your memory. This is the Paul Peterson led study that saw it’s conclusions renounced by the research group compiled the data. Here’s an excerpt from a story that ran in the Dayton Daily News in 2000:

An educational research company that compiled data for a school voucher study that showed blacks did better at private schools says gains in one city were overstated by the lead researcher.

The study, led by Paul Peterson, a government professor at Harvard and a fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution, examined three privately funded experimental programs in New York, Washington and Dayton.

It showed significant gains, based on scores on standardized math and reading tests, for black students who received vouchers to help pay for private school.

Mathematica Policy Research of Princeton, which gathered data in New York, has issued a statement that calls the findings premature and cautions against jumping to any policy conclusions, The New York Times reported in Friday’s editions.

`If you ask the question,When I offered students vouchers, did I make a difference in their test scores,’ right now you come away saying, `No, there’s no impact’ ” said David Myers of Mathematica.

……..

This was the best study Tierney could find to bolster the case for private schools? There hasn’t been a more definitive or independent study in seven years? I’m not sure how much he helped the cause.

July 24, 2006

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Colbert on Kentucky Rivers

Filed under: Labor by Kombiz Lavasany @ 11:00 am


More: The Economic Policy Institute has a news brief on the upcoming Kentucky River decision.

Eight million workers may lose union rights The National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) will soon decide three cases, known collectively as the Kentucky River cases, which could change the basic rights of workers in America. If the NLRB accedes to the demands the employers are making in these cases to significantly broaden the definition of “supervisor,” hundreds of thousands of employees could be stripped of their contract protections and millions more across the economy could be denied the right to form unions or engage in collective bargaining.

More: AFL-CIO petition.

July 23, 2006

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Teacher Stewardship, and The Sound of Silence

Filed under: Teaching by Leo Casey @ 10:32 am

Teaching is a vocation, as much as it is a profession. Most of us who become teachers do so out of a deep sense of a calling to educate young people, to nurture their intellectual and personal development, and to mentor them in the process of making lives of meaning and purpose for themselves. Many of us have passed on far more lucrative careers, and have forsaken lives of comfort, to fulfill that calling. And some of us, including most teachers in New York City public schools, have taken on the extra challenge of working in schools serving poor communities with the young people most in need of our services.

From the very first day we enter our classrooms, we confront a gaping chasm between the importance of the educational work we do every day, on the one hand, and the value American society places on that work, on the other hand. Teaching the young, especially children who live in poverty, is considered a low status job, one that requires only minimal support and remuneration. We labor in classrooms and school buildings that are often overcrowded and in serious disrepair, without up to date books, learning materials and technology, and with classes too large to allow for crucial individual attention to students. Among comparable professions that require a graduate degree, we are the most poorly paid.

This extraordinary divide between what is and what ought to be forces teachers to look beyond our classroom and our school, and to assume the role of steward of the interests of our students, our profession and American education in general. We learn very early in our professional careers that when we restrict our horizons to our immediate teaching, our ability to provide the very best education for our students is diminished, as outside forces undermine the support and the conditions we – and our students – need to succeed. We become teacher unionists because we learn that to be truly effective as stewards, we must act together, as a unified force.

Stewardship demands a vision for the future, as well as for the immediate tasks before us. And at times, it requires that we sacrifice in the here and now, in order to build a far better future. Sometimes, it requires an exceptional sacrifice. Any New York pubic school teacher who has ever gone on strike, and faced the draconian penalties of the Taylor Law, knows that a strike is an exceptional sacrifice, as they face the virtual certainty of being fined two days pay for every day that they are on strike. [Since one has to pay taxes on the fine, the penalty is actually heavier than ‘two for one.’] Teacher unions face fines which could bankrupt them, and union leaders face jail time. Students lose class time, but the lost class time can, and almost always is, made up when the strike is over. The biggest hardship for the public lies in parents having to find daycare for their children during the duration of the strike.

Precisely because it is such an immense sacrifice, teachers and teacher unions do not take strikes lightly. But precisely because we take our role as stewards seriously, and because we are prepared to make sacrifices to fulfill that role, we do not rule out strikes. If the leverage of a strike is required to move a city or a board of education to do the right thing for our students, our schools and our profession, and there are no other realistic choices, we will take on that burden. Our unions are in the tradition of Martin Luther King, and we are fully prepared to engage in non-violent civil disobedience and assume the penalties for doing so, when the cause of justice – and education – requires it.

As Joe Williams at the Chalkboard reports [somewhat belatedly], the UFT has been considering the adoption of a ‘no contract, no work’ policy. We have taken on this deliberation with the seriousness such a decision demands. In the context of a Mayor and a city that has unreasonably delayed past contract negotiations, refusing to negotiate in good faith, and then imposed a pattern negotiated by another union, and in the context of a Mayor and a city with announced intentions to gut the pension and health care benefits that are essential to attract and retain in teaching the ‘best and the brightest,’ we would be negligent if we did not give such an option serious consideration.

Joe Williams has been silent on all of the conditions that led to these deliberations on the part of the UFT. And he was silent when Governor Pataki vetoed reforms of the Taylor Law which would have created penalties for cities and boards of education which failed to negotiate in good faith.

But now he will say that in deliberating on whether or not to adopt a ‘no contract, no work’ policy, the UFT is entertaining “job actions aimed at kids who desperately need every ounce of education we can give them.”

Sometimes silence speaks as loudly as words.

July 21, 2006

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Kentucky River

Filed under: Labor by Kombiz Lavasany @ 2:57 pm

The “Kentucky River” cases which are waiting a ruling from the National Labor relation board are catching the attention of media and workers outside of the labor movement partly because the ruling can be so deterimental to the ability of workers to organize their workplace. One of the cases in the decision hinges on the classification of six nurses in Kentucky who were reclassified as “supervisors” by their hospital as an act to deny bargaining rights to the workers. Jordan Barab provides the background and significance of the upcoming ruling.

The National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) is set to rule on a series of cases collectively known as “Kentucky River,” which will determine whether nurses can be considered “supervisors.” Supervisors, traditionally considered to be employees who could hire, fire and discipline other employees, are not allowed to join unions, according to American labor law.

The origin of the supervisory exclusion was the Taft-Hartley Act which amended the National Labor Relations Act in 1947. The original National Labor Relations Act gave all employees the right to form unions and required that employers recognize certified employee unions and bargain in good faith. The Taft-Hartley, however, excluded supervisors, defined as

“…any individual having authority, in the interest of the employer, to hire, transfer, suspend, lay off, recall, promote, discharge, assign, reward or discipline other employees, or responsibility to direct them, or to adjust their grievances, or effectively to recommend such action, if in connection with the foregoing the exercise of such authority is not of a merely routine or clerical nature, but requires the use of independent judgment.”

However, even the anti-union authors of the Taft-Hartley act made it clear that it did not intend to deny coverage to professional employees, lead workers or others whose jobs do not include major managerial responsibility to hire, fire and discipline other employees.

The current problem stems from a 2001 Supreme Court ruling that found that the NLRB’s analysis of the supervisory status of six registered nurses at a Kentucky nursing facility was flawed. The Board is therefore required to come up with a better definition of “supervisor.” The problem is that some nurses act as “charge nurses,” who are allowed to decide which patients will be seen by his or her colleagues. And despite the fact that charge nurses can’t discipline other employers, hire or fire, they could be considered management by an overly broad interpretation of the law.

………

Finally, just to add insult to injury, the NLRB has refused to hear oral arguments on the cases. In fact, according to the AFL-CIO, the NLRB

“has heard no oral arguments, a fundamental part of any due process, since the Bush administration took office. In fact, the NLRB denied union requests to heard oral arguments in these cases. “

An unfavorable NLRB decision could have devastating effects on labor relations in this country

“The consequences of bad labor board rulings in these cases will reverberate far and wide, potentially stripping coverage in every nook and cranny of the workforce and creating innumerable new opportunities for mischief by employers and their hired gun consultants bent on denying workers’ their fundamental human right to form a union. Long established unions and collective bargaining relationships will also unravel, as employers emboldened by the Bush labor board’s rulings assert that they no longer have a duty under federal labor law to recognize or bargain with their employees’ unions. It will be back to the law of the jungle in industries like health care, where disruptions from labor disputes became so severe in the early 1970s that Congress passed special legislation to bring employees of private non-profit hospitals under federal labor law coverage. “

And this isn’t good new for anyone who’s ever planning on being a patient in a hospital either. Nurses unions are known to be strong advocates of increasing nurse-patient staff ratios and other measures that improve patient outcomes. Research shows that that increased nurse-staff ratios mean fewer hospital fatalities, fewer heart attacks, shorter time spent in the hospital, and fewer patient-safety errors.

………..

But would the NLRB actually go so far as to take away the collective bargaining rights of millions of American workers? Probably.

“In July 2004, the Board ruled that graduate teaching and research assistants were not covered under the NLRA, arguing that their status as students superseded their role as employees. In September 2004, the Board ruled that disabled persons receiving rehabilitative services are also not eligible to form unions under the NLRA. Two months later, temporary employees were barred from organizing unless they had the permission of both their employer and temp agency. The . . . majority then went on to strip organizing rights from artists’ models and newspaper carriers. And earlier this year, the majority ruled that employees of a private nonprofit that performs quasi-public functions are public employees, without coverage by the NLRA.

The AFL-CIO has a petition to Congress asking that the NLRB reverse its decision not to hear oral arguments in the case. The AFL-CIO has a series of blog posts about the NLRB decision on their blog.

Stephen Colbert provides the counter-argument on the Colbert report.

July 20, 2006

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New Web Resource from the AFT

Filed under: Education by Kombiz Lavasany @ 6:03 pm

The AFT has built and launched a website with tools and resources for teachers. John at the AFT’s blog has more about the site:

T-source.org, unveiled today at the AFT convention, provides resources for new and experienced teachers, with more resources coming in the future. (Check out the arranging your classroom interactive–very cool.)

T-Source joins ColorinColorado as an AFT site focused on language acquisition skills for ELL learners.

While you’re at the NCLBlog you can read part of AFT President Ed McElroy’s speech on NCLB, delivered at the AFT convention.

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Privatization, Yet Again

Filed under: Privatization by Kombiz Lavasany @ 11:46 am

Jonathan Singer at MYDD frames as another round of privatizing the public good the recent news that the Bush Administration has proposed a new voucher plan to gin up right-wing support before the November elections:

“George W. Bush and the Republican Congress are going off of the same playbook they have been following for years. Whenever any questions emerge about a public program, privatization is their answer.

The Social Security trust fund might run empty in 35 years… partially privatize it. Want to add a prescription drug program to Medicare… partially privatize it. Want to make the War in Iraq seem less expensive… partially privatize services (to Halliburton and others). Public schools are underperforming because of budget cuts… partially privatize them through vouchers.

The American people do not want to see their necessary services farmed out to corporations or private institutions, but Republicans nevertheless continue in their effort to sell off massive chunks of the American government like it was a business they just bought with junk bonds. Oh, Republicans will use terms like “vouchers” or “personalization” to make their plans more palatable to voters, but no one should mistake what their real intention is: negating America’s promise to this generation and future generations by systematically privatizing public programs.”

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