April 29, 2007

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Who Lost Bill Clinton? Who Lost Hillary Clinton?

Filed under: NCLB by Leo Casey @ 1:39 pm

In two separate stories published last week [here and here], Education Week reports that former U.S. President Bill Clinton and New York Senator and Democratic Presidential candidate Hillary Clinton have gone public with criticisms that No Child Left Behind has led to excessive, out of control testing.

Speaking to the National School Boards Association’s annual convention, Bill Clinton declared that “I would get with you and make some changes in that Leave No Child Behind Act.” “You don’t need to test every child, every year,” he said, joinging with critics of the yearly standardized testing regimen instituted by NCLB. Three tines over a student’s K-12 education would be sufficient in Clinton’s opinion.

Hillary Clinton, who voted for NCLB in 2001, told the annual convention of New York State United Teachers that the Bush’s administration’s implementation of the law had harmed education. “We do need accountability. But not the kind of accountability that the NCLB law has imposed on people. Not only has it been funded at less than has been promised, it’s been administered with a heavy and arbitrary hand.”

“It’s time we had a president who cares more about learning than about memorizing,” Sen. Clinton told a full house of thousands of cheering delegates. “The tests have become the curriculum instead of the other way around.”

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The Politics of Measuring and Promoting High School Graduation [Updated]

Filed under: NYC DOE by Leo Casey @ 1:02 am

UPDATE:

“Good grief,” as Charley Brown would say. At the Chalkboard, Joe Williams is on a ‘Lucy’ mission to find something, anything to criticize at Edwize, and puts together a whole post complaining about half of a sentence in the below piece. In Williams’ eyes, it is apparently a capital crime that we agreed with what Bloomberg and Klein had to say on this issue, because we also mentioned that we don’t agree with them most of the time. Joe is free to view Tweed’s third Extreme Makeover through rose tinted glasses is he so desires. But the world of New York City public schools looks very different from the inside of a classroom and from the commanding heights of Tweed, and we make no apologies for seeing that world from the former vantage point.

LC

High school graduation rates were the educational theme of the last week.

Here in New York, the State Education Department and the City Department of Education concluded negotiations over how to count the graduation rate of New York City public high schools, settling on a 50% rate.

In Washington DC, Senators Kennedy [D-MA], Bingham [D- NM] and Burr [R-NC] introduced a Graduation Promise Act [GPA] designed to address the question of high school graduation rates largely ignored by No Child Left Behind. The bill was supported by Alliance for Excellent Education, the Center for American Progress, Jobs for the Future, and the National Council of La Raza. Acccording to a joint statement by the four groups, GPA would authorize $2.5 billion in new spending to:

  • Create a federal-state-local secondary school reform partnership focused on transforming the nation’s lowest performing high schools;
  • Build capacity for high school improvement and provide resources to ensure high school educators and students facing the highest challenges receive the support they need to succeed;
  • Strengthen state systems to identify, differentiate among, and target the level of reform and resources necessary to improve low performing high schools and ensure transparency and accountability for that process;
  • Advance the research and development needed to ensure a robust supply of highly effective secondary school models for those most at risk of being left behind and identify the most effective reforms;
  • Support states to align their policies and systems to meet the goal of college and career-ready graduation for all students.

There are many positive features in the proposed GPA. High school graduation is the most meaningful measure of success in K-12 education, and is an appropriate target for national educational policy. There is a crisis in high school graduation rates, especially among students living in poverty and students of color. [In some quarters, the extent of the crisis is much exaggerated, but it is real and significant nonetheless.] It is important that GPA would dedicate real resources to addressing the problem — in stark contrast to the Bush administration underfunding of NCLB.

But in one important respect, GPA continues the most serious flaws of NCLB — it uses the NCLB definition for high school graduation rates, a four year cohort rate. This is an outmoded defintion which creates profound disincentives for schools serving students which need longer to complete graduation requirements, since it treats a five or six year graduation as the same as a high school drop-out. For immigrant students who are English Language Learners, to cite just one example, this is a profoundly unrealistic and unfair standard.

There are few occasions when we are in agreement with the educational pronouncements of Mayor Bloomberg and Chancellor Klein, but this is one. “If they graduate in five years, if they graduate in six years, more power to them,” Bloomberg told the Daily News.

Last summer, we did an in-depth analysis of this question on Edwize, A Plea For Educational Common Sense, With An Example Of How NCLB Defies Common Sense. Even if you read it before, it is well worth another read in the context of this week’s developments. This is a textbook case of what goes wrong with educational policy, even the best meaning of initiatives, when they ignore the real world of schools.

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The Abstinence-Only Delusion

Filed under: Education by Leo Casey @ 1:00 am

Saturday April 28 New York Times editorial, “The Abstinence Only Delusion”:

Reliance on abstinence-only sex education as the primary tool to reduce teenage pregnancies and sexually transmitted diseases — as favored by the Bush administration and conservatives in Congress — looks increasingly foolish and indefensible…

A Congressionally mandated report issued this month by the Mathematica Policy Research firm found that elementary and middle school students in four communities who received abstinence instruction — sometimes on a daily basis — were just as likely to have sex in the following years as students who did not get such instruction…

As Congress prepares to debate further financing, it should either drop the abstinence-only program as a waste of money or broaden it to include safe-sex instruction. Abstinence deserves to be part of a comprehensive sex education effort, but not the only part.

April 26, 2007

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Labor’s Voices 3 Conference

Filed under: Labor by Kombiz Lavasany @ 3:24 pm

unionproud_logo.jpgStarting Friday morning workers, activists, communicators, writers and a few bloggers are descending on New York for the Labor’s Voices 3 conference. There’s a series of interesting panelists and panels on every aspect of labor media inluding community newspapers, blogs, podcasting and maybe even some talk of web 2.0. For full disclosure I am organizing two panels for the conference: one dealing with emerging technology and the other dealing with labor in relation to the larger blogosphere and its impact.

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Graduation — We Reach The Halfway Mark

Filed under: Education by Maisie @ 11:29 am

Exactly 50 percent of 9th graders who entered New York City high schools in 2002 graduated within four years, the state said yesterday, an increase from the 2005 graduation rate.

You can really play glass-half-full-glass-half-empty games here, but most of the press (here and here) took their cue from the mayor and touted the gains.

There is no reason to question them. The achievement of students, teachers and administrators is real and welcome. As one young man, a representative of the Urban Youth Collaborative, said at City Hall last week, “We don’t want to drop out either.”

But this is the first year that the city and state have agreed on a single counting methodology. Last year there was a huge controversy over the rates, when the state said New York City graduated just 43.5 percent of its students in four years and the city said it graduated 58.2% on time. (The state has since revised the 43.5 percent figure to 47 percent, and one would have to be naive not to believe there was some high-level politics involved in the new numbers.)

Nevertheless, the 50% figure reflects a common agreement that excludes GEDs, includes some special education students and does not count students who graduated in August rather than June.

The 50 percent, as anyone who works in a high school knows, is an average that may say almost nothing about what’s going on in individual schools. The state published rates for every school, which the N.Y. Post supplied as a PDF. Looking through it, you can see that some schools literally graduate no one in four years and some schools graduate 96 percent. Charter schools around the state did particularly badly, graduating just 26 percent in four years while 34 percent of the cohort dropped out. In the city, the four-year dropout rate is over 50 percent in some large high schools, which in many others students persevere, with nearly half still enrolled for a fifth year.

The Mayor lauded that perseverence. And the DOE said (and it’s true) that it doesn’t matter so much how you count as long as you’re clear about who’s included and excluded, and you count the same way each time.

So for that reason DOE is planning to issue its own graduation report, using the old methodology, sometime before the end of the school year so there will be a consistent history. That report has a lot of important detail–for example the graduation rates of ELLs and former ELLs, the racial and ethnic breakdowns of city graduates, and all the numbers of discharged and transferred students. The state’s does not have as much detail on the city, so it’s important DOE keep its promise and issue its own report.

One thing the state’s powerpoint (available via the link above) does have are several pages of recommendations based on how successful schools increase graduation rates. Among the ideas are 8th grade bridge programs; assigning a teacher “advocate” to groups of 15 at-risk students to meet with those kids every day; group meetings of teachers who examine student work and their own practices in regular professional conversations; and ensuring that guidance and social support systems are in place for students.

Many of these features are lacking in the city’s most high-needs schools and it’s crucial they be put in place. But that’s grist for a separate post. Today’s a day to congratulate those who worked so hard, students and adults alike. God speed to the graduates.

April 25, 2007

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Reading the Aeneid

Filed under: New Teacher Diaries by Classicalteacher @ 2:40 pm

Classicalteacher is a second-year high school teacher in Brooklyn.

Not long ago, a visitor to my 9th-grade classroom took issue with my students’ reading of the Aeneid. Now, I might be mistaken but most educators would be overjoyed that high school freshmen are reading a text that many of us don’t tackle until college. But as this particular visitor, however, surveyed a classroom of students busily researching Virgil’s use of figurative language, she clearly did not appear pleased with my choice of literature.

As she noted, many of my students were non-white: given the number of black, Hispanic and Asian students in my classroom, how could I give them a work that was so unabashedly from the Dead White Male tradition? Not only that, but we had just read Homer, yet another member of that oft-maligned club, with Sophocles and Shakespeare to follow shortly. The visitor wanted to know how I could have the gall to be so culturally insensitive to the supposed needs of my diverse student body.

Though neither student nor parent had made a similar complaint during the entire year, I should have seen it coming. After all, at our school we pride ourselves on a rigorous education steeped in the classics that, we hope, will get our students into the best colleges (we don’t yet know, since this is the school’s first year) and prepare them for intellectual exploration at the highest level. We require our students to take Latin for four years, study classical literature, and partake in declamation, the public speaking exercise mastered by the great Roman orators Horace and Cato. (more…)

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Death On The Job Report

Filed under: Labor by Kombiz Lavasany @ 1:25 pm

The AFL-CIO released it’s annual Death on the Job report which documents on the job fatalities in the US over the last year. The reports is published on the AFL-CIO’s website.

The 16th edition of the national and state-by-state profile of worker safety and health in the United States reveals that in 2005 (the last year U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics are available) 5,734 workers died from workplace injuries, compared with 5,764 the previous year. But the figures show a significant increases in fatalities among Latino and foreign-born workers.

On a related note Stephen Labaton at the New York Times writes about OSHA’s late start and popcorn worker’s lung disease.

The agency has killed dozens of existing and proposed regulations and delayed adopting others. For example, OSHA has repeatedly identified silica dust, which can cause lung cancer, and construction site noise as health hazards that warrant new safeguards for nearly three million workers, but it has yet to require them.

More on OSHA at the Pump Handle.

April 24, 2007

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A Review: Norm Fruchter, “Urban Schools, Public Will: Making Education Work For All Our Children”

Filed under: Education by Peter Goodman @ 3:15 pm

Although Fruchter never mentions Bloomberg, Klein or Tweed he shreds the philosophical underpinnings of their regency. Fruchter has been a public school teacher, a school board member in New York City and the Director of the Institute for Education and Social Policy at NYU and currently the director of the Community Involvement Program at the Annenberg Institute for School Reform at Brown University.

His book proposes “that the nation’s urban public schools can be transformed to effectively educate their poor students of color, and that the nation’s urban school districts are the key agents of this transformation,” and, he attacks the “invidious myth - that U.S. public education is so ineffective that it must be transformed by market solutions.”

Just as Jonathan Kozol condemns our political leaders for allowing our schools to slide into segregation so does Fruchter - although he points to the nation’s military schooling - schools on military bases that are racially integrated and high achieving - race cannot be an impediment to success.

Fruchter flunks accountability systems - including “audit and inspection;” he proffers, “Schools with lackluster leadership and with inexperienced and demoralized teachers cannot carry out such efforts without district intervention and support.” Conferring autonomy without capcity-building will only “cut schools loose to flounder, or sink on their own”

It is clear that the current Empowerment Schools movement and perhaps the soon to be launched uber-regions and Partnership Support Organizations are allowing “floundering” schools to sink.

Without effective capacity building and operations support from the district level, schools are placed in jeopardy - and the current NYC leadership’s mantra is: freeing schools from bureaucracy - just the policy that Fruchter espouses will allow schools to fail.

The book is not all theory: it points to three districts in different parts of the country and searches out commonalties:

* Superintendents who initiated, supported and sustained reform for at least a decade.

* structured district wide strategies to focus on instruction

* developed collaborative relationships with their teacher unions

* developed and sustained strong external partners

* an appropriate balance between district mandate and school-level decisions

* new forms of collaborative leadership to makes reform a collective responsibility

* significant resources invested in professional development

And, Fruchter does not leave out parents and the community: rather than “capture” these stakeholders he urges policies to encourage them to become empowered - a bottom-up accountability.

While the current NYC educational leadership rolls out program after program, an astute observer of education points out a path - hopefully it’s not too late to put the train back on the tracks.

April 20, 2007

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Breathless At The Chalkboard

Filed under: NYC DOE by Leo Casey @ 12:58 pm

Sad to say, rhetorical hyperventilation seems to have become the stock in trade from The Chalkboard’s Joe Williams.

Today’s post brings the breathlessness to new heights.

In one fell swoop, he manages to obliterate every parent organization in the Coalition to Put the Public Back In Public Education that represents parents of color, working class parents and immigrant parents — all of the community groups from Brookyn and the Bronx involved in the Coalition for Educational Justice, the 200 groups which are part of the New York Immigration Coalition and New York ACORN.

All of these organizations were parties to yesterday’s agreement. The additional funding weights for English Language Learners and low income students and the Middle Schools initiative are parts of the agreement that are very important to these organizations, and together with our Coalition partners, the UFT fought hard for those measures.

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Coalition Agreement With New York City, DOE

Filed under: NYC DOE by Leo Casey @ 11:11 am

On Thursday, April 19 an agreement was reached between New York City, the Department of Education and member organizations of the Coalition to Put The Public Back In Public Education – the UFT, ACORN, the Coalition for Educational Justice, the New York Immigration Coalition, the Working Families Party, and the Urban Youth Collaborative. Other groups, including NYers for Smaller Classes, CPAC and Time Out from Testing, were consulted.

This agreement, while not everything we wanted, yielded major changes in the planned reorganization of New York City public schools. This vital progress was made possible by the tireless advocacy of thousands of educators, parents and students from the Coalition member organizations.

Here are the agreement’s key components:

CHANGES IN FUNDING FORMULAS

* No school will have its budget cut as a result of the new funding formulas for the next two school years [2007-08, 2008-09]. Schools with large numbers of high needs students will receive additional funding, without a reduction of funding to other schools.

* A “hold harmless” protection in the hiring of teaching staff. Schools can hire new teachers with the same experience and salary level as teachers who leave, at no extra cost.

* Extra funding for English Language Learners, special education students, and low income students, in order to provide them with the supports they need to succeed in school.

* The UFT reserves the right to pursue its grievance against the inclusion of teacher salaries in the ‘open market’ transfer system.

* A task force including the UFT, the NY Immigrant Coalition, and the Annenberg Institute at Brown University to evaluate the impact of Fair Student Funding and to recommend refinements.

CLASS SIZE

The DOE must now consult the UFT, NYers for Smaller Class Size and other stakeholders in the implementation of the new law on class size reduction. The UFT and NYers for Smaller Class Size can still fight for the best possible State Education Department regulations governing the law’s implementation.

TENURE

The DOE commits that existing tenure criteria will remain in effect for 2007-2008. Any changes beyond 2007-2008 will conform to the new state law. The UFT will participate in the process of developing any changes.

MIDDLE SCHOOLS

The DOE has committed to a Middle School initiative, working with the City Council Task Force on Middle Schools and the Coalition for Educational Justice, to overhaul instruction in the middle schools. A pilot project to implement new strategies in at least 50 schools will start in the 2007-08 school year.

PARENT ENGAGEMENT

The DOE will establish a parent engagement committee, with representation from appropriate stakeholders, to develop systems and processes for improving parent engagement and ensuring that every school has a well-functioning School Leadership Team.

STUDENT SUCCESS

A commitment to work with the Urban Youth Collaborative on improving college and career preparedness, graduation rates and college admissions among high school students.

Areas of disagreement remain between the city and coalition member organizations. At the announcement of the agreement, UFT President Randi Weingarten expressed ongoing concerns about the reorganization. But this agreement is an important first step in Putting The Public Back In Public Education, as a result of the campaign waged since January by the Coalition and by elected officials. The voices of educators, parents and students are finally being heard.

 

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