What do High Performing School Systems in Other Countries Have in Common?
American schools are frequently compared to higher performing foreign schools with the reminder that our schools need to be globally competitive in today’s economic climate.
If we look at the TIMSS Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study or PISA Programme for International Student Assessment examinations given by the Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development and (OECD), we can see many differences between America’s low achievement rate and those of other countries. One of the major differences is about to be addressed by the Obama’s administration’s “Common Core State Standards” which were released on March 10th.
The Constitution of the United States does not mention education and therefore education is assumed to be a state function not a federal government function. This has led to a patchwork of high and low state standards. The new “Common Core” is designed to remedy that. The draft lists a grade-by-grade list of common standards which 48 states and Washington, DC have agreed to follow. (Alaska and Texas are the only holdouts.)
The English/language arts standards aim to “lay out a vision of what it means to be a literate person in the 21st century.” There are 300 pages of appendices which offer examples of student work from the minimally acceptable to highest performing. There does not seem to be an attempt to tell teachers how to teach to the standards.
The government is soliciting public comments until April 2 by going to www.corestandards.org The final version is expected to be posted in late spring.
Student Loan Forgiveness
If you have a student loan, the federal government may forgive you from repayment if you are a teacher. While the process may be complicated, it is clearly explained at the American Federation of Teachers website, www.aft.org
School Sports and Graduation Rates
School sports provide important functions in schools. They teach team work, build school morale, raise funds, inspire competition and competitiveness and provide problem-solving skills. Yet there is a downside to this activity.
The United States Secretary of Education, Arne Duncan, has said that if he had any say in it, dozens of teams in the NCAA championship basketball competition would be declared ineligible to participate. It seems that a number of teams had graduation rates of less than 40%. The list includes #1 ranked Arkansas (29%) and includes Baylor (36%), California (20%), Clemson (37%), Georgia Tech (38%), Kentucky (31%), Louisville (38%), Maryland (8%), Missouri (36%), New Mexico State (36%) Tennessee (30%), and Washington (29%).
The figures were compiled from NCAA rates and come from The Institute for Diversity and Ethics in Sport at Central Florida. The reported rates do not include transfers or players who leave early for the NBA.
School sports also cost schools a great deal of money. To have such high failure rates among basketball players is unacceptable. It would appear that the players need to have academic mentors and additional academic assistance. why can’t these schools allocate funds to assist these young people?
If these graduation rates affect colleges, then school administrators in middle and high schools should look at how many of their athletes fail to graduate. After all schools weren’t built to develop athletes but were built to develop brains and academics.
Should Teachers Be Held Accountable for Student Learning?
Of course they should!
As most of you are aware, all staff from Central Falls High School in Rhode Island have been fired because the school has made little progress in improving student’s tests scores in reading and mathematics.
President Obama joined the discussion this week by stating, “If a school continues to fail its students year after year after year, if it doesn’t show any sign of improvement, then there’s got to be a sense of accountability.” Later this month, Secretary of Education Artie Duncan will release a list of 5,000 of the nation’s lowest performing schools. The firing of teachers or at least making them reapply for their jobs is becoming a nationwide trend. In Boston public schools announced that staff at six low-performing schools would have to apply for their jobs. In California, staff in 188 low-performing schools would have to do the same.
I do not know enough about the situation to form a opinion about whether these firings were justified. I would like to know what assistance, if any, was provided to help these teachers succeed. I feel certain that the problem in Rhode Island did not begin in the high school. How much professional development was provided by the superintendent or principal? How much seniority did the principal have? How much responsibility for learning did the parents have? How much extra assistance was provided to students in the form of tutoring? Were teachers supplied with qualified mentors? Until we have answers to these questions, we should not rush to judgment.
The Shame of Newsweek Magazine
I do not know how many of you saw this in Newsweek. For those of you who didn’t, here it is.
Diane Ravitch is one of the brightest educational writers in America.
The Shame of Newsweek
By Diane Ravitch on March 16, 2010 8:33 AM | 55 Comments | No TrackBacks
Dear Deborah,
Did you see Newsweek last week? What a stunning and uninformed attack on teachers and teachers’ unions. The cover of the magazine told the story: The Key to Saving American Education, by Evan Thomas and Pat Wingert. It was printed on a classroom blackboard. In the background, on the same blackboard, was the handwritten phrase, repeated again and again, “We must fire bad teachers.”
The story itself is a parody of a right-wing rant. It seems that the nation’s classrooms are overrun with “bad teachers,” pedophiles, “weak” teachers, ineffective teachers, dumb teachers, and others who remain in the classroom only because they have “lifetime tenure.” Evil teachers’ unions protect these people who are harming our nation’s children. Researchers now know, the writers say, that if we could fire all these malingerers, the notorious achievement gap between the races would soon close and America would once again lead the world in education.
The writers hold out hope: non-union charter schools and Teach for America will “save” American education.
Leave aside the odd assertion that “much of the ability to teach is innate.” (How do they know?) Leave aside the adulation for Michelle Rhee, Wendy Kopp, KIPP, and anyone who fights teachers’ unions. Leave aside the horror stories about teachers accused of abusing students and keeping “a stash of pornography and cocaine at school.” The article is a flamboyant example of outright hostility to teachers, to the organizations that represent them, and to public education itself.
Nowhere does the article mention that the highest-performing state in the nation is Massachusetts, where all or almost all teachers belong to unions; nor does it mention that the highest-performing nation in the world is Finland, where all or almost all teachers belong to unions. Nowhere in the article is there an example of a non-union district or state in the United States that has achieved high academic performance.
Instead, the article baldly asserts that “New Orleans has made more educational progress than any other city, largely because the public-school system was wiped out.” Hurricane Katrina made it possible to get rid of public education and to wipe out unions, which the article claims are the biggest impediments to high academic achievement.
No use to point out that TFA, with its 4,100 new teachers every year and its 17,000 alumni, is not going to “save” American education or replace a teaching force of 4.6 million. No mention of the many studies that show that TFA often does not outperform ordinary, experienced teachers. No reason to note the high attrition rate of students at charters like KIPP and YES Prep or to acknowledge that teachers at such schools typically work 50-60 (or more) hours each week, which is not sustainable. (By the way, all of this is documented in my book.)
The Newsweek writers applaud the firing of all the teachers at Central Falls High School in Rhode Island. It doesn’t bother them that teachers were not individually evaluated, but fired en masse. But that is not enough. They won’t be satisfied until large numbers of teachers are dismissed, teachers’ unions are crushed, and public education is replaced by non-union charter schools.
Never mind that the research on teacher effectiveness on which they rely is highly speculative and highly contested. Never mind that non-union charters, on average, do not outperform regular public schools. Why bother with such details?
Newsweek, it seems, speaks for the Jack Welch School of Management: Fire the bottom 10 percent every year. A friend said the other day, “If Newsweek is so smart, how come the magazine is in such deep financial trouble? Maybe they need to fire 10 percent of their staff every year.” A dose of their own medicine?
Diane
Not having enough Physics teachers
It is critical to any nation to have sufficient number of highly qualified teachers.
The National Task Force on Teacher Education in Physics released a report which indicates that of 23,000 teachers of high school physics, only one-third have a major in physics or physics education. The task forces urges physics departments and colleges of education to”recognize that they have a responsibility for the professional preparation of physics teachers.”
As long as industry has the ability to pay people who major in physics two to three times more than schools can afford to, we will have a shortage of qualified people who are teaching science or math. Expecting people who paid $14,000 or more per year for their college education to go into education for the glory of working in schools, doesn’t make a lot of sense to me.
Are your students “Internet Addicted”?
You’ve heard of addiction to alcohol and drugs? You’ve heard about food addiction. Have your heard about “internet addiction”?
In a study conducted by the University of Leeds in the United Kingdom, 1,300 people between the ages of 16 and 51 found that many of them were addicted to spending many hours scanning websites, texting, gaming sites, and online communities. The study found that these people were more likely to be depressed. Of the sample, 1.2 percent were “internet addicted”. Because of the amount of time they spent on the web, their online relationship had replace real social activities in the real world, leaving them isolated and depressed.
Many of us know children (and adults) who have become so dependent on cell phones, mp3 players, and the Internet that they forget to eat, play or sleep.
The real questions are what are the implications for schools? For school counselors?
My other concerns are which comes first: Do depressed people turn to the Internet? Or does the Internet cause people to become depressed?
One other thing to consider and question: With the growing number of virtual schools, will this (does this) result in depressed and lonely people and what do we do about that?
Missouri cuts K-12 spending
With states finding shortfalls in their budgets because of the recession, Missouri along with other states has decided to cut spending for public education. I understand the need for cuts but I believe that cuts in education should be among the last cuts made by states.
The Kansas City Star reported that Missouri’s yacht buys can save up to $30,000 on the purchase of a $500,000 yacht. This exemption, experts say, costs the state $6 million a year.
Missouri State Senator Jason Crowell (R, 27th District) says that $47 million is being cut out of K-12 classrooms and $15 million is being cut from the school bus transportation budget. But that $25 million is being added to the Kansas City Chiefs’ budget.
I don’t know about you, but I am getting extremely tired of hearing politicians say how important education is for the nation and for states and then cutting spending.
Zero tolerance laws
Alexa Gonzalez, 12, was arrested by New York City Police for drawing on her desk in her middle school because of a zero tolerance law. Zero tolerance policies became more popular after the Columbine High School massacre. There was no profanity, no hate. Just the words, “I love my friends Abby and Faith. Lex was here 2/1/10 
” scrawled on the classroom desk with a green marker.
She was handcuffed by the police and escorted out of the school past students and teachers. This is not the only time police were called into a school to enforce school zero tolerance laws.
The Strategy Center, a California-based civil rights group that tracks zero tolerance policies, found that at least 12,000 tickets were issued to tardy or truant students by Los Angeles Police Department and school security officers in 2008. The tickets tarnished students’ records and brought them into the juvenile court system, with fines of up to $250 for repeat offenders.
And another California school — Highland High School in Palmdale — found that issuing tardiness tickets drastically cut the number of pupils being late for class and helped tone down disruptive behavior. The fifth ticket issued landed a student in juvenile traffic court.
In 1998, New York City took its zero tolerance policies to the next level, placing school security officers under the New York City Police Department. Today, there are nearly 5,000 employees in the NYPD School Safety Division. Most are not police officers, but that number exceeds the total police force in Washington, D.C.
In contrast, there are only about 3,000 counselors in New York City’s public school system. Critics of zero tolerance policies say more attention should be paid to social work, counseling and therapy.
Kenneth Trump, a security expert who founded the National School Safety and Security Services consulting firm, said focusing on security is essential to the safety of other students. He said zero tolerance policies can work if “common sense is applied.”
“There is zero intelligence when you start applying zero tolerance across the board,” he said. “Stupid and ridiculous things start happening.”
Should these people be punished for doing this? ABSOLUTELY! Should they be arrested instead of being taken to the principal’s office and have their parents called? And then be given “community service” like cleaning graffiti in and around the school? Sure! Zero tolerance laws make little sense when common sense is not taken into account. Each offense and the person who has committed them needs to be taken into account. How would you like it if the police took away your driver’s license every time you went faster than the speed limit? Or how would you feel if your car was taken whenever you passed a red light? There needs to be some rational thought when schools call in police officers. And we need to admit that certain offenses need to be penalized with more rational thought.
Applications for Grad Nation Dropout Prevention Grant
President Obama’s plan to transform the nation’s 5000 lowest performing schools in the next 5 years requires schools to adopt one of the four reform models:
Turnaround model – Requires districts to replace the principal and at least half of the staff, adopt a new governance structure and launch a new or revised instructional model.
Restart model – Requires the district to close and repopen the school under different authority, such as a charter school operator or educational management group.
School closure model – Requires the district ot close the failing school and enroll students in higher-achieving schools.
Transformational model – Requires the school to replace the principal and help teachers to be more effective, increasing learning and teacher planning time and create community-oriented schools.
For more details, visit America’s Promise Alliance Website.
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