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May 2006
The (overblown?) power of teachers’ unions
This week’s Carnival of Education is being hosted at the Education in Texas blog. (Usually you’ll find it at The Education Wonks blog.)
The carnival includes one of my posts from last week that discussed race, tests and intelligence.
One of the entries in the carnival is from the American Federation of Teachers, which runs a blog about No Child Left Behind. In this post, AFT argues against one of the prime complaints about teachers unions, that the seniority rights in labor contracts create more transfers, making it harder for schools to provide a consistent program year-to-year.
For those that aren’t familiar, seniority rights work like this. When a teacher leaves the district, the job in the school she left is posted for any teacher in the district who wants to apply. Then the applicant with the most years of service is selected from among the applicants. This allows teachers to improve their working conditions by moving to a school where they are more comfortable — perhaps because the new school is closer to their homes or they like the principal, or even if they just feel the new school is a better teaching environment.
Critics say this leads bad schools to get worse and allows good schools to horde the best teachers at the expense of every other school, especially in high-poverty areas where good teachers are needed most.
But is that charge true?
The AFT, which has pretty good reputation for the quality of its research, says its study shows districts with labor contracts have fewer transfers. Here’s a quote from the study:
In high-poverty schools where teachers do not have a collectively bargaining agreement, the transfer rate to another school is 11.3 percent compared to only 7.5 percent when teachers worked under a collectively bargained agreement.
So is this criticism of unions overblown?
Permalink | Comments (3) | Categories: The Carnival of Education, Urban School Issues
Charters, money and new taxes in Dayton
Ohio’s complex system for funding schools, and especially charter schools, has once again left Dayton Public Schools with an unexpected financial bite.
This time, the district and the state disagree on how many kids are enrolled in the districts vs. charter schools. The discrepancy, about 675 kids, equals $6 million in state funds school officials say they will not get next school year. And school board President Gail Littlejohn said that shortfall will force the district to seek a levy in the spring of 2007, a year ahead of schedule.
“We were hoping to delay that levy until 2008,” she said. “That was the original plan. But if the discrepancy over final student head count is not resolved, we’ll have to go for it earlier.”
Charter schools are paid based on their enrollment. For every child who attends a charter, money is routed from the school district tot he charter school.
But how that money arrives at the charter schools is extremely complicated. Charter students are included in the district’s state aid calculation and then subtracted out later, a process school districts, charter schools and the state education department have said should be changed.
And counting students, who sometimes move back and fourth between the district and one or more charters, has become a high stakes game.
As students began flooding to charter schools in Dayton beginning in 1998, the district chronically underestimated charter enrollment, leading to frequent end-of-the-school-year financial crunches. But two years ago, school officials hired a consultant to help track each student on the district and charter school rolls to nail down where students belonged.
But state officials, who say charter and school district kids are counted using two distinct methods, sided with the charter schools’ figure on enrollment.
“We think it represents a more reality-based look at the enrollment levels on the community schools side of the situation,” said Paulo DeMaria, the associate state superintendent for school finance.
Permalink | Comments (2) | Categories: Charter Schools and School Choice, Dayton Public Schools
Teaching kids about money
Earlier this month, I wrote about how parents are the most important influence on a child’s future attitudes about money.
Over the weekend, my colleague Kristin McAllister wrote some tips for teaching kids about money.
Kristin also has a new personal finance blog called Making Cents, where she’s got links to more advice on this topic. Check it out.
Permalink | Comments (1) | Categories: Teaching and Learning
Making school change from the top
Dayton school board President Gail Littlejohn is the star of a story in the May issue of Governing Magazine about using school boards as levers for change.
Dayton is a rare example of school board-driven reform at a time when mayoral control and appointed school boards are in vogue. In fact, Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa today is arguing before the state legislature to take over LA’s schools.
The Governing Magazine story brings up some interesting questions about school board-driven reform here in Dayton, such as:
- Can Littlejohn’s formula for taking over and redirecting the school board be replicated in other cities?
- If it can be, why haven’t we seen many other examples of this kind of school board-driven reform?
- How much academic improvement have Littlejohn and her allies actually accomplished in their time leading the district?
Even if you’re not from Dayton, you may find the story interesting of how one motivated person set out to singlehandedly improve public education here.
First a quick recap. As the story states, Littlejohn was a lawyer and an accomplished executive with Lexis-Nexis and its parent company before retiring and stepping up her community work. That’s when she began to learn about the troubles in the Dayton school district, which in 2001 was among the very worst performing in Ohio.
She decided to do something about it. Littlejohn recruited three other professional women to run with her for school board. Then she did something even more bold — she walked into the offices of some of the city’s most powerful business leaders and asked them for money. Big money.
And she got it. Some big shots gave Littlejohn as much as $10,000, more than all candidates spent combined in most of the prior school board races. In a field of nine candidates, Littlejohn’s team raised more than $200,000 and out spent the rest by a combined 20-1 and won all four open seats — a majority on the board.
In consultation with former Houston school board President Don McAdams the board began instituting wide ranging reforms — reorganizing the business operations, launching a school construction program, standardizing curriculum and instruction with a special emphasis on support for math and reading and creating more program options at the high school level.
So back to the questions:
- Is Littlejohn’s formula replicable? I don’t see why not. I know city politics are rough and bigger cities have larger boards and more complicated ward systems that make it harder for a slate of candidates to garner a majority. But the bottom line lesson from Dayton is this — when you out spend your opponents 20-1, you’re going to win most elections. If any city’s business community really wants school board change, it ought to have the resources to follow the Littlejohn plan.
- Why don’t we see others try this? Before Littlejohn’s team ran here, the conventional wisdom was that nothing could be done to change the Dayton school board. School board elections, the thinking went, were too provincial and the stakeholders, like unions and political parties, were too entrenched to overcome. All that was proved wrong, but I think a similar conventional wisdom in other cities discourages would be reformers from running.
- Has the Littlejohn board really made things better? This question was underplayed in the magazine piece. The story makes a big deal out of Littlejohn’s shock in 2001 to learn Dayton schools ranked last out of 611 school districts in Ohio. But it fails to mention that five years later, Dayton is still last. Even so, no one is disputing that test scores have gone up steadily under this school board. Even critics acknowledge things have gotten better. On the business side of the fence, the district is more professionally run than in the past and the construction program is now in full swing after a slow start, with new schools set to open this fall.
The question is whether all that is enough.
Dayton modeled much of its reform plan after what McAdams did in Houston. In that much-acclaimed reform, Houston’s scores improved strongly, gaining national attention. That success helped propel George W. Bush into the White House, made former Houston superintendent Rod Paige into the U.S. Secretary of Education and provided some of the framework for the No Child Left Behind law.
But later, Houston’s success was challenged by critics, who said some of the gains resulted from statistical shell games or even outright cheating.
A friend who lives there summed up the Houston story this way — the question many people there have is whether kids actually learned more with the reform, or if the board was satisfied that the district simply looked much better, helping the business community relax.
There have been no allegations of cheating or statistical games here. But the same question could be asked in Dayton — are kids learning significantly more or do things just look better?
On the question of what kind of school board is best, here’s one way to look at it.
Littlejohn’s approach has these advantages — it respects our democratic process and keeps her and her allies accountable to the public. But it’s also hard to maintain momentum. Already, Littlejohn’s team is down to just two original members as one ally was defeated for re-election and one moved out of the city. The board still generally follows her lead, but it is clear she is not as strongly in charge as when she commanded a majority of the board at all times.
Mayor control bypasses the democratic process and appointed board members are not directly beholden to the public. But this approach can promote a consistency of leadership and professionalism perhaps more easily than elected boards. Those attributes were also present for Littlejohn’s reign here, which helped keep things running smoothly.
What’s your take on the best way to run a school system? Elected school boards or appointed by the mayor?
Permalink | Comments (3) | Categories: Dayton Public Schools, My Favorite Posts, Schools and Politics, Urban School Issues
The SAT gets harder
Through Joanne Jacobs’ blog I found a very interesting Wall Street Journal column by David Kahn, a New York-based SAT prep tutor, who talks about how the test has changed in recent years to demand different skills from kids.
The bottom line? The SAT is harder today, demanding more reading skill than ever. And today’s scores really are not comparable to scores of the past, so we need to readjust our expectations.
I’m not sure I agree with all of Kahn’s conclusions.
For instance, he claims the test today does a better job of identifying what kids are well educated, declares that education quality in the U.S. had sunk since the 1960s and dismisses out of hand that cultural bias or changes in the test-taking pool have affected test scores over that time.
He offers no evidence to support these assertions, and I don’t think there is any data that can prove any of it. ETS itself has never claimed the SAT in any way measures how well educated a student is. The test has its roots in intelligence testing, which was an effort to measure innate intelligence not quality of education, and its goal today is to predict college readiness, which it does well only for some subsets of test takers.
And it is easily proveable that a far greater range of students, not just a small set of college bound kids, are part of the SAT pool today, which has to affect scores.
Even so, I can agree with him that the quality of education as a factor in SAT score declines may have been underplayed on some sides of this debate. Probably the quality of education, test changes, test bias problems and an expanding test-taking pool all play roles in the decline in SAT scores over time.
Still, I found Kahn’s analysis of the changes in the nature of SAT questions interesting, along with his claim that adults cannot compare the scores they got in their day with the scores their kids get today. And colleges, too, need to adjust expectations.
Do you know your own SAT score off the top of your head? For those with teenagers, have you compared their scores with yours and either been reassured or worried about the quality of education they received?
Permalink | Comments (4) | Categories: Testing
Cash crunch to close charter school darling
The W.E.B. DuBois Academy in Cincinnati, one of the state’s best performing charter schools, has abruptly decided to close because the state apparently overpaid the school for years and the school can’t afford to operate under the correct state aid amount.
Folks, this is a real shocker. The DuBois Academy has been a poster child for all the best things about charter schools. It’s a year-round school in a very poor neighborhood with long school days and its kids score well on standardized tests.
DuBois has close ties to one of the charter movement’s heavyweights and if it closes there could be wider implications for the charter movement in general.
In fact, when the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation decided to become an actual charter school sponsor in Ohio, DuBois was one of the first schools they jumped at the chance to sign up. Over the last year Fordham, which is probably the best known and most active charter school advocacy group in the nation, has bragged repeatedly about the school’s success.
But in Jennifer Mrozowski’s story in the Cincinnati Enquirer, Fordham Vice President Terry Ryan rips the school’s governing board for its decision to close:
“I am completely surprised and thoroughly appalled by the apparent decision by the administration and governing authority of the W.E.B. DuBois Academy to abruptly close this high-performing school.”
The money issues here are unclear. Apparently the state was paying the school extra because of it’s extended school year, but it seems DuBois was paid too much extra. The corrected aid amount, the school says, is not enough for it to operate without drastic program cuts. Plus the state may ask the school to repay about $3 million it says it overpaid the school through the years — another financial back breaker for DuBois.
Is this the school’s fault for not knowing what they should be paid? Or is the state being unfair? It’s hard to tell.
But this story is a big opening for charter critics because it’s an example of the instability of charter schools — even a great charter school apparently can be gone tomorrow. If this were a great performing public school, like Stivers School for the Arts in Dayton, you can bet the school district, with significantly more resources than a single charter school governing board by itself, would do anything to keep the school open.
One big unanswered question for me is why the DuBois board would make this move to close apparently without asking Fordham for help. Fordham has both resources and political clout. And the story of the state forcing a top performing school to close seems like one Fordham would jump up and down about whether it was one of their schools or not.
If you’re interested in the school choice movement, stay tuned to this story.
Permalink | Comments (8) | Categories: Charter Schools and School Choice
Maybe kids do need cell phones
In New York City, they’ve always had a “don’t-ask-don’t-tell” and “don’t-see-won’t-take” policy toward student cell phones. As long as the phones weren’t disrupting class, school staff looked the other way if students brought them to school.
But recently, the city’s leaders were shocked to learn just what a problem cell phones are. The school district began random metal detector sweeps to look for weapons and instead ended up confiscating thousands of cell phones. Teachers said the phones are used for cheating, taking inappropriate photos and organizing gang activity.
In response, the superintendent and mayor announced an outright ban — cell phones are now forbidden in New York schools, even if they are turned off and put away.
So parents rejoiced at this sudden backbone and long overdue flash of discipline from their schools, right?
Not exactly. Unless you call protesting in the streets and threatening lawsuits rejoicing.
Parents say kids need the phones, largely for safety reasons. And parents want to be able to reach kids after school.
For some, the school district is just living in the past. Like it or not, cell phones are a fact of life in today’s world and an essential tool, they say. Outlawing them is akin to requiring horse-and-buggy for travel or banning microwaves for cooking. The world changed and it’s time for everyone to deal with it.
It would seem like there’s room for a middle ground here. Cell phones could be brought to school as long as they are stowed in a locker until the school day is over. Any cell phone that is used or rings during the day could be taken by school staff and thrown away, period.
But teachers say even with tough rules, they spend their days taking away cell phones by the box full. And the kids keep on bringing them back.
Do you see room for compromise? Or is one camp here — the parents or the teachers/school leaders — just flat wrong?
Permalink | Comments (2) | Categories: The Parent-Teacher Divide
How common is cheating?
Joshua Benton, who used to work at the Toledo Blade in Ohio, has done some great work with his Dallas Morning News colleagues writing about cheating on the state test in Texas.
The Morning News wrote an award-winning series about this a couple years ago, and guess who the cheaters were? Not the kids.
Benton and his colleagues found adults in the schools who were cheating.
Now Benton is back with another story showing cheating is still common in Texas. Through data and computer analysis, the state can discover unlikely patterns, such as a whole class of kids who gave the exact same answer on 15 questions in a row. They can also look at an “erasure study,” which looks for groups of score sheets that have large blocks of answers erased and changed.
This problem, unfortunately, is a natural byproduct of high stakes testing. Principals and teachers know their jobs are on the line and for some the temptation to improve their hand is too great. But the effects for the kids are awful. Kids tell stories of teachers giving them the answers brazenly or handing them score sheets that already are marked. What a horrible lesson to learn from your teacher. Not to mention those phony scores give everyone a false sense of how kids are performing, and may prevent them from getting needed interventions.
If this problem is happening in Texas, it’s certainly happening elsewhere, even Ohio. The question is how widespread is the problem here? Anyone have any thoughts about how much it happens here or personal experience with cheating teachers?
Permalink | Comments (4) | Categories: Testing
Best of ed blogs rounded up
This week’s Carnival of Education is being hosted over at NYC Educator, a really good education blog that I read most days and have quoted here in the past.
This looks to be one of the bigger education carnivals (a carnival is a weekly collection of the best blog posts on a given topic) to date and includes lots of good stuff from around the edusphere, including this post on Mrs. Frizzle’s frazzled life.
I’ve enjoyed following Mrs. Friz’s ups and downs as she wraps of the school year in the Bronx and tries to prepare to teach next year in Turkey as part of an educator exchange program. (I don’t speak Turkish but a friend who does says it is hard to translate in your head because the verb is always the last word of every sentence.) After today’s events, I hope there’s still and airport for her to land at in Istanbul this fall!
NYC Ed was kind enough to include two of my posts, one on parents as the new school bullies and one about saving old schools.
Permalink | | Categories: The Carnival of Education
Sex offender law goes too far?
Let me start off by saying that, as the father of three young children, I am very much in favor of tougher laws for sex offenses against children.
Even so, what Wisconsin did yesterday gave me pause.
The state legislature there passed a low requiring all child sex offenders to wear global tracking devices for the rest of their lives. The devices send police a signal if the convict goes near a school, park or other child-heavy places and tampering with the device will be a felony. The offenders can appeal to be released from the device only after 20 years!
Wow. Two things made me wonder here. First, the majority of sex offenses do not begin at playgrounds, etc. Most involve adults and children that are known to them. I’m not sure if the device is something big and visible to others or more easy to conceal. But the point is, just keeping offenders away from parks may not prevent them from offending again.
But more concerning is just the concept of being tracked for life by the government after a convict has paid his or her debt to society and been released from jail or court supervision. I just don’t know. If it prevents other children from being victimized, that’s good. But I worry a bit about what comes next after this program. If lawmakers can track sex offenders, how soon before they want to track others, maybe even non-criminals, some day? It seems a little un-American.
So I can’t make up my mind whether I favor this tough new approach, or if it’s just too dangerous a precedent. Let us know what you think.
Permalink | Comments (5) | Categories: Young Children
Race, tests and intelligence
Quick! Based on what you know about American test performance and the “achievement gap” among racial groups, answer this question:
Which racial subset tests significantly lower for mental functioning at age 8 to 12 months in a national study — white, black or Asian children?
The answer may surprise you.
The authors of the popular book Freakonomics, economists with a keen interest in education data, have a new take on race and intelligence in a forthcoming study. But on the Freakonomics blog, they give us an advanced look.
Here’s the abstract of the study:
On tests of intelligence, Blacks systematically score worse than Whites, whereas Asians frequently outperform Whites. Some have argued that genetic differences across races account for the gap. Using a newly available nationally representative data set that includes a test of mental function for children aged eight to twelve months, we find only minor racial differences in test outcomes (0.06 standard deviation units in the raw data) between Blacks and Whites that disappear with the inclusion of a limited set of controls. The only statistically significant racial difference is that Asian children score slightly worse than those of other races. To the extent that there are any genetically-driven racial differences in intelligence, these gaps must either emerge after the age of one, or operate along dimensions not captured by this early test of mental cognition.
OK, be honest. How many of you guessed Asian children would score lowest? Not too many, I’d wager, since Asians generally score well on standardized tests, often outperforming other groups at older ages.
The Freakonomics guys say the underperformance of infant Asians and the lack of a black-white achievement gap means one of two things — either the test for this young age is not reliable enough to draw conclusions, or differences among races they don’t emerge until kids get older.
Having looked at dubious tests created for four-year-olds, I can tell you right off the bat I would question data from any test of children under age seven.
But if you take for granted that tests of young children can be valid, then it seems rather curious that big gaps between black and white children are evident, according to the Freakonomics guys, at ages 2 and 3 but not at age 1. If black and white kids test about even at age 1 but white score much higher by age 5, what does that mean?
It could point to environmental factors, rather than native intelligence, as the primary driver of the test results. That also is consistent with many other studies that show strong correlations between factors like family income and parent educational attainment with where kids rank on standardized tests. And it fuels critic’s complaints that standardized tests are more of a measure of who you are (your family’s wealth and status) than of what you know.
What do you think are the implications of the Freakonomics findings?
Permalink | Comments (5) | Categories: My Favorite Posts, Testing
Your classroom teacher, 20 years later
A few things have changed for the folks standing at the front of the classroom since I was in school. Are the changes good, or bad? Tell me what you think.
While I was looking over some new data out from the National Center for Education Statistics, I found this table describing the profile of public school teachers in 2001, compared to recent years. There were some interesting changes from 1981 when I was in seventh grade.
Overall, there are a lot more teachers, and teachers are older, but there are far fewer men in the classroom. Teachers are getting paid more and have less students per day, but they work more hours per week. And percent that say they would likely return to teaching is way up.
Here are the numbers:
- The percentage of male K-12 teachers has dropped from 33 to 21 percent.
- The total number of K-12 teachers has grown by more than a third to nearly 3 million.
- The average teacher has aged, up from 37 in 1981 to 46 now.
- The mean number of students taught per day has dropped from 118 to 86.
- The average hours worked per week on all teaching duties has crept up form 46 to 50 hours a week.
- The average annual salary, in today’s dollars, jumped from $17,209 to $43,262.
- The percentage of teachers who said they certainly or probably would teach again jumped from 46 percent to 60 percent.
OK, some of these I get. We know more new teachers are bailing out of the profession quickly and there’s a big chunk of baby boomer teachers nearing retirement. And we know that far more women are entering the profession than men. I suspect the pay increase is helping teachers who made it through the early years stick with the job and feel more satisfied.
But I can’t explain why there are so many more teachers than when I was in school, or why teachers are working more hours with less students.
I’d love to hear your thoughts on these numbers.
Permalink | Comments (6) | Categories: Teaching and Learning
Parents: The new school bullies
Sarah Carr, one of the excellent reporters on the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel’s fine education team, writes today about an increase in assaults of school staff by parents. And her accounts of the attacks are pretty shocking. Here’s a taste:
Elizabeth Morgan charged into her son’s first-grade classroom this month, authorities say, shouting to the teacher: “I am sick and tired of you picking on my son and lying about him.”
With the help of her middle-school age daughter, Morgan then cornered the Parkview Elementary School teacher, according to a criminal complaint, and struck her several times in the face and body with a closed fist in front of the first-graders.
Here’s a little more detail of the attack:
Morgan was upset after her son received a one-day suspension from his teacher, Merele Mitz, according to the complaint. Morgan pleaded not guilty at a preliminary hearing Wednesday, and her lawyer says she denies the allegations.
When Morgan showed up in the classroom to protest the suspension, Mitz tried to calm Morgan down by agreeing with her, but Morgan threatened Mitz, saying to her, “I’ll get your stinky ass,” and began hitting her, the complaint says.
Kindergarten teacher Katie Krumins, who came when she heard the disruption from the hallway, told Morgan, “Honey, you need to stop.”
But, the complaint says, Morgan turned to her, arms outstretched - pointing to her chest - and said: “Do you want a piece of this?” She threw Krumins against a cabinet and resumed hitting Mitz, the complaint says.
Two male teachers got between Morgan and Mitz, and Morgan went out into the hallway, where she encountered the school principal and a principal supervisor for the district. She pushed the supervisor, causing her to fall on top of a student, who began to cry, according to the complaint. A classroom of first-graders at Parkview Elementary School watched the entire incident from their desks. A group of kindergartners saw much of it from the hallway.
Morgan has been charged with battery to two school district employees, Mitz and Yvonne Hopgood, the principal supervisor.
Carr’s story said in Milwaukee County alone there have been seven criminal cases this year involving parents attacking school staff. The problem has overwhelmed the school district’s legal department, which has been seeking boatloads of restraining orders against parents who have been disruptive, if not violent, at schools as a pre-emptive measure.
While it seems something especially troubling is going on in Milwaukee (nowhere near this much trouble happens in Miami Valley schools), the problem of increasingly combative parents is a growing problem everywhere. (I’ve even had my own experience with a belligerent parent in my daughter’s suburban first grade classroom.)
It’s gone beyond the annoyance of parents who back their kids against the teacher no matter what. And now these safety concerns force schools to be less hospitable places where parents may not always feel welcome. And after an account like the one above, who can blame school personnel if they watch parents like a hawk, sniffing for any sign that an outside adult visitor could be a violent outburst waiting to happen?
Permalink | Comments (8) | Categories: My Favorite Posts, School Violence
Playing bait and switch with colleges
For years, colleges have played the “wait list” game. Being wait-listed is to be banished to a netherworld where students must decide if it’s worth it to wait for that top choice college to see if it comes through, or cash in their chips, commit to a second choice school and make the best of it.
But now the the New York Times says some private college counselors are urging their clients to turn the tables and put the colleges in limbo. They’re advising kids to “double deposit” or send a commitment and deposit money to more than one college.
The advantage for the student is this — once a student commits to a college, schools usually are then willing to talk more specifically about financial aid and often sweeten the deal. So if a student commits to multiple colleges and keeps bargaining with all of them until he or she gets the best deal, it can push the negotiation well into the summer and perhaps squeeze out a few more bucks. Then at the end of the summer, the student can withdraw from the schools that offered aid packages that didn’t measure up.
There’s a small risk involved. Sometimes if colleges discover a student who has double deposited they will rescind the student’s admission. But that’s rare. Counselors say colleges have long held all the power in these negotiations and its only fair for students to play hardball too.
What do you think of this tactic? Is it low-down cheating, or is all fair in love, war and college admissions?
Permalink | Comments (4) | Categories: Colleges and Universities
Saving old schools
Jean Booker climbed the concrete front stairs of Jefferson Elementary School for the first day of kindergarten in 1931, beginning a remarkable 62-year journey through Dayton schools as student, teacher, principal, administrator and school board member.
At my urging, that trek ended where it began when we met in front of Jefferson on her last week as a school board member in December of 1999. I had this idea to interview her back where it all began, but even I was amazed as Booker, then 73, led me through the school to the very room where she first sat down at a desk to learn, rattling of intricate details of what it was like then and who was there.
She remember her teacher’s name, what she wore, what part of the room she stood in when she recited from the book. Most remarkable, Booker rattled off the names of all her classmates and pointed to where they all sat. Her descriptions of what school was like in her day were a real history lesson. Here’s just a small taste from the story I wrote:
“…she got her diploma from Roosevelt High School on June 7, 1944, the day after the Allies invaded France on D-Day in World War II. “I remember the faculty on the stage were all crying because so many of the boys were over there,” she said.
Booker went on to teach for 18 years at Roosevelt, the school that I’ve been writing about for the past week as school officials decided and finally announced yesterday they would tear it down and replace it with a new school bearing the Roosevelt name.
After two years of agonizing about what to do with the 83-year-old Dayton landmark, the school board ultimately decided not to preserve it in one of the most difficult decisions I’ve seen board members make in seven years covering Dayton Public Schools.
The core question with Roosevelt, and with many old schools today, is when are they important enough to save rather than raze in favor of more modern schools? I have a three-step test for evaluating a school’s significance while keeping sentimentality in check that I thought we could try out on Roosevelt today.
One of the tricky problems in judging the value of an old school is the question of its historical significance. It’s the first thing everyone says when an old school is targeted for replacement — that the school is “historic.” Most of the time, schools are not truly historic places in the sense that they played a direct role in history — such as a history book event actually happened there. But occasionally school buildings are key sites in the history of a city or area.
What’s more common is that old schools have what I call “emotional significance.” That is, the school played no actual historical role, but was so deeply ingrained in the life of the community that sustaining it has real value to a large number of people.
Many buildings are emotionally significant to small numbers of people. For instance, few of us would like to see the houses we grew up in torn down. But not all schools engender this feeling for large numbers — a school with widespread emotional significance isn’t as common as you might think. It’s most often found in particularly close-knit communities.
Finally, there’s architectural significance. This is a little out of my league, since I’m no expert on architecture. But unique designs or buildings that evoke the history or peculiarities of a place are worth saving.
So let’s run Roosevelt through the test.
Historical significance
Did Roosevelt play a direct role in history? I think all sides agree that you could make a strong case that it did for Dayton.
When Roosevelt opened, it’s 300,000 square foot size was huge on an almost unheard of scale. On its first day in 1923, the school was one of the very largest in the country.
And as Dayton, and America, changed, Roosevelt’s experience almost perfectly tracked some of the most important changes. For instance, the school was all white when it opened in a white neighborhood on West Third Street. But by 1950s, demographics had begun to change and a third of the students were black. School leaders struggled with the new reality, initially separating kids by race for activities like swimming and sports until after the Brown vs. Board of Education decision.
Even so, black and white students from that era say they forged friendships across racial lines. And many of Dayton’s future leaders say their views of race relations were shaped by both good and bad experiences at Roosevelt High School. Eventually the school, like the school district, became majority black before it closed in 1975.
(Note: Is it a little ironic that Roosevelt, a name that came to represent painful integration that ultimately conquered racial segregation, will be the name of an all-boys school — segregated by gender — in the future?)
Emotional significance
My colleague Ben Kline tells my a story that perhaps best sums up the kind of impact Roosevelt’s looming shadow had on many lives in the west Dayton neighborhood where it sits. He has a friend, August Brunsman, who still recalls the day the school opened. Brunsman told Ben he remembers the school cost $1 million to build, a huge sum in 1923. Throughout his life, anytime the figure $1 million came up, he thought of Roosevelt. “Roosevelt was my first concept of what a million dollars looked like,” he told Ben.
I know there are strong emotional ties to the school for both folks who grew up in the neighborhood and from those who attended Roosevelt. Although I am a bit surprised that there hasn’t been more community reaction to the talk of tearing down Roosevelt. School board President Gail Littlejohn told me yesterday she’s gotten more phone calls in favor of a new school at that site than opposed to tearing Roosevelt down.
Architectural significance
While I’m certainly not qualified to judge Roosevelt’s architectural value, I don’t think there’s any debate that the school is a marvel. The uniqueness of the building for its time alone is probably enough to qualify as architecturally important. And its detail and sturdiness are a testament to the hand-crafted artisanship of the builders of its era.
The bottom line is that Roosevelt does seem to be a rare school in that you can make a pretty good case for its significance on all three measures. I’m not usually sentimental about schools. I think too often schools aren’t upgraded or replaced because people get emotional about keeping them the same as they once were. And in the meantime, today’s kids can suffer in poor learning environments. But in this case, it’s hard to argue with those who want to preserve the school.
Does that mean the board is making the wrong decision? That depends on your perspective. Board members argue that at least their approach is a sure bet to bring revitalization to a neighborhood that desperately needs a break. That’s why I’ve said all along this is a tough, tough call.
What would you do if you were on the school board?
Permalink | Comments (4) | Categories: Dayton Public Schools, My Favorite Posts
Charters not following the law?
A coalition of charter school critics, led by the Ohio Federation of Teachers, has released a new study of Ohio charter schools and how they comply with state laws. Here’s their summary. Let me know what you think::
Although charter schools are defined by Ohio law as public schools, those operated by educational management companies claim their teachers are not public employees. Charter schools are required to have independent, non-profit boards, yet boards assembled by management companies exercise little independent oversight.
A new study of the four largest charter school chains provides new evidence that many Ohio charter schools do not operate as public schools, contrary to state law. The research, conducted by the Braddock Organization, reveals that charter schools are tightly controlled by their management companies, which prefer secrecy over public accountability.
The research refutes assertions by a charter school attorney in oral arguments before the Ohio Supreme Court. On Nov. 29, 2005, Chad Readler of the Jones, Day law firm, told the Court that charter schools “…carry every indicia of a public entity.� (*Transcript of Nov. 29, 2005, Ohio Supreme Court hearing on Case 2004-1688, Ohio Congress of Parents and Teachers v. State of Ohio Board of Education et al.)
But, charter schools operated by National Heritage Academies, the Leona Group, Summit Academy Management and White Hat Management (the largest operators of charter schools in Ohio) refused to provide public information when requested by Braddock. All but 2 responses to 71 public information requests came from management company officials or attorneys, not the charter schools themselves. All consistently declined to provide contracts of teachers employed at the schools. Each said the teachers are employees of the private management company and not public employees of the schools themselves. Therefore, they responded, information about the teachers’ contracts is private.
One board member also noted in his response that contracts of teachers employed at the school are unavailable even to its board members.
Yet, the schools make contributions to the State Teachers Retirement System (STRS), a pension fund for public school teachers, in apparent contradiction to these claims.
The Ohio Supreme Court recently ruled on a similar public records issue. On April 6, the Court ruled that the records of private or nonprofit entities are public when the services they provide are the traditional province of government and financed with public money. The ruling was made in a case that dealt with the public records of Oriana House, which operates private corrections facilities funded by public tax dollars.
Private management companies will receive a majority of the nearly half billion tax dollars the state pays to charter schools this year.
In an effort to determine whether charter school boards exercise meaningful oversight of the schools, Braddock researchers requested minutes for charter school board meetings held in 2005. The documents provided reveal a pattern of boards assembled and controlled by management companies rather than by independent boards.
The Leona Group
The Leona Group’s chain of charter schools includes 6 in Ohio that enroll 1,027 students. Contrary to the requirement that each charter school be run independently, one superboard controls operations for all of Leona’s charter schools in Ohio. This superboard conducted business jointly for all of Leona’s charters in one session, including the 6 currently open for business and 3 more that are in the planning stages.
Summit Academy Management
Summit Academy Management’s chain of charter schools includes 19 in Ohio that enroll 2,250 students. Contrary to the requirement that each charter school be run independently, one superboard also controlled operations for all Ohio charters run by Summit Academy Management. Unlike Leona’s joint session for all charters, Summit’s superboard appears to have convened and adjourned each charter’s business, holding several meetings in succession on the same day.
National Heritage Academies
National Heritage Academies’ chain of charter schools includes 9 in Ohio that enroll 3,510 students. Contrary to the requirement that each charter school be run independently, National Heritage charter board members overlap, with the same group of people conducting business for multiple National Heritage charter schools. Several board members appear to be interchangeable, serving on multiple boards for short stints throughout the year.
White Hat Management
White Hat Management’s chain of charter schools includes 34 in Ohio that enroll 16,000 students. White Hat runs one superboard and several smaller groups of people who serve on the boards of multiple White Hat charter schools. More than half of White Hat’s charter school board members serve on the boards of multiple schools. Three members serve on 18 different White Hat charter school boards, one member serves on 17 different White Hat charter school boards, one serves on 10 different boards, and three serve on 9 different White Hat charter school boards. Eighteen members serve on 2, 3 or 4 different White Hat charter school boards.
“It’s clear the public has no voice in these schools,� said Tom Mooney, chairman of the coalition, commenting on Braddock’s findings. “No one but the company CEO has any say.�
PTA Executive Director Barbara Sprague said, “Charter schools were called community schools in Ohio to signify that they would establish closer ties to the parents and community. They were to be less bureaucratic and more autonomous than traditional public schools. But these schools are just the opposite. Board members represent the management companies, not the community or parents.�
“The central concern of the League of Women Voters of Ohio about community schools continues to be accountability to the tax-paying public,” said Carol Gibson, co-president of the League of Women Voters of Ohio.
Permalink | Comments (5) | Categories: Charter Schools and School Choice
Breaking Roosevelt News
The Dayton Board of Education is going to announce its plans for Roosevelt High School. For real this time.
Here’s the advisory from the school board. I noticed it doesn’t mention the city, or anyone from the city, being there. I wonder why not? And I don’t know who the Oddessy Group is.
May 18, 2006
For Immediate Release
Plans for Roosevelt announced
Plans to redevelop the site of the former Roosevelt High School at 2013 W. Third St. include reinvestment in the community and re-establishing a strong educational presence on Third Street. School officials will share specifics of the plan today.
WHO:
Dayton Board of Education President Gail A. Littlejohn, J.D. Dayton Public Schools Superintendent Percy A. Mack, Ph.D. Members of the Odyssey Group
WHAT:
News conference to announce plans for redevelopment of the Roosevelt site
WHEN:
4 p.m. Today (Thursday), May 18, 2006
WHERE:
DPS Administration Building
Permalink | Comments (1) | Categories: Dayton Public Schools
Roosevelt HS: Tell me like I’m in kindergarten
It’s wasn’t quite “out of the mouths of babes,” but it was still priceless.
My colleague Cathy Mong today writes about how a dozen kids who showed up at city council angry about a plan to close their recreation center got a city official to spill some of the details on the city’s plan for a “RecPlex” on West Third Street after Roosevelt High School is torn down by the school board.
Officially, school and city officials have been mum about the details for nearly a week now, since the news first broke that they were working on a joint plan to redevelop Roosevelt, and that the plan includes tearing the historic 83-year-old building down. School officials have been promising an announcement any day and say they are waiting on the city to complete its “due diligence.”
Interim City Manager Rashad Young was trying to explain to the kids why the Linden Center and several other rec centers were slated for closure, and he just couldn’t help but start talking about the proposed “RecPlex” at the Roosevelt site, which he said would be a 50,000 square foot center that would replace six smaller, community based-centers in east and west Dayton. The school board, he said, would build it’s new all-boys K-8 elementary school next to it at the Roosevelt site. (The all-girls Charity Adams Earley Academy opened last fall.)
Rashad also helped bring the financial issues in focus. He said upgrading the current centers would cost an estimated $25 million while a new, state-of-the-art RecPlex would cost $10 million.
Interesting. The rehab cost of Roosevelt has been estimated at $30 million to $35 million. But the cost of a new elementary school is almost certainly under $10 million. So, I suppose the city and school board will argue that new state-of-the-art school and recreation facilities at Roosevelt for a cost of about $20 million is significantly cheaper than rehabilitating the old school, especially if you factor in the savings from closing the city rec centers. Plus, the cost for the new school there would be two-thirds paid by the state under Ohio’s school construction program.
But we won’t really know what the deal looks like until the school board and city finally make it public. Which should be immediately. It’s asking a lot to keep the community guessing on an issue this important for more than a week.
Permalink | | Categories: Dayton Public Schools
Carnival time
This week’s Carnival of Education is up over at its usual place, The Education Wonks blog.
The carnival is a weekly collection of the best education blog posts, recently described as a “geeky freak show,” by Los Angeles Times edublogger Bob Sipchen. Just this month, Sipchen began School Me!, which has quickly become one of my favorite daily blog visits. (I especially like the way Sipchen frequently rounds up international education news. We Americans tend to put our blinders on and decide it’s up to us to solve all the problems of education.)
This week the Wonks took note of my remembrance of James Williams, now superintendent in Buffalo, and the time he picked a fight with the teachers union that led to a 16-day strike here in Dayton.
Permalink | | Categories: The Carnival of Education
When it pays to take an extra test
This is the best example I’ve read lately demonstrating how insanely complex many state testing program have become. That is, insane to the point where doing something totally irrational actually makes sense.
In Miami, the school district has decided to require about 5,000 English language learners to take a special, extra test this week and pay teachers to hand score it rather than wait two or three days for the results of a state test these kids have already taken to come in.
Sound crazy? You have no idea. Take a few minutes and read along as the Miami Herald’s Matthew Pinzur walks us through the reasons why the district ultimately decided this was the best course of action. Pinzur’s clear and careful play-by-play will leave you shaking your head.
Permalink | Comments (5) | Categories: Testing
James Williams sighting
Remember our old friend James Williams? The former Dayton superintendent was forced out in 1999 after a tumultuous eight years when the state auditor uncovered a multi-million dollar deficit. Williams is also remembered for tough talk with the teacher’s union here soon after ascending to the district’s top job, which culminated in a 16-day strike in 1993.
Well, Williams is now superintendent in Buffalo and guess what? He’s stirring up a some angst by talking tough with the union there. (I spotted this through the Chalkboard blog, written by author and former education reporter Joe Williams — no relation.)
Back in 1993, Williams was proposing what were then radical ideas — merit pay for teachers based on the test gain of their students, hiring based on a school committee’s recommendation instead of seniority and rewarding or penalizing teachers based on the total performance of the schools where they teach.
Williams also took on the teachers over health care, claiming in 1993 that Dayton teachers were among the very few anywhere who still had 100 percent health care coverage.
Interestingly, Buffalo apparently held out more than a decade longer than Dayton. Their teachers STILL have 100 percent health care coverage — so it’s not surprising that Williams says this must change. He’s also asking for other union givebacks, saying without concessions any new money the district receives from the city will not reach the kids in the classroom.
It will be interesting to see if this goes better for Williams in Buffalo. The 1993 strike here led to replacement teachers, classroom chaos and ultimately a school board cave-in that ended up giving the teachers most of what they wanted (they did begin paying 5 percent of their health care costs).
In the end, Williams took a beating from the union.
Permalink | Comments (6) | Categories: Dayton Public Schools
Learning to prosper, or go broke
Next time you pull out that plastic for an impulse buy, you might want to think about who’s watching. If the kids are nearby, your lax attitude about money could actually be harmful to their futures.
Why? According to a Chicago Tribune story, parents are the most important influence on attitudes about, and behaviors with, money. The Trib cites a Charles Schwab Foundation study that says 56 percent of teens are worried about their parents’ finances. Even so, 87 percent of those surveyed also said they rely mostly on their parents for information about money.
The story kicks off with a now-money manager who’s father bought him 100 shares of a mutual fund for his 13th birthday. Not a very heartfelt gift, you say? Well, the manager credits his father for simply inviting a young boy into his financial life and showing him that investing was important.
I don’t know about you, but I grew up in a family where money was rarely discussed. But I did learn something about managing money from having a large paper route. My mother struck a deal with me right from the start — half of everything I earned had to go into a savings account. And often she took me with her to the bank to make the deposits. By the end of high school, I had enough money to buy my own computer (in the mid-1980s, I was the rare freshman with my own computer, an Apple II-C!).
Even so, I knew little about big picture money issues. Days before I went off to college, my father sat me down and showed me some calculating he’d done. He’d figured out how much of his money I would waste every time I missed a class. The big figures he threw out in front of me had little impact. It was only at school when I looked around at friends who were working two jobs or living at home to pay for school that I began to appreciate how fortunate I was to be student loan free.
Now with my own children creeping up into elementary school, it’s a struggle to figure what to teach them about money and when. After reading the Trib’s story, I feel good that I usually model good money behavior. I tell them frequently about their college savings funds, sometimes showing them the statements and talking about how much they have, what they’ll need and emphasizing that I expect they will go to college. I think that’s at least a decent start.
Even so, I goofed last week when my first-grade daughter asked for money to use at her school’s book fair. When I offered her $5, she looked disappointed. Did I have another $1, she asked? She wanted to buy a poster for $5 and a popular wacky pencil for $1. All I had was a $10, so I told her I wanted my $4 change. But I forgot to ask for the change later.
Two days later she came home with her book fair score — two posters, the goofy pencil, a bunch of other trinkets and one lone book. My wife was outraged. Where did she get the money? Well, I admitted, I gave her $10. Waaay too much, she told me. She should only get $5 at the most and then only with the agreement that she spend the money just on books. But we knew the posters alone were $5 each. So where did the rest of the money come from?
Seven-year-old Claire owned up that after spending my $10 she tapped her piggy bank the next day for all the bills she had. She didn’t even know how much she had spent! Needless to say, a sit down ensued.
I’d love to hear your stories. How did you teach your own children about money? Or did you parents make and right or wrong moves with you that we can learn from?
Permalink | | Categories: My Favorite Posts, Teaching and Learning
A battle brewing over Roosevelt?
The Dayton school board canceled a planned press conference today to announce a partnership with the city to build a school and recreation center at the site of Roosevelt High School. At this point, there is no indication that the deal is in trouble. I’ve been told the city and school board are simply working out details before going public. But there is no reschedule date yet for the announcement.
Meanwhile, board member Joe Lacey released a statement saying he opposes the demolition of Roosevelt and doesn’t understand why the board is moving that direction without any public discussion. I’m working on a story about this for tomorrow.
Here’s Joe’s statement:
Opposition to the Proposed Demolition of Roosevelt High School
In light of this morning’s announcement of the Dayton City School District and the City of Dayton’s plans for the site of Roosevelt High School on West Third Street, I wish to make clear my opposition to the demolition of the Roosevelt school building.
The building is significant to our community, historically and architecturally. Built in 1923, it has architectural details important to maintaining the character of the neighborhood and the West Third corridor. Any new construction could not come close to creating this level of detail externally or internally. Its historic significance in Dayton’s early struggles with integration is important to our community.
Its demolition is not necessary to the Dayton City Schools new building program. The School District has no shortage of sites in the area that it owns that would be suitable for building a new school.
Its demolition is not necessary to the City of Dayton’s recreational complex plans as they have been presented to me. Roosevelt is one of five sites that the City has considered and I am assured by commission members that this site is only under consideration once the school board has decided that they will demolish Roosevelt, a decision that has not to my knowledge been made.
The plans for Roosevelt’s restoration by the collaborative of groups are viable and should be given the opportunity to succeed. I’ve witnessed very similar plans succeed in my own neighborhood’s Huffman School. Several Dayton Public School buildings have been renovated or reused successfully as offices, shops, housing and schools. The board members supporting demolition of Roosevelt have yet to demonstrate why renovation can’t work at Roosevelt.
Permalink | Comments (8) | Categories: Dayton Public Schools
The vision for Welcome Stadium
Dayton school officials hope renovation at Welcome Stadium will raise the venue’s profile and help build momentum for more development of the area of I-75 and Edwin C. Moses Boulevard.
If things work out as planned, Welcome could host concerts and other non-sporting events. There’s even a dream that someday the Cincinnati Bengals could hold their pre-season camp in Dayton.
With a $1 million state grant, the district will undertake two years of mostly cosmetic improvements, including the installation of a brick facade entry way facing Edwin C. Moses Boulevard. (See artist renderings here.)
The street side of the building will include flags representing the district’s high schools, a large ad space for a sponsor’s billboard and some sort of homage to great athletes from the district’s past. The hope is to usher in a new era for Welcome, which now mainly hosts high school football and track and University of Dayton football games.
The state cash for renovation was helped along by House Speaker Jon Husted, a former University of Dayton football player. At a meeting to detail the renovations Thursday, John Fabelo of the design firm Lorenz Williams said another $1 million could possibly come from the state later this year.
Board President Gail Littlejohn said the district also hopes to raise cash through sponsorship, although they will not sell naming rights for the stadium itself. Rather, there will be opportunities for companies to by rights to name the field, press box or other features.
“I can assure you the advertising will be tasteful,” she said. “It will not look like a minor league baseball park.”
Promoting the stadium was a key feature of a new partnership with UD, through which the university will share in managing Welcome and advise on promoting the stadium with its professional marketing staff. That deal allows both UD and the district to continue to keep gate receipts from their own events but both will reinvest revenue from parking, concessions and other events in a fund for ongoing maintenance.
The two also are in negotiations on a new contact for other fees, including rental of the stadium for UD games and of UD Arena for major high school games. Littlejohn said those fees are unbalanced, with the district paying more than twice as much to use the arena, but that talks are on track for more equitable terms.
Permalink | Comments (2) | Categories: Dayton Public Schools
Surprise ending — wrecking ball for Roosevelt
After a few twists and turns yesterday, we learned finally that the Dayton Board of Education will pass on a developer’s proposal to rehabilitate historic Roosevelt High School for community use. Instead, the board will tear down the school and partner with the city to build a new building on the West Third Street site.
The new building apparently will resemble Roosevelt and it will contain a school, along with a recreation center and space for community programs. Details are due to be released Monday and officially nobody is talking so specifics are sketchy at this point.
This brings tan end to more than two years of discussions and agonizing about what to do with Roosevelt. The massive building was in serious disrepair and costly to maintain even empty. The board has been seeking to get rid of it, either by finding a developer to rehabilitate it or by tearing it down.
A developer, Mark Parks, came with a plan and some financing, but it seems the board felt a new structure was a better option. I think it’s fair to say this is a surprise ending to the drama. Most figured either it was going to be rehabilitated or torn down. The idea of returning a school to the site, for instance, has not been seriously discussed publicly in months.
What do you think of this turn of events?
Permalink | Comments (8) | Categories: Dayton Public Schools
Dramatic turn of events on Roosevelt HS
This is just a quick update to clarify my earlier post, in which a source said Roosevelt High School would be saved and used as a school again. That report was based on the earliest informatin we had on this important story, and the picture of what will happen at the Roosevelt site is not that clear. It is NOT certain that the building will be saved. The possibility still remains that it could be torn down or replaced with a new building.
The school board and city are planning a Monday press conference to unveil the plan. But we are working on getting more information to you faster than that. As soon as we have more complete picture of Roosevelt’s future, I’ll post more.
UPDATE: Get updated information on Roosevelt here.
Permalink | | Categories: Dayton Public Schools
Roosevelt will be a school again
Update: This story changed dramatically as new information came in. I’ve updated this post to reflect that. Follow the link for the latest.
Historic Roosevelt High School, which has not been used as a school since 1975, will have a school at its West Third Street site as part of a joint redevelopment plan with the city and school board as partners. The site also will house a recreation center.
The school board postponed until Monday an announcement of the deal that was to be held this morning (5/11/06). But Annie Bonaparte of the UJIMA Neighborhood Network said she has been briefed on some aspects of the plan.
UJIMA was one of two groups that proposed their own redevelopment plans. Earlier this year, UJIMA joined with the competing group, led by developer Mark Parks, to offer a joint redevelopment plan. The school board had said it would tear down the school, which opened in 1927, unless a viable plan to re-use for it was proposed.
But while the board was considering the joint plan, it found another option — a partnership with the city. Bonaparte said she strongly backs the new approach, which will incorporate some of what OJIMA pushed for at the site.
“It’s going to be good,” she said. “It’s good there’s going to be a school there. The whole fight was to do something there that would serve this community.”
Details of the financing and schedule are expected Monday.
Permalink | Comments (3) | Categories: Dayton Public Schools
A decision for Roosevelt HS
UPDATE: The school board postponed its announcement until Monday. Despite the last second change, I don’t have any indication that there’s a change of plan by the district. I still hear a joint school board-city project is going to be the way they go. More later.
There is a 10:30 a.m. press conference today at which the Dayton school board will announce its plan for Roosevelt High School. A source tells me they will reject a proposal offered by a community group and a developer to turn the building into senior apartments and a community and recreation center.
But the board also will not move to tear the building down, I’m told.
Apparently, the district and the city have forged a joint agreement to redevelop the building as a school and recreation center. If true, this is a big change of direction from where the board had been headed for months.
Roosevelt, on West Third Street, has both historical and emotional significance to the community — especially to its surrounding neighborhood and the west side of the city in general. Many hope a successful redevelopment there could be a the key to revitalizing the whole area. And the possibility the school could be razed if a deal was not reached sparked wide concern throughout the community.
I’ll update with more information after the press conference.
Permalink | | Categories: Dayton Public Schools
When an A = just par for the course
Wow, I read a great education blog post this morning that I found through this week’s Carnival of Education, being hosted over at Hunblog. (The carnival is a weekly collection of the best education blog posts of the week, normally hosted by The Education Wonks. I’m included in this week’s carnival for my post about the testing industry’s inability to handle the NCLB workload.)
The post was at Huffenglish, a blog by teacher Dana Huff, and it includes an education blogosphere rarity — the voice of an actual student!
Huff tries to be a tough but fair grader and she wants an A to really mean “excellent,” not just “meets expectations,” as it has come to mean in many classrooms. It’s a noble goal that nearly everyone — students, parents and teachers — agrees with in theory.
But 10th grader Anthony Ferraro argues that it is not practical for a single teacher to grade on a tougher scale than the rest of the teaching universe. Ferraro says this harms the students in the eyes of colleges, who expect straight As and for whom a B is a major red flag and a C is an outright deal-breaker.
Huff counters that colleges have other measures, like test scores, class rank, activities, etc., they can and do use to judge the total student, and that one grade in one class is not that devastating.
It’s an interesting debate and tough problem. What’s an individual teacher to do?
Permalink | Comments (6) | Categories: Teaching and Learning
Half of new teachers don’t make it
The Washington Post today reports on a new National Education Association study that says half of all new teachers leave the profession within five years. The NEA said most who bail cite low pay and poor working conditions as their reason for getting out.
As the story states, this is nothing new as this percentage has remained constant for some time.
So what can be done? While many experienced teachers make comfortable wages, it seems some at the low end just don’t think it’s enough. Is more money an answer?
The story does not specify what constitutes “poor working conditions” but I am guessing its a combination of the inadequate buildings in many districts along with the challenges of difficult kids in others. And for some, it may be bad administration. Are there any macro-level changes that can improve conditions for teachers?
Permalink | Comments (8) | Categories: Teaching and Learning
LA Times hops on the ed blog train
It apparently was launched quietly on May 1, but it appears the LA Times has a new education blog called School Me! (A nod to Alexander Russo at This Week in Education, who found it before I did.)
It appears School Me! will feature a weekly column by Bob Sipchen, a Pulitzer Prize winning editorial writer at the LA Times, adding another talented scribe with a distinctive voice to the small but growing stable of mainstream media (MSM) education blogs. In between columns, there are more traditional blog posts, which apparently will be written by Sipchen and a colleague.
By my count, this makes six MSM edublogs, including this one. Bigger papers seem to be suddenly jumping on board, with the Miami Herald’s Matthew Pinzur only recently having begun Gradebook.
Weirdly, as Russo hailed the appearance of a serious new voice in the MSM edusphere, he claims this one appears more promising and different from the rest of the MSM education blogs because Sipchen is “neither relatively green nor a reporter.”
Huh? Alexander appears to me to be mostly wrong on both counts.
First of all, I wonder if Sipchen would agree that he is not a reporter, considering that he was a reporter on the staff of the LA Times for 11 years before becoming an editor in 1998 and later helping to lead the Times’ opinion pages. Oh, he was also a freelance writer for seven years before working at the Times.
So is he really that different from the rest of us MSM edubloggers? Alexander also hints that Sipchen is more experienced, as opposed to other MSM edubloggers, whom he calls “relatively green.” What makes for a “green education reporter?” Well, at a recent education reporting seminar I went to, less than five of the 30 or so reporters in attendance had covered the beat more than three years.
So are the MSM edubloggers really green? Let’s take a quick look:
- The Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel’s blog is written by several people, but recently Alan Boursk has been posting most often. Boursk has a mere 34 years as a reporter, including 11 years covering education.
- At the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, edublogger Patti Ghezzi has been covering education since 1997, or nine years. Oh, and she used to be a teacher.
- I honestly don’t know how long Jennifer Fernandez, who’s been writing for The Chalkboard blog at the Greensboro News-Record in North Carolina, has been an education reporter. But I know she’s been edublogging longer than most, since 2004.
- Pinzur’s Gradbook blog at the Miami Herald says he’s been covering education for four years.
- Then there’s me. I’ve been a reporter for 15 years and covered education for nine years.
I don’t know. It seems like on the whole MSM edubloggers are pretty experienced and serious. And while some of the MSM edublogs are still finding their way, I think a couple have pretty distinctive voices and a lot of interesting things to say. They are, by definition, different than solo bloggers, or those who blog on behalf of education organizations. MSM edublogs have a particular, local audience they have to think about, which tilts them some. And generally, they are less opinion driven than most blogs. But I still find them informational and, in many cases, fun.
Permalink | Comments (3) | Categories: Journalism
The NBA and the SAT
Imagine you were given a chance to put together a pro basketball team for a one-time exhibition between two teams made up of some of the best players in the National Basketball Association. You and an opponent could each pick players from among all NBA rosters.
There’s just one hitch for you. The players on your team must be in the top 10 percent of the league for free throw shooting.
Your opponent choose any players based on whatever criteria I choose.He can build a team or shooters, dribblers, rebounders or defensive wizards. Or he can just go with his gut and try to pick players who will be a good mix and make a great team. In other words he gets to select a team the way managers of sports teams, or any other competitive enterprise for that matter, would actually assemble a winning team.
What would happen? Well, it just so happens that in the NBA, some of the very best players — including many of the 2005 all stars — stink at free throw shooting.
So why would anyone building a basketball team be so focused on one measure of performance — in this example, free throw shooting — that they would be willing to exclude great players who might actually help them win?
They wouldn’t, because to do so would be crazy. And that’s the point of this analogy, a clever lesson about why it may not make sense for colleges to limit admission to only those who can reach a minimum score on the SAT.
I stumbled across this example in an education journal called “Radical Pedagogy,” so perhaps it’s no surprise that Georgia State professor Jonathan Gayles’ lesson is a little out there. Gayles wanted to demonstrate for his students the pitfalls of over-relying on one measure of performance when judging overall performance. So he got creative.
He let his class pick an NBA all star team while adhering to an arbitrary minimum requirement on one measure — their players must be among the league’s top 10 percent in free throw shooting. Gayles’ team had no restrictions. With rosters chosen, the two teams played a video game — in which the outcome is supposed to simulate a real result based on statistics.
As you might guess, Gayles’ team won, dominating five of seven statistical categories in the game. The students’ team bested Gayles on rebounds, and their players made every free throw they shot, but they lost.
What does this exercise tell us about the way colleges, especially elite schools, select their students? Some schools pride themselves on evaluating the whole student, with the SAT score just one of many factors they consider. But the vast majority of schools draw an arbitrary line on the grading scale, often requiring applicants SAT scores be among the very highest in the nation at elite schools, and they won’t even look a student with an SAT score that falls short.
This may relegate the academic version of Shaquille O’Neal — a student limited in test performance but amazingly gifted on other measures — to a lower ranked school and, perhaps, a less effective education.
Interestingly, one of the few extreme talents that will cause a college to overlook a low SAT score is, of course, basketball skill.
What do you think of this analogy and professor Gayles’ class activity?
Permalink | Comments (3) | Categories: My Favorite Posts, Testing
Silver bullet reform
In one way, David Brooks’ column Sunday in the New York Times annoyed me. (subscription required)
He starts out by describing the classic, 20-year-old experiment by Walter Mischel in which he promised 4-year-olds two marshmallows as long as they didn’t touch the marshmallow sitting in front of them until after he left the room and returned.
Here’s where he turned this into a an education policy lesson:
The children who waited longer went on to get higher SAT scores. They got into better colleges and had, on average, better adult outcomes. The children who rang the bell quickest were more likely to become bullies. They received worse teacher and parental evaluations 10 years on and were more likely to have drug problems at age 32.
The Mischel experiments are worth noting because people in the policy world spend a lot of time thinking about how to improve education, how to reduce poverty, how to make the most of the nation’s human capital. But when policy makers address these problems, they come up with structural remedies: reduce class sizes, create more charter schools, increase teacher pay, mandate universal day care, try vouchers.
The results of these structural reforms are almost always disappointingly modest. And yet policy makers rarely ever probe deeper into problems and ask the core questions, such as how do we get people to master the sort of self-control that leads to success?
Right off the bat, this column was shaping up to be a classic “silver bullet solution.” You know, another example of somebody who doesn’t pay much attention to the complexities of our vast, diverse and disconnected national education system and tells us there’s a stunningly simple road to wildly improving education in the U.S., in this case just by teaching kids self control.
We’ve seen this before, such as when Nicholas Kristof told us dumping teacher certification is all we need to do to get great teachers, or when Oprah Winfrey trumpeted a handful of small schools and charter school innovations as the antidote to our education woes, or there was John Stossel’s argument that school choice would make all public schools better.
But as I read the rest of Brooks’ column, a funny thing happened. I didn’t disagree with his premise.
In the column, Brooks goes on to argue that education policy, by it’s nature, tends to focus on grand scale changes — big, systemic reforms. And often, policymakers overlook the practical aspects of what’s need at the classroom level. Ideas like small schools, choice and teacher certification reform may, indeed, help improve some aspects of how kids learn. But really none of those ideas, by itself, has direct impact on what kids are taught or the way they are taught.
There probably isn’t enough deep thought about more basic problems, like how to motivate kids to want things that will help them learn. And too often, schools write kids off as unchangeable — believing, for instance, that a kid with little self control is just unmanagable. As Brooks discusses, even an impulse control problem can be improved, if only schools would recognize the need and have the expertise to employ strategies that work.
But those nitty-gritty issues are murky and complex, and often the solutions aren’t broadstroke. They aren’t even always the same for every kid. And they’re just flat not as sexy to say out loud as “free market reform” or “standards.”
Permalink | Comments (3) | Categories: My Favorite Posts, Teaching and Learning
What it takes to be a teacher
The New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof stirred up a lot of discussions in the edusphere with his column last week arguing that teacher certification process hurt more than it helped.
Was Kristof essentially saying that anyone can teach or that it’s easy to be a teacher? Some bloggers thought so, although Eduwonk’s Andrew Rotherham argues that interpretation misses the point.
The column also prompted a few classroom reality check posts from real teachers who also blog. My favorite was this one by NYC Educator with the great headline — “The Nice Man Cometh.” Check it out.
Permalink | Comments (2) | Categories: Teaching and Learning
You heard it first here
I just can’t help but say, “we told you so.”
In the past two days, the testing industry’s stress fractures have begun to break loose in a series of stories from major newspapers.
But if you’re a regular reader of the Dayton Daily News, you knew this would happen.
The hot news of the day sounds a lot like our award winning series from 2004 about the problems of standardized testing in the NCLB era. Back then we said:
One question is whether the testing companies can keep up with the demand without compromising quality. Already, there have been embarrassing errors.
And this, which includes a remarkable quote from Ramsey Selden, vice president of a major U.S. testing company:
The mandates are squeezing the handful of companies that supply virtually the entire nation with standardized tests. Just seven companies account for 85 percent of the test-building market, with industry titans Harcourt Educational Measurement in Texas, Minnesota-based NCS/Pearson Educational Measurement and CTB/McGraw Hill in California handling two-thirds of the workload. “All of the companies are running at capacity or beyond it,” Selden said. “Companies are bumping into each other and competing against each other for the same people.”
If they were running beyond capacity two years ago, what’s happening now? As you might expect, a lot of bad things.
The Hartford Courant wrote Thursday about another major scoring problem, this time on Connecticut state test by Harcourt, one of the testing industry big dogs.
The problems, which have happened to Connecticut before, have enraged the state’s education commissioner, Betty Sternberg. Here’s an excerpt from the Courant story:
The latest problem is another sign of strain on an overburdened testing industry, Sternberg said.
Scoring problems have cropped up across the country. Only a year ago, Connecticut dumped another testing company that ran into numerous delays and scoring problems on a state test for elementary and middle school students. More recently, a test contractor reported erroneous scores for thousands of students who took the SAT college entrance exam last fall.
Some educators fear that the testing industry will be strained even further as Connecticut and other states undergo a broad expansion of testing under No Child Left Behind, which calls for a shake-up of schools that fail to meet standards.
“It’s not a problem peculiar to Harcourt,” Sternberg said. “Mis-scoring tests, having delays - there’s no company that hasn’t had something happen in those areas.”
The issue has caught the attention of U.S. Education Secretary Margaret Spellings, who met recently with testing industry executives about the industry’s capacity to handle the growing volume of tests.
Meanwhile, some New York lawmakers are fed up with scoring problems and may vote to regulate testing in the state, the New York Times reported Thursday.
Then on Friday, the Times reports that there aren’t enough test experts around, which has created a bidding war among the companies for the experts that are out there. New psychometricians are leaving graduate schools and walking into high-paid, high-ranking jobs with little experience.
The Times piece on test experts reminded me of a story one of our test industry sources told us when we were reporting the series. The source was consulting with a small state (think South Dakota, Wyoming, etc.) that was considering bids from testing companies to create and score its new state tests to comply with NCLB.
The consultant described how small teams from the testing companies gave presentations. It was embarrassing, he said. The teams couldn’t answer many of their questions. The bottom line was that the test companies, focused on big states with lucrative contracts like California, New York, Texas or Ohio, send not the B or C team out to the small states, but the rookies — inexperienced recent graduates.
Our source said the capacity problem pushes more inexperienced people into key posts, just one of many problems now evident as the industry buckles, as predicted, under the weight of NCLB’s testing requirements.
OK, so we’ve been writing for two years that these problems would come, and now they are here. The interesting thing is to see lawmakers and state officials — even U.S. Education Secretary Margaret Spellings — now beggining to demand improvements. But there are no easy solutions to the problems of capacity in the test industry.
On the other hand, if you’re good at math you might consider a graduate program in psychometrics. If you can get the degree, you can’t lose.
Permalink | Comments (10) | Categories: My Favorite Posts, Testing
Drop that pop! But will it matter?
Newspapers all across the country, including the Dayton Daily News, ran front page stories today about the the beverage industry’s agreement to not sell sugary soft drinks in schools anymore. (Here’s two other takes on the issue by USA Today and The New York Times.)
But I found it interesting that many experts were quoted saying they were doubtful this agreement, forged by former President Bill Clinton’s charitable foundation and the American Heart Association, would have much impact.
First of all, you might be surprised to learn that many schools have long ago banned these sorts of drinks. Lots of school districts have vending machines that are programmed to lock out sales of certain drinks during the school day, allowing their purchase only after school or during community events like sports games. Some critics of the beverage industry saw this as a ploy by the companies to declare victory before an inevitable defeat — momentum for the bans or even laws to enforce them were probably going to accomplish the same thing.
In our story, the head of food service for Dayton Public Schools said the ban won’t matter, that kids will just buy their soft drinks before and after school. You could argue that keeping the drinks out of the schools at least sends a message to kids and encourages good nutrition at an early age. But is this move any match for the ads for soft drinks that bombard kids on television, at the ball park and at special events everywhere?
What do you think? Is the soft drink ban really front page news or is it much ado about nothing?
Permalink | Comments (2) | Categories: Sports and Athletics
It’s easy to be a teacher
There was bit of a debate in the comments under my post last week about corporate recruiters who look to steal teachers away for other jobs.
The argument centered around whether teachers are really overworked and underpaid. After all, teachers’ workdays end in mid-afternoon, they get the summer off, even the lowest paid make at least a livable wage and in many cases they have generous retirement and health benefits.
That sounds pretty good to someone in a normal job who gets two or three weeks off a year, routinely stays past quitting time and can’t afford to even think about retiring.
New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof stirred up some blog debate this week by arguing against certification of teachers, essentially saying anyone can be a teacher. (For a rebuttal, check out blogger Jenny D’s response.)
So is it true that teaching is an easy job? Perhaps it is easy — to be a bad teacher.
If you really didn’t care whether students learned or not, I suppose teaching could be easy. You could just follow the textbook, hand out a few worksheets, give a multiple choice test and burn rubber in the parking lot at 2:40 p.m. And to be sure, most of us probably met one of these teachers along the way.
But most teachers just aren’t like that.
Conscientious teachers get to work early and leave late. They create challenging assignments, which makes for long hours of grading. They meet students outside of class. They read the latest news and research in their subject areas and work toward more advanced degrees. They constantly refine their teaching strategies and classroom management techniques.
They also coach athletic teams, moderate clubs, run the prom, head academic departments, chair important committees, coordinate standardized testing and plan pep rallies. If the most dedicated teachers calculated a true hourly wage, we might find they were shockingly low paid.
Can anyone be a teacher? Let me leave you with this story.
Several years back I followed around a Dayton middle school student for a day. The young man was very bright, an A student, but also quiet and a little shy. The teacher I remember most that day was his math teacher. He was a good man, a former professional — accountant, I think — who just felt he should do more with his life than sit in a cubicle. This was a quiet, thoughtful guy who just thought his life would have more meaning as a teacher.
And he really cared for the student I was tailing that day. They got together twice during free periods to work one-on-one. And during math class, the teacher gravitated toward my student, giving him extra attention. That was for good reason — the rest of the class was out of control.
As the bell rang, several kids were out of their seats, clowning around, mostly picking on a boisterous heavy-set boy. The teacher repeatedly asked them to take their seats, and they promptly ignored him. It took a painful 15 minutes before most of the kids were finally seated — enough so he could start the lesson now that a quarter of the class period had been wasted.
Throughout the period, kids interrupted, disrupted and and distracted the class. But the teacher was just powerless to stop them. He seemed to have neither the personality for, nor any good ideas how to go about, leading this group.
This poor guy’s heart was in the right place and he certainly had the content knowledge research says is the key ingredient in good teaching. I got the feeling that with a training and experience, he could do fine.
So is it easy to be a teacher? And is teacher training and certification necessary if you already have content knowlege? Tell me what you think.
Permalink | Comments (5) | Categories: Teaching and Learning
The carinval’s advice for bad meetings
This week’s Carnival of Education is up over at The Education Wonks blog. The carnival is a weekly round up of the best education blogging posts.
The roundup includes my post citing evidence that having a part-time job can really hurt a teen’s schoolwork.
Also check out a new education blog that the Wonks have discovered. Change Agency is written by a teacher in Houston, Texas, named Stephanie Sandifer. Her entry in this week’s carnival is about wasteful meetings and how to get out of them. Take a look and see if you’d follow her advice.
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Oakwood, Centerville nationally ranked
Newsweek’s annual list of the nation’s top 1,000 public high schools is out and just two local schools made the list. Oakwood comes in 336th (up from 405th last year) and Centerville just barely makes the list at 956th (down from 874 in 2005).
I should preface this by saying that Newsweek’s ranking methodology, which was devised by the Washington Post education reporter Jay Mathews, is quite controversial. School are ranked based on the percentage of students who take Advanced Placement or International Baccalaureate exams. Is this the best way to determine what makes the best school? That’s debatable.
Overall, just 18 Ohio high schools even made the list. Oakwood was ninth in Ohio and Centerville ranked 18th in the state.
This brings to mind a recent discussion I had with a doctor I just met. When he learned I wrote about education for a living, he wanted to know what I thought about public schools in the Miami Valley. His impression was that they are good but not great. I think the data tends to support his view.
When you look at most lists ranking Ohio schools by test performance, Oakwood generally ranks high — often in the top 20 districts. Centerville and a few others also usually fall in closer to the top than to the middle. But most of what we in Dayton think of as the best local school districts usually rank more on the high end of the middle when compared to the rest of the state.
On the other hand, the Miami Valley doesn’t have too many districts at the bottom. Dayton and Jefferson Twp are the exceptions here, usually ranking at or near the worst in the state, and lately they’ve been joined by Trotwood in many cases.
So overall, it’s probably fair to say schools in the Miami Valley, with a few exceptions, are pretty middle of the road.
But looking at this list, I suppose you could say two out of 18 of the best high schools in Ohio isn’t bad for Dayton, especially considering comparably-sized Toledo only has one school on the list and the entire southest part of the state is unrepresented here.
Are you satisfied with where the Miami Valley’s schools rank?
Here’s the list of Ohio schools:
68 Indian Hill (Cincinnati)
97 Chagrin Falls (Cleveland)
99 Wyoming (Cincinnati)
136 Solon (Cleveland)
143 Orange (Cleveland)
286 Columbus Alternative (Columbus)
310 Shaker Heights (Cleveland)
347 Beachwood (Cleveland)
366 Oakwood
398 Olentangy (Columbus)
463 Aurora (Cleveland)
706 Madeira (Cincinnati)
725 Ottawa Hills (Toledo)
729 Firestone (Akron)
777 Bexley (Columbus)
830 Upper Arlington (Columbus)
849 Hudson (Akron)
956 Centerville
Permalink | Comments (5) | Categories: Testing
