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Dayton Daily News education reporter Scott Elliott writes about schools, kids, teaching and learning.
Home > Blogs > Get on the Bus > Archives > 2006 > July
July 2006
Charter school exceptions .. or loopholes?
Reporting today’s story about the charter school cap and charter sponsors in Ohio, I learned a few things I didn’t know about our pioneering, year-old charter school authorizer law. Among them:
• Good charter schools outside Ohio can bring more charter schools to our state. OK, I followed the logic in Ohio’s new law that says a charter school management company that has a good performing school (rated in continuous improvement or better) can win permission to open a new school. So suppose a company has 20 schools in Ohio and two of them are scoring well, they can win permission from the state to open two more schools.
But here’s what I didn’t know. Suppose none of that company’s 20 Ohio schools are scoring high enough to earn it any new schools, but the same company operates two schools with a good state rating in Pennsylvania. Based on the performance of the out-of-state schools, the company could still earn the right to open two new schools in Ohio.
• There is confusion over whether the Ohio Department of Education has the right to monitor and review the performance of most of the state’s charter school sponsors. Language in House Bill 364, which last year created this new sponsoring arrangement, apparently was not clear in defining the education department as the overseer of sponsors who were already operating in the state.
The education department is so unsure, it asked the state board to send lawmakers a resolution urging them to create a legal fix to make this line of accountability clear. But as of right now, there technically is no accountability for most charter sponsors.
• A year into the new sponsor law, performance reviews for sponsors are just getting off the ground. Setting aside the question of the education department’s legal power to oversee sponsors for a moment, officials told me for the story they are just now devising a process to review sponsors.
The new sponsoring law places a great deal of responsibility on those sponsors. They are in charge of the day-to-day monitoring of the schools under their purview and the law makes it the sponsor’s call to decide when a school should be placed on probation, shut down or other action taken.
The education department says it is dead serious about holding sponsors accountable and will expect them to take corrective action with low scoring schools. This issue is absolutely crucial to the future of the charter school movement in Ohio. Bad charters make the case against them easier and dampens the charter school lobby’s clout with lawmakers.
• School districts can create “conversion” charter schools at will. Under conversion, a rarely used option, districts can take an existing school and allow it to operate independently under contract with the local school board. The school is still considered part of the district — for instance its test scores still count in the district’s averages.
The new Dayton Technology Design High School is a conversion school, although it’s an odd case in that there was really no existing school that was converted. It’s a new school completely, but it uses “existing resources” of the school district. Or at least that’s how it was explained to me.
Expect more districts to use the conversion charter option as No Child Left Behind sanctions favor creating more charters as a remedy for poor test performance. The conversion process is fairly painless and still allows the district a measure of control.
Permalink | Comments (1) | Categories: Charter Schools and School Choice, My Favorite Posts
Fine print in cap allows for more charters
By Scott Elliott
Dayton Daily News
An Ohio law passed last year limited the number of charter schools to the 285 that were open as of last summer. Or did it?
This fall, there will be 305 charter schools open in Ohio. One Dayton school is among 28 that will launch this fall.
How is the charter movement continuing to grow? The same law that created a “cap” allows three avenues for new schools, even if the number exceeds that cap.
“I don’t believe the intent was to stop growth,” said Todd Hanes, executive director for community schools at the Ohio Department of Education. “I believe the intent was to slow growth.”
There are three ways charter schools can be added despite the cap:
• Companies operating charter schools can open one school for every school they manage that is performing well by state standards — even if the original school is not in Ohio.
• Schools that applied to open last year but did not receive charters in a lottery are on a waiting list and can earn a charter if any charter school closes. About nine schools opened last year closed and three merged with other schools.
• School districts are always permitted to convert schools into charter schools. The Dayton Technology Design High School, launching this fall, is a conversion school.
Ohio’s charter movement continues to change rapidly, with Dayton leading the way.
Statewide about 15 percent of charter schools changed sponsors after just one year of a new sponsoring law, but in Dayton, nearly a quarter of all charters changed sponsors.
Those shifts have created concern that poor-performing schools could evade accountability by jumping to new sponsors and the state education department is just now putting in rules to try to prevent it.
“We’ve seen a lot of sponsor-hopping,” said Lisa Zellner of the Ohio Federation of Teachers. “Bad schools fear they are going to be shut down, as they should be, leave one sponsor for another hoping their funding won’t be interrupted.”
Todd Hanes, Ohio’s executive director for community schools, said sponsor shopping is not allowed. Sponsors overseeing poor schools have an obligation to address the problems.
“I don’t necessarily see this as a loophole in the law,” he said. “First and foremost, good monitoring is an expectation of good sponsorship. Beyond that, schools do move.”
Charters have newfound mobility after changes to state law last year. The education department now approves sponsors that oversee the schools.
Sponsors can be school districts, universities or nonprofit groups and each can manage up to 50 charter schools.
The state continues to approve new sponsors — nine since last summer — bringing the number to 67 across Ohio.
In Dayton, the biggest change came when four Richard Allen charter schools switched to Kids Count of Dayton, a new sponsor group, from Cincinnati-based St. Aloysius Orphanage.
Krista Allen, superintendent overseeing Kids Count’s nine schools statewide, said it was founded by the board of directors for the West Park Academy, a Dayton private school.
But two other local charters with past academic or management troubles also changed sponsors after one year.
Academy of Dayton’s contract was not renewed by the Toledo-based Ohio Council of Community Schools for poor academic performance but found a new sponsor in the Cleveland-based Ashe Cultural Center.
Rhea Academy, involved in a financial disagreement with the state auditor, also changed to Educational Resource Consultants in Cincinnati from the Columbus-based Buckeye Community Hope Foundation.
Hanes said his office will soon launch an evaluation process for sponsors that would keep a school on probation, suspension or termination from changing sponsors. And evaluators will be looking at how sponsors handle low-rated schools.
“Without question, the expectation would be to place on probation any school failing to meet the expectations of the sponsor,” he said.
Sponsors that fail evaluation could see the schools they operate reduced or other sanctions. But one curve ball is that the education department may not have authority over all the sponsors. The state board of education has asked lawmakers to make it clear that it can evaluate sponsors that were operating before House Bill 364 was passed. Now just 18 sponsors are directly accountable to the department, Hanes said.
Even so, evaluations will start this fall for 20 sponsors.
Zellner said more oversight is needed as the state will spend half a billion dollars for charter schools this school year.
“It’s good to see them moving forward on these things,” she said. “The question is if we are in a situation where it is already too little and too late.”
UPDATE: Click here for more on the new sponsor rules.
Permalink | | Categories: Charter Schools and School Choice, My Favorite DDN Stories
The case against school uniforms
I never did get an answer to my question last week asking if anyone knew of a suburban or rural Dayton-area school that required uniforms. I guess I’ll take that as a no.
Meanwhile, there was quite a debate over the value of uniforms in a school in the 11 comments that followed that simple, one-paragraph post.
So let’s talk about uniforms. Do they really make a significant contribution to a school on their own? I’m not buying it.
Here are some of the arguments made last week on behalf of uniforms:
—They’re cheaper and easier for parents. This may be true, but how does this in anyway improve conditions at the SCHOOL? If parents want cheap and easy clothes they could send kids to school in the same white shirt and navy pants everyday whether the school required it or not.
—They instill discipline. I’m sorry but nobody has been able to convince me of this one yet. To me, discipline is an individual personal trait that is learned. Institutions like the military use uniforms as part of an array of strategies to reinforce self-discipline in their charges. But something tells me Marines would stand just as straight and still get up at the crack of dawn if they were wearing Nike track suits.
—It makes family income less obvious and reduces teasing. Believe me, at my Catholic high school, we knew who the wealthy kids were … and weren’t. Wealthy kids had expensive jackets, earrings, shoes, belts, gym bags — anything outside the scope of the uniform rules was a signal of status.
—They reduce dress related misbehavior and the need for discipline. No way. Private school teachers tell me they spend loads of time handing out demerits and other discipline to students who don’t wear the right kinds of socks or let their uniform pants droop or leave shirts untucked.
Which brings me to my solution. While I am not convinced uniforms solve any school-related problems, I do think a consistently enforced dress code is important. A dress code can work whether a school has a uniform or not. Dress codes should enforce neatness and make clear what sorts of attire are appropriate or not.
If you have a uniform, you really also have a dress code too. It’s not good enough just to require the white shirt and navy pants/skirt. You have to tell the kids shirts must be tucked, skirts can’t be too short, etc.
I think an enforced, sensible dress code, without the uniform, works just as well.
OK, let me have it, uniform lovers. Tell me why I’m wrong.
Those wacky teacher sex cases
There’s been a lot of talk this summer about about what seemed like a bit of a run of women teachers having sex with male students. There were several high profile cases toward the end of the last school year, especially Debra Lafave (pictured above).
I can’t remember which education blog pointed me to this last week, but I found this Georgetown U. psychiatrist’s TV comments about why some women teachers become sex offenders with their students interesting.
Among the things Alan Lipman says are that teachers offending with under age students is exceedingly rare, the least common category of female sex offender, despite our media fascination with these cases. Also he emphasizes that these cases are sex offenses and that the young boys are harmed, despite the argument from some quarters that these cases are somehow not abuse.
Happy Ape-aversary!
One of my favorite teacher/bloggers, Mrs. Cornelius at A Shrewdness of Apes, is celebrating her one-year anniversary as a blogger today.
I can’t believe her blog is so young. It seems so polished that I would have guessed it had been around much longer. But the Apes aren’t much older than Get on the Bus. (Hint: Watch for an upcoming anniversary at an edublog near you.)
Permalink | Comments (1) | Categories: The Carnival of Education
What if there was a “Dayton Promise?”
Back in November, I wrote about the Kalamazoo Promise, a program funded by an anonymous donor in Kalamazoo, Mich., through which every student who completes all his or her schooling and graduates from that city’s public school system is guaranteed free tuition at any Michigan public university or college.
Last night, I went to a meeting of an anti-sprawl group that raised the idea of a similar Dayton Promise here as a way to bolster home values in the city and slow outward growth.
Before I go any further I want to clear up some confusion. The headline suggests this is a Dayton schools proposal. It is nothing of the sort. As the story states, this was one of three ideas suggested for discussion by a group called Grassroots Dayton. So nobody actually proposed anything at all. As For Dayton schools, the district sent a representative to the meeting in response to an invitation by Grassroots Dayton who merely spoke about the district’s issues. The headline was off base.
But back to the idea of a “Dayton Promise:”
Could it work here in Dayton? I don’t see why not.
Our fair city certainly has enough financial might to fund it. We’ve got Boonshofts, Schusters, Mathiles and other individuals who are philanthropic, well-heeled and interested in the well-being of the city and its youth. Plus there are foundations, like the Kettering Foundation.
What are the advantages? Bob Steinbach from the Miami Valley Regional Planning Commission said he has spoken to the Kalamazoo area Realtor’s group and it reports improved home values and inquiries from every state about moving there.
At the meeting, the anti-sprawl folks talked about the disadvantages of the way the Miami Valley is growing away from the core city. Population is mostly steady but construction continues to push further outward. This spreads out the taxpayers over a wider area. Less density means fewer taxpayers in each school district, which raises each taxpayer’s burden.
There were three ideas proposed at the meeting for combating this problem suggested by Grassroots Dayton. The others were allowing more district-to-district student transfers and creating one large consolidated school district for the entire Miami Valley.
Those two things, frankly, are very unlikely to happen. The districts that need fewer students, like Beavercreek and Springboro, would probably draw more students under the transfer plan, while the districts with capacity, like Dayton and Fairborn, would likely lose more kids. Besides, most school districts right now won’t play the transfer game and have policies against accepting them.
Consolidation of school districts also is wildly unpopular, as voters prefer greater local control, not less.
But the “promise” idea could work. The question is whether the benefit is worth the cost and if significant donors would be willing to step up to the plate and lead such an effort.
Permalink | Comments (2) | Categories: Colleges and Universities, Dayton Public Schools, School Construction
Free tuition “promise” discussed as sprawl remedy
By Scott Elliott
Dayton Daily News
Suppose every child who completed all their schooling and graduated in Dayton was guaranteed free tuition at any Ohio pubic college.
What effect might that have on housing patterns in Dayton?
In Michigan, where the Kalamazoo Promise makes such a guarantee, realtors report improving home values in that city and inquiries about moving there from every state.
A copycat “Dayton Promise” was just one idea for attacking suburban sprawl and the problems it creates for school districts discussed Thursday at a meeting sponsored by Grassroots Greater Dayton.
About 45 who attended heard John Carr, Dayton school construction chief, describe how falling enrollment in the city schools has caused the district to reduce its construction program by eight schools.
Meanwhile, Beavercreek Superintendent Dennis Morrison said exploding growth there already has the schools over capacity and are creating a desperate need for new buildings.
Dayton’s lack of wealth made it eligible for 61 percent matching funds for its $627 million building program. Beavercreek won’t be eligible until 2112 and then can only receive 9 percent state money for its projects.
The group discussed three ideas for a regional solution — allowing more students to transfer between districts, consolidating area school districts under one umbrella and a Kalamazoo-style promise.
Perhaps the least complicated option is the donor-funded scholarship program, such as that in Kalamazoo.
“It’s not really an education initiative,” said Bob Steinbach, of the Miami Valley Regional Planning Commission. “The people who funded it see it as an economic development initiative to stabilize neighborhoods in Kalamazoo and attract middle class families with educational aspirations for their kids.”
Permalink | Comments (1) | Categories: Dayton Public Schools
What to tell the kids?
During the Iraq War, the news junkie in me just took over. I watched CNN nearly every waking, non-working moment. Inevitably, my then five-year-old daughter would plop down in the chair next to me.
And the question was, what to do? Turn the war off or try to explain what was going on? And if you explain, how honest should you be?
I decided then on a policy of honesty in nearly all circumstances. It was the route that made me feel most comfortable. But I’m not always sure I made the right choice.
She had lots of questions and for the most part, she did not seem especially freaked out. But then Sadaam Hussein disappeared. I kept telling her not to worry, that eventually we’d capture him. But she seemed overly concerned. One day she asked, “if they can’t find him in Iraq, could he be in Ohio?” Absolutely not, I said. “What about California?” she asked.
It was then I realized that in her world, there really were just three places — Her home (Ohio), Her grandparents’ home (California) and the place she watched on TV (Iraq). If Sadaam couldn’t be found in Iraq, to her it seemed perfectly rational that he might be hiding out in Ohio or California.
I thought about this issue today as I read a post by my colleague Margo Rutledge Kissell, who writes about military life both in the paper and her blog On the Homefront.
Margo discusses the struggles of explaining events on the news to her four-year-old son. She also points us to some useful tips for talking to kids about war and terrorism from New York University.
I still like my honest policy, although sometimes explaining events on the news can be tricky. And I do censor the worst stories. On the other hand, I’m a firm believer that talking to kids about the world, current events and history can help them learn.
What’s your strategy in these situations?
Permalink | Comments (1) | Categories: Young Children
As test scores rise, the town gets richer
Maybe this is a “duh” study. In districts that score high on standardized tests, homes are worth more. If you want to debate the “chicken or egg” question about wealth and test scores, check out my posts on that topic by going here.
Still I found it interesting that a recent study of Ohio found that big gains in test scores by a school district translated directly to nice jumps in home prices there. From Education Week:
An Ohio study suggests that high scores by public school students on state exams may help boost a community’s home prices. Donald Haurin, an economics professor at Ohio State University in Columbus, examined 77,578 house-buying transactions for the year 2000 in seven urban Ohio communities and compared them to the 4th and 9th grade test scores in those districts. On average, he found that a 20 percent increase in a district’s pass rate on the state tests translated to a 7 percent increase in the home prices in that district. His study was published in the May issue of the Journal of Regional Science.
So the pro- and anti-testing crowds can debate all day about the value and meaning of standardized test results, but one group pretty clearly seems to believe those results are meaningful and useful — home buyers.
In your view, are these folks making rational choices? Does a sudden jump in test scores really mean a school district should command that much more respect?
Permalink | Comments (2) | Categories: Testing
An education carnival odyssey
This week’s Carnival of Education is up over at the blog Text Savvy.
You can find my post on median income and standardized test scores included in this weekly roundup of the best posts around the education blogosphere last week.
The post I found most interesting this week is from a blog called Texas ED, who clearly has had a good experience with Odyssey of the Mind.
Odyssey of the Mind is an extracurricular program for kids that promotes creativity. Kids compete in teams against other teams to see who can solve an assigned problem most creatively.
Overall, I like Odyssey of the Mind and similar programs, although I’ve seen teams of widely varying quality — from those who produce very smart and interesting results to other for whom the program is just a step above playtime.
Readers, do you have experience with Odyssey or its imitators? Tell us about your experience. Do you believe, like Texas Ed, that they truly enhance student learning and creativity in kids?
UPDATE: My post about Dixie Allen’s party switch and support of vouchers also made this week’s Carnival of Ohio Politics.
Permalink | Comments (2) | Categories: The Carnival of Education
“Our School” review on deadwood
A few weeks ago, I posted my review of Joanne Jacobs’ book “Our School” here at Get on the Bus. On Sunday, a shorter version of the review appeared in the Life section on page D8.
Permalink | Comments (1) | Categories: Charter Schools and School Choice, Journalism
Uniforms in the burbs and small towns
Do any Get on the Bus readers know of a suburban or rural public school in the Dayton area that requires kids to wear uniforms? Just curious because I noticed a strong majority of Dayton Public Schools are requiring uniforms this fall. I know public schools in other big Ohio cities require uniforms, but I’m honestly not aware of a public school outside of a major city that does. I was wondering if this was an urban-only trend.
Permalink | Comments (11) | Categories: Dayton Public Schools
The “School of Rock” approach to education
Over the weekend, I saw “School of Rock” for the first time. It’s a funny film in which Jack Black plays a struggling rocker who pretends to be a teacher to put together a new band made up of grade school students. Black’s character tells the kids they are going to be working on a class project called “rock band” and that they will be competing against others from around the state to see who can put together the best band.
In today’s paper, I wrote about the new Dayton Technology Design High School, which borrows the “school of rock” approach by giving 80 kids a common goal they must work on cooperatively. Principal David White is in the Jack Black role, and instead of a rock band the schoolwide project this time is called “virtual game.”
In the movie, Black’s class ended up putting together a rocking show for the battle of the bands. If White is a success, his kids will knock the socks off other schools with an educational video game they’ll actually pay money to use with their own students.
As far as I can tell, this is a unique approach.
School officials say they looked at somewhat similar game-building efforts at a couple of online schools, but frankly they said they were not especially impressed. So they crafted their own concept for the school and curriculum from scratch.
The goal here is to entice kids who might otherwise dropout to stay in school by giving them a “rock band” style project, a team effort in a genre — video games — that hopefully they will find interesting, fun and exciting.
It’s also risky. The whole approach could fail. But this is part of Dayton’s effort to create new options, especially at high school, for kids who in the past have gotten lost in traditional schools.
What do you think of the “virtual game” idea? Is it genius or insanity?
Permalink | Comments (6) | Categories: Charter Schools and School Choice, Dayton Public Schools, My Favorite Posts, Urban School Issues
Reading, writing and video games
(David White, principal of the new Dayton Technology Design High School. DDN photo by Jim Witmer)
By Scott Elliott
Dayton Daily News
The Dayton school district’s newest high school wants kids who are willing to spend hours staring at a video screen, working on their skills, until they master the challenges presented to them.
And some of the district’s academic stragglers already have made such a commitment, spending hours seeking electronic Super Bowl titles, imaginary ill-gotten riches or fantastic conquests over video villains.
Capitalizing on youthful passion for video games, school leaders hope to keep more kids in school by offering the chance to conceive, design, build — and sell — their own video game.
“That’s what they love,” said David White, the school’s chief academic officer. “That’s the hook.”
The Dayton Technology Design High School will enroll about 100 students, with about 80 in the “virtual game” track, requiring a three-year commitment and culminating in the completion, marketing and possibly sale of a student-created educational video game.
“When we first started talking about the video game, people laughed at us,” Superintendent Percy Mack said. “But they laughed at the Wright brothers, too.”
White knows a few things about kids who are at risk to drop out. He last worked at the ISUS Trade and Tech Prep High School, a highly regarded charter school that teaches building trades to dropouts, where he was assistant superintendent.
This technology design school, he said, is built around the typical dropout or at risk student.
“We play to their strengths,” he said. “That doesn’t happen in traditional schools.”
Before ISUS, White worked with a group that helped start the three Mound Street Academy dropout-focused charter schools run by the Montgomery County Educational Service Center that teach military, health care and information technology skills. And he also has roots in the school district, where he was an assistant principal at Meadowdale and Patterson high schools.
Troubled students, he said, have a typical personality profile. They score very low on assertiveness, calmness and “conscience restraint,” or the ability to control emotional responses.
But the same kids post among the highest scores for sociability and conformity.
“They like to talk — and especially to text,” White said. “Sociability is what they crave. But they love structure, order, routine and high expectations. You have to provide that for them or they provide their own.”
The technology design school is for 16- to 22-year-olds willing to make a three-year commitment. During 70-minute periods, course work will cover math, science, social studies and English. In virtual game classes, students will work in groups of no more than 12 on a schoolwide project, creating an educational video game.
The goal is to teach the kids work force, academic, life and “new economy” skills. Student work will focus on developing the technical framework of the game, managing the process and marketing the end product.
White said he envisions a game in the mold of a classic called Oregon Trail, a strategy game in which players must answer academic questions to earn supplies and move ahead in virtual quest to make it to the early American West.
The students will need to create an attractive concept, design the game functions and create the content.
In a perfect world, the game would prove marketable to other schools to use as a classroom tool as part of their curriculum, and income from sales could be reinvested in other projects or even used for stipends for students.
White said the model is unique — a hybrid of the purely online curriculum of “cyber” schools combined with the in-the-classroom intensity of schools designed for dropouts.
The technology design school will be housed at Jackson Center, a school remodeled as a teacher training unit, but will technically be a “conversion” charter school sponsored by the district but independently run by a separate governing board headed by former school board member Doniece Gatliff.
The hope is to get kids up to speed on academics while imparting job-ready skills like management and marketing along with technology training that could make them career ready, perhaps even in the booming video game development industry.
“This is not just a game,” Mack said. “It’s about educating students and giving them something they can do after they graduate.”
NOTE: Click here for more on the Dayton Technology Design High School.
Permalink | | Categories: Charter Schools and School Choice, Dayton Public Schools, My Favorite DDN Stories, Urban School Issues
The hard way to save a school
(New Omega Principal Tracy Ross )
In today’s DDN, I wrote about the Omega School of Excellence and its effort to totally “reconstitute” the troubled school, a radical approach that included letting all the teachers and administrators go and starting over this year with an entirely new staff.
This is one of the very rare examples anywhere in the country of a total reconstitution.
Last year I wrote about Dayton Public Schools’ use of this tactic. Dayton also took reconstitution seriously in the four cases where they’ve employed it, requiring all the school staff to reapply for their jobs and administrators restaffing the school picked only those teachers who were a good fit with the new philosophy of the reborn school and its new principal.
But in all cases Dayton placed at least some of those teachers back at the school, and sometimes close to half the staff returned. Even so, as I wrote last year, Dayton won accolades for going that far. No Child Left Behind encourages the use of reconstitution for schools that are persistently underperforming. But in most places around the country it’s looked more like “reconstitution lite,” sometimes with changes as mild as just a new principal. So Omega’s total overhaul is exceedingly rare, although it was made easier since the school is small and the teaching staff is only six.
Omega also is an interesting example of the challenges of starting a school from scratch, even with well intentioned and capable founders.
The school grew out of concern at Omega Baptist Church about the problems of middle school youth in Dayton. Church Pastor Daryl Ward and his wife Vanessa Oliver Ward, both ministers, were persuaded that they could help children most by creating a strong middle school option in the city with their own high expectations school. Originally, they pair thought to start a Christian school, but they quickly decided they’d be better off financially to go the charter route.
And Vanessa Ward originally sought out the most challenging school model around — the Knowledge is Power Program, or KIPP. KIPP today is one of the most celebrated new school models. Begun by two young teachers in Houston, KIPP aims to turnaround kids who fall behind with an intensive model. Kids go to school for nine hours a day and on Saturdays for a longer school year than other schools.
Unfortunately, as Ward says, Omega was about a year too soon for KIPP, which in 1999 was really not interested in expanding and had few materials to guide others in replicating the program. (BTW, this is why Dayton, the charter school capital of the country, doesn’t have a KIPP school, a question I’m often asked.) Ward tried anyway and at first with an ambitious KIPP-like program.
But it was hard to maintain. Over time, tight budgets and parent complaints led to cutbacks in Saturday sessions, school hours and other program elements. Then two years ago, as Ward was taken away frequently by family health concerns, the school began to slide into serious academic trouble.
The effort to save the school will be interesting to watch. It’s also the first example I know about of an organization primarily dedicated to reviving schools through reconstitution. That group, KIDS, is an equally ambitious expiriment, and one its founders hope can take its show on the road to other schools soon.
UPDATE: Omega’s revival hits a few bumps.
(Image credit: Jan Underwood, DDN)
Permalink | Comments (10) | Categories: Charter Schools and School Choice, My Favorite Posts, Urban School Issues
Real sex ed makes a difference
Two counties, next to each other, with nearly identical demographics — numbers that would suggest a high teen pregnancy rate.
One county is highest in South Carolina for teen pregnancy. The other is the lowest.
What’s the difference? One county has had a comprehensive sex education program for 24 years.
This fascinating story is on the front page of today’s Wall Street Journal. I think you may have the be a subscriber to access the story, but here’s a taste:
One explanation for how Bamberg County has performed so well is one of the nation’s most intensive and long-running programs to prevent teen pregnancy. Its director, a 47-year-old former volleyball coach named Michelle Nimmons, leads an eight-person staff at the Denmark-Olar Teen Life Center in Denmark, one of the county’s two central towns.
They bombard boys and girls with hours of sex-education classes, “life skills” sessions to teach self-esteem and saying no to sex, practical guidance on contraception and other outreach programs that take place as often as basketball or track practice.
While many schools offer sex-education classes for just a few hours a year, often after school, scarcely a day goes by here without a class, one-on-one counseling session, or a free dinner for parents and their kids. Classes and individual counseling sessions are integrated into the school curriculum and meet during the school day.
Meanwhile, the federal government today exclusively encourages “abstinence only” sex education, which critics argue are far less effective.
Is this South Carolina example an argument for change?
Permalink | Comments (2) | Categories: Sex Education
A sharper No. 2 will solve the world’s problems
So the College Board spent $5 million to have a company evaluate its SAT scoring methods in the wake of thousands of mis-scored tests last school year. What does the company recommend? Some more training, better software, adding some new marks on the score sheets to help line them up better with scanners.
Oh, one big sweeping change was recommended — providing pencils and erasers at test sites!
Critics respond that the recommendations do not address the problems that led to the scoring mistakes. What do you think? Did the College Board get its money’s worth?
Permalink | Comments (2) | Categories: Testing
Dixie Allen, vouchers and politics
Over at Eduwonk, Andy has noticed that Dayton Democratic legislator Dixie Allen is switching parties. And he’s wondering why I’m not telling him how much her decision has to do with her support, and Ohio Democrats’ disdain, for vouchers.
Well, Andy, there’s not that much to tell. Dixie Allen has been a Republican for a long time when it comes to voting and her embrace of vouchers is a recent phenomenon. I think it played little, or probably no, part in her decision to switch parties so she could run for Montgomery County Commission.
I have to say, however, that I was really surprised to see Allen seek office again, no matter what flag she is flying. I distinctly remember Allen pledging never to run again for any office, and how that decision played a role in her move to push for vouchers.
Back in February, Allen was the featured guest of a local group called Parents Advancing Choice in Education, which backs vouchers. In a room full of fired up parents, mostly with kids already in private schools, Allen told the story of how she came to be the sponsor of the bill that ultimately led to the expansion of the voucher program statewide.
She said she had been thinking about vouchers for some time and decided they were a good idea. From my notes during that meeting:
“I went to (Ohio House Speaker) Jon Husted and said, ‘I want to sponsor a voucher bill,’” Allen said. “He said, ‘you know that is political suicide for you.’ I said, ‘I ran for office the last time and I am not going for public office ever again, so what can somebody do to me?’”
I suppose we’ll see if her voucher support comes into play.
One other interesting thing about Allen’s switch and her impending resignation from the Ohio House. It appears likely then that the Democrats will get to name a replacement and that it will be Dayton school board member Clayton Luckie, who is seeking the seat. (BTW, Luckie is strongly opposed to vouchers.)
If that comes to pass, Luckie, the longest serving school board member, will resign the Dayton school board in the middle of his third term. This means the board will name another new board member this year. They already added Joe Lacey, who defeated Doniece Gatliff last November, in January and Stacy Thompson, who replaced Tracy Rusch at the beginning of the summer.
When this change occurs, the board suddenly will have a majority of members who have served a year or less — Lacey, Thompson, Lee Massoud (who replaced Tony Hill last summer) and Luckie’s replacement.
The remaining board members include President Gail Littlejohn and one ally from her original reform team — Yvonne Isaacs — plus Mario Gallin, the last holdover from the pre-Littlejohn era.
In effect, big changes are unlikely. Littlejohn did a masterful job of uniting the board under her reform plan after she was elected in 2001 and new board members since then have largely been selected by the board in appointments and shared Littlejohn’s vision. (The notable exception being Lacey, who at times is outspoken and will oppose Littlejohn publicly.)
Still, having one iron-clad ally is much different than having three on a seven-member board. It will be interesting to see if the politics get more complicated when disagreements arise.
This also shows one of the few areas that the board has fallen short on — building a farm team for itself for the future. Littlejohn and company probably should be recruiting good community people for key volunteer posts who could step up to the board when future openings occur. As it has been, Massoud and Thompson were largely unknown to the board before they applied for appointment to open seats and Lacey ran an outsider campaign in last November’s board race.
Still, the quality of candidates interested in serving on the board, even when it comes to open seats for which anyone can apply, has clearly improved during the Littlejohn era, which is a good sign for the board.
Permalink | Comments (7) | Categories: Charter Schools and School Choice, Dayton Public Schools, Schools and Politics
NY Times Tierney picks the wrong study
New York Times columnist John Tierney earlier this week took up the cause of private schools who he says were unfairly spun as the big losers in a recent study by the National Center for Education Statistics.
Tierney’s take wasn’t exceptionally thoughtful. He took the usual anti-public school tack — scapegoating unions, dismissing public school success and making a case for the cost effectiveness of private schools, if nothing else. And mostly he talked off the top of his head, citing only two studies to support his arguments.
It just so happened that both studies involved Paul Peterson, whom Tierney neglected to mention is often funded by the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation, a Washington, D.C.-based school choice advocacy group with roots here in Dayton.
Most surprising to me was that Tierney reached way back seven years to cite this 1999 study:
“The most scientific way to compare schools is with the kind of randomized experiment that has been conducted in New York, Dayton and Washington. In these cities, students from low-income families were given a chance to apply for school vouchers. After the vouchers were awarded by lottery, researchers tracked the voucher students in private schools and compared them with a control group: the losers of the lottery who remained in public school.
After three years, the white and Hispanic voucher students were doing as well as their counterparts in public school, and the African-American voucher students were testing a full grade level higher than the blacks in the control group.
Don’t remember this study? Since it included Dayton, I remembered it. Let me help refresh your memory. This is the Paul Peterson led study that saw it’s conclusions renounced by the research group compiled the data. Here’s an excerpt from a story that ran in the Dayton Daily News in 2000:
An educational research company that compiled data for a school voucher study that showed blacks did better at private schools says gains in one city were overstated by the lead researcher.
The study, led by Paul Peterson, a government professor at Harvard and a fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution, examined three privately funded experimental programs in New York, Washington and Dayton.
It showed significant gains, based on scores on standardized math and reading tests, for black students who received vouchers to help pay for private school.
Mathematica Policy Research of Princeton, which gathered data in New York, has issued a statement that calls the findings premature and cautions against jumping to any policy conclusions, The New York Times reported in Friday’s editions.
`If you ask the question,When I offered students vouchers, did I make a difference in their test scores,’ right now you come away saying, `No, there’s no impact’ ” said David Myers of Mathematica.
Researchers admit the gains among black students were concentrated heavily in Washington, where the improvement was twice as great as in New York and one-third greater in Dayton.
But Peterson stood by his conclusions, saying, “An average is average.”
The study measured test scores among 1,400 poor students given vouchers worth $1,700 a year to attend private school.
Researchers found that between 1997 and 1999, black children on vouchers raised their percentile rankings on standardized math and reading tests on average by 6.3 points.
Their scores were compared with a control group of students who were not awarded vouchers by lottery and remained in public schools. But the study, released about two weeks ago, found no similar improvements among other ethnic groups.
Advocates of voucher programs used the study to bolster support for their cause. But critics of vouchers criticized the study initially, saying it was tainted because it was done in cooperation with pro-voucher organizations supporting the three programs.
This was the best study Tierney could find to bolster the case for private schools? There hasn’t been a more definitive or independent study in seven years? I’m not sure how much he helped the cause.
Permalink | Comments (4) | Categories: Charter Schools and School Choice, My Favorite Posts
Finally, new schools
NOTE: Today’s story had an error. Cleveland opens in January and Belle Haven and Wogaman open in October.
Dayton’s school construction program is a big, complex project that has taken a long time to bear fruit, but this month the city will begin to see its 2002 tax levy dollars pay off.
Here’s a photo of what the new Kiser Elementary School looks like on the inside:
(Thanks to DDN photographer David Munch for this photo and to DDN intern Nicole Lark, who taught me how to post photos at GOTB)
I think the very first planning meeting for the Dayton schools construction project that I went to was in 1999. If that seemed like a long seven years of waiting, the new schools will soon seem like they are opening all the time. Here is the schedule for when the 15 schools already in the pipeline will open:
2006
July: Kiser Elementary School
October: Belle Haven Elementary School and Wogaman Elementary School
2007
January: Cleveland Elementary School
July: Fairport Elementary School (interim name that will likely change for a new school at Gettysburg and Kings Highway)
September: Ruskin Elementary School
November: Stivers School for the Arts
December: Kemp Elementary School, Louise Troy Elementary School
2008
January: E.J. Brown Elementary School, McNary Elementary School (at Westwood Park site)
February: Thurgood Marshall High School (replaces Colonel White at the Roth site)
April: Horace Mann Elementary School
September: David Ponitz Career Technical High School (replaces Patterson next to Sinclair Community College), Dunbar High School
Click here for the complete list of which schools will be rebuilt vs. torn down.
Permalink | Comments (1) | Categories: Dayton Public Schools, School Construction
Predestined to flunk
Should a teacher try to pre-determine that 25 percent of their students are going to get a D or F on every test? I don’t think so. But one teacher featured in this week’s Carnival of Education, hosted by Mike at his Education in Texas blog thinks this is the way to make a test.
Sounds like he needs to read this story about standardized test creation.
See, I thought tests were supposed to measure how well a group of students learned material. If everyone in the class learned really well, the’d all get A’s and we’d celebrate, right? But this approach to testing presumes there should always be about 10 percent who flunk and 15 percent who get D’s, no matter how well the teacher teaches and the kids study.
Imagine if they used this approach on your state’s driving test, deciding ahead of time that one in 10 people are just simply going to flunk and never get their licenses because the test will be designed to “differentiate” them into the bottom group. Sound fair?
Permalink | Comments (3) | Categories: Testing, The Carnival of Education
Top 10 college majors
A nod to the teacher/blogger Chem Jerk who’s quiz pointed me to this list.
Before you click “continue reading” quickly jot down your prediction for the top 10 college majors. Then see how close you are to the real list. I’ll even get you started with big hint — journalism is not in the top 10, but both of my college majors are.* And another major closely associated with this blog is on it TWICE.
Here’s Princeton Review’s list with the most popular major first:
Business Administration/Management
Psychology
Elementary Education
Biology
Nursing
Education
English
Communications
Computer Science
Political Science
Some quick observations:
—For an “undesirable” profession known for a lack of respect and low starting pay, teaching is surprisingly popular.
—There’s a noticeable lack of science and engineering on this list. About 10 years ago, I wrote a story about how biology, a long-dissed “boring” major, was surpassing physics as the most popular science major thanks to the sudden explosion of exciting biology-related research in genetics, forensics and other areas. It appears that trend has held.
—Do we really need that many people with expertise in psychology? If so, what does that say about America?
*At the University of Dayton I double majored in English and communications with a concentration in journalism because UD did not have a separate journalism department.
Permalink | Comments (5) | Categories: Colleges and Universities
The complete list of schools accepting vouchers
A total of 409 Dayton students have won vouchers to attend private schools this fall and 19 local private schools have agreed to take them.
More kids could still get vouchers as a second enrollment period begins July 21. Click here for more information about eligibility and applying for a voucher.
Here is the complete list of local schools who have accepted vouchers and how many students so far have enrolled that will use vouchers:
Mary Queen of Peace 90
St. Rita Catholic School 59
Chaminade-Julienne 40
Lutheran School of the Miami Valley 34
Dayton Christian Schools 31
Our Lady of Rosary Catholic School 27
East Dayton Christian School 23
Immaculate Conception Catholic School 21
Mulligan Stew Academy 20
Holy Family Catholic School 17
St. Anthony Catholic School 16
Ascension Catholic School 12
Precious Blood Catholic School 10
Alter High School 8
Carroll High School 5
St. Albert Catholic School 4
St. Helen Catholic School 4
Salem Christian Academy 3
St. Charles Catholic School 1
Holy Angeles Catholic School 1
Permalink | Comments (2) | Categories: Charter Schools and School Choice, Private Schools
The Miami Valley’s most overachieving (and underachieving) school districts
In earlier posts, I used data for the Miami Valley to test the theory that family income strongly influences standardized test scores.
If that’s true, then districts with a test score rank below their income rank could be viewed as underachieving. And those with test score ranks above their income ranks would then be overachievers.
Following that rationale, here are the 10 most overachieving Miami Valley school districts:
Versallies. This small, rural district north Miami Valley ranks 11th for test performance but only 41st for income.
Cedar Cliff. Also small and rural, Cedar Cliff ranks 19th for test performance and 43 for income.
Russia. Small, rural and at the northern edge of the valley, this district ranks an impressive third for test performance despite being only 22nd for income.
Milton-Union. Another small town in the northern Miami Valley, though slightly less rural than the others. Test performance rank is 22 with an income rank of 40
Fort Loramie. Small, rural, north. Noticing a pattern yet? Test performance rank of 15 and income rank of 29.
Mississinawa Valley. This is an interesting case because this small, rural, northern district is both poor and low performing. But its school officials can perhaps argue that they aren’t doing so bad. Ranked 58th (third from the bottom) for income, the district’s test performance rating is 45.
Greenville. Similar story here, although Greenville is a fairly large city in a northern rural county. Income rank 55 but a test performance rank of 43.
Vandalia. This is a fairly affluent suburban district, ranked 19th for income, but test performance is even better, ranking 8th.
Kettering. This major suburban district’s income ranking is perhaps lower than you might have guessed at 27, but its test performance is higher than might be predicted at 16.
Sidney. This city is like Greenville, fairly big but in a northern rural county. Income rank is 51 and test performance rank is 40
Now let’s look at the 10 most underachieving districts:
Bethel. Traditionally a small, rural district, the northern suburbs are putting more affluent neighborhoods within its boundaries. Income rank is a surprisingly high 9th while test performance ranks 35th.
Twin Valley South. The first of three Preble County districts on this list. It’s small and rural with an income rank of 28, but test performance ranks just 48th.
Carlisle. Sort of an oddball district in Warren County since it is neither suburban nor exploding with growth like some of its neighbors. The small city ranks 18th for income but 38 for test performance.
Shawnee. The second Preble County district on the underachiever list. Shawnee, small and rural, ranks 36 for income but 55 for test performance.
Jackson Center. This district seems like it’s on the wrong list. Small, rural and north like many of the high achievers, but test performance has dropped to a ranking of 49 while income ranks 30th.
Tipp City. Like its neighbor Bethel, Tipp is a former small town that has become a growing suburb. Ranked 11th for income and 27th for test performance.
Huber Heights. A large close-in suburb, Huber ranks 17th for income but 30th for test performance.
Jefferson Twp. Small and rural but close-in and suburban in some areas. Jefferson ranks 48th for income but last (60) for test performance.
Tri-County North. From Preble County, the third of five districts from that county that make the underachiever list. Ranks 24 for income but 36 for test performance.
Tri-Village. Small and rural, this district ranks 45 for income and 56 for test performance.
One more list for you. Here are the four district in the Miami Valley who are EXACTLY where income predicts they should be:
Mason. Ranks second for income behind Springboro and second for test performance behind Oakwood.
Newton. Small, rural, north and ranked 20th for both income and test performance.
National Trail. The fourth of five Preble County districts to make one of my lists. Small and rural, Trail ranks 47th on both lists.
Dayton. How’s this for a surprise? As much as the district is criticized for underperforming, perhaps critics forget how poor Dayton is? Ranks above only Northridge for income and only beats Jefferson for test performance — 59th out of 60 on both lists.
Permalink | Comments (4) | Categories: Testing
How much does income affect test results?
Household income is a factor in how kids score on standardized tests. I don’t think there’s much debate about that. The question is how big a factor is family wealth?
Many studies have shown family income is one of the most powerful predictors of student performance on standardized tests. Here’s one example of such a study that I was able to find quickly.
Recently, I wrote a story about the a study that showed Dayton was hit harder in the 2003 recession than other Ohio cities. For the story, I obtained tax return data, broken down by school district, that showed median income.
I thought it might be interesting to line up each school district’s median income with standardized test performance, based on each district’s “performance index” score.” The state-generated score reflects test performance across all tests taken.
I put the data together here so we could test the assumption that family income is a primary driver of student performance on standardized tests for the 60 school districts in the Miami Valley. If that assumption is true, the top 10 and bottom 10 districts for income locally should roughly match up with the 10 best and 10 worst scoring districts.
The numbers appear to back the theory that family income is highly correlated with test performance. Let’s look first at the top 10 districts by income, in order, and their test performance rank:
Springboro 8
Mason 2
Oakwood 1
Sugarcreek 6
Beavercreek 12
Centerville 5
Little Miami 18
Kings 4
Bethel 35
Lebanon 13
Six of the top 10 districts for income also rank in the top ten for test performance. That’s a pretty strong correlation. Now let’s look at the bottom 10 districts for income out of the 60 Miami Valley districts, with the lowest income at the top of this list and No. 51 at the bottom. The performance index rankings here would all be expected to be greater than 50:
Northride 57
Dayton 59
Mississinawa Valley 45
Trotwood 58
Piqua 50
Greenville 43
Mad River 44
Ansonia 46
Bradford 54
Sidney 40
The correlation, interestingly, is not as strong at the bottom as it is at the top, but it’s still pretty strong. Four of the bottom 10 districts for income also are in the bottom 10 for test performance.
So, generally, the Miami Valley data tends to show that median income rank is likely to correlate pretty strongly with standardized test performance in the school district. Following that rationale and using this data, we can probably determine the most underachieving and overachieving local school districts.
Follow the link to see those lists. It’s interesting to see what the school districts on each list have in common.
Permalink | Comments (8) | Categories: Testing
Miami Valley school district income vs. test performance
This list, ranked by median income, compares the median income of school districts to their rank in the Miami Valley for performance index score. The first number is a median income ranking in the Miami Valley. The second number is the ranking for performance index score in the Miami Valley:
Springboro 1, 8
Mason 2,2
Oakwood 3,1
Sugarcreek 4, 6
Beavercreek 5, 12
Centerville 6, 5
Little Miami 7, 18
Kings 8, 4
Bethel 9, 35
Lebanon 10, 13
Tipp City 11, 27
Wayne 12, 21
Northmont 13, 7
Valley View 14, 22
Miamisburg 15, 14
Anna 16, 10
Huber Heights 17, 30
Carlisle 18, 38
Vandalia 19, 8
Newton 20, 20
Yellow Springs 21, 28
Russia 22, 3
Miami East 2, 29
Tri-county North 24, 36
Greenview 25, 34
Botkins 26, 16
Kettering 27, 16
Twin Valley South 28, 48
Fort Loramie 29, 15
Jackson Center 30, 49
Brookville 31, 26
Troy 32, 25
Covington 33, 24
Franklin-Monroe 34, 32
Hardin-Houston 35, 36
Preble Shawnee 36, 55
New Lebanon 37, 32
Eaton 38,39
Arcanum 39, 31
Milton Union 40, 22
Versallies 41, 11
West Carrollton 42, 41
Cedar Cliff 43, 19
Franklin 44, 50
Tri-Village 45, 56
Xenia 46, 52
National Trail 47, 47
Jefferson Twp 48, 60
Fairlawn 49, 42
Fairborn 50, 53
Sidney 51, 40
Bradford 52, 54
Ansonia 53,46
Mad River 54,44
Greenville 55, 43
Piqua 56, 50
Trotwood 57, 58
Mississinawa Valley 58, 45
Dayton 59, 59
Northridge 60, 57
Permalink | | Categories: Testing
Miami Valley school districts ranked by performance index
This list ranks school districts in the seven-county Miami Valley area by their 2005 “performance index score.” This state-generated number represents state achievement test results for students in the district across all tests given.
Springboro 101.7
Mason 105.7
Oakwood 108.1
Sugarcreek 102.2
Beavercreek 100.6
Centerville 102.5
Little Miami 98.1
Kings 103.3
Bethel 94
Lebanon 100.4
Tipp City 96.6
Wayne 97.5
Northmont 102
Valley View 97.2
Miamisburg 100.3
Anna 101.5
Huber Heights 94.9
Carlisle 92.7
Vandalia 101.7
Newton 97.6
Yellow Springs 96.3
Russia 103.5
Miami East 96.2
Tri-county North 93.5
Greenview 94.1
Botkins 98.7
Kettering 98.7
Twin Valley South 87.7
Fort Loramie 100.2
Jackson Center 86.9
Brookville 96.8
Troy 96.9
Covington 97.1
Franklin-Monroe 94.4
Hardin-Houston 93.5
Preble Shawnee 83.6
New Lebanon 94.4
Eaton 92.6
Arcanum 94.8
Milton Union 97.2
Versallies 100.7
West Carrollton 89.9
Cedar Cliff 97.8
Franklin 86.5
Tri-Village 83.4
Xenia 86.3
National Trail 87.9
Jefferson Twp 63.3
Fairlawn 89.4
Fairborn 85.7
Sidney 91.5
Bradford 85.6
Ansonia 88
Mad River 88.5
Greenville 88.7
Piqua 86.5
Trotwood 72.8
Mississinawa Valley 88.1
Dayton 66.4
Northridge 80.9
Permalink | | Categories: Testing
Miami Valley school districts ranked by income
The following is 2003 median income figures, taken from tax return data, broken down by school districts in the seven-county Miami Valley area, ranked from highest income to lowest:
Springboro $56,800
Mason $54,838
Oakwood $54,280
Sugarcreek $47,130
Beavercreek $45,831
Centerville $43,994
Little Miami $43,181
Kings $41,385
Bethel $37,197
Lebanon $35,749
Tipp City $35,393
Wayne $35,209
Northmont $34,817
Valley View $34,350
Miamisburg $34,238
Anna $33,926
Huber Heights $33,640
Carlisle $32,932
Vandalia $32,882
Newton $32,800
Yellow Springs $32,702
Russia $32,640
Miami East $32,157
Tri-county North $31,918
Greenview $31,703
Botkins $31,578
Kettering $31,562
Twin Valley South $31,386
Fort Loramie $31,225
Jackson Center $31,188
Brookville $30,976
Troy $30,963
Covington $30,692
Franklin-Monroe $30,618
Hardin-Houston $30,351
Preble Shawnee $31,386
New Lebanon $30,290
Eaton $30,204
Arcanum $30,055
Milton Union $30,017
Versallies $29,800
West Carrollton $29,495
Cedar Cliff $29,393
Franklin $28,878
Tri-Village $28,425
Xenia $28,349
National Trail $28,068
Jefferson Twp $27,992
Fairlawn $27,879
Fairborn $27,755
Sidney $27,625
Bradford $27,518
Ansonia $27,092
Mad River $26,649
Greenville $26,101
Piqua $25,362
Trotwood $24,836
Mississinawa Valley $24,564
Dayton $22,995
Northridge $22,480
Permalink | Comments (4) | Categories: Testing
Letting a friend “look at” your homework
Is it ever OK for a student to borrow a friend’s homework just to “look at?” And if the borrower instead plagiarizes, how much punishment does the homework lender deserve?
And how far should the lender’s parents go to object if they believe their child’s punishment is too severe?
I’m a huge fan of Randy Cohen’s column “The Ethicist” in the Sunday New York Times Magazine. It’s an advice column in which Cohen tells letter writers his view of what the “ethical” path is for them in a sticky situation.
This week, there is a great school-based question. Here it is:
My son, a high-school junior, lent his completed homework to a friend, intending only to show him the general approach to the assignment. The friend plagiarized some of it, and their teacher found out. Although the friend backed my son’s story, the teacher put a derogatory note in my son’s file. This could prevent his getting into the National Honor Society and may discourage other teachers from writing him college recommendations. Did my son do so wrong? Name Withheld, Oregon
This is a great example of the sort of annoying issues and second-guessing teachers face every day. Let’s go through it:
—First of all, as Cohen states more politely, the lender is a either a cheater or a fool. If you want to help a friend with homework, that’s great. Sit down with them and answer their questions. If you want to help them cheat, give them you completed paper.
—The writer says the other boy backed the lender’s story that the intent was not to cheat and admits he plagiarized on his own. This sounds like a pretty obvious “oops, we got caught” cover story.
—The lender was disciplined with a note in his file. And his parents are complaining? At the college where my father taught for most of his career, involvement in plagiarism — or any kind of any cheating — was an automatic expulsion on the first offense! That was back when cheating used to be considered a serious offense. Even if you accept everything the lender is saying as true, the boy needs to learn an important lesson about cheating. Some discipline is called for.
—The parent ends with the concern that a note in the file could harm the son’s chances for National Honor Society or college. If the rest of his school career is exemplary, one reprimand is not likely to harm this boy’s chances for a good recommendation letter. As for National Honor Society, or the trust of other teachers, he’s got to earn all that back. But it can be done.
I liked all of Cohen’s answers until the end, where he addresses how the parents might respond to the reprimand:
If you disagree with its assertions, you should be given a chance to refute them. Talk to the teacher and the principal to learn your options and to determine if you are exaggerating the likely impact of this note on your son’s academic future.
I cringed at the suggestion here of involving the principal. Talk to the teacher, yes, but the parent’s posture in that conversation should not be confrontational. They should be asking the teacher what else they can do to help their son stay on the straight and narrow from now on, not arguing the reprimand, point-by-point, as the letter writer appears ready to do.
Here’s what I bet probably really happened in this case:
The kid and tried to help his friend cheat using a strategy that probably worked with other, less conscientious teachers. This careful teacher busted them and disciplined them. But the uptight parents, unwilling to see even the slightest blemish on their little darling’s record, decided to go to war over it, dragging administrators and the principal into the mix.
And what probably happened in the end? More often than not, administrators cave and the penalty is reduced or expunged. And discipline is again subtly eroded.
Permalink | Comments (4) | Categories: The Parent-Teacher Divide
Future girl gone wild
Recent news stories warning students that their MySpace pages or Web comments can come back to haunt them if college admissions counselors or prospective employers do a simple Google search reminded me of a funny story.
A friend relayed this from an educator friend. The friend had run into the mother of a former student. The woman’s daughter had been a good student and went off to a good college. Her mother was relaying all the good news of what her daughter was doing now.
“The whole time this woman was talking to me, all I could think about was the time her daughter sent me an E-mail from her home account,” the educator said. “I was shocked by her screen name, which was illshowyoumybuttfor$@email.com.”
So remember, kids — behave yourself on the Internet. You never know who’s watching, now or someday in the future.
Permalink | Comments (1) | Categories: Colleges and Universities
Are private schools really better?
Here’s a lesson in education statistics and how assumptions may not always add up.
At first blush, the results of the National Assessment of Education Progress — a standardized test given nationally at fourth and eighth grade sometimes called “The Nation’s Report Card” — seem to affirm a commonly-held belief, that private schools produce better academic results than public schools.
Here are there results of public school average test scores compared to private from NAEP:
4th grade reading: Private schools scored 14.7 points higher
4th grade math: Private schools scored 7.8 points higher
8th grade reading: Private schools scored 18.1 points higher
8th grade math: Private schools scored 12.3 percent higher
All those margins are big enough to be statistically significant, the usual standard by which researchers judge one group’s out-performance of another to be reliably believable.
But in a study by the National Center for Education statistics, researchers tried to make the comparison more apples-to-apples by controlling for outside factors that affect test scores, such as gender, ethnicity, disability, English language learner status, school size, location and the composition of the student body. Using a statistics model, they re-ran the comparisons while controlling for those factors.
Here’s what they found:
4th grade reading: No significant difference between public and private schools.
4th grade math: Public schools scored a statistically significant 4.5 points higher.
8th grade reading: Private schools scored a statistically significant 7.3 points higher
8th grade math: No significant difference between public and private schools.
Now, this is just one study using one method, but the results are quite interesting. And they challenge the conventional thinking.
Who the students are, and what kinds of homes they come from, certainly affects the test performance of students in tuition-based private schools. The question is to what degree?
At a minimum, this study suggests the big test gaps in the aggregate scores of public and private may not, by itself, necessarily mean the difference in the quality of education offered is that great.
UPDATE: The New York Times wrote about this study Saturday in a front page story that mentions the study was complete last summer but peer reviewed for a year. The story says teachers’ unions have been asking for the results for months and accurately predicted the study would be released on a Friday afternoon in the summer to gurantee minimal news coverage.
Over at the American Federation of Teachers’ blog, they trumpet the study as good news for public schools and say its results challenge the theory behind vouchers — that kids can get a better education outside of public schools.
Even if the weekend is the down part of the news cycle, there was quick reaction in the blogopshere, including Joanne Jacobs, Joe Williams and Alexander Russo.
There’s an especially good post from EdWize, a blog by the New Your City teacher’s union, that points out this study was commissioned by a Republican Bush appointee.
Permalink | Comments (6) | Categories: Private Schools
Trusting tests over teachers
Michael Winerip, the education columnist at the New York Times, created a bit of a stir in the blogopshere this week when he wrote his final column.
Winerip is a great journalist and a wonderful writer. But he has irked the pro-standards crowd with criticism of No Child Left Behind. His last column is a parting shot at NCLB in which his chief complaint is that the law’s primary message to teachers is that we don’t trust them.
Winerip argues that an education reform can only be successful if it has buy-in from the people that will put it into place. There are lots of other dimensions to the piece. For instance he trumpets small classes as a key solution to the problems of education and needles lawmakers by suggesting they be evaluated in the same way NCLB evaluates educators:
“We need a No Family Left Behind Law. This would measure economic growth of families and punish politicians in charge of states with poor economic growth for minority families.
FOR example, in Ohio, black families earn only 62 percent of white household income, one of the biggest disparities nationally. So every year, under No Family Left Behind, Ohio would be expected to close that income gap. If it failed to make adequate yearly progress for black families’ wealth, the governor and legislators would be judged failing, and after five years, could be removed from office. This way public schools wouldn’t be the only institutions singled out for failing poor children.”
But back to the question of trust. Here’s what he says about the way NCLB relies on tests instead of teachers:
“Because teachers’ judgment and standards are supposedly not reliable, the law substitutes a battery of state tests that are supposed to tell the real truth about children’s academic progress.”
There are convincing arguments on both sides of the question of standardized testing. But Winerip hits on a very narrow question that I find interesting — why do we trust the tests?
Whether a child gets a low or high score on a standardized test, what does that mean to us? That the child is smart or dumb? That they are well educated or poorly educated? Those are the sorts of judgments we often make based standardized test results.
But are those the questions the tests were designed to answer? Do the test makers claim that these tests will give us those answers? (I’ve asked them. The answer to both questions is no.)
And what do we really know about standardized tests and how they are made? Can we be sure certain they are fair and that they accurately measure the material they claim to test?
We’ve written a good bit about testing here at the Dayton Daily News. What we’ve reported is that the methods for creating, scoring and setting passing scores for standardized tests are flawed.
There are too many bad teachers out there, that’s for certain. For some, standardized tests are a solution to that problem. But the flip side is that there are too many bad standardized tests out there, too.
It is an interesting and debatable question, then — how do when know when to trust a standardized test instead of a teacher? And vice versa?
That tough question, I think, is under-reported and under-discussed. I’d love to hear your answer.
Permalink | Comments (4) | Categories: Testing
“An inspiration to all of us”
The Dayton Daily News reported this morning that legless Colonel White High School football player Bobby Martin has won an ESPY. Bobby was named “best male athlete with a disability.”
This is a nice ending to a great story, reported first by DDN sportswriter Tom Archdeacon last fall. Shortly after Tom told Bobby’s inspiring story, referees in Cincinnati barred him from a game because they said he was not in proper uniform without shoes. That sparked outrage and turned Bobby into an international story. He was interviewed by news organizations literally across the globe, including Sports Illustrated’s star columnist Rick Reilly and, of course, ESPN.
The ESPY’s, an ESPN-invented awards show for sports, will be broadcast Sunday. By all accounts, Bobby is a great kid and an “inspiration,” as one opposing coach called him. And he is really a remarkably good football player despite his obstacles. Bobby runs on his hands and is very quick and routinely made legitimate tackles. I hope the show some highlights during the awards show. It’s hard to describe but amazing to see.
I thought it might be nice to repost Tom’s original story on Bobby. Also if you go to the main DDN homepage today you can find photographer Jim Witmer’s incredible photos of Bobby.
Here’s Tom’s profile of Bobby from last September:
By Tom Archdeacon
Dayton Daily News
The Valley View fans, players and coaches had never seen anything like it:
Was he the mascot? A manager? Some never-get-off-the-bench token?
Everyone found out later in the game. But let’s let Bobby Martin — No. 99 — tell you what happened: “I was in at nose tackle,� the 17-year-old Colonel White senior said. “Their quarterback was trying to run the ball wide. Their center grabbed onto me and tried to bury me, but I broke free and ran down the line and caught the quarterback before he got to the line of scrimmage.� That might sound like a typical defensive play, except for one thing. When Bobby Martin “runs,� he does so by using his arms. He was born with no legs.
His body ends just a little below his waist.
But as the Valley View crowd found out — just as the Dunbar faithful did last Friday night at Welcome Stadium — while Martin may be lacking in stature, he stands as tall, if not taller, than any athlete in the Miami Valley.
“Bobby’s proved that when the Lord takes something away from you, He always gives you something extra someplace else,â€? said his grandmother, Martha Walker.
Valley View coach Jay Niswonger was so impressed, he sent out video e-mails of the Colonel White nose tackle’s play. Even though his team buried Colonel White, Niswonger said Bobby — who had two tackles in his late-game appearance — was the talk of all the Spartans players afterward: “He was an inspiration to all of us. And I’ll tell you, our crowd really embraced him, too.�
Justin Dean, a recent Colonel White grad who now works as a Cougars sidelines assistant, was struck by that, as well: “Their crowd gave Bobby a standing ovation. There were some teary eyes. People could hardly believe what they were seeing. It’s like that wherever we go. We get off the bus and the other team just stands there looking. I guess it’s kind of weird to them. They’re trying to figure out just what Bobby’s all about, just what he can do.�
Bobby’s capabilities — and they are myriad — sometimes get a communal hug and, other times, a traffic ticket from an incredulous cop.
“Don’t try to tell Bobby he’s got no legs — don’t tell him he’s got a handicap — he just will not accept that,� Colonel White assistant coach Kerry Ivy said. “To be truthful, he’s a tough kid to coach because he expects to be playing — every play.�
Bobby is a regular on Colonel White’s punt return team — he gets downfield faster than a lot of the other players — and he sees spot duty, usually near the end of the game, as a backup nose tackle. He hates being relegated to the bench, a point he made clear in the final minutes of Colonel White’s 23-20 victory over Dunbar.
“When he wasn’t in there late, oh was he (ticked) off,� Ivy said. “I told him, ‘Dog, I love ya’, but this is how it is now.’ But even then, you still have to keep an eye on him or he may just sub himself in.�
Being told he can’t do something is hard for Bobby to stomach. He’s spent a lifetime turning the word “no� into “yes.�
“You name it, he does it,� Dean said. “He skates, bowls, dances … even drives a car. He drives it pretty good, but I gotta say the first time I rode with him, I felt like I was at Kings Island on a ride. It was something.�
The way he worked the hand controls?
“Hand controls? There weren’t any hand controls,� Dean said. “He had a metal rod from his porch or something and he used it to press the gas and the brakes.�
Needless to say, the traffic cops who have stopped Bobby — for speeding, for no license — haven’t been that impressed.
Bobby’s mom, Gloria Martin, said the Camaro that Bobby was driving is now parked. And that means her son’s primary mode of transportation is that special skateboard he’s rigged up. Balanced on the 12-by-18-inch board he’s bolted to two sets of wheels, Bobby navigates everything from the hallways of Colonel White to the sidewalks of downtown Dayton.
“At school they told him they’d put all his classes on the first floor, but he said, ‘I’m fine. I can get up the stairs like any other kid,’ � Dean said. “He puts the board under his arm and hops up the stairs faster than most guys go with two legs.
“We went to eat at Roosters awhile back and the lady there looked at Bobby and said, ‘We have a ramp.’ When she said that, he got on his board, did a wheelie while doing a handstand, jumped off and was up the steps before she could say another word.�
Someone should have told her his nickname is Tony Hawk.
And the name of the daredevil boarder fits him a lot better than the tag his dad put on him soon after he was born. At first Bobby was called Boo Hoo because he cried so much. And no wonder. Not only was he without legs and would need an occupational therapist to teach him how to roll over, but he required extensive corrective surgery to repair his underdeveloped lower tract areas. And, he was asthmatic.
“I don’t exactly know how it all happened,� said Gloria, an intake coordinator for Day-Mont Behavioral Health Care. “At first they said I had high blood, but that wasn’t it. They said it ended up the worst-case scenario of a regressive syndrome where your legs grow together.�
In the beginning, Bobby’s dad — Robert Martin Sr. — had a tough time accepting all this, and he and Gloria both have said that played a part in their separation. But in recent years he’s come around in his thinking, and as Gloria said, “he realizes how good Bobby really is.�
Martha Walker said Gloria did a good job fostering Bobby’s independence: “The Lord picked the right person to be his mother. My daughter did what I probably would not have. I was overprotective. With Bobby, I would have been too upset. I’d have been trying to shield him from the whole world and then he wouldn’t have learned to do anything for himself. But my daughter took things as they came and let him try everything.�
As Gloria explained: “I never hindered him from anything he wanted to do, never really told him, ‘No.’ Now, I probably should have disciplined him more, but I didn’t want him to shy away from things. Didn’t want him to have any complexes.�
Bobby quickly learned how to work his way through life on his own. Prosthetic legs were an impossibility — he had no thighs to which to affix them — and he doesn’t like a wheelchair.
It slows me down,� he said.
The skateboard idea, he said, came about some 11 years ago at a Beavercreek skating rink: “They put skates on my hands, but that didn’t work. Then someone suggested a skateboard.�
With a means to get to where he wanted, Bobby showed he had plenty to do once he got there. At Roth Middle School, he played football and wrestled, using his upper-body strength and those well-muscled arms.
But once he got to high school, he strayed from sports and had brief stops at both Dunbar and Meadowdale. Neither of those worked out. At times he fell in with the wrong crowd — people more interested in the street than school — and the bad influences showed.
He finally found a home at Colonel White, where he is one of the most popular students and has been reunited with Earl White, the Cougars’ head football coach who also was his wrestling coach at Roth.
“He’s so much a part of everything that goes on, we don’t see him as handicapped,� White said. “Everything any other kid does, he does. To us, he’s just Bobby. He’s a normal kid.�
You see that in practice, where he knocks heads with the other players, trash talks with the best of them and doesn’t flinch when the barbs come back his way.
“He’s jokeable,� Dean said. “He laughs when Coach tells everyone to take a knee and the other guys go ‘You, too, Bobby.’ �
Ivy said there are times though when Bobby is faced with things other players never think about.
“Bobby always practices in shorts, so when he got his game pants, he looked over at Josh Tillman, our fullback, and said, ‘How do you tie these things up?’ Josh looked at him kind of strange and said, ‘The same way you tie up a pair of shoes.’
“And that’s when Bobby said, ‘How the hell would I know that?’ �
He learned quickly, and now when he takes the field, he’s dressed the same as his teammates except that his gold pants are cut off just a few inches below his belt line, and he wears black leather sports gloves to give his hands extra padding.
In the pregame dressing room, he’s especially vocal among his amped-up teammates. Once the game starts, he works his way back and forth on the sidelines, urging on the offense.
In the stands last Friday, Gloria sat next to her brother, Jesse Walker, and worried: “I’m always afraid someone will smash into Bobby and he’ll get smooshed.�
Against Dunbar, though, it was Bobby doing the smooshing. In the second quarter, he came barrelling downfield on a punt return and flattened the Wolverines’ 163-pound Troy Myers with a hit that was at best — you can’t hit below the waist — borderline legal. Once back at the bench, Bobby bellowed: “I ain’t playin’ with ’em out there. I’m hittin’ em!�
After the game, the Dunbar players congratulated the Cougars. Many sought out Bobby, and from the stands Gloria watched the heart-warming scene on the Welcome Stadium turf.
“All I’ve ever wanted for Bobby is for him to be the best man he could be,� she said softly. And sports-wise, that might not end with football. “He said he might wrestle again,� Dean said. “And now he’s talking about going out for track.� A grinning Ivy, shook his head: “Probably the long jump.�
UPDATE: Here is Tom’s entertaining story about Bobby hanging with the stars at the ESPYs Sunday and I found some good video of Bobby on the Net right here.
Permalink | Comments (1) | Categories: Dayton Public Schools, Sports and Athletics
MSM rides again!
It just makes me so proud to see the kids grow up!
Back last October, when Get on the Bus itself was just a tot, it was part of an online journalism first when the Carnival of Education was hosted here. Until that week, as far as I have been able to tell, a mainstream media (MSM) website had never hosted an a blogging carnival.
So now the MSM edublogging new kid on the block, School Me! at the LA Times, becomes just the second MSM site to host the Carnival of Education. School Me! authors Bob Sipchen and Janine Kahn do it up right, too, with their signature flair — they are calling it the “jukebox edition” of the carnival, complete with song clips.
Unfortunately, my serious post about the death of a promising high school student is sort of the downer of this carnival, necessitating the only “sad song.”
Thankfully, Mamacita over at Weekly Scheiss bails me out with a humorous post about the website Rate My Professor (there’s also Rate My Teacher for high schools).
Mamacita pulls out some of the funniest comments students have left while rating their professors. For a quick taste, here are a few of my favorites:
“His class was like milk, it was good for 2 weeks.”
“Three of my friends got A’s in his class and my friends are dumb.”
“Instant amnesia walking into this class. I swear he breathes sleeping gas.”
“She hates you already.”
Some teachers detest these sites, I know, and for good reason. A vengeful student could really slander a teacher with insulting or false comments. But when I read these sites, the kids seem to try to be honest and fair most of the time, even if they can be somewhat brutal.
Still, I find a lot of humor in it, and a prospective student just might find some useful information.
Permalink | Comments (2) | Categories: The Carnival of Education
Cleaned up movies declared illegal!
A federal judge has ruled small companies that edit out sex, nudity, profanity and violence from Hollywood movies must stop doing so. (I was pointed to this story by the Friends of Dave blog.)
I had not heard of these companies (the New York Times said CleanFlicks, CleanFilms and Play It Clean Video are in Utah and FamilyFlix USA is in Arizona), but they really went to some lengths to try to stay legal. The companies:
“…purchase an official DVD copy of a film on DVD for each edited version of the title they produce through the use of editing systems and software. The official release disc is included alongside the edited copy in every sale or rental transaction conducted. As such, the companies argued that they had the right on First Amendment and fair use grounds to offer consumers the alternative of an edited version for private viewing, so long as they maintained that “one-to-one” ratio to ensure that copyright holders got their due from the transactions.”
The judge instead found the companies violated copyright law.
Since I work in the publishing business, I’m in favor of respecting copyrights. Movie directors who sued these companies said it was unfair to distribute movies with their names on it that have been altered without their permission. One of the companies has already said it will shut down in light of the ruling.
Is there a middle ground here? How about this: if four companies can make a living doing this editing, it sounds like there must be some money in it. Maybe the studios could issue their own edited versions. Then those that want clean movies can get them and the studios protect their copyrights and even make a few bucks off the deal.
What are the chances a studio would take me up on this idea?
The “inspiring” lessons of summer jobs
Over at the teacher blog Get Lost, Mr. Chips, the question is, “What were your best and worst summer jobs?”
OK, I’ll play your silly game.
My best summer job, hands down, was when I got paid $8.25 an hour to watch TV for Dayton Power and Light while I was in college.
My boss was the recently-hired VP for public relations at the power company, and he was sick and tired of going to meetings and being asked about news items other top executives had seen on the news but that he had missed. He had a clipping service for newspapers, but it was impossible for him to watch every news broadcast on every station.
So he bought three televisions and three VCRs and hired a college student. I came in every day around 8 a.m. and reviewed the 11 p.m. news from the prior evening along with the early morning news. Then I’d return about 7 p.m. and watch all the mid-day and evening news broadcasts. If there were any stories that even mentioned DP&L, I dubbed a tape of the report and left it for the VP to review and route to other top execs.
Not only was this easy money, I also made funny highlight tapes of news bloopers, weird stories and sports highlights. I kept the job into the school year and ended up with a great compilation of news reports about the University of Dayton’s NCAA tournament basketball run my senior year and the accompanying near riots in the student neighborhood known as the “Ghetto.”
My worst, or at least weirdest, summer job was in high school when I was growing up in Princeton, N.J. Somehow I got a job one summer as an “animal caretaker” at Princeton University’s psychology department research laboratory. My first day I was led into a room stacked to the ceiling with caged rats. It was my job to feed them, water them and clean their litter. By the end of my time there I was immune to bad smells that overcame others who entered the “rat room.”
There was also the monkey room. The monkeys were the most trouble. The little buggers spent the whole summer outsmarting me. Their cages were spring-latched, and I noticed how one monkey in particular, they named him Honduras after his home country, would watch intently as I opened each cage. It didn’t even occur to me that he hoped to pick the lock!
But sure enough, by watching me Honduras figured out how to open the cage. At first I would find him sitting in there with the cage door wide open in the mornings. I tried wrapping the door with a chain, jamming the lock with a stick and other improvisations to keep Honduras from getting the door open but every morning that door would be sitting open and I swear he’d have a little smirk on his face at the back of the cage.
Then Honduras got a little braver. One night he opened the cages of the other five monkeys on his cell block. These guys were housed together in a small room with a little more than a small desk and cupboard. But his cellmates were not afraid to scavenge around. By morning, I had a huge mess to clean up and the monkeys had about made themselves sick by eating a whole bottle of their apparently tasty vitamins. And I got chewed out by the lab director.
So what did I learn from these experiences? Well I suppose it was clear at an early age that I had a real talent for watching television and that when it came to brains, I was no match for a central American monkey. Inspiring, eh? Perhaps I can blame a few low grades on these experiences.
What were your best and worst summer job experiences?
Permalink | Comments (4) | Categories: Teaching and Learning
Girls think careers, boys go for easy money
On Sunday, the New York Times had a long takeout on the “boy crisis,” the notion that American boys in general are in serious trouble because their academic performance has declined significantly in several areas when compared to girls.
There’s a lot of debate on this question, and much of the Times story retraces some of the broad themes of the national discussion.
But there were a few new twists in this story. Here’s a couple things that struck me:
—For many young women, high achievement in school is a way to establish themselves professionally early to allow wiggle room for career interruptions to start families later.
From the story:
Take Jen Smyers, who has been a powerhouse in her three years at American University in Washington.
She has a dean’s scholarship, has held four internships and three jobs in her time at American, made the dean’s list almost every term and also led the campus women’s initiative. And when the rest of her class graduates with bachelor’s degrees next year, Ms. Smyers will be finishing her master’s.
She says her intense motivation is not so unusual. “The women here are on fire,” she said.
Smyers goes on to explain why:
“Most college women want a high-powered career that they are passionate about,” Ms. Smyers said. “But they also want a family, and that probably means taking time off, and making dinner. I’m rushing through here, taking the most credits you can take without paying extra, because I want to do some amazing things, and establish myself as a career woman, before I settle down.”
—For young boys, skipping out on college and professional jobs can seem perfectly rational, even sensible, in their early adulthood.
Again from the story:
There is also an economic rationale for men to take education less seriously. In the early years of a career, Laura Perna of the University of Pennsylvania has found, college increases women’s earnings far more than men’s.
“That’s the trap,” Dr. Kleinfeld said. “In the early years, young men don’t see the wage benefit. They can sell their strength and make money.”
At UNC-Greensboro, where more than two-thirds of the students are female, and about one in five is black, many young men say they are torn between wanting quick money and seeking the long-term rewards of education.
“A lot of my friends made good money working in high school, in construction or as electricians, and they didn’t go to college, but they’re doing very well now,” said Mr. Daniels, the Greensboro student, who works 25 to 30 hours a week. “One of my best friends, he’s making $70,000, he’s got his own truck and health benefits. The honest truth is, I feel weird being a college student and having no money.”
—OK, this comment from high administrator at an eastern Pennsylvania school, part of a discussion about when and how colleges combat shortages of boys, just struck me as bizarre:
Longtime Dickinson administrators say that at isolated campuses with their own social worlds, gender balance is especially important.
“When there were fewer men, the environment was not as safe for women,” said Joyce Bylander, associate provost. “When men were so highly prized that they could get away with things, some of them become sexual predators. It was an unhealthy atmosphere for women.”
Huh? A small group of men surrounded by a lot of women somehow turns the men into “sexual predators?” She can’t really mean that, right?
Permalink | Comments (3) | Categories: Colleges and Universities
My review of Joanne Jacobs’ “Our School”
OK, I’m way behind on this, but I’ve just posted my review of Joanne Jacobs’ book “Our School” here at Get on the Bus. The book has been out since late last year and I so much wanted to read it that I accidentally ordered it TWICE from Amazon (so Joanne already owes me one for notching the book up Amazon’s rankings a couple extra places).
But I’m one of those people who is always buying more books than I have time to read. I was already reading two other books at the same time when I decided I couldn’t wait any longer to get to “Our School.” I put the others aside, and launched into to it. To my delight, the book is a breeze to read. I had it finished in just a couple days (incredibly fast for my usual slow reading style).
So go here and check out my take.
Permalink | Comments (2) | Categories: Charter Schools and School Choice, Journalism
Our School: Chasing dreams by rewriting the rules
Diminutive Selena gripped two sides of a basketball with uncertainty before finally giving in to the shouting principal/coach on the sideline, begging her to shoot.
She shot-putted the ball forward … and watched it sail wide of the backboard by two feet.
Selena was one of the key players on the most unlikely girls basketball team ever to win a high school game — a team that “Our School” author Joanne Jacobs hilariously describes as “the shortest basketball team in America.”
“Our School” is not about sports, but this team — eight girls hovering around five feet tall, among the few at their school who could muster the C average required to play — is the perfect metaphor for the academically undermanned students that San Jose’s Downtown College Prep charter school promises to someday send to college.
The Lady Lobos are mostly Mexican immigrants who know little about the game they’ve decided to play and are short of skills needed to succeed. But with enough “ganas” — Spanish for desire — perhaps they can somehow pull out a victory.
Likewise, “DCP students enter the school academic losers,” Jacobs writes. “They don’t know how to play the game. By the standards of middle-class high schools, DCP students aren’t really in the game. But they keep working, they get better. If they stick with it, they’ll win a college education.”
Jacobs is the education reporter and former columnist for the San Jose Mercury News now nationally known for her popular education blog, www.joannejacobs.com. “Our School” is her book chronicling the years she spent observing as two idealistic teachers attempted to write their own rules and build a high expectations high school for low performing kids in an impoverished, gang-ridden inner city.
The book is both a pleasingly written, novel-like tale of kids who struggle — and mostly win — against tough odds and something of a guide for would-be school charter school developers, complete with a “how to start a charter school” chapter as an appendix.
For the motivated teacher, or otherwise inspired individual, who has thought of breaking out on their own to start their own charter school, Jacobs’ book is really a must read. The “Lessons Learned” chapter alone is filled with telling stories and sage advice from DCP’s founders.
For instance, they sorely underestimated how much catching up their entering ninth graders would need on very basic skills after years of neglect in the school system. It wasn’t enough to set high expectations and seek to inspire them. The kids, plain and simple, needed to know how the speak English and multiply. As a result, DCP ended up much more structured and regimented than anyone ever expected because that’s what the kids needed.
The school leaders also had to come to terms with the necessity of tossing kids out, especially for misbehavior. DCP throws out a lot of kids, a detail likely to catch the eye of charter critics, who complain that other public schools would love to have that nuclear bomb in the war to maintain discipline and order. “Our School” makes the point many times that discipline is a key. The leaders believe rules must be enforced consistently and unwaveringly, and they don’t hesitate to expel even kids they like who fail to get with the program.
DCP’s success is undeniable by the book’s end. Just as the short kids on the girls basketball team work hard, get better, begin to compete and finally actually taste real victory, so their classmates, too, are reborn in academic success. All that stick with DCP to the end go to college and the school’s test scores ultimately rank among the best around.
Still, the future of the school is far from certain. Teacher turnover is heavy. By its very nature, Jacobs tells us, the school tends to attract young dreamers to its teaching staff — not the types to work at one school and retire 30 years later. By the book’s end, one of the founders is even working on getting out.
Sustainability is a big question for charter schools, even excellent ones like DCP.
I also wonder if “Our School” won’t someday be viewed as a period piece, unique to the early days of the charter movement when the romantic vision was that pioneering teachers would break free from bureaucracy and reinvent education.
In fact, the “mom-and-pop” charter schools — truly independent and run by local folks — may be a dying breed. An ever increasing share of charters are run by national management companies, such as Edison Schools and Heritage Academies, and more recently, non-profits and school districts themselves.
Even so, as the charter movement continues to grow, Jacobs has done a nice job encapsulating what these new public schools are supposed to be about and how they are different from traditional public schools. It’s a good primer for the average parent — those who’ve heard of charters but not really sure what they are exactly. And the story is an enjoyable ride right to the end.
“Pulled by my mother’s dreams, I walked barefoot across the border from Mexico,” Selena’s begins her college essay. “I was six years old.”
But with wild basketball misses behind her, on track for a diploma and a college scholarship awaiting, Selena will cross the commencement stage ready to chase her own dreams.
Note: I corrected Selena’s story at the end here. She has already earned a scholarship, but has not yet graduated.
Permalink | Comments (4) | Categories: Charter Schools and School Choice
Stupid gifts to spoil our kids
A tip of the hat to Friends of Dave, which pointed me to this great American Inventor Spot article listing 11 of the stupidest products of all time that can serve only to ruin our kids. My favorites? Well as much as I like the $19,000 toy mansion and the $17,000 gold and diamond PACIFIER, maybe the most ridiculous item on the list is the “Daddle,” as in “dad saddle.” Check it out and you’ll see what I mean.
Permalink | Comments (4) | Categories: Young Children
Ooops, we lost your SAT
A newspaper in Illinois reports 153 SAT answer sheets for kids from Naperville High School in suburban Chicago have apparently gone missing. School officials say ETS received the score sheets and only learned about the missing scores when parents started complaining about not receiving results.
ETS is not acknowledging having received the score sheets. But that’s not the point, a spokesman says:
“Ultimately what matters is that, unfortunately, the results are not there, which means we have to let these kids know they have to take it again.�
I wonder if ETS would have the same attitude, essentially saying it doesn’t matter how the score sheets got lost, if the school was clearly at fault?
But, really, ETS is sorry for whatever mistake may have happened “out there.” Again from the spokesman:
“Obviously we’re sorry for any error that’s out there that happened. We wanted to let the kids know as soon as possible what accommodations are being made.�
That’s so helpful! Because, you know, these things happen. ETS handles more than 2 million tests a year, so you know, a couple of boxes of score sheets are bound to get lost now and again. One more gem from the spokesman:
“Usually when you have so many administered, one or two boxes will have problems and we’ll try to track those down. But one or two is still unacceptable and we try to keep that to a minimum.�
Yes, by all means let’s keep the lost test sheets to a minimum. I mean, security is fairly important when to comes to the SAT, right?
Permalink | Comments (4) | Categories: Testing
Reverse discrimination?
There’s a good question in the comments under my recent post that showed black kids graduate at a much higher rate than white kids in Dayton. “Elementaryhistoryteacher” asks, “what is the ratio of white teachers/adm. to black teachers/adm.?”
Others commenters have come out even more directly and suggested there is reverse discrimination going on in Dayton — that perhaps white students are ignored or worse. Commenter “None Yabiz” describes the experience as a white student at Colonel White High School in 2001 as so unpleasant that he or she opted for a GED instead.
But is there widespread reverse discrimination in the district? Are teachers and other students actively pushing white students out?
The answer to Elementaryhistoryteacher’s question seems to suggest it can’t be too widespread.
I was unable to quickly find a racial breakdown for teachers in the district today. But I found a story I wrote in 2002 that looked at teacher race. At that time I was surprised to discover that a strong majority (63 percent) of Dayton’s teachers are white (I would probably have guessed the breakdown would be closer to 50-50).
Even more interesting, though, was how little that breakdown had changed over the prior 25 years. I would have expected at least something of a swing toward more black teachers starting after court-ordered desegregation brought cross-town busing to Dayton. But in fact, the racial makeup of the district’s teachers was virtually unchanged from 1976, when it was 63.6 percent white.
If teacher race has been that steady for that long it’s probably not terribly different today. Does it seem likely then that there would be widespread discrimination against white students in a school district where nearly two-thirds of the teachers are white? I wouldn’t guess there would be.
What is likely is that white students, at schools where they are in extremely small numbers, feel the same sort of prejudices and stereotypes that any small, isolated minority group feels. It’s just far more common in the U.S. to see black, Hispanic or Asian kids in these situations.
Several months back I wrote about UD professor Ron Katsuyama’s studies of children, how they perceive race and when those perceptions evolve to stereotypes and prejudices. The study found far less prejudice and discrimination among kids in schools with high minority enrollments of 29 to 40 percent.
The problems were worst at schools with extremely low minority enrollments of less than 10 percent. This is a strong argument for truly integrated schools. When enough diverse kids mix together they tend to understand each other better and display less prejudice. Both the majority and the minority kids benefit from this understanding.
In Dayton, with a high school enrollment that is 80 percent black, integration is an enormous challenge. And currently more than three-quarters of the white high school kids go to either Stivers or Belmont high schools.
That means extremely small numbers at the other four major high schools. White enrollment is less than 10 percent at Patterson, Colonel White, Meadowdale and Dunbar high schools.
So perhaps the discomfort that students like None Yabiz feel is the unfortunate, but predictable, result of very unbalanced schools.
Permalink | Comments (5) | Categories: Dayton Public Schools
An opportunity to reshape high school
In 1999, I took over the education beat at the Dayton Daily News just a short time after having moved back into the city and celebrating the birth of my oldest daughter.
So I talked to a lot of people about the city schools, both to help me get a handle on my work and because even in those pre-toddler years I was casting an eye about for where my little girl would one day go to school.
The conventional wisdom at the time went like this:
If you could claw your way into one of a handful of good elementary schools, the Dayton school district would be fine through grade six. But for God’s sake, get out before middle school!
The one exception to this rule back then was Stivers School for the Arts for students in grades 7 to 12 with enough artistic talent to pass the audition.
Otherwise, the word on the street at that time said, you were out of luck. The rest of Dayton’s high schools were all rock-bottom in the state ratings. Middle schools, serving grades 7 and 8, avoided a state rating, since those grades were not tested by the state, but they were still generally regarded as awful, again with Stivers excepted.
When the Gail Littlejohn-led reform school board was elected in 2001, they began by following the usual reform approach — straighten out the elementary schools first. The board launched a massive, scripted reform focused heavily on math and reading. It included 90 minutes of reading a day, beefed up libraries and math and reading coaches at all elementary schools.
The old reform wisdom was always to focus on elementary schools, with the idea that better prepared kids coming up would help the middle and high schools perform better in time. But I distinctly remember the school board meeting that first year at which Littlejohn realized the folly of that approach. The board couldn’t wait, she said — something needed to be done about the upper grades right away.
One of the first steps was a simple one — they killed middle school altogether. As the board crafted a master plan for the rebuilt school district after $627 million in new construction, it moved toward K-8 elementary schools, redirecting small pockets of 7th and 8th graders to each elementary.
At the same time, the board got serious about high school. Here’s some of what they’ve done:
—Kept Stivers intact. There were a lot of questions about the future of Stivers, in it’s crumbling, ancient building, when the board took over. Littlejohn & Co. moved quickly to rebuild the school and kept the programs intact (housed for now at the former Julienne High School on Homewood Avenue).
—Maintained the International Baccalaureate program at Meadowdale High School. This program, with higher level classes similar to Advanced Placement, pre-dates the Littlejohn school board.
—Closed Grace A. Greene Academy. This alternative school program was a chronic low performer. The district has not yet solved the alternative school problem, as the Longfellow Alternative School is also low scoring.
—Launched the “academic magnet” program at Colonel White High School. This move was in response to calls for a “college prep high school” for high performers. Now about a third of the Colonel White kids are in this program, which offers added college prep coursework.
—Founded the Dayton Early College Academy. In partnership with the University of Dayton, this school seeks kids with high potential but perhaps not always a record of high achievement. They place the kids in a high expectations environment and let them progress right to college courses when they’re ready.
—Revamped career technical education. This work still is in progress, as the new David Ponitz Career Technology Center promises an intimate partnership with Sinclair Community College and state of the art equipment and facilities.
—Started the credit recovery program. In the past, kids started failing in ninth grade, fell behind, got discouraged that they could never catch up and quit school. Now they can make up flunked classes by completing online courses before and after school, giving many the chance to even graduate with their original classmates.
—Soon will launch a small technology high school. So far, this has been described a as a specialty school with a heavy focus on IT that may be include a large number of online classes.
Interestingly, what the board has really done is try to create more good options. In the past, the choice was largely Stivers or one of the large comprehensive high schools. Now parents of high performers can opt for the academic magnet. Or frustrated kids with high potential can try the early college academy. Soon, career technology program will lead directly to Sinclair certification programs and, for many, decent jobs. The same may be true for the technology high school.
They are building a classic “portfolio” program, one provides lots of options and gives kids more freedom to find what best fits for them. While at elementary grades, reform is heavily scripted and instruction regimented. Only recently it dawned on my that this was exactly the sort of approach I heard former Cincinnati Superintendent Steve Adamowski advocate for last year.
So what’s been the affect of all this upper grade change?
Here’s how high school state report cards looked in 2004 (ratings from best to worst are excellent, effective, continuous improvement, academic watch, academic emergency):
Early College Academy — Not rated (too few test takers)
Stivers — Excellent
Colonel White — Academic Emergency
Medowdale — Academic Emergency
Patterson — Academic Emergency
Belmont — Academic Emergency
Dunbar — Academic Emergency
Longfellow — Not rated (too few test takers)
Grace A Greene — Academic Emergency
Here’s what they looked like in 2005:
Early College Academy — Excellent
Stivers — Effective
Col. White — Continuous improvement
Meadowdale — Continuous improvement
Patterson — Continuous improvement
Belmont — Academic Emergency
Dunbar — Academic Emergency
Longfellow — Not rated (too few test takers)
Grace A. Greene — Closed
New Report cards come out in just about a month. We’ll see then if the momentum continues to go in the right direction.
One remaining challenge is the comprehensive high schools, especially poor performing Belmont and Dunbar, but even the non-IB programs at Meadowdale. The district has not yet undertaken any large scale changes for them.
But the construction program offers another opportunity, as new visions for those schools can be crafted as the schools are moved into first-class facilities, as the district is doing with Colonel White and the career technology school.
Permalink | Comments (2) | Categories: Dayton Public Schools
Guidance when kids need it most
A press release from the California Association of School Counselors reports a deal has been struck for the state to spend $200 million to hire more counselors:
“…this is the first time in California history that this amount of funding has gone to provide school counselors. With the $200 million dollars, schools will able to hire 3,000 credentialed school counselors statewide. This will bring down the student/counselor ratio to 500:1 in middle schools and 300:1 in high schools. The new funding will bring the California ratios closer to the national average.”
This is big for a couple of reasons.
First, California is well known for its woeful guidance counseling situation, with high schools caseloads sometimes at 700 or 800 kids to each counselor. This new deal is a fairly stunning and well overdue turn of events given the history.
Second, California is a leader in education. Where California goes, others tend to follow. If they really get serious about guidance counseling on the left coast, other states may get with the program too.
Guidance counseling, in many ways, is more important than ever, given the complexity of the life problems kids face and the twisted roads they must navigate to services, college and careers. And the profession is moving toward more and better specialization and away from the days when the guidance office was a place where principals sometimes stashed teachers who hated teaching.
Many people my age have counselor horror stories. My counselor recommended for me a slew of low grade colleges I’d never heard of. Thank God my parents knew a thing or two about colleges. My best high school friend’s 80-year-old nun guidance counselor recommended he not retake the SAT after a very low score on the first try because “it wouldn’t fair to other kids who took the test just once.” (At my urging, he took the SAT five more times and raised his score nearly 200 points.)
Even at 300 kids to each counselor it’s asking a lot for students to get much in the way of the personal attention many of them need. But it’s a start. The question now is where will California even get 3,000 new counselors?
Permalink | Comments (4) | Categories: Teaching and Learning
Carnival is up
You can find Campus’ Watch’s post about iPods, my post about Dayton schools’ reverse black-white achievement gap and much more at the Carnival of Education, hosted this week by NYC Educator.
Permalink | | Categories: The Carnival of Education
Going to class? Don’t forget your iPod
I just discovered another MSM education blog that I didn’t know about. It’s called Campus Watch, written by Greg Esposito and recently joined by Amy Kovac, two education reporters at the Roanoke Times in Virginia.
Kovac, one of my education writer pals, recently wrote about Radford University in Virginia and how the music department now REQUIRES students to bring iPod’s to class. Not just any MP3 player, they want the Apple-brand iPod. And they prefer the big $269 model, not the stripped down (and cheaper) iPod shuffle, mini or nano. (I have the iPod Mini, which works great for my purposes — a daily three-mile run).
A professor tells Kovac the cost shouldn’t be a burden since it’s not much more than what college students often pay for textbooks. Any thoughts on this requirement? Anyone heard of Ohio colleges that have done the same?
BTW, Campus Watch now makes eight MSM edublogs that I know about, counting myself and the fairly new addition of the LA Times’ School Me! blog along with these earlier arrivals in the MSM edusphere.
Permalink | Comments (6) | Categories: Colleges and Universities, Journalism
Slightly off topic …
Indulge me for a moment while a recommend a great new blog that is unrelated to education. It’s called ShareSleuth, a site dedicated to exposing business fraud and other nefariousness using investigative reporting techniques.
The founder, Chris Carey, is a very sharp reporter who formerly worked at the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. (I met Chris through the Knight-Wallace fellowships, where he was a 2006 fellow and I was a fellow in 2005.)
This is a really interesting experiment, merging the power of blogging with traditional reporting to try to give readers information of interest or importance to them that they might otherwise never have learned. Expect to see Chris breaking major news stories on his blog in the very near future.
Permalink | | Categories: Journalism
Heartbreaking …
When Ian Ybarra went back to his old high school and talked to his father’s AP classes about a great summer camp opportunity for top students, he also was on the lookout for any really smart, motivated kids he might encourage to apply to top colleges (he’s an MIT grad).
Out of 35 kids, three took Ybarra up on the camp:
- One kid asked for his help, got a letter of recommendation from Ybarra and then … he never applied for the camp.
- Another never said a word to Ybarra or asked for his help, but applied on his own.
- And then there was Jessica Pierce, the one kid who did everything right. She wasn’t afraid to ask Ybarra for help, to utilize his guidance, and pretty soon Ybarra was pulling all the strings he could to get Jessica into a top college.
Jessica was going places, Ybarra said. Which makes her shocking death all the more tragic.
Jessica was on a student trip to Costa Rica when weather conditions changed in seconds and she drowned in the sea along with two other students and a teacher.
Ybarra’s touching tribute to Jessica reminds other young people to seize their opportunities in life:
“Today was her funeral. At the service, one of her best friends concluded her eulogy by reading the following from an essay Jessica had written for school or an application or something:
“We have all been given so many opportunities, and we need to make sure that we are doing everything that we can do to make the most of them.”
Jessica doesn’t have the opportunity to go to college now, or to see more of the world, or to find work she loves and do it with all her mind, body, and soul.
But you and so many others do.
If you run across a young person who’s finding reasons to avoid doing great things, point them to this story. Perhaps they’ll get it. Perhaps they won’t.
If you run across parents who are confining their children’s lives to the limits they long ago placed on their own, point them to this story. Help them understand how lucky they are to be able to send their daughter to college or to an internship or job 1,000 miles away. I know Jessica’s parents would love to do that, just to know Jessica was living and living well. Perhaps they’ll get it. Perhaps they won’t.
Either way, Jessica’s story will speak to those who have that special thing inside that she had. And if her legacy is having inspired even those few people, it will be a legacy of a life well lived.”
Permalink | Comments (1) | Categories: Colleges and Universities
First year teachers: Read This!
Teacher Ms. Cornelius, at her blog A Shrewdness of Apes, has an amazing post up giving advice to new teachers. It’s safe to say you’ll likely be taught none of these tips at your local college of education.
Here’s a taste:
Record all incidents of student discipline in a binder.
Mrs. C says:
“I once pulled this out when a parent insisted I call her from the principal’s office, and very mildly read back to her her own words which she was denying. She had been insisting that I had never contacted her about her darling’s difficulty. When she saw that I had a record of every conversation, complete with time and duration of call, she gave up.”
And she adds:
“… this also helps cover one’s posterior with one’s administrators.”
If you give out pencils, paper or textbooks, the kids will never bring their own.
Mrs. C says:
I like keeping a little box of golf pencils in my desk for those who cannot master their writing utensil management skills. Students tend not to want to borrow these more than once. You can also keep a cup of used pencils you have found in the hallway for distribution. I personally also like to have my dog or a convenient toddler to put chew marks on them so they won’t be so appealing to those who seem need some assistance from St. Anthony of Padua in this regard.
Pay careful attention to your health.
Mrs. C says:
“Offer students a couple of points of extra credit to bring in two good boxes of tissue at the start of the school year if your school does not provide the good stuff. You’ll thank me during flu season.
Have two trash cans in your room: one for student use, and one for you. You’ll see why this is health related in a second.
Have two boxes of tissue out at any one time. One box should be hidden away for you, and the used tissues go into your personal trash can, which I stash behind my desk. The other box is for the students, and should be placed away from your desk or where you stand most often in the room. The student trash can goes under this box of tissue, and away from you. You will avoid a LOT of colds this way. Trust me. With your insurance, you can’t afford that either, not to mention that it takes FOUR hours to write lesson plans for a seven hour day.”
Do you know someone studying to be a teacher or starting their first teaching job? Do them a favor. Print out Mrs. C’s complete tips and give it to them.
Permalink | Comments (1) | Categories: Teaching and Learning
The best teacher voices, updated!
Over at the LA Times’ School me! blog, they’ve now announced all of their top 10 favorite teacher blogs.
You might recall my feeble and tardy effort to upstage them with my own list of my top seven favorite teacher blogs.
The Times’ list by edbloggers Bob Sipchen and Janine Kahn is really good. We only had three in common that made both their list and mine, and they found four really good teacher blogs that I had not even heard of before. I’ve added them all to my daily reads. See School Me’s complete list here.
Meanwhile, NYC Educator (No. 2 on the Times list, No. 5 on mine.) thanks and gently mocks me here because I didn’t offer a cool “Get on the Bus favorite teacher blog” display button to my favorites the way Bob and Janine did.
NYC Educator: Shhhhh! Everyone here at the Dayton Daily News thinks I am incredibly techno-savvy because I have a blog! They have no idea how totally clueless I am about how the actual technology behind this stuff works! If anyone should find out that I have no idea how to do all the cool stuff they are doing at the Times edublog with pictures and graphics and all, they might realize what a hack I really am at this!
Permalink | | Categories: Teaching and Learning
