Category Archives: Education

Report Card II

Posted on by
4

Looking over the Oak Ridge Schools state report card again, I noticed some good news: even with our demographics growing more challenging each year (as noted on Friday), we’re making significant gains in the percentage of students in the "proficient or advanced" category.

 

Looking at the columns outlined in red, note that there was an 11% increase in the number of African-American students testing proficient and advanced last year in high school math.

That’s significant.

There was a 10% gain in the Hispanic population, with 100% of that subgroup testing proficient and advanced in math.

Among the economically disadvantaged — the fastest-growing subgroup in our school system — there was a 10% gain in those testing proficient and advanced.

* * *
Now, for the not-so-good news: look at the columns just to the left of the one outlined in red. The percentages of students earning an "advanced" designation have fallen in every category except for Asian/Pacific Islanders, who made a 1% gain to achieve 100% advanced.

Is this the beginning of the effect that I’ve long feared? In our push to meet the mandates of No Child Left Behind, are our schools focusing time and resources on the lowest-performing students — bringing them up to proficiency — so much so that we’re neglecting the rest?

The numbers appear to indicate as much.

No, we’re not neglecting the top performers. Most educators would tell you that there are a few students who could learn math from a history book, who will outperform the rest no matter what. The source of concern for me is those students in the middle, who with just a little help would be in the "advanced" group, but are now having to settle for "proficient."

And, as has been widely publicized, Tennessee’s standard for proficiency isn’t very high. That’s why, beginning next year, the test will be harder and the standards will be higher. And that could cause a problem with the numbers.

Don’t get me wrong: testing is very important. The problem is that the punitive nature of NCLB, focused on the lowest end, is damaging to our real mission of bringing all children to the limits of their potential.

So Wrong it’s Funny

Posted on by
3

A letter in today’s News Sentinel is so senseless that it serves to illustrate one of the problems faced by those earnestly trying to improve education in Tennessee: the pure ignorance of some of our adults.

Later school start

better for Tennessee

At least 90 percent of the people in Tennessee are for a later school start.

State Sen. Jamie Woodson, chair of the Senate Education Committee, is against this.

She has never been for the benefits of school students. She wouldn’t allow a vote to lower the requirements for the Hope Scholarship to keep 70 percent of college students eligible.

Everyone sees the hardships created by starting school the first of August (Aug. 9). Schools need to start after Labor Day, which they do in most states.

This is part of the reason Tennessee ranks near last in education. The only way we can start to change this is to vote Woodson out.

Sam Doughty

Rockwood

90% favor a later start date? I doubt that; I serve on a local school board, and I’ve had exactly one person tell me — and that was in passing at a public place — that they want school to start after Labor Day. If there’s a survey to back up that assertion, please point me to it.

To say that Sen. Woodson "has never been for the benefits of school students" is simply dead wrong. Although she and I have disagreed from time to time (and I’m not one to keep my opinions to myself), everything that she does is, at least from her perspective, with the best interest of children as the foremost priority.

A prime example of that is her steadfast opposition to lowering standards, including the reasonable standard for achieving and keeping the Tennessee Education Lottery Scholarship. Lowering standards might help some parents, but it would be a gross disservice to the students. Face it, the GPA standard for scholarship eligibility is an incentive for students to do well. The standard to achieve the scholarship out of high school is exceedingly modest; students who cannot attain either a 3.0 GPA or a 21 on the ACT just aren’t going to make it in college. I think there’s only one four-year school in the state who will even accept students with less than a 21 on the ACT.

Lastly, the start date has nothing to do with the reason that Tennessee ranks near last in education; the reason, quite simply, is that we rank near last in funding education. That’s why Sen. Woodson worked so hard last year to pass the BEP 2.0, providing funding targeted specifically to academic improvement, and increasing accountability measures for the adults in charge of those funds.

Sam Doughty can’t vote against her, and I can’t vote for her. Let’s hope the folks in her district pay a little more attention to the facts.

Report Card

Posted on by
5

The 2007 Tennessee Department of Education Report Card arrived today.

It was the statistics section that really stuck me: just in the last four years that I’ve been a member of the school board, our demographics have changed significantly. That means that to maintain and improve, we’re going to face new challenges, and we’ll have to do some things differently.

The most glaring to me is that our economically disadvantaged population has grown from 29.5% in 2004, to 34.7% in 2007 (in 2000, it was 23.3%). In seven years, we’ve seen more than a 10% increase in at-risk students!

Students with disabilities have grown from 21.8% to 25.1%. Students with limited English proficiency have doubled, from 55 to 111 students.

Over that same time period, our per-pupil funding has grown from $10,032 to $10,602 — a 5% increase over four years. Just as Oak Ridge is different than it was a few years ago (remember when we didn’t have any murders?), our school population is different as well.

 

Liveblogging: EdEvangelist Ian Jukes

Posted on by
3

Talking way too fast for me to accurately transcribe, self-described education evangelist Ian Jukes lectures to the final session of the NSBA T+L conference this morning in Nashville.

His message is simple, yet almost indescribably complex: today’s students — everyone 25 and younger — are simply, physically and intellectually different.

It’s rather widely known that various experiences alter the development of neural pathways in the developing brains in children. The digital bombardment of interactive experience with games and computers. The new field of neuroinformatics studies the ways that specific mental processes occur.

In short, they’re finding that today’s students, whom he calls "digital natives," are using measurably different neural pathways to process the same tasks as those who are older. I rather wish that Joel was here to give me some hints about the validity of this research. One of my questions would be, will these same digital natives process information the same when they’re 40 as they do at 16 (when they’re less hormonally handicapped).

One of the findings is that today’s students’ attention is much more strongly drawn to the upper left half of a page, with attention to the lower right half — think about that, and think about the context of a typical web page: where are the menus? Should the producers of educational materials take that into account?

Digital kids think differently, process information differently, than we do.

Our teaching and assessment methods, he says, is completely out of sync with they way they learn. Unlike us, they can process multiple forms of information simultaneously.

Six major changes he proposes are as follows:

  1. It is time for education and educators to catch up, to learn the new digital world.
  2. In the information age, students need to be both producers and consumers of content. We have to move beyond 20th century literacy to 21st century fluency — being able to use technological tools without thinking about it. "Focus on headware, not hardware."
  3. Educators need to shift their instructional approach from director to facilitator, encouraging higher-order thinking skills. After two weeks, students remember 10% of what is read, but 50% of what is seen and heard (simultaneously), and 90% of what they both say and do. He thoerizes that rather than experiencing an epidemic of ADD and ADHD, we’re simply not teaching effectively to the way students learn today. If we want understanding and comprehension, we must teach in a new way.
  4. We need to let students access information natively. Just as calculators were scoffed in the 1960s, social networking is similarly cast aside in schools today — where it needs to be an integral part of learning.
  5. Let kids collaborate
  6. Prepare them for their future, not our past.

This is just wrong.

Posted on by
7

WATE has the story about a fight on a Knox County school bus, but unlike most, where witnesses may or may not talk, this one was caught on tape (by another student).

It’s patently obvious that the victim did not fight back, yet he, too, is out of school until a disciplinary hearing can be held.

The fight happened October 5 on the way home from school. It was filmed by another student who wasn’t involved in the fight. And it was posted on the site my.break.com.

It’s not known what lead up to the fight. But the video shows a 14-year-old boy named Aaron standing up on the bus saying he doesn’t want to fight .

Aaron is heard saying, "I’m not getting in a fight. I’m not going to fight," several times. He says "Let me through! Let me through!"

But as Aaron tries to make his way down the aisle, another student blocks his way, pushes him and starts punching him.

Once Aaron falls to the floor of the school bus, the other student is seen kicking and stomping on him until the bus driver pulls him off.

Amazingly Aaron wasn’t seriously hurt. But his mother, Kimberly Carlisle, is outraged.

As she has every right to be.

When a student is jumped by one or more others seeking a fight, it’s my opinion that the victim should not be punished — even if he or she attempts to defend against the attack.  (By defend, I do not mean revenge, but a shove to create the opportunity to get away should be acceptable).

In this instance, there’s a tape (it’s short — go ahead and see for yourself) that shows unquestionably that the victim did nothing wrong.  No defense at all.  Yet, he’s falling behind in his classes (right at the end of the term, even) because the school system can’t seem to see what’s right there for the whole world to judge.

The victim in this case is doubly harmed: once by the beating, and again by putting his academic success at risk.  It should never happen that way.

Get Congress out of the Classroom

Posted on by
3

Diane Ravitch, Professor of Education at New York University, has an excellent opinion piece in yesterday’s New York Times.  She served as the assistant secretary for education research from 1991-1993, the latter part of the term of George H.W. Bush.

It might be a little surprising, therefore, that she would come out with a rather strongly critical opinion of No Child Left Behind, the flagship legislation of Bush 43:

DESPITE the rosy claims of the Bush administration, the No Child Left Behind Act of 2002 is fundamentally flawed. The latest national tests, released last week, show that academic gains since 2003 have been modest, less even than those posted in the years before the law was put in place. In eighth-grade reading, there have been no gains at all since 1998.

She also makes a good case for juxtaposing the roles of states and the federal government with regard to education:

No Child Left Behind can, however, be salvaged if policymakers recognize that they need to reverse the roles of the federal government and the states. In our federal system, each level of government should do what it does best. The federal government is good at collecting and disseminating information. The states and school districts, being closer to the schools, teachers and parents than the federal government, are more likely to be flexible and pragmatic about designing reforms to meet the needs of particular schools.

This idea — that the best government is that which is closest to the people — is supposed to be one of the core principles of the Republican Party… but maybe that’s a just relic from the days when the Republican Party embraced "principles" rather than "values."

Her next two paragraphs illustrate some of the flaws  in the current system (other than the absolute impossibility of 100% of children attaining 100% proficiency by 2014):

However, under current law, state education departments have an incentive to show that schools and students are making steady progress, even if they are not. So the results of state tests, which are administered every year, are almost everywhere better than the results of the National Assessment of Educational Progress, the benchmark federal test that is administered every other year.

Many states claim that 80 percent or more of their students are proficient in reading or math at the same time that the federal assessment shows only a minority of students in those states reaching its standard of proficiency. We will never know how well or poorly our students are doing until we have a consistent national testing program in which officials have no vested interest in claiming victory.

(emphasis added)

We know this is true.  We know it’s true in Tennessee — that our own standards are lower than those of the NAEP, and sinking.  But, the NAEP isn’t given to every student, or even taken at every school — it’s a so-called "representative sampling," of which I am somewhat suspicious.  I don’t know the last time that the NAEP was given to students in Oak Ridge, to which students it was given, and whether the "representative sampling" for Tennessee is any decent measure of how our school system is doing.

What would it cost to completely do away with the TCAP, and use the NAEP for all students instead?  If all states did away with their own proprietary tests and used the NAEP instead, would that not achieve some cost savings, in addition to doing away with states’ gaming the system through artificially adjusted performance standards?

On the downside, if it is that, it would mean that all the states would have to align their standards — what subjects they teach at what levels — with the NAEP rather than the state test.  With that comes the possibility of federalizing educational standards, which I don’t think is a good idea.

I’d love to know what you think.

Help Wanted

Posted on by
5

Google "bus drivers" shortage, and the results will show that Oak Ridge’s problem (this one in particular, anyway) is far from unique.

More surprising to me was finding that the hourly rate offered is about the same as places like Northern Virginia, Seattle or Salt Lake City, despite the fact that our cost of living is (along with wages generally) lower here.

Bill Dodge, a frequent writer to members of the school board, claims that Oak Ridge pays drivers 50% more than surrounding districts.  Although I have not verified Mr. Dodge’s claim, the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ website shows that the mean hourly wage for school bus drivers nationally is just $12.08.

*  *  *  *  *
The News-Sentinel reports this morning that the Anderson County jail is overcrowded again, with 19 positions open.  Of the last 20 to take the Civil Service exam for that job, only 4 passed. Local governments are hiring, but no one’s answering.

No Child Left Behind (really!)

Posted on by
4

I’ve had a virtual gumbo of thoughts simmering this week, but this news piece provided the shrimp, if you will.  I’m fired up for Fred Thompson for many reasons, but this one really pleases me.  It goes back to the basic Republican philosophy of "the government closest to the people is the best."

*   *   *
The side effects being caused by the penalties for failing to meet ever-increasing standards are showing up in ways that most people wouldn’t have imagined.  For example, if Podunk School System expels Bubba for drinking moonshine in the locker room, then he won’t graduate and they might miss the ever-increasing graduation rate standard.

But they can’t take any more of Bubba’s nonsense, and have to do something.   So, they call Bubba’s folks into the office, and the conversation goes something like this:

Principal:  "Now we just can’t tolerate stuff like that going on in our school; moonshine’s a Zero-tolerance offense.  So, there’s going to have to be some serious consequences for this mess…  unless maybe you folks put Bubba in school over across the county line.  You can pay tuition and send him there, or you can move and send him for free."

Ma Bubba:  "They’ll still take him over there, even though he’s in trouble here?"

Principal:  "Well no, not if he gets expelled.  But it’ll take us a week or so to do the paperwork on that, so if he were to go over there and enroll, say, tomorrow, then we technically wouldn’t  have any record of  disciplinary action against him.

So  Bubba’s folks mosey on across the county line and enroll Bubba in a new school.  The new school calls back to Podunk County to get his records, and asks if he has any behavioral issues.  "Not that we know of" is the response from the Podunk County Principal, who then chuckles all the way to the lunchroom, knowing that he’s rid the school of its biggest troublemaker but hasn’t taken a ding on the graduation rate since he can document that Bubba enrolled in another school.

Don’t kid yourself; it’s already happening.

*  *   * 
The graduation rate bit of NCLB is one that needs to be clearly understood, for "graduation" in NCLB doesn’t really mean graduation; it means graduation in precisely four years plus a summer (if needed) with a regular diploma.

So, a developmentally disabled child who simply cannot — will not ever — perform up to the standards required to pass the gateway exams and graduate with a regular diploma, simply counts as a dropout.  Even if he or she stays in school until age 21 (as the law allows), works hard, and earns a special ed diploma, he or she is still a dropout on the NCLB scorecard.

And it’s the schools’ fault, of course, because everyone knows that every child is the same — each capable of the same mastery in the same time frame. There’s no such thing as mental retardation, after all.

Equally tragic is that a student who just screws up for one year, is denied the chance to repeat a year in high school (getting back on track academically) because he would count as a "dropout," even though he might graduate with honors (given that extra year) and go on to college fully-prepared.

The other thing that befuddles me is that a GED doesn’t count.  If it doesn’t count, why do we have one at all?  The answer, of course, is that there needs to be some avenue to demonstrate basic competence for those people who — for whatever reason — don’t get enough credits in high school.  When a student moves into a district at age 17 with only five high school credits, it’s just not possible to earn all the credits needed in the one remaining year.  But, of course, it’s the district he moves into that will suffer a hit to their graduation rate, not the school that failed him to begin with.

*   *   * 
That’s a lot of bellyaching over one pot of educational gumbo, I know.  Believe it or not, I am very much in favor of standardized testing and accountability for results.  I believe we have an obligation to provide students with the knowledge and skills to push the limits of their potential — whatever that potential may be.

Success for some will be a PhD and a brilliant research career; for some it may be certification as a plumber, and for others, simply the ability to dress themselves each morning.  People are not born with equal gifts and abilities.  To try and force all into the same mold is a gross disservice to all.

I like Thompson’s approach: get the federal government out of the way and let states and local governments do what we need to do for our students.

Adjusting NCLB

Posted on by
1

The Washington Post reports on proposed revisions to No Child Left Behind, the sweeping education reform initiative that was the hallmark of GW Bush’s first term.

NCLB brought to the forefront some of the closet issues in education, but as with many federal reforms of largely local initiatives, there are some problems.  Among those "closet issues" was the ability to mask the underperformance of certain demographic groups behind the overall test scores of the student body as a whole; however, the weakness in the legislation as originally passed is that states were allowed to define the size of sub-groups.

In addition, Miller proposed strengthening a rule that requires test scores to be reported separately for groups of students identified by ethnicity, race, family income and other factors. Currently, Maryland reports separate scores for groups in a given school if there are at least five students in the demographic category. D.C. schools report scores from all groups with at least 40 students in a given school, and Virginia sets the threshold at 50 students.

The proposal would require scores to be reported — and achievement raised — for all demographic groups with at least 30 students in a school. That could make it harder for Virginia and D.C. schools to reach academic targets.

Having a consistent subgroup size will at least ensure some equity in comparing one state’s progress to that of another.  That said, it’s inevitable that all states will eventually be doomed to failure under the current testing method, as human beings just aren’t 100% alike in our capacity to learn.  In particular, students who don’t speak English — the language of instruction and testing — and students with learning disabilities, may never meet the proficiency goals.

Another area that needs some work is the graduation rate standard:

Miller’s draft also puts new emphasis on high school dropouts, proposing resources to help schools with the lowest graduation rates have "data-driven decision making, improved curriculum and instruction, personalization of the school environment, staff collaboration and professional development and individualized student supports," according to a summary of the plan.

The graduation rate is defined as the percentage of students who graduate in four years.  Unfortunately, that has created an adverse side effect that is contrary to the best interest of some students.  Take, for example, a high school freshman who blows 9th grade in a big way.  Not failing, mind you, but not learning much, putting forth only the effort required to scrape by.  At the end of the year, the parents and student have a serious heart-to-heart, and both agree that repeating 9th grade would be in the student’s best interest.

So, they approach the school, which denies the request out of hand.  Why?  Because if they allowed it, then the student would take five years to graduate (even though it would be an extra year well spent), and the school would take a hit on their graduation rate.

One student can cause a school to miss the mark; it happened right here in Oak Ridge.  Not because of the aforementioned scenario, but due to a student who enrolled as a transfer but never actually attended a single class.

NCLB is a noble goal, but remains unworkable as written.  I hope that the tweaks are effective.

Hot Topic

Posted on by
4

Should school start after Labor Day to avoid the heat-induced problems faced this year?

Some people think so.

The reason that most school systems have adopted calendars beginning in mid-August (or earlier) is to allow students to complete the first semester before winter break.  Many systems have also incorporated a Fall break in between the first and second grading periods; here in Oak Ridge we began last year offering a 1-week  Fall break in late October, and the response from parents and students has been overwhelmingly positive.

As our society has changed over the past several decades and extended families tend to live further apart, it is increasingly important to offer long enough breaks over traditional holiday times to allow for travel.

However, we must also meet the required number of days per year, and student attendance grows more important with the addition of higher standards and increasing course loads.  30 years ago, school started later in Oak Ridge, but summer break did not begin until midway through June.  In terms of comfort levels, June is decidedly cooler than late August, but that eliminates the ability to finish the first semester prior to Christmas.

Any thoughts?