Diane Ravitch’s “U-turn”: The teachers were right

Were I to advise Diane Ravitch right now, I’d tell her to change all her computer passwords and redouble the security on her servers.  Why?  After what happened to the scientists who study global warming, I expect many of the same wackoes are working right now to get her e-mails, knowing that the mere act of stealing them will be enough to indict her change of heart on education in America.

It’s much the same mob crowd in both cases.  [I'm hopeful it's not a mob.]

Dr. Ravitch thinks big thoughts about education.  She stands in the vanguard of those people who are both academically astute in education, and who can make a case that appeals to policy makers.  Working under Checker Finn at the old Office of Educational Research and Improvement, we quickly got familiar with Ravitch’s works and views.  Finn and Ravitch, good friends and like-minded in education issues, were the running backs and sticky-handed receivers for any conservative education quarterback, back in the Day.

Finn was Assistant Secretary of Education for Research under Bill Bennett.  Ravitch succeeded Finn, under Lamar Alexander.  While Bennett and Alexander took troubling turns to the right, and Finn stayed much where he was, Ravitch has been looking hard at what’s working in schools today.

Ravitch doesn’t like the conservative revolution’s results in education.  She’s changed her views.  Says one of the better stories about her changing views, in The New York Times:

Once outspoken about the power of standardized testing, charter schools and free markets to improve schools, Dr. Ravitch is now caustically critical. She underwent an intellectual crisis, she says, discovering that these strategies, which she now calls faddish trends, were undermining public education. She resigned last year from the boards of two conservative research groups.

“School reform today is like a freight train, and I’m out on the tracks saying, ‘You’re going the wrong way!’ ” Dr. Ravitch said in an interview.

This is big stuff, and good news to teachers who, since I was at Education in 1987, have been telling policy makers the same things Ravitch is saying now.

David Gardner and Milton Goldberg wrote in the report of the Excellence in Education Commission in 1983 that America faces a “rising tide of mediocrity” because of bad decisions.  That’s true of much education reform today, too.

Gardner and Goldberg also said that, had a foreign nation done that damage to us, we’d regard it as an act of war.

Maybe Ravitch’s turn can help mediate an end to the Right’s War on Education and pogroms against teachers.

Here in Texas the conservatives on the Texas State Board of Education didn’t like Ravitch’s views when she was in the conservative camp, so Texas has started, finally, to vote out commissioners who don’t get it, who prefer a state of war on Texas’s children to promoting public education

Let’s hope more people listen to Ravitch now.

More:

Be sure to listen to the NPR interview from Morning Edition, yesterday (you can read it, too).

And, in next Sunday’s New York Times Magazine, a story about how to build a better teacher; do you know the difference between testing and teaching?

Dallas to cut nearly 700 teachers

Let’s get back to education nuts and bolts for a while.  I have not commented on this partly because I’ve been on the road and just busier than most teachers with three preps, and partly because this is just jaw-droppingly unbelievable stuff.

Education nuts, anyway, maybe without the bolts.

Officials at Dallas Independent School District (DISD) announced over a week ago they had discovered an accounting error that led to hiring too many new teachers, and a $64 million shortfall.  The Board of Trustees asked for more details to a plan proposed last week that includes layoffs of teachers, including some that were newly-hired.

The second report is due this afternoon, and the DISD Board will meet tonight to consider action.  If people are not cut, the budget shortfall will double in the rest of this fiscal year.

Most teachers have been working on estimates that 750 teachers will be axed, which works out to about 3 from each campus.

The Dallas Morning News’s DISD Blog says fewer than 750 will go.

More employees could be laid off than expected. We’re hearing from a good source that 1,209 employees would be let go if the board approves to have a reduction in force at today’s 3 p.m. meeting.

The layoff numbers breakdown like this:

Central office – 164
Campus non-contract support staff – 250
Campus administrators – 50
Teachers – 675
Non-teaching campus support staff – 70

One more battle lost in the War on Education.  For Dallas, this is a big one, for the effects on morale alone.

Coupled with the collapse of schools in Milwaukee, lack of gasoline in Tennessee, the unmitigated and unreported natural disaster from the storm named Gustav that hit Baton Rouge, the known disaster caused by Hurricane and Tropical Depression Ike, one might be excuse for thinking much of the U.S. is sinking to second- or third-world status.  Oh, and did I mention that most of our larger financial institutions are in ruins, too?

As one of the more recent hires in Dallas ISD, excuse me while I go back to working with the kids.

What?  You thought I’d have time to chew my fingernails?  You don’t know jack about teaching, or teachers, if you thought that.

Stay tuned.  Check out resources listed below.

Resources:

• DISD Daily Dish for September 25
• DISD webpage on the financial crisis
• Dallas Morning News, “Teachers cope with insecurity”

$1 billion boondoggle: Bush’s reading program doesn’t work

From today’s New York Times:

By SAM DILLON

Published: May 2, 2008

President Bush’s $1 billion a year initiative to teach reading to low-income children has not helped improve their reading comprehension, according to a Department of Education report released on Thursday.

Read the study here:

Created under the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) of 2001, the Reading First program provides assistance to states and districts in using research-based reading programs and instructional materials for students in kindergarten through third grade and in introducing related professional development and assessments. The program’s purpose is to ensure that increased proportions of students read at or above grade level, have mastery of the essential components of early reading, and that all students can read at or above grade level by the end of grade 3. The law requires that an independent, rigorous evaluation of the program be conducted to determine if the program influences teaching practices, mastery of early reading components, and student reading comprehension. This interim report presents the impacts of Reading First on classroom reading instruction and student reading comprehension during the 2004-05 and 2005-06 school years.

The evaluation found that Reading First did have positive, statistically significant impacts on the total class time spent on the five essential components of reading instruction promoted by the program. The study also found that, on average across the 18 study sites, Reading First did not have statistically significant impacts on student reading comprehension test scores in grades 1-3. A final report on the impacts from 2004-2007 (three school years with Reading First funding) and on the relationships between changes in instructional practice and student reading comprehension is expected in late 2008.

NCLB comes to football — No Halfback Left Behind

Who was the genius who wrote this? It’s an internet e-mail masterpiece, and it comes without attribution. Do you know who wrote it? Please tell us in comments.

And if you don’t understand it, you’re not a teacher. Pass it to a teacher to explain to you what’s really going on; tip of the old scrub brush to Pam at Grassroots Science; she pointed to this piece in Shibby’s Alaska Journal:

No Child Left Behind – Football Version

The football version of what is going on in education right now. (If you’re not an educator, this may not make a lot of sense to you. But send it to your friends who are in education. They will love it!) For all the educators – In or out of the system.

1. All teams must make the state playoffs and all MUST win the championship. If a team does not win the championship, they will be on probation until they are the champions, and coaches will be held accountable. If after two years they have not won the championship their footballs and equipment will be taken away UNTIL they do win the championship.

2. All kids will be expected to have the same football skills at the same time even if they do not have the same conditions or opportunities to practice on their own. NO exceptions will be made for lack of interest in football, a desire to perform athletically, or genetic abilities or disabilities of themselves or their parents. ALL KIDS WILL PLAY FOOTBALL AT A PROFICIENT LEVEL!

3. Talented players will be asked to workout on their own, without instruction. This is because the coaches will be using all their instructional time with the athletes who aren’t interested in football, have limited athletic ability or whose parents don’t like football.

4. Games will be played year round, but statistics will only be kept in the 4th, 8th, and 11th game. This will create a New Age of Sports where every school is expected to have the same level of talent and all teams will reach the same minimum goals. If no child gets ahead, then no child gets left behind.

Why not treat kindergarteners like college students?

Vouchers in Utah have the wooden stake right in the heart. That’s one proposal in one state. More voucher proposals are promised, and the debate continues.

Voucher advocates generally make a plea that colleges have something akin to school vouchers with Pell Grants (Basic Education Opportunity Grants), Stafford Grants, the GI Bill and other federal programs, plus many state programs, which give money to a student to use at a college of the student’s choice.

Why won’t this work for kindergartners, 8th graders and 10th graders? the voucher advocates ask.

The short answer is that we regard college students as adults. Beyond that are several other differences between elementary schools and colleges that we should, perhaps, explore.

Texas Ed: Comments on Education from Texas has a couple of posts that provide some insights to the issues. In the first one, “We Have Vouchers for Higher Education,” the question is raised about why not let elementary students operate like veterans, and take their government money where they choose to.

In the second, “Vouchers Are About Choice, Not Quality,” we get a glimpse of real life — parents fighting to keep open their neighborhood school, despite there being better performing schools available to take their kids.

We might want to compare systems, at least briefly.

Entire nation left behind on math

Sec. of Education Margaret Spellings defends the Bush administration’s “No Child Left Behind” Act (NCLB) because, she says, it helps with accountability.  It’s all about testing to make sure education takes, don’t you know.

Unless the test might show that Spellings and Bush haven’t done what they promised to do.  Then the tests are off.

Bug Girl has the story:  The U.S. has pulled out of the international testing for math and science, claiming budget restrictions.  Surely the Bush administration did not fail to budget for their big test showing.   Is that the real reason?  Or do they fear that the test comparisons will show that NCLB has not worked?

Good discussion in the comments, too, about sequencing of math and science courses.

Progress? Latest education assessment scores

Scores from the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) were released officially yesterday.

Education Week said:

Fourth grade math scores on NAEP, called “the nation’s report card,” rose from 238 to 240 from 2005 to 2007, while 8th grade performance climbed from 279 to 281, both on a 500-point scale. The 2007 NAEP results were released today.

Those gains continued an overall upward trend in NAEP math scores in both grades that dates to the early 1990s, while reading scores have been more stagnant over that time. While the gains in math were smaller than in some previous testing cycles, they were still statistically significant, as were the increases in reading.

“It shows that the public attention to math instruction and professional development of teachers is having a positive impact,” said James Rubillo, the executive director of the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics, in Reston, Va. The movement for stronger standards that dates to the 1980s “has brought math and reading to the forefront of attention,” he said.

In reading, the subject that has seen the greatest investment of federal and state education spending over the past several years, 4th graders’ scores have risen from 219 to 221, also on a 500-point scale, since 2005. Eighth graders’ average mark increased from 262 to 263, which was a statistically significant gain, though that test score dipped slightly from the NAEP reading test given five years ago.

Two point gains on a 500 point scale sound measly to me. That’s less than 1%, after five years of a program that should have produced much more significant gains.

Is the No Child Left Behind Act badly misnamed?

Perhaps, instead of spending money on testing and forcing teachers to teach to the test or else, we should try putting some money into getting the best teachers, by providing significant pay raises, and put more money into providing the resources teachers need to make their classrooms successful — books, projectors, software, film, video, grading machines, classroom tools, classroom supplies (paper and pencils), preparation time, and parental involvement.

Other resources:

• Extremely rosey press release from Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings
• Serious analysis from the National Assessment’s governing board; (this link will get you directly to the press release, in MS Word format)
• Wall Street Journal notes “modest gains”
• Salt Lake Tribune noting Utah’s edge on other states may be fading (‘So, obviously, the thing to do is eviscerate the public schools — that’ll improve scores!’ That’s what the pro-voucher forces will argue, just watch.)
• Chicago Tribune says Illinois students “fail to keep pace”
• Time, “Why Johnny isn’t reading much better”