Lemon musical chairs

Posted on February 8, 2010 by axooms

In another sign that antiquated and harmful education practices once thought sacrosanct are starting to fall, Denver’s “Dance of the Lemons” — the process by which the teachers no principal will hire are forcibly placed into a classroom somewhere in the public school system — may finally change.

Last year, the Denver Post noted:

Nearly three-quarters of unassigned veteran Denver Public Schools teachers who have not found jobs are forcibly placed into schools with the poorest students… Under union and district rules, these direct placements are made without regard to the desires of the teachers, school principals or parents.

On Friday, DPS superintendent Boasberg announced his intention that the District’s lowest performing schools — almost all with high poverty student demographics — become exempt from receiving any of these teachers.

This is a significant move by DPS, and also long overdue.  Now the music still plays, and lemon dance is not over yet, as under the DCTA contract these teachers will have to be placed somewhere, but the seats are going to be a little harder to find, and far better illuminated.  When higher-performing schools, which generally have a stronger culture and leadership, and more engaged parents, get stuck with lemons, you can bet the chance the system undergoes change increases, because the tolerance for bad teachers will be far lower.  I’ve written about the power of affluent parenting previously — if some of Denver’s best schools suddenly face the forced hiring of several teachers, expect some parents and civic groups to finally take a stand on this deplorable practice.

There is increased agreement that education hiring should be by mutual consent (both the teacher and the principal agree to the hire), an approach that was embraced by the rest of the employed world, oh, just a few decades ago.  Changing the lemon dance to a game of musical chairs is a good first step, but far better would be to turn the music off entirely.

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The turnaround fallacy

Posted on November 20, 2009 by axooms

A remarkable and contrarian essay (and video) in Education Next by Andy Smarick which addresses the current federal and district fascination with school turnarounds and makes a fairly persuasive historical point: they usually don’t work.

For as long as there have been struggling schools in America’s cities, there have been efforts to turn them around. The lure of dramatic improvement runs through Morgan Freeman’s big-screen portrayal of bat-wielding principal Joe Clark, philanthropic initiatives like the Gates Foundation’s “small schools” project, and No Child Left Behind (NCLB)’s restructuring mandate. The Obama administration hopes to extend this thread even further, making school turnarounds a top priority.

But overall, school turnaround efforts have consistently fallen far short of hopes and expectations. Quite simply, turnarounds are not a scalable strategy for fixing America’s troubled urban school systems.

As Smarick notes, schools are insulated from much of the healthy pressure which impacts most other institutions – private, government, and non-profit alike:

We shouldn’t be surprised then that turnarounds in urban education have largely failed. The surprise and shame is that urban public education, unlike nearly every other industry, profession, and field, has never developed a sensible solution to its continuous failures. After undergoing improvement efforts, a struggling private firm that continues to lose money will close, get taken over, or go bankrupt. Unfit elected officials are voted out of office. The worst lawyers can be disbarred, and the most negligent doctors can lose their licenses. Urban school districts, at long last, need an equivalent. […]

Those hesitant about replacing turnarounds with closures should simply remember that a failed business doesn’t indict capitalism and an unseated incumbent doesn’t indict democracy. Though temporarily painful, both are essential mechanisms for maintaining long-term systemwide quality, responsiveness, and innovation. Closing America’s worst urban schools doesn’t indict public education nor does it suggest a lack of commitment to disadvantaged students. On the contrary, it reflects our insistence on finally taking the steps necessary to build city school systems that work for the boys and girls most in need.

The difficulty is that when turnaround efforts fail, the usual claim is of neglect: not enough money, time, people or planning.  The failure is then seen as a failure of reform. This essay posits the possibility that failure of a turnaround program may correctly be that they do not go far enough.

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The reform stew…

Posted on November 17, 2009 by axooms

Recent news in the same vein: Big money into education reform. From the LA Times:

The Ford Foundation pledged $100 million Wednesday to “transform” urban high schools in the United States, focusing on seven cities, including Los Angeles.

The seven-year initiative is among the largest philanthropic efforts aimed at improving education in the United States and, as described, could both complement and challenge aspects of the Obama administration’s education reform efforts. It will fund research and reform in four areas: teacher quality, student assessment, a longer school day and year, and school funding.

But look closer.  This is not the usual cast of reformers.  As the WSJ puts it:

…the Ford press release contains not one mention of charter schools, vouchers, merit pay, or even Teach for America. […] Ford’s formula for reform involves more money, less accountability and a bigger role for the unions.  […] One of Ford’s first grants will go to the new American Federation of Teachers Innovation Fund, a “union-led initiative to make grants to AFT affiliates nationwide for innovative efforts established jointly by teachers, administrators, and parents.”

The gentle preview to a small dose of doublethink?

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Do charter schools benefit all students?

Posted on November 6, 2009 by axooms

A very provocative study that can be seen as a companion to the Hoxby piece in NYC.  An excerpt from a news summary summarizes it thus:

Marcus Winters, who follows education for the Manhattan Institute, has released a paper showing that even students who don’t attend a charter school benefit academically when their public school is exposed to charter competition.

Mr. Winters focuses on New York City public school students in grades 3 through 8. “For every one percent of a public school’s students who leave for a charter,” concludes Mr. Winters, “reading proficiency among those who remain increases by about 0.02 standard deviations, a small but not insignificant number, in view of the widely held suspicion that the impact on local public schools . . . would be negative.” It turns out that traditional public schools respond to competition in a way that benefits their students. […]

One of the most encouraging findings by Mr. Winters is how charter competition reduces the black-white achievement gap. He found that the worst-performing public school students, who tend to be low-income minorities, have the most to gain from the nearby presence of a charter school. Overall, charter competition improved reading performance but did not affect math skills. By contrast, low-performing students had gains in both areas, and their reading improvement was above average relative to the higher-performing students.

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DPS’s School Performance Framework, magnified

Posted on November 4, 2009 by axooms

With the DPS Board election now over, it’s back to the grind. Much of the current discussion around DPS — including the bulk of a recent A+ meeting — is focused on the School Performance Framework (SPF). Now I like the SPF, I think it is rigorous and highly useful for comparing individual schools, and I applaud the district’s honest and transparent view.  However, as a snapshot of the District overall, the data is not presented particularly well — which makes sense, since that was not its original purpose.

But the SPF is increasingly used to evaluate the District as a whole.  The recent A+ meeting got me thinking about what the SPF information would look like if viewed with a wider lens and in a simpler presentation. Turns out it is quite a magnified perspective.

The SPF ranks individual schools on a variety of criteria, and places each school into one of four categories.  In ascending order of quality, these four categories are: On Probation, On Watch, Meets Expectations, and Distinguished. Looking at summary data for these categories, and it becomes clear that there are three significant areas where the SPF somewhat distorts the broader view due to its focus on individual schools.  The data is illuminating on all three:

1. Size matters. The SPF ratings do not factor the size of student enrollment in a school.  In a broader view, a good school of 500 students should be roughly equivalent to two bad schools with 250 students each.  However far more of the worst DPS schools have large student bodies. In the lowest category of “On Probation” there are 10 schools (of the 20 possible) with more than 500 students.  In contrast, in the highest category of “Distinguished,” just one school (of the 9 possible) have more than 500 students. So 50% of DPS’s worst schools have over 500 students, while less than 10% of its best schools have over 500 students.

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Dropout epicenters

Posted on October 29, 2009 by axooms

The ever-entertaining Daily Beast has a piece on high school dropouts, but also ranks the 10 cities with the lowest percentages of high-school graduates.  It’s an interesting list, since most of the big urban cities (Detroit, Chicago, etc) are not on it.  The pandemic of high school dropouts peaks in several unexpected places: according to DB, the top dropout city is Bakersfeld, CA.

From the story:

Fifteen percent of American high schools, known as “dropout factories,” produce more than half of American dropouts. Research shows these schools are clustered in California, the Southwest, and the Old South. Now a new Census analysis by The Daily Beast demonstrates that regions with poor schools are lifelong magnets for high-school dropouts, and suffer from stagnant economies and rock-bottom salaries.

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Neighborhood schools quiz (part two)

Posted on October 21, 2009 by axooms

I wrote a post last week on Neighborhood Schools, in no small part because I think the term is an open vessel in which people place widely divergent beliefs about what is important in public education.

Every designed system has virtues and errors.  We enroll children in public schools through a system based primarily on location: you default into the school close to where you live.  This has a number of positive benefits – among them an automatic social network and heightened sense of community.  But it also has significant faults, primarily that our schools are far more likely to suffer — and all too rarely transcend — the economic and social segregation of our worst neighborhoods.

In the discussion over neighborhood schools, I continue to be discomforted that locality is automatically viewed as virtuous.  Where one lives is highly influenced by income.  A system based on geographic proximity currently denies most of Denver’s underserved students access to a good school, while at the same time rewarding many of their most privileged peers.  There is a reason why houses in the best school districts sell at a premium.  Yet the same sentiment that would never tolerate outright purchase of admission for one’s child in a top public school becomes oddly oblivious when this transaction is masked by real estate.

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