Playing games to sneak kids into good schools

Posted on September 14, 2009 by axooms

Students across Denver have now put aside their summer games and trotted off to school. Where they head, however, is often decided by how well their parents play the games afforded by the public education system.

The most egregious example of gaming the system came to a head last spring, when parents for more than 10 percent of Bromwell Elementary School’s students were asked by DPS to verify their claimed residency under the threat of perjury. The majority did not do so. It is unlikely only one school has this issue.

Why lie about where you live? Because the differences between district schools are immense. Bromwell holds DPS’s highest rating of “distinguished” with an overall academic proficiency rate of 90 percent and less than 10 percent of its students in poverty. By contrast, just 1.5 miles away sits another district elementary school, with DPS’s lowest rating of “on probation,” an overall proficiency rate of just 30 percent, and 80 percent of its students in poverty.

These two schools demonstrate a central conundrum of public education in Denver. The vast majority of public schools are far worse than most people know. But Denver’s public schools are not quite bad enough, as savvy middle-class parents can still game the system to get their kids a decent education. This paradox perpetuates a failing system and inhibits meaningful reform.

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Posted in Engagement, School Performance | 2 Comments

College one-two punch

Posted on September 12, 2009 by axooms

Two fascinating articles.  The first is a futuristic view of online higher education:

In less than two months, she had finished four complete courses, for less than $200 total. The same courses would have cost her over $2,700 at Northeastern Illinois, $4,200 at Kaplan University, $6,300 at the University of Phoenix, and roughly the gross domestic product of a small Central American nation at an elite private university. They also would have taken two or three times as long to complete.

And if Solvig needed any further proof that her online education was the real deal, she found it when her daughter came home from a local community college one day, complaining about her math course. When Solvig looked at the course materials, she realized that her daughter was using exactly the same learning modules that she was using …

The second is a harsh reminder of why the first might not be so bad after all:

If you were going to come up with a list of organizations whose failures had done the most damage to the American economy in recent years, you’d probably have to start with the Wall Street firms and regulatory agencies that brought us the financial crisis. From there, you might move on to Wall Street’s fellow bailout recipients in Detroit, the once-Big Three.

But I would suggest that the list should also include a less obvious nominee: public universities.

Is this latter article based on work by some radical subversive half-wit?  Try William Bowen, former President of both Princeton and the Mellon Foundation.

I don’t know that anyone can predict the future of Higher Ed, but I’m guessing it will change more substantially than K-12 over the next 50 years.

Posted in Fiscal & Economic, Higher Education | Leave a comment

Reunion prompts diversity questions

Posted on August 31, 2009 by axooms

My wife had her 20th high school reunion recently.  She attended a large public high school noted then, as now, for the diversity of its student body.  But attendees of the reunion itself were not nearly as diverse as the student body had been 20 years earlier. This, she and her peers readily agreed, was a shame.

What would account for the difference?  My completely unresearched guess is that it has a lot to do with academic proficiency.  At this high school today, recent School Accountability Reports show black and Hispanic students with proficiency rates over 40 percentile points behind their white classmates.  Better academic preparation in high school leads to more post-secondary education, increased professional opportunities and higher income.

I would expect that students who are not proficient by graduation don’t pursue additional education and often end up in menial and blue-collar jobs.   And I think people with lower incomes, educational levels, and professional status are far less likely to attend their high school reunions. The proficiency rate of the high school’s black and Hispanic students is currently under 50% (for white students it is 90%).

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Posted in College and Career Preparation, Poverty, Student Achievement | Leave a comment

New Orleans as Phoenix

Posted on August 27, 2009 by axooms

One of the interesting thought experiments of the past decade is the question: what if you could redo an entire school district including a large percentage of independently managed schools with different models, instead of the usual one-size-fits-all central bureaucracy that has permeated most urban districts. From the tragedy of Hurricane Katrina rose that chance.  The story will be some time before it is finished, but here is the start:

NEW ORLEANS — The devastation of Hurricane Katrina four years ago brought with it many changes for this city, but perhaps its most enduring mark may be the new charter school system that came cascading in during the storm’s aftermath.

Take, for instance, the students at Langston Hughes Academy. Once struggling to meet state testing standards, they’re getting a lot of help to try and do better. Their learning environment has changed to one with electronic blackboards and teachers hailing from Ivy League schools.

The talk here is not about where to go after school, but where to go to college.

“There are higher expectations now and no excuses,” said John Alford, the Harvard-trained leader of the school. “Kids are starting to see college more as a reality, a real option.”

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Boettcher evaluation: More facts, please

Posted on August 26, 2009 by axooms

I am generally leery of statements in education which begin “It’s a fact…”  I am even more so when these facts overwhelmingly support the organization making the claim in a sort of self-congratulations (though this is extraordinarily common).  So I turned to the recent commentary on the effectiveness of the Boettcher Teachers program in these pages with some caution.

IT’S A FACT: BOETTCHER TEACHERS PROGRAM GETS BETTER RESULTS

[…] Students in classrooms with Boettcher Teachers are scoring better on CSAP and district Measures of Academic Progress (MAP) tests than their non-Boettcher prepared peers, according the evaluation, conducted by The Evaluation Center and the University of Colorado Denver School of Education and Human Development.

While the text is far more modest than the headline (which implies the program produces the results), and unlike some others it does not quite claim causation when it witnesses correlation.  But the claim here, even couched, is pretty clear: Having a Boettcher teacher significantly improves student academic growth (by a factor of 2X or more, if one believes the chart).

Now I believe the Boettcher teachers program to be pretty good.  I’ve met several Boettcher fellows, have been generally impressed, and I have seen first-hand the considerable impact of one teacher in particular.  What I don’t know is if this teacher (and others) would have had equal results without the Boettcher training.

And while I am not familiar with the Evaluation Center, I would assume they understand this area in great depth.  So what I really don’t get is why smart people from different areas lend their substantial work and reputation to such thin claims, especially when it would be easy to do a whole lot better.

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California dreaming?

Posted on August 26, 2009 by axooms

Sweet dreams or nightmares?  Say what one wants about the advantages or disadvantages of what follows, but the pace of change — not minor, incremental, paper-shuffling change; but bold, substantial, systematic change — quickens:

In a startling acknowledgment that the Los Angeles school system cannot improve enough schools on its own, the city Board of Education approved a plan Tuesday that could turn over 250 campuses — including 50 new multimillion-dollar facilities — to charter groups and other outside operators. […]

The action signals a historic turning point for the Los Angeles Unified School District, which has struggled for decades to boost student achievement. District officials and others have said their ability to achieve more than incremental progress is hindered by the powerful teachers union, whose contract makes it nearly impossible to fire ineffective tenured teachers. Union leaders blame a district bureaucracy that they say fails to include teachers in “top-down reforms.”

“The premise of the resolution is first and foremost to create choice and competition,” said board member Yolie Flores Aguilar, who brought the resolution, “and to really force and pressure the district to put forth a better educational plan.”

When the system gets bad enough, things happen.  Read the full piece.

Posted in Charter Schools, District Performance | Leave a comment

Why measuring growth matters

Posted on August 12, 2009 by axooms

Last week’s CSAP results were coupled with the Colorado Growth Model in a way that began to peel the onion back on school and district performance.  However, one major piece was, to my mind, still missing. The growth model does not differentiate between the performances of schools or districts with vastly different percentages of Free and Reduced Lunch (FRL) students.  For me, one of (if not the) primary goals of education reform is to lower and eliminate the achievement gap that persists between low-income students and their affluent peers.  Unless you measure these students compared to their peers, it’s hard to see who you are helping.

As an example, EdNews helpfully provided a list of some of the larger Colorado school districts with both their status and growth scores.  But missing was any sense of which districts serve the most (or least) FRL kids.

Well, here is the regression graph on FRL & status scores by school district (based on the EdNews data):

status1

This is pretty much the same graph that has haunted public education in the US for the last 50 years.

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Posted in District Performance, Poverty, Student Achievement | Leave a comment