Coming late v. leaving early

Posted on February 18, 2009 by axooms

In a debate that makes one yearn for the intellectual challenge of “tastes great v less filling” comes news that DPS’s five additional late-start days, added to the calendar at the DCTA’s request during the last round of contract negotiations, may become five additional leave-early days:

Instead of starting classes three hours later on five days throughout the school year so teachers can train, the district will release students three hours early.

“Yay!” cheered school board President Theresa Pena, when DPS staff presented the plan. “We certainly heard from a lot of parents that late start isn’t working for them.”

Yes, you did.  But here’s an elephant tucked in the corner: DPS has only about 172 instructional days per year (and I believe that was before the late-start days).

The fault is not only at the district level; Colorado mandates a specific number of hours.  Although the data is from 2004 and does not cover every state, it puts Colorado as one of just three states with less than 174 days of instruction.   The norm is 180 days.

An international study of 43 countries noted 33 of them have school years longer than 180 days, with a high of about 220 days per year.  (For another view, try the documentary film 2 Million Minutes)

Is 220 instructional days that high? There are 260 non-weekend days in a year.  Let’s take off 20 for vacation (15 days) and holidays (5 days).  Heck, let’s lop off yet another 20 days for professional development or just slacker activities (company picnic anyone?), which works out to 220 working days per year.

The 220 days include 48 days — nearly 10 weeks — more of instruction than will take place in Denver.  That is 28% more time.

Imagine trying to qualify for the Olympics by running a four-minute mile.  Except you have to do it in 3:08 while the people in each adjoining lane can run an extra 52 seconds.  That is what we are now asking our students to do when competing in a world economy when they go to school 172 days while other countries get 220.

Can we fix this?  It is not on anyone’s list in the current economic and labor environment.  The costs of adding days to the school calendar for teacher and administrator salaries alone would overwhelm a impoverished system, not to mention transportation, food, heat, and all the other costs.

One of the easiest answers to the question of reforming public education would simply be: spend more time teaching.  Instead, DPS and DCTA are cutting instructional time and trying to decide between coming late v leaving early.  Tastes lousy, less filling.

Posted in Teacher Unions | Tagged | 1 Comment

The disease of direct placement

Posted on February 17, 2009 by axooms

Tomorrow, the Denver Board of Education will hear public comment on and discuss Superintendent Boasberg’s proposal to limit forced direct placement for Title I schools.  While I continue to believe this policy — which turns a free-form dance into musical chairs — is a good first step, it does little to address the root cause.

Data on DPS direct placements is fascinating: the disparity for Title I schools — which house a higher proportion of students in poverty — is well documented.  Less well known is how specific grades are affected: if you looks over the past three years, each DPS traditional middle school averages 6 direct placement teachers, compared to high schools (4), K-8 (3) and elementary programs (2).  That seems a tough burden to continue to sap DPS’s struggling middle-school sector. Also little known is who does not take DP teachers: both Charter and Innovation Schools.  That the proponents of education reform both outside and within the DPS establishment both believe it is a bad idea is as clear a signal as I can imagine.

Aside from the specific DPS proposal — which does not even forbid DP’s at Title I schools, it just tries to limit it — is the greater context of forced direct placement.  For this practice is a disease, and while Denver is not as sick as other cities, it would be an error not to understand the full extent of the illness.

Read, for example, this LA Weekly article titled “LAUSD’s Dance of the Lemons.”  What is fascinating here, apart from the sheer injustice of the practice, is that among LA’s public employees, the inability to terminate poor performers is unique to the school system:

Just a few blocks from LAUSD’s skyscraper headquarters, Los Angeles City Hall’s approach to firing public employees provides a stark contrast to protections enjoyed by teachers, also public employees. Despite civil-service protections, City Hall fires from its 48,000-plus workforce of garbage, parks, street-services, engineering, utilities and other employees more than 80 tenured workers annually. During the past decade, in which LAUSD fired four failing teachers, 800 to 1,000 underperforming civil service–protected workers were fired at City Hall. City Personnel Department General Manager Margaret Whelan says nobody is paid to leave. She was dumbfounded that LAUSD is paying to dislodge teachers, saying, “That’s ridiculous. I can’t believe that. Golly, it makes no sense. Some are not even mediocre, they’re horrible.”

Also worth reading is the New Yorker essay — generally recognized as one of the best long-form pieces of journalism last year — on New York City’s rubber rooms.

Lastly an Op-Ed from NYC Chancellor Joel Klein — who found that prosecuting Microsoft for monopoly practices was a cakewalk compared with trying to fire NY teachers with a history of poor performance.

Denver is not LA or NYC (thank goodness).  The problem of forced direct placement here is — like the city itself – smaller and more manageable.  However just because the harm is on a lesser scale is not a reason for inaction.  At least one member of the board has already dismissed Boasberg’s proposal as a PR stunt.  But until Denver and other cities do away with forced placement altogether and move to a system of mutual consent, the disease of direct placement will continue to claim as its primary victims the one group that has no say in the practice and does not participate in the debate: children.

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Half-pregnant reform

Posted on February 13, 2009 by axooms

An excellent article in the Washington Post describing the efforts in Boston around both charter and district-led pilot schools:

[Boston] has unleashed imaginative teachers to run both independent charter schools and semi-independent “pilot” schools, with much of the rest of the country waiting to see which does best. […]

A study by scholars from Harvard, MIT, Michigan and Duke, sponsored by the Boston Foundation, shows the Boston charters are doing significantly better than pilots in raising student achievement. This includes results from randomized studies designed to reduce the possibility that charters might benefit from having more motivated students and parents.

I am not surprised by the study and I confess I find the efforts of districts to create their own semi-autonomous schools misguided. Making significant changes to large organizations – be they bureaucracies, private companies or governments –  is not achieved through incremental steps.  One cannot successfully get half-pregnant with reform. What is unclear is why these schools would be better off trapped in this halfway house of reform rather than becoming full charter schools and shredding the complete carapace of the district system, instead of just one or two parts.

This is relevant to Denver as well, as the district’s efforts to create reform within the schools they operate (compared to charter schools which they oversee) are at best inconsequential and at worst a waste of time and resources.  In recent memory were first beacon schools, then innovation schools (originating with an initially promising legislative bill, eventually badly watered down by special interests). I have not seen a study of relative performance of these schools compared to their peers, so perhaps there is some data to the contrary, but my anecdotal reading of the lists of distinguished schools makes this seem unlikely. I’ve written before on the mistake of DPS in trying to create new schools from inside a system which is not hospitable.  At some point hopefully consensus will emerge that these efforts are a platonic cave of of real reform.

There have been hints of Denver once again trotting out new efforts to create high-performing district schools that would claim innovation while encumbered by many of the same practices (district operations and hiring, principal approval) that have shown no progress. Proponents of the “do-it-ourselves” efforts would be well-informed to find some evidence of success nationally (and safe to say it won’t be in Boston) or admit that this idea is neither new nor good.

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Obamaesque change in education

Posted on February 10, 2009 by axooms

Somewhat overlooked in Obama’s first press conference were his comments on education.  Here’s my shorthand: 1) more reform; 2) more money; 3) higher teacher pay; 4) better teacher training; 5) fire bad teachers; 6) pro charter; 7) high standards.

Imagine the following being said by any previous national Democratic leader:

“Both Democrats and Republicans are going to have to think differently in order to come together and solve that problem [entitlement spending]. I think there are areas like education where some in my party have been too resistant to reform, and have argued only money makes a difference. And there have been others on the Republican side or the conservative side who said no matter how much money you spend, nothing makes a difference, so let’s just blow up the public school systems.

And I think that both sides are going to have to acknowledge we’re going to need more money for new science labs, to pay teachers more effectively, but we’re also going to need more reform, which means that we’ve got to train teachers more effectively, bad teachers need to be fired after being given the opportunity to train effectively, that we should experiment with things like charter schools that are innovating in the classroom, that we should have high standards.

So my whole goal over the next four years is to make sure that whatever arguments are persuasive and backed up by evidence and facts and proof that they can work, that we are pulling people together around that kind of pragmatic agenda.”

Clearly the most striking and controversial is the proposal that presumably in return for higher pay and after better (not more) training, bad teachers should be fired.  Although efforts will be made to pull individual pieces out and argue for some and not all of these, this is a full prescription regimen, and I think his sense is — in my view correctly — to have a chance at success, it has to be all done together.

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Is the ivory tower basement still college?

Posted on February 9, 2009 by axooms

With a lot of focus on college preparation and readiness as early as middle school (including the charter on whose board I serve), it’s disquieting, but probably important, to read another view.  Here is a piercing article from The Atlantic on the “destructive myth” that higher education is for everyone, written by someone who sees the other side all too often:

Some of the failing grades I issue gnaw at me more than others. In my ears rang her plaintive words, so emblematic of the tough spot in which we both now found ourselves. Ms. L. had done everything that American culture asked of her. She had gone back to school to better herself, and she expected to be rewarded for it, not slapped down. She had failed not, as some students do, by being absent too often or by blowing off assignments. She simply was not qualified for college.

This, on top of the recent news on college remediation rates from Colorado high schools, where 30% are unprepared for college work, should not be passed over too quickly.  Like so much else, the act itself of attending college — without quality preparation – is the veneer of success masking eventual failure.

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Today for school lunch: Salmonella!

Posted on February 8, 2009 by axooms

Being a reduced-cost or free lunch student has always meant significant disadvantages in nutrition and overall health (not to mention taste).  But even its worst critics could assume that these lunches were not actually dangerous.  No more: from an article in the New York Times:

Peanuts From Tainted Factory Sent to Schools

School lunch programs in three states — California, Idaho and Minnesota — have been told not to use any peanut products that they received from the federal government in the last two years because of concerns that they could be tainted.

The peanut products came from the Georgia factory at the center of the nationwide salmonella scare, but were not among the products initially recalled last month. The recall has since been expanded, and the Department of Agriculture last week notified the states who received the potentially contaminated peanut butter and roasted peanuts from the Peanut Corporation of America.

Increasingly I see the FRL program encompassing the absolute worst in education policy set by a removed and detached federal bureaucracy which far too often caters to adult interestsfar outside education.  It’s time (past time) to start the slow process of fixing this multi-faceted problem.

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What would POTUS eat?

Posted on January 30, 2009 by axooms

My particular hotspot for the federal school lunch program and the sheer inertia of action to fix it is usually pretty precise, but imagine instead a kinder, gentler question: what would the guy in charge of feeding the President Of The United States say about school lunches?

Well, anticipate no more: Obama’s New Chef Skewers School Lunches.

In May, over a meal of locally-produced beef and barley soup, Mr. Kass lamented the sorry state of the National School Lunch Program, which provides low-cost or free lunches to schoolchildren. He noted that what gets served up to kids is influenced by government agricultural subsidies. As a result, he says, meals served to students are low in vegetables and disproportionately high in fat, additives, preservatives and high-fructose corn syrup.

As Kass rightly points out, there is an entire other side to school lunches besides poor nutrition: they bolster a wide range of useless agricultural subsidies:

The government subsidizes various agricultural industries, creating overproduction in commodities such as beef, pork and dairy. This overproduction depresses prices, endangering the vitality of producers. The U.S. government purchases the overproduction it has stimulated and then disposes of the excess by giving it to schools.

It’s an instructive talk and well worth a read — especially if you eat at your desk. Oh, and no food posting would be complete without an admonition to read Michael Pollan.

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