Bullseye, overlooked

Posted on November 21, 2010 by axooms

Overlooked in the controversies of the board meeting on Thursday night was an important vote that signifies a considerable change in policy.  The board was contemplating a course of action for Manny Martinez, a charter school who, in its first year, received the lowest score on DPS’s School Performance Framework, including perhaps the first (and hopefully the last) single-digit score for academic growth.

In the silence of the consent agenda, and thus passed on a unanimous 7-0 vote, the Board agreed to neither shut Manny Martinez entirely, nor to leave it intact. Instead, the Board voted to essentially freeze the student population by not allowing a new class of 6th graders to enter the school.  No current students were displaced, but the district was understandably unwilling to allow more students entry into an academic sinkhole.

This is an important shift, as previously the board only pursued a choice between two options – leave the school essentially intact with minimal consequences for poor performance, or shut it entirely thus displacing students.  Too often an unwillingness to do the latter left the BOE with a default to the former.  That binary world now has changed.

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I write the papers that make the whole world sing…

Posted on November 15, 2010 by axooms

Think that students are all doing their own work?  Try this truly stunning first-person piece from a hired ghost writer for, well, anything:

I’ve written toward a master’s degree in cognitive psychology, a Ph.D. in sociology, and a handful of postgraduate credits in international diplomacy. I’ve worked on bachelor’s degrees in hospitality, business administration, and accounting. I’ve written for courses in history, cinema, labor relations, pharmacology, theology, sports management, maritime security, airline services, sustainability, municipal budgeting, marketing, philosophy, ethics, Eastern religion, postmodern architecture, anthropology, literature, and public administration. I’ve attended three dozen online universities. I’ve completed 12 graduate theses of 50 pages or more. All for someone else.

It’s pretty shocking stuff.  The amount of straight cheating and plagiarism that happens at an undergraduate level is both remarkable and has probably existed in some form throughout time.  However, technology has now enabled students to find someone to do their work who is geographically distant, qualified, affordable, and highly-skilled.

And I could not help but shake my head at the following:

I, who have no name, no opinions, and no style, have written so many papers at this point, including legal briefs, military-strategy assessments, poems, lab reports, and, yes, even papers on academic integrity, that it’s hard to determine which course of study is most infested with cheating. But I’d say education is the worst. I’ve written papers for students in elementary-education programs, special-education majors, and ESL-training courses. I’ve written lesson plans for aspiring high-school teachers, and I’ve synthesized reports from notes that customers have taken during classroom observations. I’ve written essays for those studying to become school administrators, and I’ve completed theses for those on course to become principals. In the enormous conspiracy that is student cheating, the frontline intelligence community is infiltrated by double agents. (Future educators of America, I know who you are.)

Yikes.

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Ghost alumnus

Posted on November 10, 2010 by axooms

Perhaps it is the proximity to Halloween, but what I find most troubling about the wrenching and difficult decision to close or transform schools are the ghosts: All of the kids who went through the school, received an education wholly inadequate to the demands of modern life, and are no longer in view. Traces of them linger, but they have largely vanished.

I see this with the controversy over Montbello. Many of the people attending public forums to comment on the plan are current students, their parents, and teachers.  If the reform plan goes through, teachers will lose their jobs, and they are fighting intently for their positions and livelyhood.  That’s their right, and should surprise no one.

Students and parents are fighting for the devil they know.  I continue to think that the opinions of current students and parents are critical, valid, and almost hopelessly biased (in much the same way that all parents believe their children are beautiful – to them they are).  Several years ago a survey of parents showed that 72 percent of them gave DPS overall a grade of “D” or “F”, however only 27 percent of them gave their child’s school a grade of “D” or “F.”  As a parent, I implicitly understand this — how could any parent admit to themselves that they are sending their child off to a failing school each and every day?

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The 2010 election and ed reform

Posted on November 4, 2010 by axooms

One of the ongoing lessons of the shifting electorate is that party affiliation is less and less likely to predict specific election outcomes.  It’s simply no longer possible to count votes based purely on one’s declared party.  2010 clearly demonstrated this trend with victories for three officials — none of whom previously held statewide office — in related positions: a governor from one party, combined with a treasurer and secretary of state from the other. So, ignoring the limited lens of party affiliation (if we might), how was Colorado’s 2010 election for education reform?

Last fall saw a bitter contest — most of it within the Democratic party — on SB 191.  At the time, and exacerbated after the failure of R2T dollars to follow, there was the fear that 191 would be a ed reform waterloo, and many of the Democratic legislators who defied party stalwarts and traditional supporters to vote in favor of the bill were warned that they would suffer a lack of Democratic support, enthusiasm, and dollars in upcoming elections.

So how did they do?  Of the nine democrats (and 21 total legislators) who voted for 191 and were up for election, just one lost his seat — in a race where education was not a factor.

Also consider the local efforts of Stand for Children, a national nonprofit group founded by Jonah Edelman, son of activist Marian Wright Edelman. Stand is an non-partisan advocacy group for kids in a public school sector where most of the decisions are made both by and for adults (disclosure: I recently joined Stand’s local advisory board). For this election cycle, Stand both contributed money and developed an endorsement strategy that reached across party lines to find candidates whom its members believed were true education champions for children.

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Can’t you NOT meet a nice young lawyer…

Posted on November 2, 2010 by axooms

Among the tensions in higher education are expensive professional schools supplying graduates with higher debt loads than their industries can bear. Recent revelations include legal graduates describing their law schools as ponzi schemes and paper mills, as detailed in this piece. Some background:

Law school, always the safe choice, became a more popular choice. Between 2007 and 2009, the number of LSAT takers climbed 20.5 percent. Law school applications increased in turn.

But now a number of recent or current law students are saying—or screaming—that they made a mistake. They went to law school, they say, and now they’re underemployed or jobless, in debt, and three years older. And statistics show that the evidence is more than anecdotal.

One Boston College Law School third-year—miraculously, still anonymous—begged for his tuition back in exchange for a promise to drop out without a degree, in anopen letter to his dean published earlier this month. “This will benefit both of us,” he argues. “On the one hand, I will be free to return to the teaching career I left to come here. I’ll be able to provide for my family without the crushing weight of my law school loans. On the other hand, this will help BC Law go up in the rankings, since you will not have to report my unemployment at graduation to US News. This will present no loss to me, only gain: in today’s job market, a J.D. seems to be more of a liability than an asset.”

Law students suffer given the burden of the loans incurred at law school (one student even included his law school in a bankruptcy filing, asking that they “admit that your business knew or should have known that Plaintiff would be in no position to repay those loans”). But they are not alone. Education has a similar problem.

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

Are liberal arts pricing themselves out of existence?

Posted on October 15, 2010 by axooms

An engaging piece which both decries the diminishing attraction of a liberal arts education and yet lays some responsibility for the shift at the very universities for whom liberal arts are the foundational core.  The money shot:

It has by now become received wisdom: college students today are less interested in traditional subjects, and have become more professionally oriented. They’ve voted with their feet, choosing business, pre-med, and engineering majors over German, art history, or comparative literature. […] By raising the cost of education to stratospheric levels, we oblige students to seek a higher return on their investment. It is this sort of economic calculation, I suggest, and not some alleged generational change, that is driving students in droves towards preprofessional degrees.

I was an undergraduate philosophy major at a liberal arts college.  I believe strongly in the value of a liberal arts education. But I am increasingly appalled at how we price this experience out of the range of first-generation college students and low-income families. It is not the outstanding student who will receive a full scholarship that suffers the most; it is the marginal student for whom a high-quality education and the exploration inherent in a liberal arts model is an even more important determination of future success.

There is considerable irony if the much decried drive away from liberal arts to more practical studies such as business is partly due to the former’s inability to address the implications of its pricing model. This irony does not diminish the damage.

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How to evolve the School Performance Framework

Posted on October 11, 2010 by axooms

The recent results of Denver’s School Performance Framework (SPF) was fairly minor news. That’s encouraging, because it means that evaluating schools, with a premium on student academic growth, is more and more part of the lexicon. No one will, or should, claim that the SPF is the only metric that matters, but it is pretty hard to argue that the data is not useful (although I’ll offer even money that someone in the comments may take up this challenge).

At the same time, after spending considerable time with the SPF, I also think it needs to evolve. Now I come to praise the SPF, not to bury it — in my opinion, the Colorado Growth Model (the engine of the SPF) is one of the most important developments in recent memory. However let’s take the SPF seriously enough to acknowledge its limitations and look for ways to improve it.

There are three main ways I think the SPF could evolve to include and sort data to provide a fuller view of school achievement. It’s been true for too long that some board members actively resist comparative data, which allows them to support pet projects and political agendas when a hard look shows their programs to be underperforming. Moving to a data-informed opinion is critical to make any significant changes in the way we educate our children.  The data I would add include: a confidence interval; inclusion of selective admissions, and a comparison by FRL.  These are all highly important variables in school evaluation. Let me explain each.

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