Category Archives: Education

Education, Peoria Public Schools

Not a single student proficient in math at Trewyn Primary School

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Courtesy of Wirepoints, Trewyn Primary School is on a list of 53 Illinois schools where not a single student can do math at grade level.

There are 386 students in Trewyn at $15,936 in tax money expended per student. And not a single student proficient in math. Think about that. That’s over six million dollars being spent with nothing to show for it. It’s even worse than it looks when you consider all the efforts the school district has gone through to inflate student grades. The lowest grade students can get on their assignments or tests is a 40 (out of 100). Even with this inflation, there is still not one student doing math at grade level out of 386 students.

And yet, all these children will get passed to the next grade level regardless. Why aren’t these kids being held back from advancing to the next grade until they master the material? Are we really helping children by inflating grades and practicing social advancement? Does the district administration care more about the money that comes from enrollment and reaching certain metrics (on paper, though not in reality) than they do about the education of children?

Education

Quote of the Day

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Discuss:

[T]he standards of the two kinds of education [liberal and practical] are fundamentally different and fundamentally opposed. The standard of liberal education is based upon definitions of excellence in the various disciplines. These definitions are in turn based upon example. One learns to order one’s thoughts and to speak and write coherently by studying exemplary thinkers, speakers, and writers of the past. One studies The Divine Comedy and the Pythagorean theorem not to acquire something to be exchanged for something else, but to understand the orders and the kinds of thought and to furnish the mind with subjects and examples. Because the standards are rooted in examples, they do not change.

The standard of practical education, on the other hand, is based upon the question of what will work, and becasue the practical is by definition of the curriculum set aside from issues of value, the question tends to be resolved in the most shallow and immediate fashion: what is practical is what makes money; what is most practical is what makes the most money. Practical education is an ‘investment,’ something acquired to be exchanged for something else—a ‘good’ job, money, prestige. It is oriented entirely toward the future, toward what will work in the ‘changing world’ in which the student is supposedly being prepared to ‘compete.’ the standard of practicality, as used, is inherently a degenerative standard. There is nothing to correct it except suppositions about what the world will be like and what the student will therefore need to know. Because the future is by definition unknown, one person’s supposition about the future tends to be as good, or as forceful, as another’s. And so the standard of practicality tends to revise itself downward to meet, not the needs, but the desires of the student who, for instance, does not want to learn a science because he intends to pursue a career in which he does not think a knowledge of science will be necessary.

It could be said that a liberal education has the nature of a bequest, in that it looks upon the student as the potential heir of a cultural birthright, whereas a practical education has the nature of a commodity to be exchanges for position, status, wealth, etc., in the future.”

—Wendell Berry, The Unsettling of America
Education, State of Illinois

Question of the Day: How should Illinois fill the NCLB void?

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While the goals behind No Child Left Behind were admirable, experience has taught us that the law has some serious flaws that are hurting our children instead of helping them. Teachers are being forced to teach to a test, while subjects like history and science are being squeezed out. And in order to avoid having their schools labeled as failures, some states lowered their standards in a race to the bottom….

Yesterday, I announced that we’ll be giving states more flexibility to meet high standards for teaching and learning. It’s time for us to let states, schools and teachers come up with innovative ways to give our children the skills they need to compete for the jobs of the future.

— President Obama, Weekly Address, 9/24/2011

States are going to be able to get waivers from the federal standards of “No Child Left Behind,” but in order to get those waivers, they will have to present another plan for improving school performance. Illinois is reportedly looking at applying for a waiver (WJBC, Chicago Tribune). Nearly all educators agree that the federal No Child Left Behind standards were unrealistic. But now that states have a chance to write their own standards, what should they be?

The question of the day is: What standards should Illinois put in place to replace federal NCLB requirements and improve school performance?

Education

Now we know how Atlanta’s schools raced to the top

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Georgia is one of ten states that won big grants in the “Race to the Top” competition last year. “Race to the Top” is an education incentive plan championed by President Obama that awards billions of dollars to states that have the best plans for school reforms. Illinois didn’t make the cut.

But in Atlanta, they figured out a sure-fire way to improve test scores: cheat.

Across Atlanta Public Schools, staff worked feverishly in secret to transform testing failures into successes.

Teachers and principals erased and corrected mistakes on students’ answer sheets.

Area superintendents silenced whistle-blowers and rewarded subordinates who met academic goals by any means possible.

Superintendent Beverly Hall and her top aides ignored, buried, destroyed or altered complaints about misconduct, claimed ignorance of wrongdoing and accused naysayers of failing to believe in poor children’s ability to learn.

For years — as long as a decade — this was how the Atlanta school district produced gains on state curriculum tests. The scores soared so dramatically they brought national acclaim to Hall and the district, according to an investigative report released Tuesday by Gov. Nathan Deal.

In the report, the governor’s special investigators describe an enterprise where unethical — and potentially illegal — behavior pierced every level of the bureaucracy, allowing district staff to reap praise and sometimes bonuses by misleading the children, parents and community they served.

The report accuses top district officials of wrongdoing that could lead to criminal charges in some cases. […]

For teachers, a culture of fear ensured the deception would continue.

“APS is run like the mob,” one teacher told investigators, saying she cheated because she feared retaliation if she didn’t.

The voluminous report names 178 educators, including 38 principals, as participants in cheating. More than 80 confessed. The investigators said they confirmed cheating in 44 of 56 schools they examined.

The scandal has prompted a lot of soul-searching among educators. Many want to blame a system that holds teachers accountable for student performance on tests: “In Atlanta, teachers who confessed to cheating told investigators they felt inordinate pressure to meet targets set by the district and faced severe consequences such as a negative evaluation or termination if they didn’t. The behavior was reinforced by a district culture of fear and intimidation directed at whistle-blowers.” Others say the individuals involved in the cheating have no one to blame but themselves for their moral/ethical lapse.

While this scandal is notable for how widespread and blatant it is, the pressure on the nation’s public schools to improve performance has prompted many less-scandalous, but questionable decisions. For instance, Peoria’s District 150 made a change to its grading policy a couple of years ago. Now, “if a student puts forth the effort and completes an assignment but receives less than 50%, the grade shall be recorded as 50%.” What is this if not institutionalized cheating? It gives credit for work that was not earned, and artificially raises averages for individual students as well as the school itself.

And there are other tricks. Scores are evaluated on a per school basis over time, so one way to reset the clock on under-performing schools and raise test score averages is to close schools that are on the academic watch list and consolidate students into larger schools. Combining low-performing students with high-performing students raises averages for the school without necessarily improving achievement among the individual low-performing students. Plus, the new consolidated school gets to start over on the state’s evaluation process. That’s not the official reason given for consolidation, however. We’re told that consolidation is necessary to save money, yet the supposed monetary benefits never seem to materialize.

Money is a very strong motivator, and that’s why the federal government is increasingly tying its money to performance. But here’s the problem: that only works for teachers and administrators, not students. Teachers and administrators need to be motivated to do their best, but so must students. What systems or incentives are in place to motivate students to learn, or to take responsibility for their own education? And what about parents? Parents, not the state, are ultimately responsible for their children’s education. What systems or incentives are in place to motivate them to take that responsibility seriously? Perhaps there are none, and perhaps there can be none. But if so, we need to find an evaluation mechanism that holds teachers accountable for what they can control and not punish them for what they cannot control.

I don’t excuse or condone the Atlanta teachers and administrators involved in the cheating scandal. What they did was wrong. But let’s not let their moral failings obscure the legitimate problems that exist within our current education system.

Education, State of Illinois

Public education ain’t what it used to be

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Readin’, writin’, and ‘rithmetic. Two out of three ain’t bad for us Illinoisans:

Illinois high school juniors no longer will be tested on writing skills during the state’s standardized tests every spring, eliminating the last Illinois writing exam and shaving about $2.4 million amid budgetary shortfalls…. “Good teachers, good schools, good principals don’t need a test,” said Barbara Kato, director of the Chicago Area Writing Project. “But the problem is, without the test, the focus on writing as a whole ends up taking a back seat.” [Source: Chicago Tribune]

R U thinking wht Im thinking?

Education, Movies

“The Cartel” touts vouchers, school choice

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I went to see “The Cartel” at The Peoria Theater over the weekend (it’s playing through Sept. 16). From a technical standpoint, I was immediately disappointed that it was a DVD played over an LCD projector. When I go to the theater, I expect to see an actual film. I recognize that many films today use digital cinematography, but 4K or even 2K digital film resolution is a far cry from a standard-def TV signal output to an LCD projector.

But leaving aside that pet peeve and getting into the actual content, “The Cartel” breaks no new ground. You’ll find the usual complaints against public education in this country — and the usual solutions. Some critiques are better than others. Teachers unions and tenure are criticized for protecting bad teachers and not adequately rewarding good teachers (good critique). Top-heavy administration and patronage hiring are blamed for keeping money away from the classroom (good critique). One of the interviewees claims there’s an inverse correlation between the quality of the school district and the number of luxury cars parked in the administration lot (ridiculous critique).

The film focused almost exclusively on New Jersey public schools, but the filmmaker stated emphatically this wasn’t a New Jersey documentary, but rather a documentary on the entire American public school system. He apparently feels the problems in New Jersey are a perfect example of what’s wrong everywhere. By and large, that’s probably true, although earlier in the movie he had some nice things to say about Maryland public schools, so evidently not all the problems addressed in the film are universal.

As for solutions, there seemed to be an implication that teachers unions have to be busted. But the most overt solution presented was school vouchers. A good part of the film was spent presenting and defending the use of vouchers. He deals head-on with the usual criticisms of voucher systems, and steadfastly defends the redeeming power of free-market forces (if kids get vouchers, the free market will create lots of high-quality private schools, the public school system will improve because they’ll want to compete with the private schools, etc.).

From a film-making standpoint, I thought the music and graphics were good, as was the editing. The movie is broken up into chapters, and each chapter forms a cohesive unit that is well-put-together and keeps your interest. However, the chapters don’t feel like they tell a story when put together. They feel more like discrete issues presented in no particular order. In other words, there’s not a sense of flow to the film. While most of the film was well-argued (whether you agreed with the arguments or not), some parts of the film felt a little too heavy-handed and propaganda-ish.

All in all, I would recommend seeing this documentary. I think it would make a good jumping-off point for discussion on the issues surrounding public education.икони

Education

L. A. Times uses value-added analysis to rate public school teachers

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Public school students are graded and tested all the time. Schools are scored too — California rates them in an annual index.

Not so with teachers.

Nationally, the vast majority who seek tenure get it after a few years on the job, practically ensuring a position for life. After that, pay and job protections depend mostly on seniority, not performance.

That’s from The Los Angeles Times, which recently published a fascinating article about evaluating teachers (read it here). They used a statistical method known as “value-added analysis” to rate teacher effectiveness in Los Angeles public schools. They explained that, “Value-added analysis offers a rigorous approach. In essence, a student’s past performance on tests is used to project his or her future results. The difference between the prediction and the student’s actual performance after a year is the ‘value’ that the teacher added or subtracted.”

The Times obtained seven years of math and English test scores from the Los Angeles Unified School District and used the information to estimate the effectiveness of L.A. teachers — something the district could do but has not.[…]

Among the findings:

  • Highly effective teachers routinely propel students from below grade level to advanced in a single year. There is a substantial gap at year’s end between students whose teachers were in the top 10% in effectiveness and the bottom 10%. The fortunate students ranked 17 percentile points higher in English and 25 points higher in math.

  • Some students landed in the classrooms of the poorest-performing instructors year after year — a potentially devastating setback that the district could have avoided. Over the period analyzed, more than 8,000 students got such a math or English teacher at least twice in a row.

  • Contrary to popular belief, the best teachers were not concentrated in schools in the most affluent neighborhoods, nor were the weakest instructors bunched in poor areas. Rather, these teachers were scattered throughout the district. The quality of instruction typically varied far more within a school than between schools.

  • Although many parents fixate on picking the right school for their child, it matters far more which teacher the child gets. Teachers had three times as much influence on students’ academic development as the school they attend. Yet parents have no access to objective information about individual instructors, and they often have little say in which teacher their child gets.

  • Many of the factors commonly assumed to be important to teachers’ effectiveness were not. Although teachers are paid more for experience, education and training, none of this had much bearing on whether they improved their students’ performance.

I highly recommend reading the whole article. A question for teachers and administrators who read my blog: what do you think of value-added analysis, and using this as a tool to evaluate teachers? The article concedes that it should not be the sole method of evaluation, but suggests that it would be beneficial if it made up 30-50% of a teacher’s review.

Education, State of Illinois

“Raise my taxes!” the people cried

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I never thought I’d see the day that I’d read this in the paper: “…the crowd turned to face the Capitol and shouted ‘Raise my taxes.'”

A rally of 15,000 people from throughout the state roared in anger and frustration outside the state Capitol on Wednesday, protesting budget cuts affecting education and social services…. Sen. Dave Koehler, D-Peoria, co-sponsored legislation in the Senate calling for increasing the state income tax from 3 percent to 5 percent.

That’s right, a crowd of Illinois residents, including many from Peoria, descended on Springfield yesterday imploring lawmakers to raise their taxes — and not a little bit, either. Going from three to five percent is a 67% increase.

Raising taxes in order to maintain/increase spending is not the answer. Instead, reforms should be made to the pension system, and programs like FamilyCare/AllKids need to be means-tested. There are undoubtedly some programs that could be cut completely.

If anyone thinks that more money is the answer, look no further than the lottery. Remember that? The lottery was going to help schools! Well, they kept their promise. The proceeds from that tax on the poor did go to schools, but then they reduced other spending on schools by a commensurate amount, so it was a zero-sum bargain — an accounting trick. They found other ways to use the net increase in funds, and it wasn’t to help schools.

I guess it shouldn’t surprise me that people would ask to have their taxes raised. After all, they voted for an increase in their sales taxes here locally in the middle of a recession to pay for a non-essential boondoggle. I guess it really is better here — residents have money to burn.

Education

Ravitch: “Race to the Top” worse than “No Child Left Behind”

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At Tuesday’s City Council meeting, Terry Knapp spoke to the council and encouraged them all to read a new book by Diane Ravitch called “The Death and Life of the Great American School System: How Testing and Choice are Undermining Education.” He wanted them (especially the Mayor) to read it before next week’s education symposium with Education Secretary Arne Duncan and school reformer Paul Vallas.

The book is available from Amazon.com here, but you can get a pretty good synopsis of her thesis by watching this lecture (two parts, approx. 15 minutes total, from the Radical Film and Lecture Series at NYU, via YouTube):

“Diane Ravitch is a historian of education. She is Research Professor of Education at New York University. She is a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution in Washington, D.C.,” and “From 1991 to 1993, she was Assistant Secretary of Education and Counselor to Secretary of Education Lamar Alexander in the administration of President George H.W. Bush,” according to Politico.

While listening to her speech, I couldn’t help but think about Peoria’s charter school, which is heavily promoted by business interests, not the least of which being the Peoria Area Chamber of Commerce. I also thought about how the school board was not even invited to next week’s education symposium — a telling omission. And finally, I thought about this article I recently read from the New York Times: “A charter school created and overseen by Stanford University’s School of Education was denied an extension of its charter on Wednesday night after several members of the school board labeled it a failure. Last month the state placed the charter school, Stanford New School, on its list of persistently lowest-achieving schools.” Ravitch is quoted in that article as saying:

“Maybe this demonstrates that schools alone cannot solve the very deep problems kids bring to school,” said Diane Ravitch, the education scholar and historian. “You cannot assume that schools alone can raise achievement scores without addressing the issues of poverty, of homelessness and shattered families.”

It’s too bad Ms. Ravitch won’t be at next week’s symposium. It would be interesting to hear her spar with Duncan and Vallas.

Education, Nation/World, Peoria Public Schools

Michelle Rhee: Blueprint for urban schools?

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I heard a story on NPR the other day about the chancellor of the Washington (D.C.) public schools, Michelle Rhee. She has a plan for improving the struggling urban school district:

She has proposed a new contract for the union that would undermine tenure, the teachers union holy of holies. The carrot is money. By tapping Mayor Fenty and private philanthropists, she is hoping to make D.C. teachers the best-paid in the country. Current teachers would actually have a choice. If they are willing to go on “probation” for a year—giving up their job security—and can successfully prove their talent, they can earn more than $100,000 a year and as much as $130,000, a huge salary for a teacher, after five years. If not, they still get a generous 28 percent raise over five years and keep their tenure. (All new teachers must sign up for the first option and go on probation for four years.) Rhee predicts that about half the teachers will choose to take their chances on accountability for higher pay, and that within five years the rest will follow, giving up tenure for the shot at merit pay hikes.

Of course, the goal of this is not only to reward successful teachers, but to get rid of “incompetent teachers,” as Rhee puts it elsewhere. The teachers union says, “You can’t fire your way into a successful school system.” Rhee counters that tenure does nothing to improve student achievement and only makes it harder to terminate poor teachers, which is bad for the children. The union questions Rhee’s ability to judge who is or is not a good or competent teacher. And back and forth it goes.

Rhee has a bargaining chip: charter schools.

About a third of D.C. parents now opt to send their kids to charter schools, which are public schools—but where the teachers are non-union. The union has lost more than a thousand of its more than 5,000 teaching slots during the past decade. Rhee, it appears to many, is not interested in protecting turf. If she can open more charter schools that are better than the regular city schools, she seems willing to let the old system wither away.

In either event, if Rhee gets her way, many are saying that it will have a ripple effect through the nation, with many other urban school districts trying to follow in Rhee’s footsteps.

District 150 is starting to look into charter schools, and on an unrelated note they’re looking for creative ways to save money. For the new math and science academy, they’re even looking to partner with Bradley University; such an arrangement “could help the university develop and train better teachers, as well as provide a better educational opportunity within District 150.” No word yet on what relationship charter school teachers would have to the union.

So, should District 150 follow Rhee’s plan for improving urban schools? Or, to put it another way, should Peoria’s public schools make tenure-busting and/or union-busting part of their strategy?