Early Education on Education

On last night's Matt Allen Show, Andrew described his series of recent posts tracing standardized test scores across Rhode Island. Stream by clicking here, or download it.

The State of Education in Rhode Island, Part 5

The same method that was applied to the changes between 8th an 11th grade NECAP results, to try to get a measure of the performance of Rhode Island's high-school systems taking into account the initial proficiency-level of the students, can also be applied to changes occurring between other grades.

The chart below is a 2D-index based on how well districts did in improving NECAP scores between the 5th and the 8th-grades...

Schools nearer the upper right-hand corner did well in both reading and math. Schools nearer the lower left-hand corner have showed declines in both areas. The charts below the fold present the underlying information on...

• Improvements in students Proficient at Reading.
• Improvements in students Proficient with Distinction at Reading.
• Improvements in students Proficient at Mathematics.

Details on the specifics of the methodology and its rationale is available, starting from here, then tracking backwards. As before, calling this plot an "index" literally means that the values associated with each city and town aren't as important as the information they can lead you to.

Two differences from the 8th-grade to 11th-grade results are immediately worth noting...

1. Between the 5th and 8th-grades, some districts did succeed in improving their number of students proficient in mathematics, unlike between the 8th and 11th-grades, where every district showed a decline. (For this reason, change in students proficient or better, rather than partially proficient or better, is used as the mathematics index.)
2. Reiterating once again that the results here are far from dispositive, it should be noted that there is a much stronger correlation here than at the high school level, between districts starting from low proficiency rates and the largest declines in proficiency. This suggests that students in Rhode Island's underperforming districts may be falling furthest behind somewhere before high school begins. Exploring this result further will require matching test results to the movement of students in and out of a district, between the starting and ending years of a measured test period.

Continue reading "The State of Education in Rhode Island, Part 5"

Funding Formula on Final Approach

Coming out of last Thursday's State Board of Regents for Education meeting at the West Warwick High School Auditorium, if I had to place a bet, I would have to put my money down in favor of a "funding formula" for distributing state education aid being passed this session, probably a plan that is very close if not identical to the plan that has been put forth by Rhode Island the Department of Elementary and Secondary Education and officially endorsed by the Regents.

Momentum for passing a "funding formula" is coming from three main sources…

1. Valid or not, Rhode Island's governing class cannot resist the argument of "49 other states do this, so we have to do it too". (We'll find out exactly what the number-of-state threshold is for this rationale when a few more states eliminate straight-party voting, but I digress)
2. Eligibility for future Federal education aid will likely be conditioned on having some kind of "funding formula" in place, and
3. Perhaps most importantly, the Department of Education has come up with a plan that is more politically viable than the "Ajello" plan (named for its primary sponsor, Providence State Representative Edith Ajello) that has dominated "funding formula" discussions for the past several years; according to the Department of Education's presentation, under their “funding formula” proposal, schools serving 71% of the students in Rhode Island can receive "more resources" (that's education official-speak for "more moolah"), without any new revenue having to be raised.

This outcome is made possible, in large measure, by drawing Rhode Island’s charter schools into the same state-aid system as the geographic-monopoly district schools and shifting a portion of state-aid away from the charters. The 71% figure also depends upon current big-aid communities not getting quite as much as they would under the usual Ajello numbers, e.g. Providence gets "only" $30 million under the Dept. of Ed. plan instead of $50 million under the Ajello plan, Woonsocket gets $4 million instead of $13 million, Pawtucket gets $7 million instead of $10 and 1/2 million, etc., with much of the difference going to communities that would "lose" under the Ajello plan (though some of the differences may also be attributable to declining enrollment in some cities over the past 2-3 years).

If one thing is most likely to stop a "funding formula" from being implemented in the very near future, it would be representatives from the traditional big-aid recipients getting greedy and trying to re-jigger the numbers to get more for themselves (already, at Thursday's meeting, a number of public comments boiled down to "this is a good start, but urban districts need more more more"). There is also the little matter of slipping a 15% cut in aid to Newport past Senate President Teresa Paiva-Weed (D - Jamestown/Newport) that cannot be entirely overlooked. However, politics being what it is, if the new “funding formula” holds together around its current form as it passes through the legislative sausage factory, there will be a large legislative majority able to vote in favor of more money for their constituents, by voting in favor of the new formula.

In the pre-Deborah Gist era of Rhode Island education policy, the impact of the new formula on charter school funding would be of definite concern -- specifically, are the cuts to charter schools intended as a backdoor way to kill charters altogether? Given her record so far, I believe that the Commissioner has earned the benefit of the doubt here and that due-diligence has probably been done to make sure the cuts won't be fatal (plus, could Federal replacement money for charters be a future possibility, if everything breaks correctly?). From a more affirmative perspective, a reasonable trade-off appears to be involved: for the cost of an upfront hit to their current aid, charters become fully integrated into a follow-the-student system for distributing state money, where increased funding is virtually automatic to charters able to attract larger numbers of students.

A few other items worth noting…

1. The new formula eliminates the "regionalization bonuses" that were given to districts that chose to regionalize in the 1990s (according to Commissioner Gist’s remarks on Thursday, the bonuses were supposed to be phased out anyway but never were, when state aid amounts got frozen in the 1990s).
2. In terms of quantifying student need, the formula uses only a single weighting-factor, the number of students receiving free or reduced priced lunch.
3. The loss in aid to Central Falls (about $11 million) won't occur as quickly as losses in other districts (on a percentage basis), as the transition will be eased along with money from a separate "state stabilization fund".
4. Commissioner Gist mentioned that the "Gallo" approach (named for Hanna the State Senator, not Frances the Superintendent), i.e. changing funding amounts only after state revenues increase, had been considered but rejected as unrealistic.

So is this a good plan for Rhode Island? As recently as two or three years ago, the "funding formula" was the only change in education policy in Rhode Island seriously being considered at the statewide level. A major component of my skepticism was that if our political capacity was limiting us to a choice of only one thing that could be changed, then the "funding formula" was a poor choice of focus as shifting money between existing education structures, without changing them in any way, was unlikely to produce any significant impact on educational outcomes. However, given the willingness now in evidence of the Education Commissioner, the Board of Regents, and even the Federal Department of Education to undertake multiple reform initiatives, concern that we will hear “we just passed a funding formula, we don't need to do anything else for a while” from our public officials has been greatly reduced, at least for the moment.

Which is not to say that the details of this plan can be forgotten about as we move towards other kinds of reforms. For one thing, Rhode Island's education reformers need to make sure some kind of anti-charter poison-pill isn’t inserted into Rhode Island law, in the middle of the night, on the last day of a legislative session, in the next few years. For another, the Department of Education and Board of Regents have to rigorously and seriously follow through with the spirit of their own recommendations (see page 12) for monitoring and updating funding policy results on a regular basis. In that vein, I would like to offer a suggestion for fiscal oversight that is important to the rectitude of any statewide "funding formula", but has been largely missing from the debate that has brought us to where we are…

A Friday Night Pedagogical Thought

Reviewing The Marketplace of Ideas by Louis Menand (subscription required), James Piereson raises a number of interesting concepts related to higher education, but this is perhaps the most fundamental:

The liberal arts at their best, he says, disseminate "knowledge that exposes the contingency of present arrangements," a surprising formulation coming from an author who takes the organization of the academy so thoroughly for granted. It is also revealing of a pedagogical outlook now pervasive in the academy: that students can learn how to think before learning anything important to think about.

At least to my experience, most of the examples used, in college lessons, are of the sort in which the answer is already presumed to be known by the professor. Race is the most common, with gender and sexuality in the mix, as well. The focus is the evil of oppression, not the borderlines of issues at which big ideas actually clash, as between civil liberties and civic structure. Slavery was and is an unmitigated evil, but concern about states' rights is not merely a sly way to support evil.

Indeed, an extremely interesting course could be built around the unintended side effects of measures taken to remedy the sins of the past. The Fourteenth Amendment comes to mind. Unfortunately, the largely progressive faculty who populate liberal arts departments don't seem inclined to offer their students a path to considering whether the easiest route to "progress" might not be the best.

Which ties into the above block quote in that grappling with actual Important Ideas, rather than trying to follow the illusory path of logic flowing from the first principle that no ideas are objectively important, might persuade developing generations that there are concepts worthy of real battle — and worthy compromise.

Privileges on Demand

Yeah, yeah, I know it sounds all right-wing conservative to say, but it's difficult not to fear for the future of our country with this sort of thing in the news:

Students and activists have staged demonstrations in recent months at public colleges across California to protest deep budget cuts that have led to steep tuition hikes, enrollment cuts, faculty furloughs and reduced course offerings.

In Berkeley, about 50 people broke through a fence surrounding Durant Hall, which is closed for renovation, and about 20 entered and occupied the building, said Cpt. Margo Bennett of the UC Police Department.

The group smashed windows, sprayed graffiti, damaged construction equipment, knocked over portable toilets and hung up a banner promoting the March 4 rally, UC officials said. Others blocked police from entering the building.

So they're protesting budget-driven cuts by causing damage that the strained budget will have to cover. Worse, they're protesting something that until very recently was considered a huge privilege.

I can't help but wonder if part of the problem is that grown-up manipulators didn't fully understand the effects on subsequent generations of all of their "rights" talk, with regard to privileges, over the past few decades.

Confusion over Gallo Accepting Union Offer

It seems there is some confusion over the latest page in the Central Falls High School story. The ProJo headline reads, "School chief, teachers agree to resume talks." There is mention of both "sides" returning to "the table," which is some of the common parlance used when it comes to contract negotiations. In the ProJo story, Gallo is quoted as saying:

“My heart skipped a beat,” Gallo said after reading Sessums’ proposal. “I thought, ‘They are basically saying they want what we want for the first time, with the kind of assurances I need.’ … This brings the union back with us, in the conversation about meaningful reform. It’s where they should be."

Further, as Supt. Gallo made clear this morning on WPRO's John DePetro Show (podcast), she's not talking about contract negotiations. The “table” the teachers are being invited back to is not a negotiating table but the one at which the reforms needed at the school will be discussed.

Additionally, it appears Supt. Gallo is not going to rescind her “fire” order until she’s sure the teachers are all in when it comes to reforming the school. She made clear in a radio interview this morning that she is holding out from rescinding her “fire” order until after the teachers take part in the planning process necessary to chart the path for fixing the school. She hopes to have that done in early May. After that, according to Gallo, then it will be up to the Board of Trustees of Central Falls to decide if they want to rescind the “fire” order.

Cumberland Approves Early Retirement Plan for Teachers

Cumberland has approved a plan designed to entice top step teachers into retirement for the purpose of saving cash.

If [20] teachers at the 10th salary step took retirement, it would save nearly $500,000, according to the board's estimate....The idea is for teachers at the first salary step to take the place of those at 10th salary step who choose retirement. Among several retirements incentives is paying 10 percent of the 2009-2010 school year's base salary on Aug. 15 or providing three years of healthcare coverage under the school district's plans. The retiree's copay would be at the same rates as those paid by people who remain employed by the school district.

This is something other school districts have done in the past, too. Heck, private industry has offered these sorts of deals for years, though not as much as they used to, so there is certainly a precedent to this sort of thing: offer the expensive middle-management types a deal to get leaner and, if need be, hire cheaper replacements.

Of course, the difference in the private sector was that, in addition to the short term savings from replacing older employees with younger, long-term savings were realized by offering those younger employees less generous benefits packages. Not so sure if that's going to happen here. And I'm not sure if making it attractive for some of your most experienced--and one would think at least a few of the best--teachers to leave is the best thing for education.

Colleges Are Liberal Havens, Even When They're Catholic

It's interesting to see the political shifts of Catholic college students assessed on a scale of agreement with Catholic doctrine:

On pro-life issues, the results indicated a "mixed pattern," it said. A majority of Catholic students leave college disagreeing that abortion should be legal but they number fewer than those who entered with that opinion, it said. Overall 56 percent said they disagreed "strongly" or "somewhat" that "abortion should be legal." ...

Like Catholic students at most public colleges, they moved toward agreeing with the church's position on the need to reduce the number of large and small weapons and its view that federal military spending should not be increased.

On the death penalty, 49 percent of Catholic students on Catholic campuses agreed "strongly" or "somewhat" with the church's opposition to the death penalty and were more likely than Catholic students at public colleges to agree with the church's social justice teaching on the need to reduce suffering in the world and "improve the human condition."

In brief, college moves kids to the left. Since the Church crosses the center line of Western politics, the students move toward the Church in some instances and away from it in others.

Management-Union Friendship and Money Seeking

Linda Borg's Sunday Projo article, "In Providence, more collaboration than conflict," weaves a tale of cooperation between the the city's schools superintendent and its teachers' union leadership:

Call it a tale of two cities.

While the superintendent and union president have been going at it in Central Falls, Brady and Smith have worked together on a plan to radically reshape five of the state's lowest-performing schools.

Her Saturday article, "Providence teachers face job uncertainty," gives some indication as to why. First of all, Providence has already effectively experienced the "turnaround model" that has Central Falls roiling:

Teachers, however, had to reapply for their jobs, and only 50 percent of the existing staff chose to do so. What made Hope High School successful was that, in the end, the teachers who stayed were committed to making radical changes, from moving to longer class periods to spending more time planning instruction.

Union President Steve Smith credits "the faculty" with initiating that idea, but whatever behind-the-scenes maneuvering there may have been, it was ultimately a difference in the union's behavior, not the district's plan. Further along in the same article, we find a clue that might explain the two sides' inclination to cooperate (emphasis added):

But for teachers to embrace dramatic change, they want the district — and the state — to give them the resources they need to get the job done, Smith said. He is bringing those concerns to School Supt. Tom Brady so that the School Department can push for federal monies to pay for additional support, whether it's creating alternative classrooms for disruptive students or remedial classes for students who are performing below grade level.

Let's take as given that the cooperation in Providence is desirable, whatever its motivation. We still should consider such evidence as the newly proposed funding formula. Providence has been underfunded, and no doubt stands to drink deeply from any pool of Race to the Top federal money that comes to the state. The Department of Education has determined that Central Falls, by contrast, is already receiving much more state money than is "fair."

In summary, the Providence union has already acquiesced to the sorts of changes that the Central Falls union is fighting, and education leaders on both sides of the negotiating table in Providence have reason to expect their good behavior to be rewarded mightily.

Avoid Long Term Ramifications: RIIL Should Deny Cranston Team Consolidation

Cranston's recent proposal to merge school sports is currently being weighed by the Rhode Island Interscholastic League. John Gilooly explains why allowing such a merger would set a bad precedent:

The problem I see is that as an association of individual high schools, if the Principals Committee allows two high schools from the same city to combine teams as a cost-saving measure, it would be hard pressed in the future to prohibit schools from two different local governments to combine some teams to save money.

Hopefully, the people in Scituate and Smithfield or Middletown and Newport never think this way, but if the precedent is set, how could the Interscholastic League not allow neighboring small communities, as well as other large cities, to save money in hard financial times by combining teams?

The result would be fewer opportunities for state’s high school students to reap the whole spectrum of benefits that come from playing for a high school varsity athletic team.

That goes against the 78-year mission of the R.I. Interscholastic League.

Trying to make the best of a bad situation by allowing team consolidation for the purpose of giving more kids the opportunity to play--while noble sounding--is a flawed, short-term fix. For while this something-is-better-than-nothing solution would save a few sports in one community, the long-term ramifications would be detrimental to student athletes in Rhode Island. As Gilooly explains, this seemingly pragmatic approach, if authorized by the RIIL, could be used by communities across the state to justify cutting and combining sports, which would mean fewer spots for student athletes.

Such unintended consequences stemming from a purported fix in school athletics isn't unprecedented: the Education policy known as Title IX--which seeks to equal the playing field for female and male participation in school sports--is often used by schools to justify cutting boys sports to help maintain that equity. It's easier to cut men's baseball at Providence College, for instance, than to add and fund a new sport for women athletes, you see. The goal may be admirable, but there's no guarantee that the means to achieving will be quite what we'd hoped.

Finally, when viewed from a political angle, the RIIL shouldn't bail out Cranston for its self-made budgetary and fiscal problems. It's up to Cranston parents and voters to exercise their power and remind the politicians of what the priorities should be, one way or another.

The State of Education in Rhode Island, Part 4 (Or "Yes, this Series Does Have an End")

So how is the high-school in your community doing in general? To help you find the answer that question, I have created an index in the form of yet another two-dimensional plot. The x-axis represents information about improvements in reading proficiency, the y-axis information about declines in mathematics proficiency. The closer a district is to the upper right hand corner, the better it did in terms of changes in scores (at least relatively speaking, as at some point it would be nice to see positive numbers on the y-axis, so some cases of "who has improved the most in mathematics" would be represented, instead of them all being "who has declined the least") while the closer a district is to the lower left, the worse it did in terms of changes in scores.

In fully technical terms, the x-axis is a weighted average, determined by…

• Multiplying each district's metric representing the increase (or decrease) in students proficient-or-better at reading calculated in Part 2 by its number of 8th-grade students who were less-than-proficient, then
• Multiplying the metric representing the increase (or decrease) in number of students proficient-with-distinction in reading calculated in part 3 by its number of 8th-grade students proficient or better, and
• Adding the products together and dividing by the total number of students in 8th-grade.

The final result is that, for districts that began in the 8th grade with most students already-proficient, the x-axis value is weighted towards the metric based on students moved from proficient to proficient-with-distinction, while in districts that began with many students less-than-proficient, the x-axis value is weighted towards the metric based on students moved from less-than-proficient to proficient-or-better. Yes, it is a bit involved, but it's a better choice than using one metric or the other as it gives every district a chance at improvement, based on where it started from, which has been the purpose of this analysis.

The y-axis, in all cases, in the decline in number of students partially-proficient in mathematics or better.

This plot is intended as a true index, in the sense that the numbers don't mean as much as does the information they can lead you to that explains their creation…

• Part 1: Starting from counts, rather than percentages.
• Part 2: Evaluating counts, in terms of opportunities taken and opportunities lost.
• Part 2 Take 2: Tables to accompany the graphs.
• Part 3: Going beyond just proficient in reading, settling for partially proficient in math.

…if you are so interested.

Everybody Needs a Dad

In a recent column, Julia Steiny ran through various ways in which fathers are, in general, distinguishable from mothers. Here's a sample:

... dads bring other huge contributions. For one thing, they play. That fatherly roughhousing that most kids love actually aids brain development. Play has been proven to enhance learning, and dads usually play with their kids more than moms. This play "promotes confidence in motor skills, courage, risk-taking and autonomy. It puts the kid on the path of healthy development and gives the child strong self-esteem," Glantz said. Even as they're wrestling with one another, the child can feel the love. And, "Dad's love is valuable like nothing else."

What all of the differences come down to, it seems to me, is that a father has unconditional love, like a mother, but without the sense of unity. As Steiny quotes from researcher Tonya Glantz:

"... think of how dads talk. It feels like: 'You are here with me' as opposed to 'You are a part of me.'"

That somewhat different relationship is not only something learned by the experience of being an actual parent, but also something that has been woven into our personalities and culture, in conformance with out biological natures. Whether you want to believe it's purely evolutionary or admit a Maker, fatherhood is expansive in the subtlety of its inherent effects on our society. (Which, of course, ties into the theological discussions that we've had around here, from time to time.)

What I've written above will have broad currency, in our culture, when the topic is education, parental responsibility, social work, and so on. However, much as fatherhood is broader than, say, an economic relationship, the concept of fatherhood and its importance ought to have implications for how we conceive of such things as marriage.

The State of Education in Rhode Island, Part 3

An examination of the NECAP reading proficiency results presented in Part 2 reveals that only 2 of 12 Rhode Island school districts that began with 70% or more of their students proficient or better in the 8th grade according to the 2005/2006 NECAPs exhibited an increase in their total numbers of students proficient by the 11th-grade. (The two districts were Portsmouth-Little Compton and Smithfield).

This raises at least two questions almost immediately. First, once a district reaches 70% proficiency, is improving the performance of the 30% who remain below the proficiency line (while not losing any of 70% above the line) a more difficult and perhaps qualitatively different problem than educating the "first" 70%? Note, for example, the contrast with districts that began in the range of 50% to 60% proficient in 8th-grade; 10 out of the 13 of these districts were able to increase their total number of student proficient. Answering this question accurately will ultimately involve either a few more years of Rhode Island data, or data from other parts of the country.

There is a second question, however, that we can go after right away: is talking about "proficient or better" where a discussion about educational achievement should end? One criticism of No Child Left Behind Act and the testing regime it has engendered is that too much emphasis is placed on making students average, perhaps at the expense on helping students excel, i.e. if schools are being held accountable for their number of students who are proficient or better, how much effort will they expend on helping the students already proficient improve from there?

The structure of NECAP provides a way to look into this question. Instead of looking for proficiency-or-better, we can look at the number of students who scored "proficient with distinction" -- the highest score attainable on the NECAP. And, at least at a first glance, the PwD results in reading provide are some of the most encouraging for education in Rhode Island so far, where between the 8th and 11th-grade NECAPs, almost every district in Rhode Island saw an increase in the number of students who scored "proficient with distinction".

Proficient-with-distinction absolute numbers can be turned this into a percentage in the same way as the proficient-or-better numbers were, with the appropriate choice of denominator. One such choice is to use the number of students who were "proficient" in the 8th grade in each district, in cases where districts increased their number of PwD students. One way to interpret this result is as a measure of how well school districts are doing with the group of students that have shown a a level of commitment to academics.

In mathematics, the basic problem is the opposite from the one of reading; given that every RI district underwent a loss of proficient-or-better students between 8th and 11th-grade results, maybe if the numbers of partially-proficient of better students are analyzed, we will be able to observe a stoppage of the bleeding.

Alas, the result is not any more heartening than the proficient or better is Rhode Island. Every district in Rhode Island saw a decline in the number of students who were partially proficient or better, and there is no avoiding the fact that mathematics education everywhere in Rhode Island is in a state of complete collapse.

Continue reading "The State of Education in Rhode Island, Part 3"

President Obama Uses Rhode Island Education Reform Examples

In a speech to Americas Promise Alliance to tout a $900 million school turnaround program, President Obama turned to Rhode Island for both positive and negative examples (h/t ProJo):

We'll not only challenge states to identify high schools with graduation rates below 60 percent, we're going to invest another $900 million in strategies to get those graduation rates up. Strategies like transforming schools from top to bottom by bringing in a new principal, and training teachers to use more effective techniques in the classroom. Strategies like closing a school for a time and reopening it under new management, or even shutting it down entirely and sending its students to a better school.

And strategies like replacing a school's principal and at least half of its staff. Now, replacing school staff should only be done as a last resort. The public servants who work in America's schools -- whether they're principals or teachers, or counselors or coaches -- work long and hard on behalf of our children and they deserve our gratitude. Keep in mind I've got a sister who's a teacher, my mother spent time teaching -- one of the most important jobs that we have in this country. We've got an obligation as a country to give them the support they need -- because when principals and teachers succeed, then our children succeed.

So if a school is struggling, we have to work with the principal and the teachers to find a solution. We've got to give them a chance to make meaningful improvements. But if a school continues to fail its students year after year after year, if it doesn't show signs of improvement, then there's got to be a sense of accountability.

And that's what happened in Rhode Island last week at a chronically troubled school, when just 7 percent of 11th graders passed state math tests -- 7 percent. When a school board wasn't able to deliver change by other means, they voted to lay off the faculty and the staff. As my Education Secretary, Arne Duncan, says, our kids get only one chance at an education, and we need to get it right.

Of course, getting it right requires more than just transforming our lowest performing schools. It requires giving students who are behind in school a chance to catch up and a path to a diploma. It requires focusing on students, from middle school through high school, who face factors at home, in the neighborhood, or in school that put them at risk of dropping out. And it requires replicating innovative ideas that make class feel engaging and relevant -- because most high school dropouts in a recent study said the reason they dropped out was that they weren't interested in class and they weren't motivated to do their work.

So that's why we'll build on the efforts of places like Communities in Schools that make sure kids who are at risk of dropping out have one-on-one support. That's why we'll follow the example of places like the Met Center in Rhode Island that give students that individual attention, while also preparing them through real-world, hands-on training the possibility of succeeding in a career.

Whether it passes or fails, it sure looks like Rhode Island is going to be on the forefront of education reform.

The State of Education in Rhode Island, Part 2 Take 2

Oftentimes, information communicated in terms of underlying counts gives people a sense of what is reasonable and what is possible that can be lost when results are presented solely in terms of percentages. So before moving on to the part 3 post in the State of Education in RI series, I am going to post in a tabular form the numbers that the part 2 graphs were based on.

In the tables below, the second column shows the change (by district) in total number of students proficient or better, as measured by the 8th then 11th grades NECAPs. The absolute numbers of students used to calculate these differences were presented in Part 1. In all cases, this column provides the numerator of the percentage shown in column five.

The third column is the number of students who were proficient or better on the 8th-grade NECAPs. In cases where the total number of students who were proficient or better decreased between 8th and 11th grade results, column three is used as the denominator of the percentage in column five, defining column five as the change in the number of less than proficient students in a district, between grades 8 and 11, as a percentage of the number of students who were proficient or better in grade 8.

The fourth column is the number of students who were less than proficient, i.e. who scored "partially proficient" or "not proficient", on the 8th-grade NECAPs. In cases where the total number of students who were proficient or better increased between 8th and 11th grade results, column four is used as the denominator of the percentage in column five, defining column five as the change between grades 8 and 11 in the number of proficient or better students in a district, as a percentage of the number of students who were less-than-proficient in grade 8.

In other words, if the number of students who were proficient in a district went up between 8th and 11th grades, column five is the percentage of less-than-proficient students as measured in the 8th grade who advanced. If the number of students who were at least proficient went down, column five is the percentage of proficient-or-better students as measured in the 8th grade who declined. As stated in Part 1 of Part 2, this split metric isn't ideal. In the case of districts that experienced declines in number of students proficient, no distinction is made between those who advanced a large number (or large percentage) of already proficient students, versus those who advanced smaller totals. This is why it is useful to plot results described here in conjunction with the starting percentage of students proficient or better from each district, to provide a look at the changes over time than can occur in districts that start from similar levels (when you look at a horizontal slice of the 2D-plot) or from different levels (when you look at the entire plot) of academic achievement.

Results in this post are sorted from highest percentage to the lowest. Part 3 in the series to appear on Monday.

Community	Change in # of Students PoB at Reading, between 8th and 11th Grades	# of 8th-Graders Proficient or Better at Reading, '05 & '06 NECAP	# of 8th-Graders Less-than-Proficient at Reading, '05 & '06 NECAP	Change in # PoB at Reading, between 8th and 11th Grades, as % of '05/'06 8th-Graders LtP
Bristol-Warren	71	344	191	37.2%
Foster-Glocester	54	285	146	37.0%
Chariho	82	379	233	35.2%
Providence	634	1115	2704	23.4%
Westerly	38	358	185	20.5%
Woonsocket	112	293	697	16.1%
Tiverton	19	228	130	14.6%
Smithfield	13	332	93	14.0%
Burillville	23	287	166	13.9%
Newport	20	184	198	10.1%
Central Falls	40	150	403	9.9%
Cranston	42	1090	703	6.0%
North Providence	11	390	194	5.7%
West Warwick	11	339	255	4.3%
Cumberland	11	568	264	4.2%
East Providence	17	532	438	3.9%
Portsmouth-Little Compton	3	412	98	3.1%

---

Community	Change in # of Students PoB at Reading, between 8th and 11th Grades	# of 8th-Graders Proficient or Better at Reading, '05 & '06 NECAP	# of 8th-Graders Less-than-Proficient at Reading, '05 & '06 NECAP	Change in # PoB at Reading, between 8th and 11th Grades, as % of '05/'06 8th-Graders PoB
Barrington	-2	526	47	-0.4%
North Smithfield	-9	224	89	-4.0%
Warwick	-50	1119	711	-4.5%
Lincoln	-25	400	138	-6.3%
East Greenwich	-25	357	58	-7.0%
Exeter-West Greenwich	-17	241	97	-7.1%
Coventry	-55	641	258	-8.6%
South Kingstown	-52	518	144	-10.0%
Narragansett	-22	210	38	-10.5%
North Kingstown-Jamestown	-82	697	190	-11.8%
Scituate	-34	262	53	-13.0%
Middletown	-34	242	142	-14.0%
Pawtucket	-94	655	900	-14.4%
Johnston	-121	341	228	-35.5%

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Community	Change in # PoB at Mathematics, between 8th and 11th Grades	# of 8th-Graders Proficient or Better at Math, '05 & '06 NECAP	# of 8th-Graders Less-than-Proficient at Math, '05 & '06 NECAP	Change in # PoB at Math, between 8th and 11th Grades, as % of '05/'06 8th-Graders PoB
Barrington	-105	485	88	-21.6%
East Greenwich	-95	341	74	-27.9%
Lincoln	-129	344	192	-37.5%
Narragansett	-67	176	70	-38.1%
Portsmouth-Little Compton	-148	381	129	-38.8%
Westerly	-121	296	247	-40.9%
Bristol-Warren	-120	293	242	-41.0%
Chariho	-145	347	268	-41.8%
Cumberland	-186	433	401	-43.0%
North Kingstown-Jamestown	-265	602	285	-44.0%
South Kingstown	-211	476	188	-44.3%
Burillville	-98	213	240	-46.0%
North Smithfield	-96	198	115	-48.5%
Foster-Glocester	-131	270	161	-48.5%
Smithfield	-124	255	170	-48.6%
Scituate	-121	240	74	-50.4%
North Providence	-127	237	352	-53.6%
Cranston	-418	779	1019	-53.7%
Middletown	-142	264	121	-53.8%
Exeter-West Greenwich	-120	219	118	-54.8%
Providence	-488	873	3008	-55.9%
Newport	-98	174	209	-56.3%
Coventry	-326	569	329	-57.3%
Woonsocket	-139	241	761	-57.7%
West Warwick	-178	300	291	-59.3%
Tiverton	-134	215	143	-62.3%
Warwick	-593	923	901	-64.2%
East Providence	-297	437	533	-68.0%
Johnston	-157	226	346	-69.5%
Central Falls	-64	85	492	-75.3%
Pawtucket	-429	552	1025	-77.7%

A Regionalization Correction

I've made one set of corrections to the education statistics presented at the beginning of last week (Part 1 here, Part 2 here), specifically to the results for North Kingstown and Portsmouth. As the result of agreements between towns, North Kingstown High is the public high school attended by students from Jamestown and Portsmouth High is the public high school attended by students from Little Compton. Therefore, to properly establish the starting point for an approximate cohort of North Kingstown 11th-graders, 8th-grade totals from North Kingstown plus Jamestown should be used. Likewise, the starting point for Portsmouth's 11th-grade results is the 8th grade totals from Portsmouth plus Little Compton.

And with that, we can resume our tour through the education outcomes in Rhode Island's cities and towns…

Rhode Island Statewide Coalition Winter Meeting Table of Contents

Anchor Rising's complete coverage of the Rhode Island Statewide Coalition's winter meeting:

• My on-the-scene liveblog
• Video: RISC Chairman Harry Staley's opening remarks
• Video: 630AM/99.7FM Host John DePetro
• Video: Central Falls Superintendent Frances Gallo
• Video: RISC President James Beale and Business Network Organizer Jeff Deckman
• Video: Rhode Island Governor Don Carcieri
• Video: Board of Regents Member Angus Davis

Board of Regents Member Angus Davis at RISC's Winter Meeting

NOTE: Any members of the media who couldn't make it to the meeting and rely on this video for future reports are encouraged to do so, but a brief note of the video's source would be appreciated.

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Rhode Island Board of Regents member Angus Davis came out with guns blazing in a surprise speech at the Winter meeting of the Rhode Island Statewide Coalition, as described in my liveblog of the event. (More video in the extended entry.)

Davis was especially animated when discussing an email from gubernatorial candidate Linc Chafee at the beginning of this clip.

Yesterday, I received an email from Senator Chafee. In this email, Senator Chafee asked for clarification on whether or not teachers had really been offered 100% job security, describing it as, quote, the basic question that must be settled, unquote. He said he does not want to, quote, inherit the labor mess, unquote, as he works to build a more prosperous Rhode Island as governor.

What kind of leadership thinks the basic question about a school in which only half of children graduate and 90% can't do basic math — what kind of leadership thinks that the basic question involves job security for its adults rather than the educational outcomes for its children?

Continue reading "Board of Regents Member Angus Davis at RISC's Winter Meeting"

Central Falls Superintendent Frances Gallo at RISC's Winter Meeting

NOTE: Any members of the media who couldn't make it to the meeting and rely on this video for future reports are encouraged to do so, but a brief note of the video's source would be appreciated.

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Herewith, the video of the speech given by Central Falls Superintendent Frances Gallo at the Winter meeting of the Rhode Island Statewide Coalition, as described in my liveblog of the event. (More video in the extended entry.)

Although the entire speech is notable as the most comprehensive statement of Supt. Gallo's position that I've seen (and I don't claim to have searched high and low), the beginning of this segment may be a new news item:

I'll answer now, although I was never asked by anyone: No. We can't mediate now. I'll say it clearly, and I mean no offense to anyone, but those ads continue. What kind of an effort at true desire for change when you keep those ads.

Continue reading "Central Falls Superintendent Frances Gallo at RISC's Winter Meeting"

Funding Formulas

A new funding formula for schools--to be phased in over a few years--is being floated.

The Barrington School District would see a boost of $3.8 million, or nearly 190 percent, over the next five years. Other winners include Providence (up $28.7 million, or more than 15 percent), Cranston (up $9.6 million, or almost 29 percent) and Pawtucket (up $6.9 million, or nearly 11 percent).

State Department of Education officials worked with Brown University to craft the plan and quietly shared drafts of the plan in recent weeks with some school districts, interest groups and legislative leaders, but planned a formal release at next Thursday's meeting of the Board of Regents for Elementary and Secondary Education.

State lawmakers have for years considered formula proposals, but this represents the Department of Education's first formal proposal. Members of the House and Senate are expected to be briefed next week on the complicated formula that is sure to ignite a political firestorm.

Communities that lose funding would have as many as 10 years to absorb the cuts.

Central Falls heads the list of losers, down $11.6 million, or almost 26 percent. Others include the Bristol-Warren school district (down $9.1 million, almost 47 percent), the Metropolitan Regional Career and Technical Center, in Providence, (down $8.2 million, or 64 percent) and the Chariho School District (down $6.6 million, or nearly 47 percent). Aquidneck Island communities would be particularly hard hit as well; its three communities would lose a combined $7.4 million, or almost 29 percent.

This should be interesting.

Yeah, We Have No Idea

Here's another instance of the disconnect of the labor unions:

"We think it’s an outrage," Jane Sessums, president of the Central Falls Teachers Union, said, as hundreds of union supporters from across the state began flowing into Jenks Park. "Our members are feeling awful, devastated. How would you feel, being terminated?"

One gets the impression that, on some level, they don't believe that anybody ever gets laid off anywhere. Some construction companies in the Newport area have laid off almost as many employees as work in Central Falls. The worst part is that the teachers could have avoided the whole thing if the unions weren't so intent on standing their ground in hopes of averting a statewide conflagration of concessions and reform.

Yorke Airs Both Sides of Central Falls Debate

Dan Yorke spoke with both Central Falls Superintendent Francis Gallo (podcast link) and Central Falls High School Guidance Counselor George McLaughlin (podcast link) on his show yesterday. Supt. Gallo explained that she was stymied by the union in trying to work out a solution based on the "transformation model." But first she wanted assurances on as first step on transformation model:

1) increase length of school day by around 20 minutes
2) formalize committment by teachers to tutor 1 hr a week to ascertain its impact / effectiveness
3) have lunch with students once a week as an informal way to get-to-know each other, not as a lunch duty
4) two weeks of curriculum work in the summer at $30/hr
5) 90 minutes a week for teacher team meetings (common planning) @ $30/hr
6) 3rd party evaluation that could lead to teacher firings as necessary

As Yorke later elaborated, the only difference between these assurances and the "turnaround model" is that #6 is a termination of all teachers and a maximum re-hiring of 50% of the current teaching staff. Related to the evaluation/firings (#6), Gallo explained that she had started discussions thinking that 80% of the teachers would be retained but eventually told the union that she would not fire any teachers if they would go along with the rest of her plan. According to Gallo, the union leadership was unresponsive. (And she took the extra step of detailing this final proposal in a letter to CF Teacher union leadership).

During his time, McLaughlin explained that all he wanted was for the parties to go to the table and work something out. He gave his perspective as someone in the school and reiterated that the problem wasn't about money but about job security. When Yorke explained that Gallo had taken teacher firings off the table (as just described) and had a letter to prove it, McLaughlin said it was incumbent upon Gallo to show the letter. To this, Yorke made the counter-point that McLaughlin could just as easily go to Gallo (or union leadership) and check it himself.

McLaughlin also tried to score debate points by saying Gallo was inconsistent regarding the lunch period (item #3) because she had removed the teachers from lunch duty in the first place. (Here, it's worth contrasting this with what Gallo said: it seems she was addressing this potential contention by emphasizing that the new lunch hour request was explicitly to spend time with kids, not as a "duty"--I wonder if she's heard this "talking point" before?). But, as Yorke pointed out, the only reason she had removed the teachers from lunch duty was because the union wanted a time concession somewhere to make up for previous requests (from prior years) that Gallo had made concerning common planning time and the like. In short, McLaughlin accused Gallo of telling only half the story....while only telling half the story. (McLaughlin is obviously a guy who genuinely cares for his school, the kids and his colleagues...he's just got a lot of years in the education industrial cocoon, which informs his perspective).

UPDATE: Today, Yorke has posted the letter from Gallo to the union. The key excerpt:

I need to re-emphasize that the Transformation Model is the only model in which it is possible for the majority of teachers and administrators at the school to retain their jobs.

Unfortunately, to date we have been unable to reach agreement with you regarding the implementation of key elements of the Transformation Model, specifically including the following:

1. Increase the length of the high school day so that the student day is 8AM – 3 PM
2. Formalize the high school teacher commitment of weekly tutoring for one hour outside of school time
3. Each teacher will partake of a communal lunch with students one day each week
4. Agree to continue paid professional development for two weeks outside of the typical school calendar
5. Agree to meet for 90 minutes each week in order to look at student work, assess data, plan units of study and seek continuous improvement in professional practice
6. Acknowledge that third party evaluators will begin evaluation of all high school teachers on March 1, 2010.

Please note that these six elements listed above are what I view as the core elements of my being able to inform the Commissioner that Transformation is a viable option for our high school. For your convenience, I have attached (Attachment 1) all elements of both the Transformation and Turnaround models directly from the Protocol.

With your agreement to move forward, I will notify the Commissioner that Central Falls has selected the Transformation School Reform Model. Without your agreement, since the Closure and Restart models are not viable options at this time, it will be incumbent upon me to either choose the Turnaround School Reform Model for Central Falls or inform Commissioner Gist that we have collectively failed to select an intervention model for the high school and cannot begin planning for implementation. Pursuant to the Protocol, that latter option “shall be cause to trigger the reconstitution authorities granted” to the Board of Regents to Reconstitute Central Falls High School. In the case of either Turnaround or Reconstitution, I cannot provide any assurances to any faculty member or administrator at the high school that they will remain employed at the start of the next school year.

It is my sincere desire that we find a way to work together to implement Transformation, which I firmly believe is in the best interests of the students of the high school, as well as the members of the Central Falls Teachers Union.

As Gallo stated, though the letter doesn't explicitly state that there will be no job loss, point #6 mentions an evaluation process and does not mention any teacher firings, such as an 80/20 (retention/let go) formula. The clear implication is that the transformational model, which Gallo was trying to get the teachers to go with, was the best chance for the most teachers to have security in the future.

Not Much of an Education Story

We're in sad circumstances when this hardly seems like much of a story at all:

The [Cranston] School Committee Tuesday approved a nearly $123.6-million budget that eliminates high school teams, the enrichment program [aka, honors programs], the elementary school strings, band and choral program, and lays off about 16 employees.

The teams cut are: freshman baseball, basketball and football; girls junior varsity field hockey; golf (coed); tennis (boys and girls); and indoor track (boys and girls).

Rhode Island students are being palpably harmed because adults lack the imagination and political will to beat back other adults' greed. Which brings us to Pat Crowley testifying before the RI House Finance Committee:

The education cuts would apply immediate pressure on municipalities to raise property taxes, cut staff or reduce student programs, according to Patrick Crowley, assistant executive director for the National Education Association of Rhode Island.

What's missing from Crowley's list is something that officials fear to make a public point about: reductions in remuneration. The reason is that it's the obvious necessity. They behave as if negotiations and concessions are some mysterious bending of reality that happens when officials and union leaders get together for verbal fencing behind closed doors. They're wrong, and they should fear (as I do) that continuing failure to step forward into the light and declare the game over will result in voters' demanding a Central Falls in every town.

Re: Times of Drasticness

By way of follow up, I asked Director of Administration and Finance Doug Fiore a couple of questions after tonight's school committee meeting, here are various interesting data points derived from our conversation:

• Approximately $130,000 of the $450,000 increase in health insurance costs would have been erased from the next budget if the union hadn't blocked the intended coshare increase from 12% to 18%. I assume (but did not clarify) that $260,000 would have been saved if that percentage had been applied to this year and next.
• The layoffs and reassignments that the district is leaving open as possible by sending out notices to teachers would, in total, save $1.3 million.
• That same amount could be saved by reducing combined salaries and benefits across the board by approximately 8%.
• That means that the current shortfall of $750,000 could be covered with an across-the-board reduction of about 4-5%.

I want to stress that these are ballpark figures provided while wrapping up a meeting, so they shouldn't be taken as working numbers. I'm merely trying to illustrate comparative options for covering the budget shortfall that, for some reason, aren't aired publicly.

Times of Drasticness Begin

I was a few minutes late to tonight's Tiverton School Committee meeting, and it was already underway. The high school library is pretty well filled, which means probably about 30-40 people, an apparent mix of students, teachers, and residents. The topic: closing the high school. Of course, when the union is looking for a juicy raise, the teachers pack the gymnasium, which means three digits rather than two.

Frankly, I can't help but recall the first school committee meeting after the financial town meeting at which the electorate restrained the school district's budget by $627,000 or so. At that time, the message coming from people associated with the district was that the committee had to do something drastic to drive parents to the financial town meeting and vote for lots of money.

Now Superintendent Bill Rearick said, just now: "Folks in our community need to decide what they want." He says they should go to town meetings, including the financial town meeting. This is just a dance to drive a few hundred more people to the FTM to raise taxes by double digits for everybody else.

7:25 p.m.

Rearick argued that adjustments to labor would only solve this year's problem, not the systemic problems that are yielding such high deficits, ignoring:

• That one of our problems is that raises are compounding.
• That the committee spent hundreds of thousands of dollars in "stimulus funds."
• That he really shouldn't leave such things as pensions out of the labor costs.

We're something like $750,000 short for next year. Had the committee frozen compensation rather than giving out retroactive raises, it would now be only about $150,000 short, and the federal stimulus money was much beyond that.

7:36 p.m.

Deborah Pallasch just read a letter on behalf of the Democratic Town Committee urging rapid resolution of negotiations with the union. No doubt some of the Democrats are urging the union to secure the maximum as they can right now, because they see that things are only going to deteriorate.

7:39 p.m.

A resident whom I don't know just said that the retirement communities that moved to town in recent decades are "cancers on our community." He must be among the faction calling for unity and cooperation in town.

7:41 p.m.

If he's talking about Tiverton Citizens for Change, I can testify that a majority of the core members are not gated community types.

Jan Bergandy took the opportunity to say that people have to turn out for the FTM

Dave Nelson is now addressing the committee. As he's began speaking, he turned periodically to face the audience. Unbelievably, Deborah Pallasch shouted from the audience: "You need to address the committee, not the audience." Who does she think she is?

7:49 p.m.

Here's an interesting angle: A resident just asked whether there's been any communication about bringing Little Compton students into our system. I know they used to do that, and I'm not sure what happened. But it does raise the interesting point that the district has an opportunity if it concentrates on making its programs attractive.

That means getting more for its money.

The next speaker talked about hiring maintenance staff who keep the property up, rather than merely cleaning it. Again: The upshot is that the district now allocates its money poorly. It needs to shift some of its per-pupil expenditures toward new programs, some to maintenance, some to technology, and so on. That will mean holding existing labor flat or somewhat decreased to make the school more attractive — especially with the possibility of increased student choice in the near future.

7:58 p.m.

School Committee Chairman Jan Bergandy just pointed out that the argument that some have made that losing the high school would make property values plummet has the problem that Little Compton's property values are much higher even though the town has no high school. It's not really a valid comparison, because the two towns are very different, but it's interesting that he argued that way.

Deb Pallasch just suggested that the committee "do whatever it can do" to drive people to the FTM.

8:12 p.m.

They've moved on to talking about possible health insurance switches. The upshot is that it would take a lot of money and research even just to find out whether switching would make economic sense.

8:17 p.m.

Health insurance increases account for $450,000 of the current shortfall. Not sure what percentage of that is due to the union's argument that it didn't have to negotiate a new contract this year and would not accept the budgeted increase of health insurance coshare from 12% to 18%.

Now they're discussing the 31 pink slips and 15 displacement letters that the district will send out to meet the legislative deadline of March 1 for such notices.

How absurd is it that the district must simply pick the junior employees for all layoffs. Are there no older teachers whose absence would save more money and whose absence would minimally affect the students (or perhaps not at all)? Moreover, I just don't understand how the union can make all of the arguments for class size, solidarity, and basically its entire argument for existing if it would rather cut young teachers loose rather than give concessions.

A young librarian is making an extended argument for what her department accomplishes. Good for her. None of these programs should be cut.

8:35 p.m.

Just an observation: Supt. Bill Rearick is offering a conciliatory lay-off-related speech, encouraging more participation in the leadership process, but his tone of voice is confrontational. His tone isn't always so, which makes me wonder who, in his mind, he's confronting.

8:41 p.m.

A recent graduate of the high school just argued on behalf of the library staff, and she closed by expressing the opinion that "a more critical eye" should be applied to the layoff process. Perhaps it's an introduction to the effect that the union system can have on a professional workforce. It's plainly wrong and strategically ludicrous.

8:47 p.m.

Bergandy mentioned that there's been no movement with NEA negotations, except the scheduling of a March 4 mediation.

8:49 p.m.

I'm increasingly persuaded that union-friendly legislators set the deadline for layoffs so early precisely for the angst and disruption it causes among teachers and the community, even though budgeting can't possibly be complete by this point. The law should change, and teachers should be leading the charge.

Politics & Pupils

Monique and Matt talked Central Falls and Chafee on last night's Matt Allen Show. Stream by clicking here, or download it.

Parents Can Only Teach What They Know

The raging blame debate, when it comes to public-school students' performance, made an appearance in RI Education Commissioner Deborah Gist's online chat for the Providence Journal:

Parent: As a parent of 2 children, I know how crucial parent involvement is. Has anyone looked at educating the parents of the kids of these failing schools? You can replace the teachers....and you can give new teachers incentives to change things around. But this is a band aid. Teachers are blamed for too many problems. They can't be expected to solve the problems of society. Teachers have many many challenges these days- more so than 25 years ago. Kids and parents need to take responsibility for on education. Just look at math grades around the state. Kids don't know how to deal with fractions because they don't know how to tell time on an analgoue clock. But the teachers are blamed. Let's take a look at the real problems. Educate the kids - the parents- look around the country at other programs. Please don't make this mistake.

Deborah Gist: Parent involvement is important, and supportive, engaged parents are important partners in a child's education. Fortunately, we know that great teaching can overcome those instances when children have parents who are unable to provide that level of support. I don't blame teachers, but I do hold them accountable for results. I also hold myself and everyone on my team accountable.

I wonder if this mightn't be an area in which productive cooperation is actually possible. With math in particular, many students aren't being taught in a manner with which their parents are familiar. Indeed, from time to time one reads or hears about parents' being explicitly instructed not to teach their children the "old" (tried and true) methods of mathematics while helping them with their homework. In a society in which parents are already too disengaged, increasing the likelihood that they'll appear ignorant in front of their children isn't going to help.

Something similar surely comes into play with the fading of literary classics from the curriculum and the reworking of history books to reflect the radical tinge of the academy. A "back to basics" campaign in which the commissioner encourages a resurgence of more-traditional curricula would be an excellent complement to her reforms related to the structure of the public education system.

A Day in the Life of RI Education

A look at the papers today gives quite a little snapshot of the sorry state of education in Rhode Island. Central Falls is firing it's high school teachers as a way to deal with a chronically under-performing school (with the blessing of the State Education Commissioner Gist and U.S. Secretary of Education, Arne Duncan) because the teachers union didn't want to put in a couple more hours a week at $30/hr; Cranston is cutting school sports and other activities instead of cutting where it would hurt adults; the budget crunch is prompting West Warwick and Cumberland to look at school consolidation--something worth studying on its own, not as part of crisis management; Providence held a meeting about their troubled schools and all of 30 or so people came; nor did anyone show at a funding formula hearing at the State House; finally, apparently Pawtucket has been spending about $10 million a year over budget on their schools. Union games, knee-jerk solutions, playing on the emotions of parents, parental apathy and budget mismanagement. All predictable and preventable if only more stakeholders (which is pretty much every RI taxpayer!) had the will to make the necessary changes.

Thankfully, we seem to have an education Commissioner who is willing to follow up her rhetoric with actions and lead us forward with new ideas and a fresh attitude. It's up to us to support her (as some are) by backing her proposals and demanding accountability and change in council and committee meetings. The alternative is more of the same stories, day after day.

Steps Don't Just Go UP

Reading a couple different articles (and the comments) prompted me to go looking for the Rhode Island statute that required teacher steps. Here it is (16-7-29):

§ 16-7-29 Minimum salary schedule established by community. – (a) Every community shall establish and put into full effect by appropriate action of its school committee a salary schedule recognizing years of service, experience, and training for all certified personnel regularly employed in the public schools and having no more than twelve (12) annual steps. The term "school year" as applied to the salary schedule means the ten (10) calendar months beginning in September and ending the following June.

(b) Nothing in this section shall prohibit a freeze or reduction of the monetary value of the steps in the salary schedule through the collective bargaining process. (emphasis mine)

Part (b) is pretty interesting, no? So, while steps are indeed required, they can be "level funded" or reduced. All the law really asks is that a predictable schedule be in place. Seems like school committees could take a variety of innovative approaches to redesigning the schedules such that cost savings could be built into the schedule.

The State of Education in Rhode Island, Part 2

The district-by-district count data, presented in yesterday's post, on changes between the 8th and 11th grades in the numbers of students proficient in reading and math needs to be compared to a measure of opportunities for change, in order to be useful for purposes of analysis and accountability. Depending on whether a change in number of students proficient was positive or negative, two possible measures of opportunities are...

• The number of students who started out as less-than-proficient, when the number of students who are proficient or better in a subject increases (net opportunities taken), or
• The number of students who started out as proficient or better, when the number of students who are proficient in a subject declines (net opportunities lost).

These definitions do involve a degree of oversimplification. For districts with large numbers of students proficient in the 8th-grade, they do not give explicit "credit" for the effort required to move large percentages of proficient 8th graders to 11th-grade proficiency. On the other hand, for districts that begin with fewer numbers of proficient students, larger percentages of their student bodies must be moved to proficiency, in order to match the improvement percentages of districts that began with higher-numbers of students already proficient. Also, these opportunity definitions sidestep the question of, to use specific numbers in an example, how much easier or harder moving the “last” 10% of a student body to proficiency is than moving the "middle" 50%.

Since it is unlikely that all of the different possible effects balance one another out, instead of presenting results in a 1D table, the results will be presented in 2 dimensions so that -- in the spirit of a value-added analysis -- changes in groups of students who began from roughly the same place can be compared.

The y-axis of the plot below shows the percentage of students who scored proficient or better on the 8th-grade NECAPs in 2005 and 2006, i.e. the “starting point” for each district. The meaning of the x-axis changes, depending on whether the value is positive or negative…

• For positive values, the x-axis represents the change between the 8th and 11th grades in number of students who scored proficient or better in reading, expressed as the percentage of students who were less-than-proficient in that district in the 8th grade.
• For negative values, the x-axis represents the change between the 8th and 11th grades in number of students who scored proficient or better in reading, expressed as the percentage of students who were proficient or better in that district in the 8th grade.

Since 8th-grade proficiency percentage is the baseline, effects of dropout rates are not hidden in the x-axis of this plot, as each student who drops out represents either a lost opportunity to move a less-than-proficient student to proficiency or a loss of a proficient student.

Where a district sits along the x-axis is an attempt to measure how well it did or didn’t do in the time-interval considered, with a reduced dependence on starting point. Certainly, the rankings according to the x-axis are different from the usual rankings of Rhode Island school districts. Between the 8th and 11th grades, Central Falls, Woonsocket and Providence saw the number of students who were proficient in reading increase by 10% to 23% of the percentage of students who were less-than-proficient in 8th grade. Districts that showed improvements according to this metric, within these bounds include Burrillville, Tiverton, Westerly, Smithfield and North Kingstown.

The graph above can also be read in terms of horizontal bands. The most "diverse" horizontal band lies between 8th-grade proficiency starting-points of 60% and 70%. Some districts (Bristol-Warren, Foster-Glocester, Chariho) increased their numbers of students proficient in reading by nearly 40% of their less-than proficient 8th-grade total while other districts, like Middletown, Warwick and Johnston experienced declines in the number of students proficient or better in reading -- in the case of Johnston, a very substantial decline. (And no, this is not in and of itself an argument for regionalization.)

Finally (for reading), instead of plotting the y-axis in terms of the starting point 8th-grade proficiency, results could also be plotted in terms of the final 11th-grade percentage of students proficient. Even better, both starting and ending proficiency percentages can be shown on the same plot…

The results here are a bit counter-intuitive, as districts like Pawtucket and Middletown can experience a drop in the number of students proficient in reading while their proficiency percentages increase, because large numbers of less-than-proficient students have left the system. I would suspect much of this type of result is the result of dropout rates.

In math, because every district experienced a decline in the number of students who were proficient, in every case, we are measuring the loss from the number of 8th graders who started out proficient, and essentially looking for who declined the most or the least. The results here appear to much more directly correlate to starting proficiency than do the reading results.

(N.B.: Results for North Kingstown and Portsmouth have been corrected from the original version of this post, to correctly account for the fact that high-schools in these districts serve students from Jamestown and Little Compton, respectively.)

In Part 3, we’ll take on some refinements of data presented above, to answer 1) if we can do anything to further analyze districts that are starting from high numbers of students already proficient 2) the same question, but for districts starting from very low numbers of math students already proficient, and 3) how can we move beyond asking if a basic level of proficiency is the only thing we should be looking at?

The Cause of the Firings

Every working Rhode Islander, and all of those looking for work, can see the disconnection of Central Falls union rhetoric:

"We still hold that this termination of the entire faculty is a violation of the contract and contrary to state law and federal law as well," [teachers union President Jane] Sessums said. "This is a termination of the entire faculty without cause, we believe."

You want cause?

• Only 4% of students proficient in math in 2008-2009, up from 3% the year before, with 75% "substantially below proficient."
• Only 45% proficient in reading.
• Only 29% proficient in writing.
• Only 17% proficient in science.
• A 48% graduation rate.
• A 50% failure rate for the current school year.

As a body — and it is the teachers' decision to be handled as a collective union — the teachers are failing. Every year, every day, students are deprived of a successful educational experience. That must change, and since the union's been blocking the avenue for change that doesn't entail a mass firing, a drastic step must be taken.

The Same Old Local Political Roundabout

As circumstances deteriorate, it's instructive to observe the varying reactions and strategies for handling them. In Tiverton, the established order, so to speak, has redoubled its efforts to keep the negative focus on Tiverton Citizens for Change in the hopes that people won't notice that the plans for improvement bear a striking resemblance to the plans that got the town into its current mess. I've got a letter pointing out the 'round-and-'round nature of the debate:

On January 27, 2009, the school committee approved a largely retroactive contract for teachers that ate up about $300,000 of that year’s budget, added approximately $150,000 to the current year’s, and is contributing more than that to the $600,000-plus increase in salaries and benefits budgeted for the next fiscal year. At a November 2008 meeting, Ms. Pallasch argued for approval, saying, “Let's start working on the new one, and give ourselves a little bit of room to refocus on the classroom and away from the adults.” The argument was that we should resolve the running dispute while there was still time to negotiate the subsequent contract amicably.

At the time, I spoke up to predict that the union would not negotiate. Rather, it would wait out the recession based on the obvious reasoning that it could avoid concessions during hard economic times and — as we’ve taught its members to expect — receive retroactive raises when times improved. I also handed out a chart showing that there had been no abatement of the increases in teacher salaries and benefits in the past decade. Indeed, the per-pupil dollar amount had gone up more (54%) than the same number for the state as a whole (40%). Over the same period, the chart showed that most other expenditures had hardly moved.

Well, negotiations did not resume with an amicable tone. Indeed, in August, the union pointed out a clause in the contract extending it for another year. The school committee had somehow missed the trick that it was supposed to notify the union of its intention to negotiate the next contract a full month before the previous one was actually approved. Changes in healthcare copayments for which the committee had budgeted went out the window. So did negotiations.

And the usual suspects are back, making all of the union's arguments for it in advance of the debate. Wealthy people wanting to increase taxes rather than stand firm with the organized labor behemoth that has soaked up a growing portion of our educational and municipal funds.

The system is broken. Revving it up for another season is not the solution.

re: The State of Education - Aye, the Co-hort 'tis the thing

Andrew has inspired me to hop on his coattails concerning the way we look at NECAPs (so read his post first). Basically, I've been putting off posting how we can look at the same NECAP data in two ways. As Andrew explains, the "value-added" method would be to follow the cohorts (ie; the same group of kids from year to year). Andrews task of digging deeper into how we can tease out data comparing 8th grade and 11th grade scores for essentially the same group of kids is more difficult than what I am going to look at: comparing cohorts from year-to-year in elementary schools.

Here is a made-up example of how we're usually asked to "read" the NECAP scores. (Let's assume these are writing scores for "Quahog Elementary School"). Generally, we are given data that is "shaped" so that we look at the change from year to year for each grade like this:

GRADE	2005	2006	GROWTH	2007	GROWTH	2008	GROWTH	2009	GROWTH
3	63%	76%	13%	76%	0%	76%	0%	78%	2%
4	73%	65%	8%	77%	12%	75%	2%	73%	2%
5	63%	89%	22%	75%	14%	78%	3%	85%	10%
6	72%	68%	4%	78%	10%	75%	3%	85%	10%
AVERAGE	69%	75%	6%	77%	2%	76%	1%	80%	4%

This is the snapshot approach and it's flaw is that it compares one cohort of kids to its predecessor. Guess what? Cohorts are comprised of different mixes of kids--economic, family structure, academic expectations, etc. There is such a thing as a wicked smart class! So, instead, why not also track the grade-to-grade progress being made by the same set of kids (the same cohort)? To that end--to try to actually get some real value--we have to look diagonally at the above table. By doing so, we see something like this:

Year in Grade 3	2005	2006	GROWTH	2007	GROWTH	2008	GROWTH	2009	GROWTH
2005	63%	65%	2%	75%	10%	75%	0%	-	-
2006	-	76%	-	77%	1%	78%	1%	85%	6%
2007	-	-	-	76%	-	76%	0%	85%	10%

From "shaping the data" this way, we see that the 2005 and 2007 third graders both saw a 10% increase in proficiency between their 4th and 5th grade years. The 2006 third graders saw only a 1% increase between 4th and 5th grade, but a 6% increase between their 5th and 6th grade years. The NECAP is given in October, so the tests given in 5th grade are supposed to be on what they learned in 4th grade. As such, this data seems to indicate that the 4th grade teachers are pretty good at improving the proficiency rates of the students they've been given. Meanwhile, the 5th grade teachers are batting around .500 (from the data I've re-shaped) in improving vs. maintaining the status quo.

I believe that looking at the data by comparing different cohorts at the same grade level provides some value in assessing progress, however, I believe that a better method--one that is probably more fair to teachers and the students within a given cohort-- is the alternative method outlined above.

The State of Education in Rhode Island, Part 1

The graph at the bottom of this post, compiled from the two most recent years of New England Common Assessment Program (NECAP) proficiency scores, contains the information you are probably used to seeing for describing the state of education in the cities and towns of Rhode Island. And if you are familiar with the data displayed there, then you are probably also familiar with the oft-expressed objection to its use for school-system accountability purposes, that the graph is mostly an illustration of the social-economic status of the various communities represented, more than of how well a school-system is doing or not doing with the students it has.

However, if instead of confining the analysis of test results to scores taken from one point in time, consideration is given to changes in scores in a group of students across time, then it becomes possible to begin to isolate the factors that impact test scores which are directly related to the school-system, for example, through an examination of the evolution of performance of similar student cohorts who start from comparable achievement levels. This idea is the basis of what is called the "value-added" method of analysis of education. Since much of the focus has been on high schools lately, let's see what can be done with Rhode Island's basic 11th-grade NECAP results, to take a step in this direction.

Rhode Island 11th-graders have been tested in the subjects of reading and math with the NECAP for the past two years. 3 years prior to those tests, many of those same 11th-graders took the NECAP as 8th-graders, and changes in performance at the school and district level, between grades 8 and 11, involving many of the same students, can be evaluated.

But exactly what changes should be measured? NECAP results characterize student achievement in terms of four categories, the numbers of students "proficient with distinction", "proficient", "partially proficient", and "not proficient". The summary that is most frequently reported to the public is the percentage of students in a district (or school) who are proficient or better. However, a comparison of proficiency percentages from year to year may not fully capture what is going on inside of a school. Between 8th and 11th grade, almost every district loses students. In some districts, according to the NECAP totals, that figure can be as high as 30% and the reasons for enrollment drops (e.g. dropouts, students leaving for private schools or charters, etc.) will skew percentage measures in ways that don't necessarily reflect the quality of schooling.

So instead of going directly to results expressed as percentages, we will begin by taking a step back and looking at how the number of students proficient or better in 11th grade in each district changed from the number of students who were proficient in 8th grade in that same district. We can combine the two approximate cohorts of students for which 11th grade test data is available, and calculate the how the number of 11th grade students who scored proficient or better on the 2008 and 2009 NECAPs in each district changed from the number of 8th grade students who scored proficient or better on the 2005 and 2006 NECAPs

Several results become immediately obvious:

1. Even in many of the districts thought of as poorly performing, the number of students proficient or better in reading improved between the 8th and the 11th grade testing (even when total enrollments dropped).
2. In every school district in Rhode Island -- including the ones thought of as well-performing -- the number of students who are proficient or better at mathematics in the 11th grade is less than the number of students who were proficient or better in the 8th grade.

District	# of 8th-Graders Proficient or Better at Reading, '05 & '06 NECAP	# of 11th-Graders Proficient or Better at Reading, '08 & '09 NECAP	Change in # PoB at Reading, between 8th and 11th Grades	# of 8th-Graders Proficient or Better at Mathematics, '05 & '06 NECAP	# of 11th-Graders Proficient or Better at Mathematics, '08 & '09 NECAP	Change in # PoB at Mathematics, between 8th and 11th Grades
Barrington	526	524	-2	485	380	-105
Bristol-Warren	344	415	71	293	173	-120
Burrillville	287	310	23	213	115	-98
Central Falls	150	190	40	85	21	-64
Chariho	379	461	82	347	202	-145
Coventry	641	586	-55	569	243	-326
Cranston	1090	1132	42	779	361	-418
Cumberland	568	579	11	433	247	-186
East Greenwich	357	332	-25	341	246	-95
East Providence	532	549	17	437	140	-297
Exeter-West Greenwich	241	224	-17	219	99	-120
Foster-Glocester	285	339	54	270	139	-131
Johnston	341	220	-121	226	69	-157
Lincoln	400	375	-25	344	215	-129
Middletown	242	208	-34	264	122	-142
Narragansett	210	188	-22	176	109	-67
Newport	184	204	20	174	76	-98
North Kingstown -Jamestown	697	615	-82	602	337	-265
North Providence	390	401	11	237	110	-127
North Smithfield	224	215	-9	198	102	-96
Pawtucket	655	561	-94	552	123	-429
Portsmouth-Little Compton	412	415	3	381	233	-238
Providence	1115	1749	634	873	385	-488
Scituate	262	228	-34	240	119	-121
Smithfield	332	345	13	255	131	-124
South Kingstown	518	466	-52	476	265	-211
Tiverton	228	247	19	215	81	-134
Warwick	1119	1069	-50	923	330	-593
Westerly	358	396	38	296	175	-121
West Warwick	339	350	11	300	122	-178
Woonsocket	293	405	112	241	102	-139

(N.B.: Results for North Kingstown and Portsmouth have been corrected from the original version of this post, to properly account for the fact that high-schools in these districts serve students from Jamestown and Little Compton, respectively.)

Next, we need to find an appropriate context with which to evaluate the absolute count data. That will be the subject of tomorrow's post on the subject…

Continue reading "The State of Education in Rhode Island, Part 1"

Learning to Hear the Union

Mike at Assigned Reading is dead on that the Newsmakers head-to-head between Central Falls union representative Jim Parisi and Superintendent Frances Gallo is very revealing about the two sides' priorities. Perhaps the most crystallized example of unions' determination to spin rather than inform — because everything's "negotiable" — comes at approximately 9: in the video:

Asked about the extra tasks that the administration is requesting from teachers, Parisi says:

What people aren't informed of is that Central Falls teachers already have more common planning time and professional time than any other public school district in the state, because we were a willing partner to make that happen. How come the union and its teachers don't get the credit for something like that?

Sounds like a reasonable statement, no? The teachers are already working hard, compromising, so that they can accomplish as much as possible for their students. Well, the spin unravels when Gallo explains:

That time is taken out of the school day — out of the instructional school day. We're trying to add the time to the after school time so that the instructional day remains such. We actually have an instructional day of just over four hours.

In other words, that state-leading planning and sit-down time was negotiated as time away from the most difficult part of the job: interacting with the students. A union will brag about helping its clients to lower their blood pressure — leaving out, of course, that it does so with a knife.

Schools and Dollar Signs

Last night, Marc discussed schools with guest host Tony Cornetta on the Matt Allen Show. Stream by clicking here, or download it.

Some Fundamental Fixes Need to be Done in Warwick

Yesterday, a report in the Warwick Beacon compared the Cranston and Warwick school systems (the teachers for both districts are represented by AFT). By the numbers:

Warwick Budget: $164.6 million
Cranston Budget: $121.4 million.

Warwick Students: 10,507
Cranston Students: 10,774

Warwick cost/pupil: $15,666
Cranston cost/pupil: $11,272

Warwick # Schools: 24 (3 high schools)
Cranston # Schools: 23 (2 high schools)

Warwick Full-time teacher positions: 1,038
Cransont Full-time teacher positions: 944

Warwick salaries/benefits: $144 million
Cranston salaries/benefits: $105.3 million

A review of the most recently available Warwick School budget (via the Transparency Train) reveals that the amount spent on direct payment to personnel has decreased around .5% since 2008 (during that time 4 schools were closed--basically, to piggyback on Justin's point, Warwick already traded schools--as well as teachers and administrators jobs--to keep raises in place). Meanwhile, costs in benefits has increased 10%, which can't be dealt with unless the contract is reopened for negotiation.

Warwick School Committee Member Paul Cannistra said yesterday there needs to be a better balance of student needs against financial realities.

Cannistra, who voted against the teachers’ contract in 2008, arguing it would cost too much money for taxpayers, said that the district needed stricter health insurance co-share premium payments from its employees. Warwick teachers pay $11 per week for both individual and family plans.

Teachers in Cranston pay a 15 percent co-share of the premiums for health care. The Cranston School Department’s bus drivers pay health insurance co-share payments of 10 percent.

According to Warwick School Business Affairs Director Len Flood, the Warwick School District receives about $600,000 from its teachers due to the $11 per week co-share payment. A 10 percent co-share payment would mean the district would receive $2 million. With a 20-percent co-pay, the district would save $4 million.

That's the key: a percentage co-pay, not a flat amount. (Incidentally, Mayor Avedisian made the same mistake on the municipal side last year).

Further, as the Beacon reports, another primary cause for the difference is the practice of weighting students with IEPs (Individual Education Programs), whereby a student with an IEP is counted as 1.5 or 2 students for the purpose of determining class size limits (this is something unique to Warwick's teacher contract). According to Rosemary Healey, the school department’s director of compliance, the practice of weighting is also a magnet:

According to Healey, that might explain why despite having a smaller total student population, Warwick has 460 more students on IEP’s than Cranston. Cranston has 1,700 students on IEP’s whereas Warwick has 2,160.

“I think we provide quality education here. I think our special education program is second to none. I think the affirmation of that is that people want to move here for it,” said Healey.

“Is it very expensive? Yes. Is it necessary? Yes. I think we owe it to our students.”

The Beacon calculates that if no weighting was done, Warwick schools could save about $11 million per year. While he agrees that weighting helps students, Warwick School Committee Chair Chris Friel thinks it may be too costly:

“The question becomes, can the Warwick School District afford to continue the weighting procedures as currently enacted,” said Friel.

“I think that it is becoming cost prohibitive when you take into account the financial situation we currently find ourselves in.”

Whether or not to maintain, discontinue or scale back the practice of weighting is a cost/benefit exercise worth going through.

The bottom line is that there are some fundamental items in contracts and benefits that need to be completely revised, not just patched for now. And while the schools need to do the majority of the work, municipal contracts need to be re-opened (besides the limited, short-term give backs just negotiated) to make co-pays a percentage of costs, not a flat rate. (If I was a dreamer, I'd include revamping the contract step scheme....)

Trading Schools for Raises

The Newport Daily News isn't very friendly about putting information online, so I don't have a link to the story, but I read this weekend that the Tiverton School Committee is floating the idea of closing the town's high school. In hopes of saving $450,000, as I recall, the town would either send its students elsewhere or bring in a charter school company to run things.

Meanwhile, in West Warwick, closure of an elementary school is expected to save $750,000, with the students dispersed to other schools and fifth graders heading to middle school. A reader emails:

So you are looking at placing 10 and 11 yr olds with potentially 15 y/o kids in the middle school. It gets even worse, its one thing to save the $750,000 but to then budget $900,000 in Teacher Step raises is mind boggling. Closing a school to fund Teacher raises, West Warwick is currently in the top 5 in salaries, with the top step at approx. 79,000 and health care contributions this year at 10% and next yr at 15%.

Here in Tiverton, the proposed increase in salaries, for next year, is $535,954. In other words, multiple Rhode Island communities are toying with the idea disrupting the lives of the students for whom they have responsibility in order to fund pay increases for well-remunerated public-sector workers in the middle of a painful recession and the economic collapse of the state. As if to add insult to injury, evidence of the quality of education in the state continues to be negative, such as this from the Providence Business News:

According to the College Board, 1,766 students in Rhode Island's class of 2009, or 17.3 percent of the class, took at least one A.P. exam during high school, compared with 26.5 percent nationwide. That was up from the 1,555 students in the class of 2008 who took an A.P. test and 1,112 in the class of 2004. ...

The organization said 10.7 percent of last year's class — or 62 percent of A.P. test-takers — earned a passing score of 3, 4 or 5. That was up from the 9.5 percent who passed at least one the prior year, but lower than the 15.9 percent of students who did so nationwide.

If we're to resist the urge to let emotion run away with us, we must admit the probability that some of the school closure talk is little more than a ploy to rile the public to accept tax increases and shame the teachers' unions into accepting concessions. Even so, the current dynamic is unacceptable: that the anxieties of residents are being manipulated in an attempt to achieve the obvious and reasonable step of holding salaries flat, or even trimming them a little, for professionals who, as a group, are failing their students.

The Union Chooses Firings

Anybody who's surprised that the teachers' union in Central Falls has chosen to stare down mass firings and do battle rather than submit to some eminently reasonable additional responsibilities should think through the future scenarios of the game.

With administrators now standing firm on key planks that were previously popular political catch phrases, the unions are going to challenge authority way up to the top — to Education Commissioner Deborah Gist and beyond. Their secondary strategy will be to delay significant changes until they have an opportunity to change the players. They've lost no ground in the General Assembly, either in recent elections or in the selection of the new speaker of the house, and they've an opportunity to affect the governor's office, this year, which means access to the Board of Regents, from which the commissioner ultimately derives her authority.

If the unions can delay the mass firings, through friendly labor review authorities and the courts, for even just one year, they'll have time to re-rig the game entirely in their favor. If they lose on questions of authority, they'll use their political clout to turn the top-down model to their favor. In other words, when voters, school committees, and district administrators seek localized, bottom-up reforms, the newly enhanced authority of the state and the education commissioner will be used to squelch the movements before they can begin.

Consider the thoughts of the only Central Falls teacher whom I've seen offer public comment outside of the union channel:

Sheila Lawless-Burke, an English-as-a-Second Language teacher, said teachers are not opposed to working harder — or longer; they simply want the opportunity to negotiate the details of their contract, not have it imposed from above.

"It's all about the politics," she said, "about making Fran Gallo look good. The issue is having the right to negotiate. Once we allow the superintendent to get her foot in the door, where will it stop?"

Even under circumstances of dire failure, the unionists want to assert their rights to drive up costs and usurp management authority. What Lawless-Burke ignores is that politics is the game of figuring out "where it will stop" when differences of opinion negate a hard rule. It will stop when the public decides that the superintendent has exceeded her mandate. That's how politics work.

It's also the reason that local administrations and the state education bureaucracy should devote some of their attention to fostering community-level involvement of additional players. I mean not only extending some budgetary authority for the schools to town councils and mayors, but also opening channels of communication and cooperation from taxpayer groups and the like.

The top-down reforms, in other words, require a complementary bottom-up foundation, not only to solidify local support from the folks who ultimately pay the bills, but also to rope in stakeholders who will cry out when the unions attempt to manipulate the game at the top. The unions may succeed in reversing Commissioner Gist's reform efforts such that the options offered to failing districts all entail additional benefits for union members, but they'll find it much more difficult to silence constituencies who've been allowed into the decision-making process.

Academic Gatekeepers and the Pursuit of a "Life of the Mind"

In the Chronicle of Higher Education, Thomas Benton explains why middle-class students should not be seduced by a "life of the mind" in academia; unless they know what they're getting into. Namely, post-graduate degrees and the academic life are set up in such a way that only the socially and financially privileged can really take advantage of them.

Some people have mistaken my position that graduate school in the humanities is fine for the rich and connected for the view that that's how it should be, as if I am some kind of smug elitist. It often happens that readers—looking only at an excerpt from a column—mistake practical advice about coping with a harsh reality for an affirmation of that reality, instead of a criticism of it.

One reason that graduate school is for the already privileged is that it is structurally dependent on people who are neither privileged nor connected. Wealthy students are not trapped by the system; they can take what they want from it, not feel pressured, and walk away at any point with minimal consequences. They do not have to obsess about whether some professor really likes them. If they are determined to become academics, they can select universities on the basis of reputation rather than money. They can focus on research rather than scrambling for time-consuming teaching and research assistantships to help pay the bills. And, when they go on the market, they can hold out for the perfect position rather than accepting whatever is available.

But the system over which the privileged preside does not ultimately depend on them for the daily functioning of higher education (which is now, as we all know, drifting toward a part-time, no-benefit business). The ranks of new Ph.D.'s and adjuncts these days are mainly composed of people from below the upper-middle class: people who believe from infancy that more education equals more opportunity. They see the professions as a path to security and status.

But it's a more frustrating path than most are prepared for:

The myth of the academic meritocracy powerfully affects students from families that believe in education, that may or may not have attained a few undergraduate degrees, but do not have a lot of experience with how access to the professions is controlled. Their daughter goes to graduate school, earns a doctorate in comparative literature from an Ivy League university, everyone is proud of her, and then they are shocked when she struggles for years to earn more than the minimum wage. (Meanwhile, her brother—who was never very good at school—makes a decent living fixing HVAC systems with a six-month certificate from a for-profit school near the Interstate.)

Benton's goal isn't to dissuade people from following their chosen career paths, but to make them aware that it isn't going to be easy and that the risk/reward ratio may not be what they think.

Good for Students Versus Good for the Public Education Industry

Tom Ward writes on the success of Democracy Prep Blackstone Valley charter school in Cumberland, noting:

"My concern, as the [Lincoln] superintendent (Georgia Fortunato), is that if they move into Fairlawn, Democracy Prep, people are going to think they are part of the Lincoln School Department and I think we are going to lose a lot more children," said Fortunato. "It could be very devastating for the school district."

Devastating - as in "We lose $8,000 per child" - for the school district. And perhaps the best single thing that will ever happen to the children. How did we get to this place, where what's best for the school district and what's best for the child are two very different things?

Mike, at Assigned Reading, follows up:

Fortunato's complaint that Democracy Prep hurts Lincoln's bottom line will fall on deaf ears; parents won't consider the financial impact when they decide who can provide the best education for their children. It also doesn't help that, last week, Fortunato was arguing for $31,000 in next year's budget to paint and recarpet the administration building. Considering there are no children in this building, is this the best way to spend education funds in these tough economic times? Really.

For those of us with young children, the Rhode Island Way of doing public education is a matter of urgency. That's part of the reason that I found Dan Yorke's interview with Education Commissioner Deborah Gist, focusing on Central Falls, so encouraging. I did, however, have to remind myself that, even if Gist is so successful as to justify many times her salary, the forces that have brought Rhode Island to its current low will not go away. And as quickly as she may advance the state's education system, relatively small changes in the political winds could turn around the turnaround using the interventionist precedents that she's setting.

A Clash of Realities in Central Falls

You'd think some higher-up planner in the teachers' union would begin advising members that it's time to back off for a while for the purpose of public-impression rehabilitation. Apart from the wholly inappropriate imagery of using a candle-light vigil for a union action, the particulars of the circumstances in Central Falls are absolutely certain to elicit a response of "are you kidding me" from any Rhode Islander not in the thrall (or payroll) of the union.

First there's the performance of the high school (news report and Dept. of Ed. PDF):

• Only 4% of students proficient in math in 2008-2009, up from 3% the year before, with 75% "substantially below proficient."
• Only 45% proficient in reading.
• Only 29% proficient in writing.
• Only 17% proficient in science.
• A 48% graduation rate.
• A 50% failure rate for the current school year.

Then there are the salaries:

The average teacher's salary at the high school ranges between $72,000 and $78,000 a year, because most are at the district's top step, Gallo said.

That's without incorporating benefits and all of the other perks of being a public school teacher. Then there are the demands for doing what any professional should be expected to do when collectively performing so abysmally:

Gallo said she offered to pay teachers $30 an hour for two additional weeks of training in the summer. Gallo also said she would try to find grant money to pay teachers for 90 minutes a week of after-school planning time, also at $30 an hour.

But she says she has no extra money to pay for other changes she is pushing for, including lengthening the instructional day by 25 minutes, so teachers work 8 a.m. to 3 p.m. instead of 7:50 a.m. to 2:25 p.m. She wants teachers to formalize a rotating tutoring schedule, so a teacher is available to help students for an hour before or after school, and she wants teachers to have lunch with students one day a week.

"Right now, they have no duties," Gallo said. "But I don't want them to see lunch as a duty. I want them to establish true relationships with not a few students, but all students." ...

Union officials have been pushing for $90 per hour and want the district to pay for more of the additional responsibilities.

Then there is the transparent mealy-mouthedness from the union, with this on the one hand:

James Parisi, a field representative of the Rhode Island Federation of Teachers and Allied Health Professionals, said that Gallo had asked teachers to work a longer school day, attend after-school training and set aside two weeks in the summer for professional development. Parisi said the union balked because the district wasn't willing to pay teachers enough for the additional time and work.

And this on the other:

"We've been supportive of the transformational model, we think it's the right path," [Central Falls Teachers' Union President Jane] Sessums said. "But we need more details. We've never been opposed to the additional time that is needed. Our concern is that we really get an opportunity to understand what is necessary."

It's time for those teachers who've retained a modicum of professional integrity to step forward and tell the union to back off. They've a responsibility to improve the school in which they work without proclaiming that poor performance should justify even more reward.

Reminder: Teacher Pink-Slips Don't Actually Mean Layoffs

Pink slips are flying at teachers in Woonsocket, East Providence and Lincoln and probably soon in your town, too. Two points:

1) State law dictates that all layoff notices be sent by March 1st. Why then and not later, say mid-May? Could it be that it is more politically beneficial for some to have teachers and parents upset at layoffs during the budget-making season of late winter/early spring rather than later.
2) Aside from the fact that laying off anywhere from 1/3 to 2/3s of all of the teachers in a district is frankly impractical (if not impossible), most teacher contracts cap the number of layoffs allowed each year. For instance, in Warwick (p.48 of document), only 40 layoff notices can be sent and only 20 teachers can actually let go in any given year.

Now, this isn't to say that laying off teachers is the way to go by any means. But so long as the teacher union leaders refuse to renegotiate their contracts, this is one of the only ways left to school committees and administrators to cut costs. (Often due to their own shortsightedness!).

Anti-Abstinence Crusaders See What They Want to See

On the day that the news section of the Providence Journal acknowledged that abstinence-only sex-ed programs could potentially be successful, the editors of the Lifebeat section thought it necessary to rush to the defense of their modern kulturkampf with the headline, "Program blamed for rise in teen pregnancy" on the section's front page. Of course, the immediate question is who is doing the blaming:

The national teen pregnancy rate is on the rise again after 15 years of decline, and the group providing the data lays the blame squarely on the Bush administration’s stepped-up funding for abstinence-only education programs.

The Guttmacher Institute, a nonprofit that’s aligned with Planned Parenthood but nevertheless is respected for its data on reproductive issues, reported last week that the U.S. teen pregnancy rate had risen by 3 percent from 2005 to 2006, the latest year for which figures are available.

What makes the citation especially troublesome is that the article specifically notes the research of John Santelli. Back when one of his studies was fresh, something in the reported data bothered me, so I actually purchased a copy of the study in order to review the methodology. What I discovered was that Santelli's basic math simply didn't show what he claimed it to show. In a nutshell, his equations credited contraception not only with its own success rate, but also with the success of increasing abstinence. My communications with Dr. Santelli became snippier, on his end, in proportion to the specificity of my explanations.

The basic pattern of distorted findings being spun to even greater distortions in the press is very familiar. Indeed, back in 2004, the New York Times heralded a study disclaiming the effectiveness of an abstinence pledge. When I looked into the numbers, I noticed not only that abstinence had, in fact, increased, but also that many of the respondents who had not "lived up to their vows" to remain abstinent had actually broken that vow after making another: they got married.

Thus, we end up with a bifurcated society, in which readers of the Projo's Lifebeat section heed the research wing of Planned Parenthood, while others share Robert Rector's understanding of the situation:

No one knowledgeable about abstinence education, however, would find this startling. In fact, eleven previous sound studies showed strong positive effects from abstinence programs. The mainstream media simply ignored them.

Human nature will always tend toward a (generally productive) battle between groups preferring different conclusions. But when that battle is amped up on the steroids of massive amounts of federal funding and even more substantial potential for the regulation of people's lives, objectivity — not to mention common sense — becomes more difficult to maintain. (See also, climate change.)

Focusing on That Which One Can Influence

Julia Steiny presents some thoughts on how to hire great teachers, and this point caught my eye:

[Delia Stafford, CEO of the Haberman Educational Foundation] adds that an interviewee might answer a question with: "'What do they expect of me? The parents don't show up and the kids don't bring homework.' If they tell us that kids are at risk because so many parents are not doing their jobs and the students aren't interested, they aren't going to work out. Some list everything outside of the classroom: 'The curriculum doesn't fit; we test them too much.' On the other hand, another person might say, 'I would never punish kids because their parents didn't show up.' These are basic, core beliefs."

Of course, such an attitude during a job interview shows extremely poor judgment, in the first place, not the least because it assumes shared group-think with the interviewers. Putting that aside, though, the lesson is certainly not exclusive to teachers: We can only change that which we have the power to control.

A person hired to do a job should see obstacles as problems to be addressed, not preemptive excuses. Homework, for example, has a purpose. If it isn't getting done, then that purpose isn't being achieved. A teacher must either figure out a way to motivate a particular student to do the homework or find some alternative method that achieves the underlying goal of the homework.

The strategies could be very broad, such as changes to school policies and culture, but they're likely to be very specific to the student and the situation. As Stafford suggests, the important things are the core beliefs — the basic understanding of role and approaches to problem solving.

A Curriculum Change with Merit

You may have read that North Smithfield students have been making significant gains:

In a single year, the school's test scores jumped more than 20 percentage points in reading — the largest improvement in the state — and more than 9 percentage points in math.

Only Barrington, East Greenwich and Jamestown — the state's highest-performing and wealthiest districts — can boast higher proficiency rates in reading than North Smithfield's 88 percent.

And the school's improved math proficiency — 69 percent — places it in the top quarter of Rhode Island's 57 middle schools, according to the most recent round of state test scores that were released on Wednesday.

Note especially this:

"We saw that writing was our weakest area, so we decided to concentrate on that," Arnold said. "We also felt that writing is global — it's required in every subject now. Math, science, social studies. So we felt like it could make the most difference."

That's precisely the sort of strategy that I suggested could be tied to some sort of merit pay system, when the topic came up in Tiverton:

Sure, some component would have to be related to students' actual performance. But other components could be tied to district targets. For example, one argument that I hear all the time is that parents simply aren't sufficiently involved, so perhaps some component of the evaluation and merit increase could kick in for teachers who do something to bridge that divide. A perfect example: retired music teacher (and TCC member) Anne Parker spoke of her experience doing extra work with a parent/student choir. Or, if a target area is math, a shop teacher could prove merit by integrating lessons with the students' math classes, thus improving immediate understanding while illustrating the practical utility of an abstract subject.

Abstinence as Good Decision

Having challenged the premises (and the math) of naysayers of abstinence-only education, I don't find these results surprising:

Billed as the first rigorous research to show long-term success with an abstinence-only approach, the study differed from traditional programs that have lost federal and state support in recent years. The classes didn't preach saving sex until marriage or disparage condom use.

Instead, it involved assignments to help sixth- and seventh graders see the drawbacks to sexual activity at their age, including having them list the pros and cons themselves. Their cons far outnumbered the pros. ...

Two years later, about one-third of abstinence-only students said they'd had sex since the classes ended, versus nearly half — about 49 percent — of the control group. Sexual activity rates in the other two groups didn't differ from the control group.

The bottom line is this: Safe-sex education gives children knowledge about how to do something — and tells them that it's "safe." Effective abstinence-only curricula help them to understand why they shouldn't act on that knowledge.

Such programs should involve lessons in self esteem, in decision-making, in life decisions, in cultural expectations, and so on. What our society must learn, above all, is that sex is not the be-all-end-all of human existence, and that at a young life can be much better spent than dealing with the obstacles, discomforts, and obsessions that typically follow sexual activity outside of monogamous adult relationships.

Formulas, Formulas....funding, weighing and otherwise

I was surprised to learn that Warwick is alone in "weighing" its students based on whether or not they have an IEP (Individual Education Plan). It goes like this: kid with normal educational needs = 1; kid with IEP = 1.5 (and sometimes 2). So, as the Warwick Beacon reported last week, "there are 10,482 students enrolled in Warwick schools. Or are there 11,582 students?" Obviously, with a cap on class size of 28, this can affect how many teachers can be hired. To use an extreme example, If there are 28 IEPs, that really means there are 56 kids, and thus two teachers are required.

[T]he school administration is looking at all ways it can save. Increasing class sizes by eliminating weighting isn’t likely to occur until after the teacher contract expires in August of 2012, if then. Nonetheless, the weighting system that is unique to Warwick is being considered. It’s not the first time.

For as long as school human recourses and counsel Rosemary Healey can remember, elimination of weighing has been on the list of School Committee demands at the opening of contract negotiations. That demand has always been dropped for some other concession.

She said the weighing system was introduced in the 1980s and has been a part of the teachers contract ever since.

How expensive is it?

No one has figured out the precise cost of weighting students, but it is estimated to have resulted in the hiring of an additional 110 teachers. Each teacher is estimated to cost the department $100,000 based on salary and benefits. That’s an annual cost of $11 million.

According to Richard D’Agostino of the Warwick School Department, 20% of Warwick students have IEPs. And that's down a few percentage points since Warwick instituted a more comprehensive screening process! I don't doubt that there are legitimate benefits to IEPs for those who truly need them, but I don't like the way this emotionally-loaded "bargaining chip" is being played.

Teachers Union President Jim Ginolfi likewise acknowledges the prevision may be unique to Warwick, but also in part credits it for making the system outstanding.

“I think Warwick is in the forefront. Warwick has always been in the forefront with special education students”, he said. Elimination of weighting would not correlate into a reduction of costs since the district would still be obligated to meet the requirements of those students with an IEP, says Ginolfi.

“They’re going to need more time to devote to those students”, he reasons....Ginolfi argues that there is flexibility with weighing.

He observes the district has options. It can put all special education students in a single class; it can move IEP students into resource classrooms for special instruction, and it can introduce special education teachers into classrooms where there is a mix of IEP and regular students.

Until they enter negotiations Ginolfi can’t say whether weighing is one of those issues the union would hold out for. As for trimming costs, Ginolfi offered no suggestions.

“Education is expensive”, he said, “and that is why we need a (funding) formula at the state level.”

Ginolfi's "options" are calculated to be unappealing to parents of kids with IEP's, who (understandably) won't be happy about what sounds like "warehousing." But that will all have to wait, because the real unionist solution boils down to: "Sorry, can't help ya...let's wait for contract negotiations or a funding formula."

More Refreshers: RI Academic Achievement, Teacher Salary Ranking, Student to Teacher Ratio

Further to Justin's post, national ranking of the Rhode Island public school system in certain areas of interest.

Academic Achievement: 40th

[Source: ALEC Report Card on American Education, 15th Edition]

National Ranking of Rhode Island Teacher Salary: 9th highest

[Source: NEA, middle column, Page 37, of this PDF]

Ratio of Students Enrolled per Teacher: 51st (lowest ratio in the country)

[Source: NEA, Page 35 of this PDF]

School Committees and parents around the state may wish to keep these rankings in mind as contract renegotiation nears.

Fresh Data Alert: the NEA report, "Rankings & Estimates", linked above twice, was issued just last month.

A Refresher on Teacher Salaries

Pat Crowley's in the comment section slinging mud at my numbers. For consistency's sake, here's the relevant chart for the state as a whole:

Crowley's claim is that the increases in teachers' salaries are not keeping up with inflation. One could argue the relevance of that fact on the grounds that everything else must therefore really not be keeping up with inflation. One could argue the relevance of that fact, I should say, if it were a fact. There are two ways in which Crowley likes to make the inflation claim deceptively. The first, less applicable here, is to look at the category of "instruction" and draw his inflation numbers from that.

When he tried this trick back in 2007, I explained that, while the "instruction expenditures" category increased 19.8% from 2000 to 2006, in comparison with 19.9% inflation, teasing out teacher pay showed their salaries increasing 28.1%. Last year, I put the point in graphical form:

Another method that Crowley employs, that is probably more relevant in the current context, is to lump all teachers together to hide the continual increases in all of their salaries. I've looked at this, too, and the trick is that Rhode Island has been on a teacher-hiring spree:

Obviously, hiring young teachers will bring down the average salary. Indeed, the more teachers we hire, the more it appears that their pay isn't going up:

Of course, the system must then deal with this mass of teachers as they progress through their sometimes double-digit salary increases, what with cost-of-living adjustments and steps combined. Brace yourselves, Rhode Island; salaries and benefits are going to be absorbing much more of the budgets for your students' schools, and the odds that the very same teachers will be able to turn around their abysmal results with even fewer resources are slim to none.

The Usual Ommission from School Budget Fights

Anchor Rising readers shouldn't have any trouble guessing (let alone discerning) what's missing from this report out of Cranston:

Wednesday night, on what was the first chance for the public to speak on the proposed budget, students, coaches and parents flocked to Cranston West's auditorium, where the School Committee budget hearing was moved to accommodate the expected crowd.

Many donned team jerseys (revealing a clear home-team advantage) and defended the value of sports and the added push that rivalry brings.

"Don't expect us to give up without fighting for what we have worked so hard to build up," Deanna Archetto, a senior who swims for Cranston West, told the School Committee.

"There have to be other options that don't involve chopping from the bottom," she said.

The $1.1-million in proposed cuts — which include the elementary school enrichment program along with strings, band and chorus, following the recommendations of a court-ordered performance audit — follow the state Supreme Court ruling last month that found the district ignored the financial reality, continued to overspend its budget and then sued the city for additional money.

For readers who may be new to the site, I offer this clue:

At a time when the executive director of the National Education Association of Rhode Island is playing games with an application for nine-figures of federal assistance so as to keep his union's members above accountability,* residents who wish to protest cuts to sports and other services should target their ire where it belongs.

* Which is not to say that I support the continued federal takeover of our educational system. I'm merely pointing to the clear priorities of the teachers' union.

Educational Formulating

As the only state without a funding formula, there is certainly something to be said for putting something in place so that cities and towns can have some ability to forecast what they're going to have for education spending. That being said, I'm sure I'm not alone in having mixed feelings when I hear such things as this:

Education Commissioner Deborah A. Gist...points out that the current distribution is unfair, insofar as it gives some school districts too much, and other districts too little...“What I want to see is a system that in every respect, whether it’s finance policy or curriculum or professional development, is built around what students need and not what adults need or are used to having,” said Gist, who became commissioner last summer.

“This is going to require that some people step up and have the political courage to say to their communities, ‘We will have to make some changes … and let’s look at why that is the case.’ ”

First part is good, second part makes me wary. Adding to my wariness is the involvement of Brown University--"Kenneth Wong, a Brown education professor, and two of his graduate students"--in the formulating (yes, I'll admit this is probably biased on my part, but there you go--so convince me).

Unlike previous approaches that added more money on top of what districts were already spending, the new proposal starts from scratch.

Using a “market-basket approach,” the Brown team members added what they considered the most important elements for a quality education: the salaries of key personnel such as teachers, teacher assistants, guidance counselors, nurses, librarians, principals and assistant principals; books and other instructional materials; training for teachers; and a portion of teacher-pension costs.

Those elements form the basis of what the team calls a “foundation” formula, resulting in a cost of $8,200 per student per year. That figure could change if elements are added or subtracted.

The state average per-pupil cost in 2009 was $7,246, but that figure does not include $78 million the state contributes to teacher pensions, a cost included in the $8,200 figure.

Districts with large numbers of poor children would receive more money to address their higher levels of need. Education officials say the poverty level is also a measure for other student needs, such as special education and English classes for non-native speakers.

Sounds sorta redistributive, doesn't it? Under this formula, I'm guessing most of us will, and should, take an even keener interest in the urban schools. Looks like more of our money will be heading there.

Choice Is the Best Accountability

In Julia Steiny's second article about the Laborers Construction Career Academy charter school in Cranston, she focuses on the difficulty of measuring such schools according to standardized criteria:

But the work that [Executive Director Paul] Silvia and his team do is not captured by data in the state's accountability system. EQ [i.e., emotional adjustment], to use Silvia's term, can make or break a kid and his academic career. Currently, accountability systems take no notice of which schools actually support their kids and their parents. They should. The state could develop and publish indicators on par with the almighty test scores to hold schools accountable for supporting the kids' social and emotional success. If it did, communities would have far fewer unsuccessful kids, fewer dropouts, fewer lost 20-year-olds.

I'm not sure it's possible to measure such intangibles in a standardized way without the potential for fudging that winds up capturing nothing and protecting incompetence. The fact that subjective criteria are important can only adequately be answered through a system of choice. Parents will know whether their children are doing better in a particular school than they would elsewhere, even if scores don't compete well on statewide standards.

To quote a song, those who strive for a government hand in all judgments and decisions are trying to catch the wind, and in the meantime, generations are failing to acquire necessary knowledge and academic habits.

What Consolidators Are Missing

I suppose this Projo editorial opposing the newly legislated board for statewide health insurance benefits for teachers is better late than never, but the editors continue to keep two and two from being joined:

Obviously, Rhode Island can do much better than rushing through a new system whereby a panel of special interests reward themselves at the taxpayers' expense. The approach adopted is, in essence, a new and costly mandate on local communities, with less, rather than more, local input into spending decisions that affect the bottom line.

That will always be the case, once the messy reality of human self-interest is introduced to the shiny machinations of planners. Better policies on a case-by-case basis may delay the deterioration as power and money are consolidated, but they will never prevent it.

More importantly, though, we all should have learned by now that there are other aspects of Rhode Island's government that must be fixed prior to consolidation. Handing a mandate to consolidate to the ruling class that has brought Rhode Island to its knees is like buying a home-owner's insurance policy from the thief who just broke in and stole all of your belongings.

Blame and Motivation in Education

Friday night's Violent Roundtable on the Matt Allen Show featured Rhode Island House Minority Leader Bob Watson and legal analyst Lou Pulner, and I was surprised to find Pulner nearly standing alone when the conversation turned toward the teachers unions' blocking the state's federal Race to the Top application (on which the RI Federation of Teachers and Health Professionals has just changed its position):

Matt Allen: The teacher unions in Rhode Island are stuck, because they do not want teacher evaluation to be dependent upon student performance. I guess Deborah Gist's proposal is 51% of teacher performance and evaluation will be based on student performance and standardized tests.

Lou Pulner: Gee, what a bummer that would be, huh? Think about it --- that we're actually going to rate our teachers based upon how they're students are doing in class and on exams.

Bob Watson: And you know what's always interesting is you wonder if you inventory the rank and file, how many of them are in agreement with the positions that the teachers union's take.

LP: I'll bet you 80%. They don't want to lose their job because they're doing a poor job.

BW: On certain core issues, I think you're right. But then there are other areas, I think that there are certain areas where some of the better teachers --- and I happen to have a brother that's a teacher and a sister that recently retired, my mother's a teacher, having retired, so I've got some bias, I suppose.

MA: My soon-to-be wife is also a public school teacher.

LP: But she's not political, you told me.

MA: She's not political.

BW: And when I knocked on doors in East Greenwich and campaigned for office, I found one of the predominant ...

LP: Where is your brother a teacher?

BW: In Cranston.

LP: OK. Good schools. East Greenwich, good schools. But if your brother were a teacher in Central Falls or Pawtucket, maybe you wouldn't be taking this position.

BW: As I said, one of the predominant second incomes in East Greenwich is a teacher's salary, and I've often found myself talking to a teacher from all sorts of parts of the state. They live in East Greenwich; they may teach in Central Falls. They have the same interests in having quality teachers in the schools, because when the good teachers are in a classroom next to a teacher that's slacking off and just not carrying their weight, trust me, all morale is reduced.

LP: But what happens, then, Bob? Then they bump in to a Classical High School because they have seniority.

BW: When it comes to certain issues relative to compensation, they share common ground, but I also think that, were it put out to a vote --- maybe it would have to be a secret vote, not one of those hold a paper card up in a room full of peers --- but if it were to come to a vote, I think more teachers than not would support this.

LP: But we're talking about a hundred million dollars that could come to the state of Rhode Island for educational purposes.

MA: Here's the thing, and I gotta tell you my soon-to-be bride's job has affected my opinion on this, because I get to see the inside, and let me just tell you this. Let me offer you up a piece of information. I know --- this is not from her, but from other situations that she's told me about --- where you have classrooms that might as well be hospital wards, because they are required by law to teach all sorts of kids and in all sorts of situations and all sorts of backgrounds and everything else.

LP: But special-ed can be backed out.

MA: Let me tell you something: Special ed is not backed out. Special ed, at least where she teaches, is in the classroom, with everybody else, and so you have these kids in this room, and they all have to pass the same standards that everybody else does, and then you gotta... you know... what kid didn't take a shower this morning, what kid didn't get breakfast this morning, what kid had to deal with a mother's boyfriend that night, what kid had to deal with this and the other thing, and one kid's got restive leg syndrome, so he can go and do jumping jacks in the back of the classroom whenever he wants to do it.

LP: Matty, I love you, but pillow talk aside between you and your betrothed is the fact that we need $100 million to enhance our education here in the state of Rhode Island, and the fact is that teachers ought to step up, and maybe they ought to work a little bit harder to make sure the students in their class are achieving.

BW: You know, Lou... show me a bad student, and I bet there's a bad parent at home waiting for that kid.

LP: Every time? Not every time.

BW: More times than not, Lou, and let's face it: We have too many people having children, and they don't keep the responsibility of raising those children properly.

LP: That's the babies are having babies argument. You're getting violent, Bob; you're getting violent right now. [Laughter.] This is VRT at its best.

BW: I can't use words on the radio, but I want to make my point: blame the parents; don't blame the teachers. A lot of good teachers try to do what they can, and Matt just explained just a typical day in a classroom.

LP: Bob, you don't think there are teachers in there who have the same curriculum and the same syllibus for forty freakin' years, and they're going through the motions.

BW: Because certain things don't change. Math doesn't change. Reading, writing, arithmatic shouldn't change.

MA: Let me just say this: I think that there's a happy medium. I think that student performance should be a factor. I just don't know how much of a factor it should be.

LP: For $100 million, I say raise it up a notch.

MA: I think we do need to go through and separate the wheat from the chaff, though, in the teachers' ranks, because some people I hear about need to go.

Coming from the legislative leader of the opposition party in Rhode Island, Watson's position is just not acceptable. Indeed, if it's an indication of the alternative that voters have in November, parents needn't wait until then to determine that they have to move or find a way to pay for private school. Watson's commentary is so knee jerk as to be dumb and so biased as to be offensive.

According to the latest Infoworks! document (PDF) from the state Department of Education, fewer than one-fifth of Rhode Island high school students are proficient in science, and just about one-quarter of them are proficient in math. Are 75-80% of Rhode Island's public school students living with bad parents? Or is Mr. Watson a bit too sanguine about 40-year-old lesson plans? (I use that reference emblematically, not literally.)

Matt's introduction of the conditions in some classrooms only highlights the critical factor. Note that he had to become intimate with a teacher before hearing about the challenges that education policies can present for them. As somebody who pays attention to local news, he's surely been very well aware of proposed salary cuts and healthcare copay increases, but when was the last time teachers worked to rule because their working conditions made it impossible for them to perform?

Perhaps if teachers' pay were strongly tied to the performance of their students, they'd be taking the lead in education reform, rather than standing in its way as a unionized matter of course. That probability brings us to the bigger problem of our blameless system. Let's quote Watson again:

Blame the parents; don't blame the teachers.

In the archetypal example of the Rhode Island Way, Watson here attacks the one group in the educational chain that is not on a government payroll. The General Assembly blames the towns, because after all, they have direct control over contracts and policies. The school committees and administrations blame the General Assembly for mandates and insufficient funding and the unions for contractual demands that drain control and resources. The teachers blame all of the above as well as the parents.

Well, if the folks on government payrolls have no power to improve the quality of education in the state, then those payrolls ought to be decimated. They're a waste of money. Redirect the resources to "good parents," so they can select an appropriate private school, and to social workers, so they can assist the "bad parents."

But I don't believe that the blame lies solely with the group whose main interest in the education system is through the well-being of their children. If we step back from the finger pointing and look at the situation as adults seeking to develop a functional educational machine, it is clear that mechanisms for incentives and accountability must be introduced. Evaluate teachers almost entirely on their performance, with formulas that adjust to the actual students — their challenges and their prior performance — and give the ultimate say to administrators, who are in a position to know all of the less-tangible considerations. On the other end, keep the General Assembly and federal government out of the equation.

In that way, the communities that are most affected on a personal level will have the ability to trace and change problems from the school committee dais down to the classroom in a chain accountability rather than evaded responsibility.

Not So Much of a Head Start

Here's some news you're not likely to hear trumpeted throughout the media or proclaimed in town and state meetings of education officials:

After some prodding, yesterday the Obama administration released the long-overdue first grade evaluation of the federal Head Start program. As expected, the results show that the $7 billion per year program provides little benefit to children — and great expense to taxpayers.

The evaluation, which was mandated by Congress during the 1998 reauthorization of the program, found little impact on student well-being. After collecting data on more than 5,000 three and four-year-old children randomly assigned to either a Head Start or a non Head Start control group, the Department of Health and Human Services found "few sustained benefits".

You'll want to store this information somewhere in the mind. An ear to the tracks of education policy in the state reveals that expanding public education to younger ages is a favored idea among administrators, teachers, and unionists. At the education policy event that I attended in Warren, recently, the need for pre-K education was certainly mentioned multiple times.

This federal report suggests that a simple principle still applies: Early education definitely starts a child on a potentially more erudite path, but it isn't a remedy for inadequate instruction each and every year. The burden should be on the public education system to become more effective at its current task before its role expands.

(One wonders how conscious big-government types are of the dynamic that finds them with more power and influence the less competent they prove themselves to be.)

How Many Years Behind Are Our Students?

Mick Schulz has been considering the American condition, with respect to education, as a story in the Texas v. California saga, and he posts a reader anecdote that ought to make every Rhode Island parent uncomfortable:

A new neighbor (former migrant worker from northern California who opened a family business, and had to move to Houston for a young daughter's cancer treatments) reports to me that when she enrolled her 10 year old in the neighborhood elementary school, they determined that the child was at least a year behind. This is a school with an English-as-a-second-language program, and despite normal demographics which would put it in the bottom rung of schools, won an exemplary rating from the state.

I think the writer meant to suggest that the California school that the student had previously attended had been the "exemplary" one. Which makes me wonder: How far behind are the students of Rhode Island's "high performing" schools? I've long had the impression that these measurements of performance are artificially inflated and, frankly, don't trust them to provide any useful information for judging our system as a state.

Stratifying the Student Body

A supporter of school choice must accept that schools will experiment with, and families will opt for, educational strategies that he or she doesn't like. I've never been a fan of Fame-style schools specializing in music, for example, and for the same reasons, I've reservations about Laborers school in Cranston, which Julia Steiny described in her Sunday column:

At Laborers, Cranston academic teachers and instructors who are journeyman laborers themselves jointly craft an academic program geared to the construction trade. For example, math involves everything from learning financial literacy to calculating the volume of concrete needed for a job. The skills are the same as those taught in traditional schools, but applied to the world of construction. ...

Shortly after the school opened, it was clear that some of the students were more interested in finding an alternative school than they were in construction work. So the school developed a second strand of learning, called The World of Work (WOW), which [cofounder Armand] Sabitoni considers consistent with the union’s mission.

Having had my own feet in several dramatically different social pools, so to speak, as an artist-type, an academic-type, a white-collar cubicle dweller, and now a carpenter, I'm uncomfortable with the social implications of stratification at such an early age. Surely, for example, all children would benefit from practical lessons in math — both for current learning and for a minimum of familiarity when one day they encounter tasks outside of their professions. Before I began in construction, about five years ago, I was utterly clueless when it came to repairs around the house, let alone do-it-yourself modifications.

Extracting the labor segment of the student body will decrease the incentive for general-ed schools to cover material relevant to them. From another perspective, while practical lessons might help a particular student pick up academic concepts, the career from which those lessons are drawn isn't necessarily a fit for him or her.

More significantly, though, there's a benefit to having all social types and career tracks interacting within a generation through high school. This is true, first, because cultural coherence and social empathy are a prerequisite to a healthy democracy. A second consideration is that very young students shouldn't find themselves on fated tracks. A creative, dynamic society increases the likelihood that its members will come to fresh conclusions, combining previously disconnected ideas for new purposes, and cradle-to-grave career tracks do the opposite.

Guard the Local Control in Education Reform

I notice that Mike, of Assigned Reading, is cynical about the ratcheting up of consequences for failing schools that Andrew mentioned yesterday. Here's Mike:

This is why education bureaucrats drive me crazy. Today Commissioner Deborah Gist announced that five schools in Providence have been performing so poorly for so long that the Department of Education is stepping in. Radical change is being mandated that could result in the closing of these schools. And how does Superintendent Tom Brady respond? ... My best translation: We have utterly failed, but offer no apology, and are pleased that someone else will now be making the decisions.

Mike goes on to wonder why, if there's such enthusiasm among education leaders who face the new reforms, the schools have been allowed to deteriorate so drastically. Andrew emphasizes an arguably contrary perspective:

Significantly, unlike the usual RI options, these new options involve making changes directly at the individual school level. The message is that schools, as a fundamental unit of education, matter.

One could cast the statements to which Mike objects as precisely what one would expect from bureaucrats; they can't exactly proclaim the untranslated message. Still the subtext of the interactions — the projected submissiveness of highly paid professionals with substantial responsibility — is important. That's why I find this news vaguely disconcerting:

PAWTUCKET — The quest for a new school superintendent is getting more attention than usual.

The search committee that convenes Tuesday will include the usual School Committee representatives as members, but also Mayor James E. Doyle and Deborah A. Gist, the state commissioner of education.

It may be that I'm making too much of it, but it seems to me that the inclusion of Commissioner Gist on such a committee is a signal of obsequiousness. Perhaps she'll favor a district whose leadership she helped select, but it would be in the nature of a powerful person to expect the controlling influence to continue beyond the date of hire.

Is anybody in Rhode Island educational sufficiently motivated and confident to enunciate an understanding of the real problems of the system and declare an intention to address them without the intervention of a state-level appointed official? Commissioner Gist may do wonderful things for education in Rhode Island, but (one) she won't hold the seat forever, and (two) when it becomes clear that policy decisions rest not with local elected officials accountable to the people of the municipality, but to an unelected director, the strategies of the people behind the current mess will change, with the prize being more-direct and less-correctable control.

Budget Season Begins

Tonight's the first meeting at which the Tiverton School Committee will address next year's budget. The upshot is that Superintendent Bill Rearick is offering, as an initial budget, an increase at the state cap (4.5%). Of course, he included in last year's budget "surprise" federal "stimulus" cash, so this budget is actually 7.13% above the allocated amount at last year's FTM.

ADDENDUM (from home):

My coverage of tonight's meeting wasn't exactly comprehensive, because I was following the conversation with especial intentness and offering comments from time to time. A few points:

• I was incorrect about the reason, but correct about the result, when it comes to budget discrepancies. The "stimulus" money wasn't included in the number for last year's budget, but it shows up as a deficit in the coming budget, meaning that current projected spending exceeds the amount laid out in the budget by $892,268.
• Superintendent Rearick mentioned several times that the taxpayers' attempted level funding (thwarted by the federal gift) was to blame for the large shortfall, but it fell to me to point out that the district could have planned for that when it discovered itself flush with revenue.
• Owing to pension changes, the district currently has something like $235,000 lying around, but since midyear cuts in aide from the state are on the table, the committee and administration are inclined to leave that completely out of the picture, for now.
• The teachers' union, which is currently without a negotiated contract, is concentrating on "ground rules" and such rather than taking up actual dollar amounts and negotiations.
• The currently proposed budget assumes no changes to healthcare-copays and zeroes out salary increases, excepting steps and an AFSCME raise scheduled at 2%.
• There does not appear to be much support from the folks on the state (metaphorically speaking) to impose labor policies unilaterally.
• Rearick was not shy about speaking the phrase "program cuts."
• I estimated that a 3.5-4% across-the-board cut in combined salaries and benefits would entirely erase the deficit, and nobody contradicted my math.
• Tiverton Citizens for Change President Dave Nelson was not happy.

So basically, we're looking at a district administration that's pushing for the maximum tax increase that it can secure, a school committee that isn't ready to commit to anything, a union that wants to delay, delay, and delay until the economy improves, as I predicted they would do back when the school committee made the ill-advised give-away that the last contract represented, and the TCC is not going to simply watch this budget float away.

A Real Reform Menu for Education?

Traditionally, Rhode Islanders have been offered a choice of two options for improving their troubled educational system…

1. Spend more money on district-level bureaucracies, with minimal change to existing school practices.
2. Spend more money on non-educational social service programs.

According to Jennifer D. Jordan of the Projo, however, in the case of six currently underperforming Rhode Island schools, while the spend-more-money piece is still in play, state Education Commissioner Deborah Gist is putting forth four new options to replace the above two...

• “School closure and sending students to other schools“.
• “A turnaround model which replaces the principal and retains 50 percent or fewer of existing teachers and staff.”
• “A restart model which invites in a regional collaborative or a charter management organization to take over the school”
• “A transformation model which replaces the principal, evaluates all teachers, revamps classes and offers ‘expanded learning time’ including longer school days or weekend classes.”

Significantly, unlike the usual RI options, these new options involve making changes directly at the individual school level. The message is that schools, as a fundamental unit of education, matter. Expect wailing and gnashing of teeth to commence soon.

Rule by Funding and Memoranda

I'm one of two people in the audience of an "emergency" Tiverton School Committee meeting, which was called in order to approve a memorandum of understanding from the Rhode Island Department of Education for the state's Race to the Top application, and the sense that I'm getting from the discussion is not encouraging.

Here's the upshot: School committees are under a lot of pressure to sign the MOU so that the state can prove "political will" to implement the program to the federal government. The problem is that the document that the local officials are being asked to sign is apparently not wholly inclusive of the information on which they believe they're voting. Some supposed facts are in a repeatedly changed FAQ document. Others were conveyed during in-person meetings. Some of it is in documents from the federal government. And the really-honestly-truly final document won't be released until Monday.

So, in the name of chasing after taxpayer money, the people whom taxpayers have elected to guide their local investment in childhood education are being asked to sign on to mandates and requirements from state and national officials without, as far as I can understand, even receiving assurances that the higher tiers of government will provide more money than they're requiring districts to spend.

ADDENDUM:

Here's an interesting point from School Committee Member Leonard Wright, who seems extremely suspicious of this whole thing: There is language in the memorandum that the district agrees to comply with the terms of the federal grant and a "RIDE subgrant" that apparently has not yet been produced.

ADDENDUM II:

And isn't this FAQ point interesting:

Are there "supplement, not supplant" requirements for Race to the Top?

Race to the Top contains no "supplement, not supplant" requirements.

Furthermore, the language that Mr. Wright cited about a state "subgrant" suggests to me that the state could take advantage of the lack of "supplement, not supplant" language while still imposing that very rule on individual districts.

Another point that's coming up is that the town is probably going to be subject to increasing regulations and mandates whether it signs on for Race to the Top or not. It's the old "nothing to lose" lure. But imagine this outcome: The collapsing state causes a political surge for reform, among which is the elimination of state-driven mandates... except, of course, where those mandates are part of contractually agreed grant programs.

ADDENDUM III:

The school committee has added, as a condition of its agreement, stipulations that all program requirements will be fully funded and that the funding from Race to the Top would supplement, not supplant, allocated state and federal aid to the town.

When a Bureaucratic System Can't Sustain Successful Reform, Shouldn't We Change the Bureaucracy Rather Than End the Reform?

The transition of Hope High School in Providence back to city control, reported on most recently by Linda Borg in today's Projo, illustrates the premises that animate both charter school and site-based management school reform movements.

Rhode Island's State Commissioner of Education took a direct role in operating Hope High in 2005; after educational results showed some improvement, Hope was returned to full city control this past February. However, the school administration in Providence has announced its intention to undo some of the changes that have helped Hope improve…

Beginning in September, Hope will move to a six-period day like all of the other high schools in the city. The high school currently has a so-called “block” schedule composed of four 90-minute periods a day, a schedule that teachers say allows them enough time to delve more deeply into subjects.

The new schedule will also reduce or eliminate Hope’s various common planning periods that teachers say are vital to revamping the school’s academics, creating individual learning plans and developing student advisories.

The reasons cited for the changes are increased costs associated with the differently structured school-day…

According to [Providence Superintendent Tom Brady], this model requires 20 to 30 additional teachers at a cost of roughly $2.5 million a year.

...as well as a desire by Providence's school administrators to make Hope's school day uniform with the rest of the district.

But suppose there was an organization, either an outside school operator or a homegrown group of teachers and administrators, that said it believed it could find a way to make the new schedule work within a more standard budget, if various regulations and mandates were relaxed. Would trying to figure out how to make a program like that work be worth trying? Or should the highest goal of an educational bureaucracy be to impose a uniform structure on everyone's school-day, and on other aspects of school management, whether that uniform structure provides the best education or not?

Pawtucket and East Providence Have a New Rep. With Old Ideas

The last paragraph of Alisha A. Pina's story in today's Projo on Democrat Mary Messier's victory in Tuesday's District 62 special election (former Rep. Elizabeth Dennigan's old seat, mostly Pawtucket with a little bit of East Providence) provides a perfect example of how the state Democratic Party's intellectual bankruptcy on fiscal issues continues to propel Rhode Island towards the more conventional form of fiscal bankruptcy…

During her campaign, [Ms. Messier] said the “need to control taxes” is a top priority and also supported the development of a new school district financing formula that would be fair to all cities and towns.

Alas, as has occurred all too-often in Rhode Island, we have a brand-new Democratic representative who believes that a "funding formula" can do the impossible: bring more money to her community, without requiring substantially higher new taxes to raise that money -- unless 1) soon-to-be Rep. Messier meant during the campaign that Pawtucket, already one of the largest recipients of state aid, should receive less money from the state, when she discussed making things "fair to all cities and towns" or 2) "controlling taxes" has become a new Democratic codephrase for "raising statewide taxes", i.e. "we controlled them by not raising them as high a we could have!"

Rhode Island won't be able to pull out of its fiscal and economic crisis if it keeps electing representatives who expect that state's problems to be solved by revenue-shifting programs funded by magic money that will fall from the sky.

Merit Pay on the Radio

WRNI's Elisabeth Harrison includes Tiverton in her radio review of the notion of merit pay. A national expert suggests that longevity and such are not effective, but that the formula for a mert-based system hasn't been perfected, yet. I'm encouraged, though, to hear that Education Commissioner Deborah Gist is on the page that I consider to be the correct one:

We have a system that is investing in our educators in ways that doesn't show that it's directly going to get us the results that we want. So, what I'm interested in doing is having systems in our state where teachers move up in a salary scale based on their performance.

Merit Is a Principle, Not a Program

At last night's Tiverton School Committee meeting, a member of the town's hard left (a state social worker who, as I understand, was instrumental in banning the Easter Bunny when he was on the school committee), acting in his capacity as Voice of the Community, cited Providence Journal columnist Julia Steiny as some sort of authority on merit pay. What I continue to find striking, in this whole debate, is the thralldom to buzz words.

When I've thought of "merit pay," it has essentially had the meaning "pay related to merit." People who don't like the idea of evaluations with teeth prefer to make everybody believe that those two words indicate a specific program that (fait accompli) has already been shown not to work somewhere. I'm surprised to find Steiny among those people.

She begins thus:

No evidence anywhere shows that merit-pay systems, aimed at individual teachers, improve education. Incentives to groups of teachers are effective, but not individuals.

From there she lists four "boondoggles" following from the assertion that "the moment you've drafted a complicated set of rules governing eligibility for individual 'merit' pay, you're instantly mired."

Boondoggle #1: Merit pay is money on top of the regular salary schedule and annual raises. Very expensive.

Teachers unions aren’t about to let anyone mess with their negotiated salary schedule.

This is defeatism from the outset. Here's how the stage is set: A growing contingent of aggravated voters is beginning to take the reins from elected officials and "public servants" who've allowed the state's and the nation's education systems to be dragged into a pit of incompetence and greed, and one critical component of that action will be dislodging the rigid pay schedules that indicate nothing but seat-warming. Steiny's response? It won't work because it won't work.

There's no reason that merit can't be inserted into salary schedules rather than layered as a too rigid merit system over a too rigid longevity system.

Boondoggle #2: Define "meritorious," or even "good."

Texas spent $300 million, over three years, to give excellent teachers bonuses of between $3,000 to $10,000. But without an iron-clad definition of "good," clay-footed principals generally gave all teachers about $2,000, spreading the money evenly, broadly, politely. Student achievement didn't budge.

That's why the political will of residents that would have to be roused even to implement changes to the system must be maintained to ensure that administrators aren't permitted to sail through with failing schools. Give principals and superintendents the actual authority that will make them responsible for success and then can them if the difficulties of restrictive contractual systems turn out to have been little more than cover for their own inability. Give them incentive, that is, to resist the restrictions. From a self-interested point of view, having a school committee give up management rights is to the benefit of administrators; we have to put their feet to the fire.

Boondoggle #3: If your definition of "merit" mainly involves test scores, the performance of the "bad" kids will get worse.

Part of giving administrators authority is requiring them to determine what examples of merit will improve the school's performance. Those who design the system shouldn't attempt to define every contingency in order to leave administrators no work but to insert a bunch of numbers into an "objective" formula. That's no less inappropriate than declaring that teachers can't possibly be evaluated and so must be paid according to longevity.

Boondoggle #4: Merit pay encourages all manner of gaming the system.

You could take the "pay" right out of that sentence. Any form of incentive that might actually prove desirable will motivate those who are better at politics than at their profession to attempt to game the system. Consequently, we get squishy leaders suggesting awards and smiley-face stickers. Parking spaces. Lunches with the boss. Anything that's kinda-sorta nice, but not so attractive as to actually drive behavior or increase the quality of the candidate pool.

This attitude can't stand. The system has to change. It has to change now. And the biggest obstacle to that change is the broad swath of people who've got one thing or another that they wish to preserve in the top-down control of the education system.

If It Weren't for Your Kids...

One expects for this sort of thing to slip out in the heat of argument — in person or in comment sections — but it's a splash of cold water to see retired social studies teacher Robert Salerno offer it as op-ed material:

I submit that they might learn that the problems of public education do not lie with the teachers but with the students themselves. Although many youngsters try to be good students, there are far too many who do not.

These boys and girls should be called "attendees," ones who go to school but give little or no effort. Their numbers are larger than ever and I will leave it to our educational leaders to find out why this is happening in many areas of our state. These unmotivated students hurt their parents, classmates, school and society. According to the research, this begins to appear in middle school and becomes worse as these "attendees" move to the high school. This phenomena is not the fault of the classroom teacher.

Two thoughts: First, if the problem is the broader society (and I'm certainly not one to argue that the culture doesn't need an overhaul), then our massive outlay for education, and especially staff and faculty costs, would seem to be misdirected. We shouldn't be spending billions of dollars to pay people to do a job that can't be done.

Second, since substandard student performance reflects poorly on teachers, one would think that their unions would be striving to implement methods of identifying such students in order to (1) help them and (2) decrease the extent to which they hinder the high performance and shining image of educators.

The State Follows Tiverton on Evaluations

Well, the title of this post is a bit of an overstatement (downright presumptuous, actually), but I just received the following press release from the Rhode Island Department of Education:

All Rhode Island teachers will be evaluated at least once a year, following the historic vote tonight by the Board of Regents for Elementary and Secondary Education.

At its meeting tonight (December 3rd, 2009) at Lincoln Senior High School, the Board approved the first-ever standards for evaluation systems for teachers and other educators. From now on, all evaluation systems will provide feedback on performance, create incentives for highly effective educators, and improve the performance of or remove ineffective educators.

Under the new Rhode Island Educator Evaluation System Standards, "an educator’s overall effectiveness is to be determined by evidence of impact on student growth and academic achievement." The evaluations must include observations of practice, and evaluators should seek feedback from supervisors, colleagues, students, and families.

The Regents also approved the first Educator Code of Professional Responsibility, which will "guide professional conduct" of educators in "all situations with professional and ethical implications." The code "embraces the fundamental belief that the student is the foremost reason for the existence of the [teaching] profession." The code will "serve as a basis for decisions" regarding certification and employment.

"The new evaluation system will help Rhode Island to improve educator quality by attracting, mentoring, and retaining top teachers and education leaders," said Robert G. Flanders, Jr., Esq., Chairman of the Board of Regents. "The evaluation process will be fair to educators because it will be tied to existing standards and expectations and because it will be consistent across all districts. These votes will help to ensure that we have excellent educators in every school and classroom."

"By approving these new standards for evaluation systems and the Code of Professional Responsibility, the Regents have acted in the best interest of our students," said Deborah A. Gist, Commissioner of Elementary and Secondary Education. "I have said many times that the single most important factor in the education of our students is the effectiveness of their teachers. These new standards, which emphasize student achievement and professional growth for all educators, are a big step in our work to transform Rhode Island education."

The Department of Elementary and Secondary Education (RIDE) will develop evaluation-system templates, which districts may adopt or modify, subject to the Commissioner’s approval. RIDE will post the standards and the code on its Web site, www.ride.ri.gov.

As some of my Tiverton Citizens for Change colleagues will hasten to point out, this has more than a flavor of an unfunded mandate. Tiverton Schools' Superintendent Bill Rearick put the figure for an initial increase in evaluations at $250,000. Unless the state is going to send its own evaluators, a command for such a process from the top — from the state — becomes something for which towns must pay, which means something added to the bill to taxpayers.

Enacted at the town level, evaluations are a self-motivated mechanism for improving the district's educational product, which means towns will more readily rework their systems to make room for them.

Re: The Projo’s Unintentionally Informative Juxtaposition of the Day

Responding to a post from earlier this week, National Education Association Rhode Island Chapter Executive Director Robert Walsh comments that Jennifer D. Jordan's recent Projo story on charter schools, where it was reported in the voice of the omniscient journalistic narrator that the NEA "disagrees" that charters have certain benefits, failed to capture the full breadth of the position he had offered. Mr. Walsh's more complete position is that…

The problem with proposing additional funding for charter schools during the current budget crisis is that it further diverts those dollars from state aid to education and the approximately 150,000 students in traditional public schools, and the further diversion of these funds hurts the existing schools and directly impacts property taxes.

Further funding for charters at this time also goes against two public policy imperatives. First, since charter schools are stand-alone entities, often with a higher percentage of costs allocated to administration, more charters mitigate against the policy interest of regionalization and consolidation of services. Second, despite an impetus towards performance measurements, the record of the existing charter schools is decidedly mixed. Perhaps existing charters that are not making the grade should be defunded and those resources should be allocated to new charters with a better chance of success. Another alternative is to follow the original idea behind charter schools - identify successful educational ideas and move those into the public schools so that all children can benefit from them. The idea that some children need additional time on task or more personal attention is not a new concept, and the funds should be made available to the traditional public schools so that all students can benefit from them.

Based on reaction that Mr. Walsh has engendered in the past, I am compelled to issue an early warning regarding comments in this thread. To start by accentuating the positive, an example of an acceptable comment would be pointing out that making a priority of whether the bureaucracy that manages a school is municipally-based or regionally-based does nothing to mitigate the main point of the original post, that the union is more focused on creating particular bureaucratic structures than on educating students. (And, by the way, isn't a charter school like the Blackstone Valley Democracy Prep, which accepts students from multiple towns an example of a regionalized school -- albeit one that's been regionalized from the ground-up, instead of the top-down?)

Likewise, asking "fiscally conservative" readers if they are going to continue to believe that top-down regionalization is the panacea they've been told it is, when it is being offered as a reason why the state shouldn't more fully innovate in the delivery of public services, would also be an example of an acceptable comment. (And just so there's no confusion, these are comments that I actually am making).

Personal attacks, name-calling and other comments unrelated to the substance of what's being discussed are not acceptable, and will be quickly removed from this thread.

The Projo’s Unintentionally Informative Juxtaposition of the Day

The online headline of Linda Borg’s article in today's Projo announces one community’s goal for education…

In Central Falls, the goal is getting pupils to read better.

…which, despite its seeming obviousness, is a bit different from the goal being emphasized by the National Education Association, according to a companion article written by Jennifer D. Jordan...

Charter schools are taxpayer-financed public schools that operate free of many of the restrictions of regular public schools. Charters often offer smaller class sizes, require students to wear uniforms, encourage parent involvement and provide a longer school day. State education officials say charters provide choice to low-income students, and can produce innovative approaches that school districts can replicate.

But the National Education Association of Rhode Island disagrees, saying charter schools siphon away badly needed resources from the public school system.

Got that? According to the NEA, providing money to “taxpayer-financed public schools” is taking money away from the “public school system”. Not all students in public schools are entitled to public funding according to the union’s logic, because only students in schools managed by a particular form of bureaucracy should be entitled to public money. This rationale unequivocally elevates the imposition of a particular bureaucratic form on Rhode Island students above more fundamental educational goals of the kind mentioned in Linda Borg’s story, e.g. teaching students to read.

Fortunately, in a ray of hope for Rhode Island, State Education Commissioner Deborah Gist offers a clear statement on the absurdity of an educational philosophy that emphasizes funding bureaucracies instead of funding public-school students…

“Ideally, as a state, we will be working to implement a funding formula, so that taxpayer investment in a child’s education is based on the student, whatever public school that child attends — regular or charter,” Gist said.

One final note: Compared to prior Projo offerings on the same subject, Jennifer Jordan makes a little progress on properly explaining to the public the relationship between the “funding formula” and charter schools. Instead of the voice of the omniscient journalistic narrator telling us that Rhode Island’s lack of a “funding formula” implies that taxpayers are paying “extra” for public charter schools, as occurred this past June, today's article attributes this connection only to the “critics of charters”. And the “critics of charters", of course, continue to be as wrong on this issue as they always have been, because…

You can direct money just as easily -- maybe more easily -- to charter schools through use a "funding formula" than you can without one. Or you could decide not to fund charters, without implementing a "funding formula". Either way, the decision by a state to fund or not fund charter schools precedes the creation of a "funding formula"; the formula only implements a policy decision that's already been made.

What Might Merit Mean?

In a comment to my liveblog post, Thomas Schmeling asked me to "provide some information on the 'merit system' of compensation that [I] support." The short answer is that I don't have a tremendous amount of detail to put forward.

For one thing, I volunteered for the Tiverton School Committee Subcommittee on Evaluations in part to develop my understanding of the various considerations involved, and we have yet to meet. For another thing, a fair portion of he details should be left to administrators to hone according to the actual forces and dynamics in their own districts.

Basically, I just support the idea that compensation and professional advancement should be related to capability — not longevity. (Although one would expect longevity to result in escalating capability in most cases.) I don't think the one-time bonus structure is very effective, especially if the bonuses are small, and group bonuses probably wouldn't prove very effective unless the groups are very small. There should be an individually based spectrum, ranging from firing and probation to raises and promotion.

The "afterthought" of my earlier post included a sketch of factors that would be considered while adjusting pay, but the long and short of it is that everything should have an effect, from standardized scores to demonstrable extra work, to student and parent reviews, to peer reviews. By some process that suits the school and district, administrators would factor in these various considerations — a good amount of which could easily be incorporated via objective scales — and produce an annual raise and promotion result.

Tiverton School Committee Merit Pay Workshop Video, 6

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Tiverton School Committee Merit Pay Workshop Video, 5

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Tiverton School Committee Merit Pay Workshop Video, 4

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Tiverton School Committee Merit Pay Workshop Video, 3

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Tiverton School Committee Merit Pay Workshop Video, 2

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Tiverton School Committee Merit Pay Workshop Video, 1

So when I arrived at last Tuesday's Tiverton School Committee workshop on merit pay for teachers, I set up such that I could capture the faces of speakers in the audience. But the committee out-thought me and positioned a microphone at the table typically set aside for the stenographer, and by the time I realized it, the more-appropriate side of the room was filled (and with my political opposition). Consequently, my video features mainly the backs of non-committee member participants. Consider it an effort to make the viewer feel as if he or she is actually there.

Each of these posts will include three videos, two in the extended entry.

Continue reading "Tiverton School Committee Merit Pay Workshop Video, 1"

The Desire for Relief

A little bit of clarity about what charters and mayoral academies are all about could help our state in ways beyond education. This paragraph from an article about Cranston Mayor Allan Fung's interest in starting one of the latter puts it succinctly:

Like other charter schools, [Democracy Prep Blackstone Academy, in Cumberland] operates outside traditional rules and regulations, but it is free even from some rules that other charter schools must follow, such as those on prevailing wages.

State and federal mandates and oppressive union contracts are strangling our education system to line the pockets and stroke the vanity of adults. The very same factors are strangling our economy. Changing that reality could transform Rhode Island with astonishing speed.

The Focus of the Advocates

Julia Steiny's column last Sunday focused on declining numbers of students in Rhode Island, but the paragraphs on the cause stick in the mind:

Mather elaborates, "In general terms, people leave New England because of job growth elsewhere. Many young people go to New England for college, but when they're finished or ready to start a family, they go where there are more opportunities, more affordable housing, and a warmer climate."

Well, but NCES shows that also-not-warm mountain states Idaho and Colorado both will enjoy double-digit growth, 26 and 19 percent respectively, between 2006 and 2018. Even Nebraska and Minnesota are growing.

So yes, says John Simmons of the Rhode Island Public Expenditure Council, the state's economy is the issue. He sighed as he rattled off a laundry list of badly needed changes to the state's tax structure, health-care system, pensions, and onerous regulatory burden. "If we don't begin to make changes today, by 2012, the problems become unsolvable. This has to be faced."

If it were actually true that, as outgoing National Education Association General Counsel Bob Chanin put it, "what unions do first and foremost is represent their members," it seems to me their focus would be wholly different. They wouldn't be funding left-wing Web sites and advocating for growth-killing progressivism.

Over at Assigned Reading, Mike, himself an RI teacher, reacted to a speech by American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten thus:

Weingarten reveals through her speech what is an essential conflict: teachers unions only play for one team. Teachers unions have become arms of the Democratic party, activists for liberal causes and champions of politicians on the left. By aligning themselves with one side, they have effectively created enemies of the other. And they are major players in the blame game.

It isn't only the divisiveness and political activism, per se, to which union members ought to object, in this. They should find it unacceptable that the union organizations to which they pay so much in dues, and whose baggage they must carry, locally, are ideologically hindered from advocating for policies that would help membership in the long-term — policies that increase the wealth of taxpayers and expand the class of young clients.

A Merit-Based Meeting

Thankfully, the Tiverton School Committee's workshop on merit pay is much better attended than has been, well, any other meeting since the poorly considered passage of the retroactive teacher contract. Maybe 50 people.

School Committee Chairman Jan Bergandy mentioned some communications that he's received from teachers to the effect of: "How dare you let people discuss this."

Superintendent Bill Rearick just suggested that adding money to payroll may not be necessary, if the goal is to sort through teachers. He suggests stronger evaluations and the ability to dismiss bad teachers. I don't think anybody from Tiverton Citizens for Change would argue against that strategy.

7:27 p.m.

Some discussion has passed, but I was participating, so I couldn't be posting, as well. Former School Committee Vice Chairman Mike Burke is speaking against spending any further time discussing merit pay. He's clearly presenting his prepared remarks as a direct political response to some initial thoughts by Tiverton Citizens for Change. But that's what one is to expect from the people who've been running Rhode Island and its cities and towns: His position is that all change is blocked at contractual, legal, and budgetary considerations.

Tiverton Establishment: "No change. Keep funding a failing system. Let's do some research."

One interesting point that he's made is that the financing of the districts is too closely integrated for a district's merit pay system to work. I'd argue that a system that has relatively low pay for just showing up to work, but high pay for good teachers would tend — within the static system that Burke describes — to attract the better teachers within the state. Not surprisingly, he wants to wait for the state to act and force something from union-controlled top down.

8:24 p.m.

I haven't written much because the conversation has gone along pretty predictable lines, and there's been no deep investigation into specifics of a program. One notable thing is that merit pay does reshuffle the ideological deck, some. I know I've had behind the scenes arguments on my side, and it's clear that the other side is (or should be) having their own.

One lesson, perhaps, could be that merit pay isn't its own issue, apart from broader reforms, especially in Tiverton, which is currently working through the first stages of a strategic plan. I'll agree with some of the suggestions of folks with whom I generally disagree, that we don't want to derail other initiatives. So, perhaps merit should be built into the evaluation system currently in development. (I happen to be on the evaluation committee...)

Afterthought

Overall, the workshop had a productive, cordial tone, so one thing that stuck out felt inappropriate to explore — mostly because it could have devolved rapidly. Comments were made several times that, essentially, teachers aren't really motivated by money. Indeed, School Committee Vice Chairwoman Sally Black said that she found the idea insulting that teachers would work harder for money. A teacher in the audience said the same. School Committee Member Carol Herrmann suggested that perhaps "merit pay" could be refigured as a sort of merit acknowledgment, with no money necessary.

Having sat through school committees watching teachers visibly shaking with passion over raises that amounted to a few thousand dollars, I find tonight's assertions kinda hard to square with experience. Boiled down, they seem to be suggesting that it is insulting not to give them annual increases (on top of step raises) simply for being teachers, but that it is also insulting to promise them additional money for proving themselves to be good teachers.

I honestly believe that the teachers do hold these views sincerely and with honorable intentions, but it just goes to show how infantilizing union membership and propaganda can be.

The bottom line on merit pay, from my perspective, is that it shouldn't be just a bonus, but an entire system aligning compensation with performance. And it shouldn't be based solely on test scores, but on job performance as broadly written as is appropriate. Just like career advancement is in the private sector.

Sure, some component would have to be related to students' actual performance. But other components could be tied to district targets. For example, one argument that I hear all the time is that parents simply aren't sufficiently involved, so perhaps some component of the evaluation and merit increase could kick in for teachers who do something to bridge that divide. A perfect example: retired music teacher (and TCC member) Anne Parker spoke of her experience doing extra work with a parent/student choir. Or, if a target area is math, a shop teacher could prove merit by integrating lessons with the students' math classes, thus improving immediate understanding while illustrating the practical utility of an abstract subject.

When it comes right down to it, though, none of this is going to be free, and the real test of whether teachers are "motivated by money" is whether they think a system of objective, useful evaluations to be worth a few years of very minimal raises.

Losing Sleep Over and Paying Attention to Education

I've got a letter in the online version of the Sakonnet Times (prospectively in the print edition out tomorrow) that begins thus:

Residents who wish to understand the gradual deterioration of Rhode Island's public school system need only contrast school committee meetings addressing two issues: teacher contract negotiations and abysmal standardized testing results. The passion that sets the auditorium on fire when adults' high pay and lavish benefits are threatened with mild budgetary restraint is nowhere to be found when, say, only 25.8% of eleventh graders prove proficient in science (down from 30.5% the year before).

I go on to make some general suggestions regarding the necessary shifts in attitude and policy.

While I'm on the topic: The Tiverton School Committee's workshop on merit pay is tonight at 6:30, in the high school library.

Mayor McKee on an Educational Funding Policy

In this week's Valley Breeze, Cumberland Mayor Daniel McKee lays the groundwork for an educational "funding formula" proposal that looks to be substantially different from the other proposals that have been recently considered for Rhode Island. The key passage in the op-ed is this one…

Three attributes mark good governmental funding policy at any level: 1) the funding is equitable; 2) it's transparent; and 3) it rewards the right kinds of behavior. Our current state funding policies bear none of these hallmarks.

Neither of the options currently before the state legislature, the so-called Ajello or Gallo bills, contain anything like this third provision; they are simple redistributive plans based on tax rates, property values and theoretical estimates of per-pupil costs that give no consideration to factors like spending efficiency or educational outcomes.

With regards to the first point, alas, the fact that the term "equitable" has lost all meaning in the context of the RI "funding formula" debate -- officials from communities already receiving big amounts of state aid use "equitable" to mean they should receive even more, while officials from communities receiving lesser amounts use it to mean that per-pupil funding should be more, well, equitable -- makes it difficult to determine exactly what is meant there. Mayor McKee does discuss the concept of funding students instead of school-systems, but at least in this op-ed, stops well short of endorsing a true money-follows-the-student funding program.

Stay tuned. As anyone who has followed the development of Mayoral Academies in Rhode Island knows, Mayor McKee has shown a preeminent ability for getting changes that he's set his sights on implemented at the State House…

A Mayoral Academy for the West Bay?

According to the Cranston Herald's Meg Fraser, Cranston Mayor Allan Fung is interested in bringing the "Mayoral Academy" model of education reform, currently being spearheaded by Cumberland Mayor Daniel McKee, to Cranston and, if we assume that it would follow the regional design used by Mayor McKee, to the entire West Bay…

“I definitely want to start a mayoral academy in Cranston,” [Mayor Fung] said….

“With the mayoral academy you’re not going to have those handcuffs that are going to tie you down. You’re not bound by a lot of the contracts that you have with the traditional teachers contracts,” he said.

The school he would like to establish would use merit or outcome-based pay for teachers and, in line with the recent announcement by Commissioner of Education Deborah Gist, would not take seniority into consideration.

“With the charter schools, you just can’t take anyone. You’ve got to have someone who buys into the philosophy,” he said. “It’s not for every student and it’s not for every teacher.”

Talking About Merit Pay for Teachers

The footage from last night's discussion of merit pay by the Tiverton School Committee begins with Tiverton Citizens for Change President David Nelson and continues in the extended entry:

Continue reading "Talking About Merit Pay for Teachers"

Merit in a Meeting

So I'm at the Tiverton School Committee meeting that begins the town's discussion on merit pay for teachers. Tiverton Citizens for Change President David Nelson proposed a workshop to discuss the topic, and even just the conversation sparked thereby illustrates the need for a more substantial forum to discuss strategy, funding, tie-ins with the state, and so on. The motion to set up a workshop passed unanimously.

An interesting note: the audience consists of five TCC members (me among them), the wife of one, and Newport Daily News reporter Marcia Pobzeznik. No union folks. No teachers. That's peculiar even when there's nothing at all on the agenda.

Well, hey, if they want us to control the field on this one, we're happy to oblige.

Some points that have already been raised for thought:

• In Denver, merit pay took years to consider and pass.
• The Chariho district in Rhode Island has a clause in the latest contract to implement merit pay, with $400,000 to be put toward the result.

Individual Assessment, Individual Allocation

'Round here, we tend to be skeptical of buzzwords, generally, and "fair funding formula" talk, specifically, but I like what Cumberland Mayor Dan McKee says here:

A strong education funding policy would be based on individual student need, establishing the base level of state support every student requires and providing additional support through an equitable and transparent formula for special needs that require costly additional services.

This measurable amount of funding would follow a child to any Rhode Island public school parents choose. Only in this way can we get taxpayers' dollars where they were intended to go. Only in this way can we avoid the practically comic system under which we now live, where a district can continue to receive tens of millions of dollars for thousands of students who no longer attend its schools or, in many cases, even live in the district, while another district can face an influx of costly students and not receive one additional dime in state aid. Only in this way can the state stop providing fiscal incentives for bad results like high dropout rates.

Unless the money follows the student — wherever his or her parents wish to spend it — Rhode Islanders can't even trust the evaluations whereby students are determined to be "special needs," because the assessors have financial incentive to return a verdict of "yes." The only way forward is to increase parental freedom. And that doesn't mean "regionalization," so that the same core infrastructure can protect the object of its gluttony; it means "competition," so that districts begin to think of students and communities as the granters of revenue, not merely the raw materials that can be transformed into money by the machinery of politics and bureaucracy.

Talkin' Education Blues

If I were a legislator of the "there oughtta be a law" sort, I think I'd put forward a law dictating that public meetings seeking citizen participation can't start before 6:30 p.m.

I'm at the Education Commissioner's event in Warren (PDF), and in typical non-Rhode Islander fashion, I came to an intersection with no signs in the wilds of Warren and followed the path that all the cars were taking. That was the wrong way.

Not that I hurt the attendance, though, the place is pretty well packed. Commissioner Gist's staff sat me at a small-group discussion table consisting mainly (as far as I can tell) of teachers and school committee members.

6:58 p.m.

The small groups are now sharing their key points with the room. This is all well and good, and I suppose some ideas might come out of it, although I have a hard time believing that the folks at the Department of Education couldn't come up with most of this stuff on their own.

Functionally, what is the purpose of these things? Is it the business/organizer thing... essentially just to keep moving?

7:33 p.m.

Two thoughts:

1. Bristol/Warren people like the idea of regionalization. My response is: great, from district to district, but it should be bottom up, not top down.
2. These forums are, well, dangerous. Everybody's talking about what programs are needed — all day kindergarten, universal pre-K, programs to involve parents, technology — the "then what" is the issue. You can see how the people in this room tend to go out into the communities with the notion just to "get more resources." They're not really addressing the core problem, which is the continual bleeding of limited resources into one component of the school budget: teacher remuneration.

7:52 p.m.

Yay! My table finally brought up the contract requirements.

Of course, the event's just about over, so we're not going to get to move on to why regionalization etc. will hurt that cause.

After thought:

One point that came up among school committee members opposing charter schools was that the charters receive from the district the average student cost, but they don't have to take the children who typically cost the most. To throw some arbitrary numbers out as examples: If a town's average per-student cost is $15,000, it might be that a general ed student only costs $10,000, but a special ed student costs $20,000. If the first student goes to a charter school, he brings that extra $5,000 with him.

It seems to me that this is an argument for shifting school policies to attract the lower-cost students. As I tried to express at the table, there's an underlying demand, among parents, for alternatives to public schools. That's why private schools are so popular, in this state. (And why there's political will to force districts to provide busing and textbooks to students who attend them, which was another complaint of some school committee members at my table.)

Of course, getting administrators and school committee members to begin thinking in terms of the services that they provide as a means of attracting, essentially, customers is just another way of bringing them toward the proper perspective to begin attacking the fundamental problem: the labor unions that force districts into inappropriate models, undermine innovation, and manipulate the political system for reasons other than education.

Students Aren't Economic Gurus

As a follow-up to this morning's post on Rhode Island's need to get out of the way of its economy, Tabetha recently offered a comment in our discussion of the economy and higher education to which I'd like to return:

If RI wants to keep college grads, the number 1 need is pretty simple: have jobs in the most popular fields available. Without jobs in their field, recent grads have no reason to stay in RI. It would make most sense to analyze the most popular majors and then try to attract businesses that would hire graduates in those areas. RI has a high unemployment rate and I suspect that a dearth of employment opportunities in popular fields of study most affects the decision to leave town. After 4 years (or more) of study and the probable accumulation of student loans, I doubt many recent grads are going to be content to work the counter at the local Dunkin' Donuts.

This approach comes at the problem from the wrong perspective. Students choose their fields of study for a variety of reasons, ranging from personal desire to experience with adults' careers to advice and research about economic directions. Even to the extent that a college degree dictates a particular industry or type of business (which is less and less the case), the student's research and preferences are not the most reliable criteria on which to build an economy.

It's like giving the folks in entry-level positions a decisive say in the company's big-picture management. To the contrary, the people who have invested their years and their fortunes in a particular business are the ones best suited to say what it should do and where it should be located.

Again: Rhode Island's focus should be on getting out of the way of people who are willing to imagine and build the economy, not on allowing government functionaries to try their hand at economic prognostication or selecting an array of jobs that might dazzle young adults who know little about the way of the world or even what a career should look like.

Chariho Teachers Approve Contract: Stepping Away from Steps?

As the ProJo reports, the Chariho teachers have approved a new contract (PDF) that includes nearly the complete eradication of the traditional increases (go "here" to see what I mean by "traditional") in the hard-coded contract step increases. This is what the Chariho contract looks like:

Usually, a step contract would have something like a 2.5% annual salary increase for each pay step. Not here. This time the teachers' union and district agreed on a step schedule that remained constant over three years for steps 1-8, decreased for steps 9 and 10, fluctuated for step 11 and (apparently) added a new step 12 in 2010-11.

As I've shown by including the "Yr X Raise" column, that doesn't mean that teachers aren't getting a raise every year, it just means the usual increase in pay that comes via a step increase isn't being further compounded by a raise on each step, too. As an example, I've highlighted (in blue/green/red) what the "real world" salary increases would be for a new teacher as they progress to 2011-12 under this contract. Being guaranteed over a 6% increase per year still ain't a bad deal.

Whether or not we agree with the amount of increases from step to step, it is significant that there is no raise being applied from year to year for each step. Whether or not this will inspire--or embolden--other districts to follow suit will be interesting to see.

The Time for Investment Has Passed; Now We Need to Produce

Can't Republicans at least agree that the last thing the state needs is more government "investment"?

Governor Carcieri Friday morning said Rhode Island must invest more in higher education and mentoring programs if it wants to encourage young, educated people to stay here for the long haul.

"As you invest in higher education, you make a statement to young people about what you value and what's important to the state," Carcieri told the crowd at the Knowledge Retention Symposium, a gathering at Brown University focused on preventing what's known as brain drain in the Ocean State.

Even within the brief article is evidence that the governor is misassessing the actual problem, with the following from Providence College President Rev. Brian J. Shanley:

"I hear this all the time and it drives me crazy. They come to Rhode Island to these great institutions and they fall in love with Providence and the state of Rhode Island, but they don't think this is a place they can stay. They think this is a launching pad to New York or Boston, or Chicago and Washington, and it's critical to the future of our state that our students, when they come here, think 'This is a place I can stay.' "

The students are already coming; the problem is that they leave, and to the extent that further government investments (read: taxes and bonds), regulations, and mandates continue to hinder the Rhode Island's private sector, the state will continue to circle the bowl and graduates will flee before they're sucked in.

The Audacity of the Union

If you've paid even moderate attention to union squabbles in this state, you've got to drop your jaw at some of the pro-binding arbitration ads that the National Education Association is putting out. Look at the clippings at the top of the picture highlighting all of the lawyers fees and other bad effects of recent negotiation disputes; all of them originate with the unions. They file the lawsuits. Their intransigence leads to work-to-rule.

I'm also reminded of a comment that local Tiverton unionist and guidance counselor Lynn Nicholas made when the union was pushing for retroactive pay, last year. The audio is available at the end of this post, but the relevant portion is as follows:

Has anybody... tried to figure in what it's going to cost for lawyers fees once we get back into arbitration? Have you begun to think about that?

Two observations: First, lawyers are still needed in arbitration and the steps leading up to it, and negotiations that ultimately land on an arbitrators desk for a binding decision will surely be hard-fought. Second, the cost of lawyers that the union intended to impose on school districts has been a repeated threat during negotiations; are we to believe that the unions are going to give up this weapon — indeed, promote its relinquishment as a salable benefit — for an arbitration regime that won't unduly benefit them?

Let the word go out: No legislator who votes for binding arbitration should be considered worthy of being reelected, no matter what else he or she might do while in office, because not only would that have been a vote to benefit the unions at the expense of the residents, but it would also affirm deceit as a central tool in Rhode Island's political system.

Preemptive Support for Evaluations

Is it too cynical to be suspicious of union enthusiasm to develop evaluation standards for teachers?

The Rhode Island Federation of Teachers and Health Professionals has received a $200,000 national grant to develop a much more demanding method of evaluating and mentoring new teachers. The union will work closely with four urban school districts: Providence, Pawtucket, Central Falls and Woonsocket.

"The union is tired of being portrayed as a protector of bad teachers," said union president Marcia Reback. "We have no interest in having incompetent teachers in our classrooms. We want to have good, rigorous, substantial evaluations."...

The peer-evaluation system would work as follows: a consulting teacher would observe, evaluate and mentor between 8 and 10 novice teachers over the course of a year. In the spring, the consulting teacher would recommend whether the new teacher should be awarded an additional contract. A board comprising administrators and union representatives would make its recommendation to the superintendent, who, in turn, would offer advice to the local school committee.

So a group of union reps and administrators (often previous members of the union) translate a union member's review of another union member to the superintendent, who brings it to the elected representatives on the school committee. Sounds like an attempt to derail evaluations that would involve more stakeholders, such as students, parents, and taxpayers, at a more fundamental level.

It always rankles, by the way, to hear union executives talk about "our classrooms." Perhaps public clarification of ownership is in order.

Gist: No More Seniority-Based Teacher Hiring

Rhode Island Education Commisioner Deborah Gist has quickly become a breath of fresh air, indeed (via 7to7):

Dropping a bombshell on Rhode Island's teacher unions, state Education Commissioner Deborah Gist announced Friday that districts must abolish seniority as a method of assigning teachers.

Gist, in a letter to all superintendents Thursday, said the Board of Regents' new Basic Education Plan, which takes effect in July 2010, requires that highly effective educators work with students who have significant achievement gaps.

"In my view," she wrote in a press release, "no system that bases teacher assignments solely on seniority can comply with this new regulation."

The state has 12,000 public school teachers who are represented by one of two unions, the Rhode Island Federation of Teachers and Health Care Professionals or the National Education Association, Rhode Island.

The Rhode Island Federation of Teachers and Health Care Professionals has already promised to take Gist to court, claiming that she has exceeded her authority under state and federal law.

I think Gist is willing to fight them on that. No more seniority, pushing for higher teacher standards, taking a hands-on approach....Gist has been impressive so far.

UPDATE: Gist talked to Dan Yorke and explained that this is not a "bomb" and she is doing nothing more than explaining an aspect of the Basic Education Plan that everyone should have realized. Further, she thought it unfortunate that union leaders were trying to use it as a wedge issue between herself and teachers. (Incidentally, lest we forget, Gist was a teacher of the year....).

Broke by Binding

I've got an op-ed in the upcoming Providence Business News addressing a topic that's on a great many Rhode Island minds: binding arbitration.

The Prick of Local Authority

What to make of the story of the teacher who accidentally stapled a student's head?

A Superior Court judge has upheld the firing of a Smithfield social studies teacher for stapling a student's scalp during a classroom stunt three years ago.

Judge Daniel A. Procaccini ruled that the Smithfield School Committee, the state education commissioner and the state Board of Regents for Elementary and Secondary Education Appeals Committee showed "good and just cause" in finding that Bethany St. Pierre should be dismissed from her job as a Smithfield High School social studies teacher after injuring a student and then urging the class to cover it up.

The education commissioner's finding of facts, in February 2008, offers a good summary of the incident (PDF). As ever, multiple issues come into play. Should the teacher have been fired for the accident? Absolutely not; our attempts at an antiseptic society contribute (I believe) to a bevy of our current problems, including educational mediocrity. Should she have been fired for not taking appropriate steps that would have alerted other adults to the incident and suggesting that the students keep the incident in the classroom? Probably not, although her first reaction clearly should have been to send the student to the nurse, personally notify the principal, and send a note to the parents (or pick up the phone) to explain the incident. But was the school within its rights to fire her for a mere error of judgment? Yes.

Look, the courts should not be a mechanism for interested parties (such as unions or private associations, like church groups) to leverage higher tiers of government to micromanage the decisions of officials in lower tiers. Resolve the issue through the administrative and political processes available for that purpose. Relying on the judiciary merely lets everybody in power off the hook.

Work of the Hand Is Not Exclusive of the Mind

Marc's post on education and "dirty jobs" — the entire recent discussion about college and the necessity thereof — brings to mind this passage from Walter Rose's wonderful book The Village Carpenter, which reflects on Rose's family business as the era of the automobile and the machine came on strong:

These words are not to the old who, like myself, have passed the years of prime, but to the youth, whose years of promise lie before him. He seeks to acquire a personal knowledge of the craft, the ability to achieve as others have done and still do. Is he prepared to pay the price, in time and study of the principles of the craft, and the details of its execution? In my father's day seven years of apprenticeship was not thought too long to obtain this knowledge. When I was a youth the term had become reduced to four or five years. To-day there is a general disinclination for any apprenticeship at all, and a sad misconception as to the amount that has to be learned. But all the quickening processes of science have failed to train the human mind at a more rapid pace, and those who have studied woodcraft for half a century find themselves still learning and quite unable to pack all their knowledge into a nutshell for the convenience of a beginner. The training is not that of the university; it is, however, quite as exacting in its own way and so merits equal recognition and respect, and it is encouraging to note that this idea is slowly gaining ground.

Slowly,indeed. The Village Carpenter was originally published in 1937.

Private School Teams on Public Fields

I don't know if this will go anywhere, but the lawsuit by the ACLU against the Pawtucket Parks and Rec Department for supposedly giving parochial schools priority over public schools for athletic field use caught my attention. As summarized at 7to7:

The ACLU, in a news release Wednesday, alleged that parks and recreation gave the preferential treatment in issuing permits for athletic field use to parochial schools over public schools.

The suit has been filed on behalf of seven Pawtucket parents and their children and it asks for the court to declare unconstitutional "both the preferential treatment to religious schools and the city's lack of any objective standards" for issuing the permits for fields use.

As an example, the suit claims that O'Brien field has "been reserved exclusively" for Saint Raphael Academy after it was refurbished using tax dollars.

And junior high school teams at the city's public schools have been denied use of two other fields, which are used by athletic teams from Saint Raphael and/or Bishop Keough Regional High Schools, the suit alleges.

I'm much more persuaded by the claim that the city has no objective standards for determining field use than by any supposed religious preferential treatment. (I suspect that any preference has more to do with who in the Pawtucket Parks and Rec may or may not be an alumnus of a particular school or not). Perhaps the most persuasive argument (PDF) is that these athletic fields were built and are maintained by public tax dollars, but the permitting has undeniably favored the athletic teams at St. Raphael's over the public schools.

[F]or most of the period before and since the O’Brien Field has been refurbished through the use of public monies, Saint Raphael Academy has enjoyed the exclusive use of said field, particularly on week-day afternoons in the fall season, despite repeated requests by various public school officials for use of O’Brien Field for public school sponsored interscholastic sports, submitted to the City of Pawtucket’s Office of Parks and Recreation, by and through Defendant William D. Mulholland.

This is part of a larger debate: to what degree should public dollars support private education? Many (all?) municipalities are required to bus students to private schools within their zone, for instance. If private school is a choice--often made out of necessity--should the public (ie; the taxpayer) be expected to subsidize any portion of that education? (Keeping in mind that parents who send their kids to private school subsidize public schools via their taxes)? Would this all go away if a voucher-type system was enacted?

The Science of Running Schools

The Tiverton School Committee meeting has gotten around to the abysmal NECAP science scores, which I described when they came out. Superintendent Bill Rearick has run through the process of evaluating the problem, yadda, yadda, yadda, yadda. It takes some years to turn things around. The East Bay Collaborative is attempting to come up with money to fund new "kits." The district is applying for grants.

News flash: There are kids graduating every year. There are students taking inadequate classes right now.

This is a bottom-line kind of thing for me. Screw contracts and hierarchies and standards and all the other grown-up junk. The district has resources allocated to it within which it must work. This is a basic function at which it is utterly failing. Expand the time that science teachers must work, if it's necessary. Fire anybody who isn't willing to put in the same degree of effort that any other professional who is utterly failing would have to put in.

Everything must stop until students are receiving the education that they deserve, and for which the town is already paying.

7:51 p.m.

Chatter. Starting the conversation with the statement, "this is obviously unacceptable," isn't sufficient. I don't want to hear what balls the district has started to roll. I want to hear what they're doing to roll them faster.

7:55 p.m.

Committee Member Danielle Coulter is trying to push the conversation toward what can be done immediately and what further effort can be pushed. You know, any private company, in any industry whatsoever, seeing a public release of this level of badness would be out in the public with a plan for repairs within a day. The tone of the administrators of Tiverton school district is what one unfortunately expects in the public sector. Essentially: "We're doing all of the steps that you're supposed to do. We need money. We're looking into tools."

These results (and not just science, either) should be keeping administrators across the state up at night.

7:59 p.m.

Supt. Rearick just said that there is no local money left to invest in this. Earlier in the evening, Director of Administration and Finance Doug Fiore proclaimed that the budget is balanced. I hate to contradict that, but there are clearly holes therein.

College Isn't Required to Earn a Good Living

Two stories in last week's ProJo have been jangling around in my head. Then Justin noted Deborah Gist's "anger" over kids not wanting to go to college and, correctly, pointed out that college ain't for everyone. I agree, especially when the value of a B.A. seems to be less and less while we pay more and more. The first story that caught my attention last week was that the RI Board of Governors for Higher Education raised tuition and fees by almost 10% at URI, RIC and CCRI, continuing a trend. Yet, Rhode Island isn't alone, it's a national problem. One cause of these increases is what's called the "cookie monster" effect, says Ronald Ehrenberg, who directs the Higher Education Research Institute at Cornell University.

Continue reading "College Isn't Required to Earn a Good Living"

Is the Gig Up for the RI Education Industry?

It's worth your time, if you haven't already read through the Sunday Providence Journal article about RI Education Commissioner Deborah Gist's elevation of the state's standardized test requirement for prospective education students to the highest in the country. The college and university estimates of how many students would miss the mark are head shakers, but of particular value is revelation of the gig, the game, the scam of educator education:

"Everybody understands what Commissioner Gist wants to do and I think her goals are laudable," [acting higher education commissioner Steven] Maurano said. "We absolutely want to work with her to do whatever we can to improve the quality of teachers in Rhode Island Schools. The concern that the institutions have is that if you raise the score for the Praxis I too high in one fell swoop, we will deny a significant number of students the opportunity to get into teacher prep programs."

Limiting the "opportunity" to enter into teaching programs is kind of the point, isn't it? It gets better:

Teacher training programs argue that there are several other safeguards before a student graduates, including requiring that students pass a series of exit exams in specific subjects toward the end of their program, called Praxis II, and perform student teaching for a semester.

Rhode Island requires high cut scores for these exit exams and they are a better indicator of the kind of educator a new teacher will become, say Byrd and Eldridge.

Reporter Jennifer Jordan doesn't explore how the percentage of students who pass the exit exams correlates with the estimates of how many would fall short of higher entrance scores, but the underlying argument is telling. Those who run training programs want a low bar for the students rushing to give them money, but a high bar for achieving the goal that motivated the exchange. In typical Rhode Island fashion, the objective appears to be to introduce waste (of time, money, and human potential) for the benefit of those who live off of it.

The most suitable names for such behavior might make a good question in the vocabulary portion of the Pre-Professional Skills Test.

Don't Drop Out, but Stay for the Right Reasons

A "summit" addressing the high-school drop-out rate in Rhode Island has gotten some attention, as the topic certainly deserves. Talk about students' coming to see their teachers as the "enemy" rightly made the Providence Journal article and the WRNI audio report, but it may be that a statement of pro forma outrage from the education commissioner deserves more attention:

Deborah A. Gist, the state's new commissioner of elementary and secondary education, said Thursday she had a disturbing conversation with a group of teachers recently. They told her that many of their students aren't interested in attending college.

"That made me really angry," Gist said at a dropout-prevention summit. "Afterward, I asked nearly every student what they wanted to do after high school and every single child talked about going to college."

Apart from any occupational interest that she might have in encouraging high attendance rates, why should students' lack of attention to college make Ms. Gist "really angry"? Not every career path does, can, or should lead through an expensive few years of higher education, involving hours of effort and thousands of dollars for undesired lessons (whether fluff or culturally significant).

In fact, I'd hypothesize that decades of higher education's being presented as a must-take next step after high school has contributed to dropout rates. If college is a seamless continuation of secondary school, then achieving a diploma at the earlier stage is marginally more significant than not achieving one, and if a student isn't interested in the careers for which they expect college to prepare them, then they've no reason to be interested in an earlier curriculum intended to prepare them for college.

As a society, we have to make the pitch as to why high school graduation is important in its own right, and that will require a straightforward enunciation of the opportunities available thereafter — even if some students might find them adequate or even more attractive than continued time in plastic chairs with bolted-on desks.

Discussing the Undiscussable in Westerly

On the agenda at Wednesday night's meeting of the Westerly School Committee, in the words of Victoria Goff of the Westerly Sun, was "[finalizing] the termination of Schools Superintendent Steven Welford's two-month employment with the school district". Mr. Welford had begun a three-year contract as Westerly's superintendent of schools in July of this year.

Goff's article quoted the statement offered jointly by Welford and the Westerly School Committee that had announced the unexpected end of the new superintendent's term of employment...

On Friday evening, the school board and Welford issued a joint statement saying Welford's employment would end today because of a "differing philosophy about the operation and direction of the school district." Murano said he would offer no comments other than what is in the joint statement.

A number of Westerly residents used the open comment period of Wednesday's meeting, attended by close to 100 people, to express their dissatisfaction with the vagueness of the official explanation.

• Westerly Resident Harry Staley was the first speaker on the topic: "I think it's fair to say that the only who people in this room tonight who understand Mr. Welford's reason or reasons for leaving are the members of the school committee….As a result, there has been a flood of rumors, that run the gamut from allegations of serious criminal acts, to petty personal disagreements between administrators including claims that serious financial problems exist…" At that point, School Committee Chairman James Murano asked Mr. Staley not to talk about the specifics of job performance.

  After a brief discussion about what was appropriate to discuss and why, Mr. Staley continued: "Like the rest of us here who are gathered tonight, I have neither the power nor the authority to do anything else but register my concern…"

• Westerly Resident Mark Sullivan expressed similar concerns, concluding by saying that any new candidate for the position of superintendent "would have to be incredibly courageous or just flat-out nuts to subject themselves to the environment that [Westerly is] projecting to the community, the state and the region".

• Another Westerly resident asked if residents could expect sometime in the future to learn more details about Mr. Welford's termination.

• Finally, Westerly resident Christine Misto asked that if the termination had truly resulted from "philosophical differences about the direction of the district", could the school committee's philosophy be explained to the public. (Earlier speakers had offered a related point, asking why philosophical differences serious enough to warrant the dismissal of a superintendent were not apparent during the screening and hiring process.) Chairman Murano tried to answer the question about philosophy in general terms, saying that goals and objectives are included in the annual school budget, but following-through on his promise in Goff's article, he offered nothing specific with regards to Welford's situation.

I know there is a reluctance amongst governing bodies of all kinds to discuss anything defined as a "personnel matter" in public that rooted in some valid legal concern. Still, when a decision of this magnitude is made without any credible explanation being put forth, how can the people of a community trust that their current school committee is providing truthful and transparent explanations on other matters that it decides upon?

Failing Our Students, Once Again

It is unequivocally unacceptable that a mere fifth of Rhode Island's high school students can achieve proficiency on the science version of the NECAP test. I'm especially incensed by the fact that Tiverton was one of only two districts in Rhode Island to lose ground at every grade level. Johnston was the other, and while Johnston's scores are worse, Tiverton's declined more severely (PDF).

The question that begs to be asked is whether the result is further evidence that the raises that the Tiverton school committee dished out in January were ill considered or it is an indication of union members' inability to maintain and improve the quality of their work while they're agitating for unaffordable increases in pay.

Turning back to the state level, Julia Steiny's got an interesting column today making the observation that the problem is much deeper than just an inability to lead students to grasp scientific concepts:

In the spring of 2008, Greg Shea, physics teacher at Mt. Hope High School, was proctoring the 11th-grade New England Common Assessment Program science test.

As he wandered among the test-takers, he was blown away by the number of kids leaving the open-ended questions blank. They seemed buffaloed by having to explain their thinking in writing. His heart sank.

Sure enough, when the test results came in, an anemic 19 percent of the kids were "proficient." (State average: 17 percent.) Shea says, "The biggest driver of the science NECAP scores was the students' inability to respond to the extended-response questions. We dug into the issue by asking the kids what happened. They told us we hadn't given them enough opportunity to develop the [needed] skills."

Steiny presents the story as an ultimately hopeful illustration of what can happen when professional educators work together and try comprehensive approaches. In a darker frame of mind, one could point out that we aren't merely failing to provide students with a body of basic knowledge, which is bad enough, but are unleashing them into the world unable to learn, think, or express themselves in practical ways, which is nigh upon criminal and brings into doubt the very argument for funding public education at all.

Where Competition Ought to Happen

I hadn't intended to attend tonight's school committee meeting in Tiverton, but I saw on the agenda that they'd be discussing the item on the floor today: full-day kindergarten, rather than the current half day. Superintendent Bill Rearick put the additional cost at $223,953 per year, although he noted that, with next year's financial difficulty — by which he means the budget hole approaching $1 million resulting from a failure to hold over any of the magic Obama money — make it financially infeasible.

It's a shame. Rather than year after year paying more for the same or fewer services, the public schools should start to add services — to increase the value of the system to the town, rather than to the employees.

7:47 p.m.

It's the theme of tonight's meeting. Now they're talking about the district's inability to adequately monitor and coordinate curriculum development across all grades because they can't afford the extra hours for teachers. Committee Member Carol Herrmann presented the choice as between canceling classes or monitoring the classes we keep.

Superintendent Rearick put the price tag at about $100,000, saying, "We know how to build a Cadillac. We know what we need. We just can't afford it. We have a survivalist budget."

And yet the committee approved retroactive raises in the middle of an open-ended recession earlier in the year.

Performance Pay Doesn't Mean Cut-Throat Workplace

Dan Yorke has been talking about the East Providence school administration's push for a pay-for-performance system for teachers, and one teacher from the district called in from her house in Barrington to explain that that sort of pay schedule doesn't work in her profession. Teaching is cooperative, you see, meaning that unlike other professions (apparently) the teachers have to work together, and if some know that others make more, they'll refuse to help.

If that's the case, then the people with whom we currently entrust our children's educations must be replaced immediately, because they lack the requisite maturity.

Now, I know all other fields of work pale in comparison with the divine calling that is public-school teaching, but in every job that I've ever had, whether carpentry, editing, graphic design, office help, retail seafood, or even private-school grade school, differing pay has had absolutely no effect on employees' ability to work as a team. (Boy, wouldn't professional sports be in trouble!) For one thing, pay-for-performance is not zero sum; high-performing employees do not take their additional money away from those who perform less well.

Indeed, it behooves those who earn less to help those who earn more so the latter will provide them assistance in return — both as a matter of course and explicitly to aid in advancement. The carpenters on my jobsite are always quick to help each other, regardless of pay, and they are also quick to seek the input of those whom they know to have more experience and knowledge. Heck, the carpenters are quick to help the electricians and plumbers, who make more money than us even if they're terrible! As long as the structure is perceived as fair and is available to everybody, nobody has cause for grievance against their fellow workers.

If the current crop of teachers in East Providence can't even match the cooperation of lowly construction workers... like I said, they've gotta go.

A Different (and Less Effective) Way of Doing Business

I share Julia Steiny's aversion to teacher "bumping," of course, but her weekend column brings out the downright philosophical difference that exists in public education, as distinct from private-sector work:

A single regulation from the state, effective the moment each contract expires, would allow schools to get the best teachers they can, when vacancies occur.

But that leaves the problem of displaced, or "excessed" teachers.

Cohen believes that "If teachers don't find a position after a year, they should be cut. Chicago and Austin have negotiated contracts that say that after a year, you're dismissed from the system."

Hmmm. That's a bit harsh. I might give them two or three years, so the time is limited, but enough to burnish their credentials or skills if need be. In the meantime, they could have a permanent substitute position at one school, two at the most, where they can be a member of a school community, instead of floating among schools where they can't integrate into a school culture, or be properly evaluated.

For folks who live their professional lives out from under the government wing, the entire discussion seems other worldly. A professional is hired to do a particular job, not to be a part of a system. It changes the relationship between employer and employee entirely. The public education system is having enough trouble teaching students what they need to know to be successful in life without undertaking the additional mission of coddling adults.

If teachers are "excessed," it means one of two things. Either the specific district of which they were a part had no opening for their talents, in which case, their experience should help them to find another job. (And shouldn't job placement be their union's role, not the the system's?) Or they weren't up to the task that they were hired to perform, in which case, both they and the students are best served by the application of maximum incentive to improve or to find a more suitable area of focus or even a more suitable career.

It is, of course, in any organization's interest to foster among its employees a sense of belonging, and that cannot be accomplished if it is unwilling to expend reasonable effort to find mutually beneficial positions for those who've already been hired. Such decisions can only be made on a case-by-case basis, and any systemic effort to influence the outcome beyond the motivation for success is counterproductive.

For the Benefit of the Sellers of Useless Knowledge

Actually, I'd argue that no knowledge is useless, although some is worse than useless. But Walt Gardner's observation (which does not raise uselessness, by the way) is right on the money:

THE NEWS that employment opportunities for college graduates have dramatically shrunk in today's recession comes as no surprise to anyone who has been following hiring trends. It merely confirms that the United States has been wildly oversold for far too long on the indispensability of a university degree as a haven against the dislocation caused by global competition.

The hard reality is that the overwhelming number of new positions in the next decade will require short-term, on-the-job training — not lengthy tertiary education, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The time frame is widely acknowledged to be between one week and three months, depending on the complexity of the tasks involved.

Higher education for all is the sort of unnecessary burden that folks who've never had to work (meaning actual work) like to impose. For a great many Americans, a standard four-year degree is a waste of time and a trap door into decades of debt.

Vlogging About Open Negotiations

My latest video blog is about open negotiations, drawing on material from Tiverton, but applicable elsewhere.

I'd be especially interested in feedback on this one, inasmuch as I tried some new tricks (in an effort to throw myself at the learning curve) and am still trying to get a sense of appropriate content for the medium. Let me know your thoughts on any aspect of video that might inspire comment. In advance, I'll say that this is probably about as long as my vlogs will ever be, and yes, next time, I'll take a few minutes to shave beforehand. (Hey, it was a busy weekend.)

Open Negotiations in Tiverton

Yes, this is a local instance, but I've no doubt whatsoever that similar opinions exist — and the same arguments would be made — in towns across Rhode Island, were school committees to begin considering a demand for open negotiations.

I've posted video of the discussion about the topic at the last school committee meeting in the extended entry.

Continue reading "Open Negotiations in Tiverton"

Mixed Messages from School Districts, and Final Decisions from the Judiciary

Doesn't it seem that school districts somehow always just happen to find money? I mean, sometimes a car's brake lines just happen to go the day after it's been in the shop for a tuneup, but it's difficult to know what to make of the Woonsocket superintendent's claim that the district can now hire a few new teachers, as the state insists, without increasing the budget deficit:

Gerardi said those positions could be paid for with money that the district was receiving from the Northern Rhode Island Collaborative and by consolidating classes elsewhere in the system because of lower-than-expected enrollments that became apparent after the start of school.

For two other positions — an administrator for part of the literacy program and a librarian at the high school — Gerardi said the district believes it can show that more qualified people already on staff will be capable of fulfilling the responsibilities of those positions.

So was that collaborative money just going to be used for red balloons? Were those "qualified people" just going to be employed blowing them up? One begins to sympathize (just a little) with unions' feeling that school committees and the administrations that they direct preserve plenty of fat in their budgets that they can trim when required.

That impression adds a little bite to Education Commissioner Deborah Gist's reference, in this context, to state law requiring "maintenance of effort." It would be disconcerting to think that Ms. Gist sees the maintenance of effort clause as license to force districts to adhere to her demands.

Meanwhile, in East Providence, the embattled school committee is seeking a 3.5% increase in the municipality's contribution to its funding, even as the state demands that the city revise its plan for balancing its budget. Look, I'm thrilled about the list of items slated for increases:

The proposal calls for a 210-percent increase, from $250,000 to $776,962, in what was allocated for textbooks and instructional supplies this year. It also has more money for building and classroom maintenance (from $289,500 to $820,500); technology (from $214,682 to $489,682); and athletics and extracurricular activities (from $46,453 to $146,453).

But not only are these things that Rhode Island's townspeople should be considered as already paying for, but it can't do otherwise than leave it to judges to decide between this spending and increases in adult compensation packages. Maybe they'll rule the right way, maybe they won't. But it's way too easy to envision their joining with Gist in affirming the principle that budgets may always be balanced with an increase in taxes.

President's Address to School Kids

As promised, the White House has released the prepared text of President Obama's speech to school children today. Here's the theme:

Now I’ve given a lot of speeches about education. And I’ve talked a lot about responsibility.
I’ve talked about your teachers’ responsibility for inspiring you, and pushing you to learn.

I’ve talked about your parents’ responsibility for making sure you stay on track, and get your homework done, and don’t spend every waking hour in front of the TV or with that Xbox.

I’ve talked a lot about your government’s responsibility for setting high standards, supporting teachers and principals, and turning around schools that aren’t working where students aren’t getting the opportunities they deserve.

But at the end of the day, we can have the most dedicated teachers, the most supportive parents, and the best schools in the world – and none of it will matter unless all of you fulfill your responsibilities. Unless you show up to those schools; pay attention to those teachers; listen to your parents, grandparents and other adults; and put in the hard work it takes to succeed.

And that’s what I want to focus on today: the responsibility each of you has for your education. I want to start with the responsibility you have to yourself.

More excerpts after the jump. Content wise, there are a few things here and there that I didn't like (a reference to AIDS--the President needs to remember his audience, here). All in all, it's OK, but it's way too long for kids. After five minutes, the tune-out factor will be setting in. "When's recess?"

Continue reading "President's Address to School Kids"

Re: Teacher-in-Chief

I touched on the growing controversy surrounding President Obama's address to school kids earlier in the week. As I said, I thought Obama's speech would be pretty harmless and I expect that the speech will be filled with the usual platitudes and educational cheerleading. That's fine and is the sort of feel-good thing we should expect the President to do. However, I did find the "lesson plan" released by the Administration to be a little weird. I think it was this memo, not the speech itself, that got people wound up and paranoid to the extent that some school districts across the country aren't going to air the speech in their schools.

Supporters of President Obama have pointed out that both Presidents Reagan and Bush, Sr. also addressed school children. And they were also criticized. For instance:

As Barack Obama prepares a nationwide broadcast to America's students next Tuesday, it has been revealed that Democrats complained in 1991 when then President George H. W. Bush broadcast a speech from a Northwest Washington junior high school.

In fact, the House Majority leader at the time, Dick Gephardt (D-Mo.), said "The Department of Education should not be producing paid political advertising for the president, it should be helping us to produce smarter students."

Such was reported by the Washington Post on October 3, 1991 (h/t KY3 Political Notebook via Chuck Todd)

The difference, I'm pretty certain, is that neither Reagan nor Bush put out a comprehensive lesson plan, much less a poorly written one, beforehand in preparation for their speeches.

The Obama Administration has fallen to blaming this misunderstanding on the "inartfully worded" memo and has changed at least one "suggestion" from, "Write letters to themselves about what they can do to help the president” to "Write letters to themselves about how they can achieve their short-term and long-term education goals.” That's a smart change and more indicative of what the President's address should aim to do a la Reagan and Bush. Inspire the students about education in general by encouraging them to think about themselves (that's what kids do best, anyway!). Shy away from anything that could be inferred as Presidential hagiography. President Obama is also going to release his speech ahead of time. Another wise move.

So, the lesson plan is one reason--and probably the biggest--why people got upset over this. Over-exposure is another. Since he took office, we have seen or heard the President speaking at us about nearly every aspect of our lives, from health care to the economic crisis to the baseball All-Star game. People who disagree with Obama's politics are just plain getting sick of the Obama Show. Yet, despite all of the media exposure, at least they could switch the channel or turn the page. But with this address to the schools, they see Obama circumventing their ability to control who or what has access to their children. I think they are over-reacting and that part of being a parent is discussing such things at the dinner table. Re-programming, if you will. Dan Riehl (h/t) thinks the backlash is symptomatic of a deeper conflict going on within the country:

That what once would have been a non-event is so incredibly controversial suggests to me that a great many Americans likely feel disconnected from the nation's political affairs right now, as well as extremely concerned about what the future's going to bring. The crisis Rahm [Emmanuel] suggested taking advantage of doesn't just cut one way, after all. And I doubt that any alienation, or all the concern came about from just 9 months of any one term.

That is certainly part of it, but it has been a heckuva nine months. For myself, I agree with John Podhoretz:

If, in his speech, he tells kids to do their homework and listen to their teachers, he will be doing something good, especially for African-American kids, who are, all sources and studies report, desperately in need of hearing that performing well in school isn’t some kind of betrayal of their race.

If he does use the speech to do some politicking on his agenda, there’s going to be trouble in the schoolhouse. As the nation learned in June and July, it turns out there are few things more boring than listening to Barack Obama discuss health care; school-age children by the millions will be shifting in their seats, rolling their eyes, and beginning to think seditious thoughts if they are forced to sit through such a thing.

Basically, I think most kids are going to hear Charlie Brown's teacher. Mwa mwa. Mwa, mwa mwa mwa mwa. BUT, if some come away inspired to learn, all the better.

The Hard Work of Educating

The rhetoric about public-sector workers' doggedly, thanklessly doing the hard work that the community requires, recently promoted around here by Phil, comes to mind especially with the item that I've italicized in the following:

EAST PROVIDENCE — The city's teachers have voted to withdraw from volunteer activities in the district's schools.

The roughly 500 educators won't help with afterschool activities except for those that are accompanied with paid stipends, nor will they chaperone dances, buy supplies for their classrooms or participate on committees for curriculum development, accreditation or school improvement.

This isn't just a temporary imposition affecting only the irreplaceable educational experiences of current students — which is egregious enough; it's acceptance of decay in the system itself. Teachers may see school committees come and go, they may see budgets swell and ebb, but in East Providence, they apparently don't consider themselves to be guardians of the city's education system. Of what value are they, then, beyond replaceable cogs in the public machine?

Perhaps it should be encouraging that Education Commissioner Deborah Gist included the East Providence teachers' actions among the issues of concern that she highlighted at yesterday's Board of Regents meeting, but a contrast of emphasis emerges. In the case of Woonsocket, she threatened the superintendent's certification over the hiring decisions of the school committee. If she believes, as she states, that educators should never "make decisions that directly impact students" (in a negative way, we can assume she means), then perhaps she should be looking into revoking their certification when they behave as if their jobs are more a matter of entitlement than calling.

E.P. Teachers Offer "Kid-Friendly" Boycott of After School Activities

ProJo reports:

The city's teachers have voted to withdraw from volunteer activities in the city's schools.

The roughly 500 educators won't help with afternoon activities except for those that are accompanied with paid stipends, nor will they chaperone dances, buy supplies for their classrooms or participate in committees for curriculum development, accreditation or school improvement.

The changes are effective immediately and will affect all of the city's 13 schools. School begins Sept. 9.

"We're continuing all our contractual obligations and beyond," said Valarie Lawson, the president of the local teachers union, East Providence Education Association. The union adopted the policy at a Monday membership meeting.

"This is not work to rule," said East Providence High School history teacher Greg Amore, a member of the committee that developed the teachers' plan.

When teacher unions vote to do only what is contractually necessary, it is considered "work to rule" in education circles.

The city's teachers, however, will continue to write letters of recommendation for students, meet and talk with parents and be involved with parent-teacher organizations. They will also continue to offer after-school help, coach sports teams, correct papers and plan lessons at home, and participate in all paid extracurricular activities.

Amore said this plan is "kid-friendly."

Right.

A Glimpse of Another System

This sort of turnaround would flourish in a system of educational choice and merit-driven, professional teaching careers:

After a $35-million renovation that left no surface untouched, Nathan Bishop is truly a Cinderella story. Closed nearly three years ago, the school today welc omes its first class of sixth-granders and a new cadre of teachers handpicked by Michael Lazzareschi, an award-winning former elementary school principal who is determined to dispel the myth that middle schools are the district’s weakest link.

Handpicked teachers? You mean they weren't selected for these plumb jobs based on proximity to retirement? Some would argue that this is more in line with the way "professionalism" ought to function in the public education system:

The Massachusetts Teachers' Association expressed concern that such a system [of rewarding teachers for student success in AP classes] threatens "collegiality" in the schools, since some teachers who make the effort are rewarded more than others who do not. (The MTA wants the local unions to snub grants that go directly to teachers in the form of increased compensation.)

Union leaders in Dartmouth and Leicester rejected the grants that would let their schools participate, meaning only 12 systems will participate, though there is money for 14 this year.

Retired Teacher in Favor of Binding Arbitration. Surprised?

It's disappointing to see retired teacher and principal John Savage (R - East Providence) release an op-ed in favor of binding arbitration on House Minority Office letterhead. The piece (provided in full in the extended entry) amounts to union spin issued in the name of the Republican Party. The substantive core of Savage's argument is as follows:

There is a belief that arbitration decisions overwhelmingly favor teacher unions. Over a span of ten years, (long enough to give us a respectable sampling) 636 teacher contracts were negotiated in the Nutmeg State. Only seventy-five (12%) of these contracts (756 individual items) were submitted to arbitration. Scorecard of decisions rendered: School Boards-379/ Unions-377. Let us probe deeper! Health Insurance issues: School Boards-52%/ Unions 48%, Working Conditions: School Boards 53%/ Unions 47%, Salary issues: School Boards 42%/ Unions 58%.

Well did those arbitrated salary decisions put the strain on municipal budgets? Maybe they did, but certainly not because of the arbitration. The arbitrated salary increases averaged 2.39% while the negotiated salary increases averaged 2.48%.

Savage offers zero, zilch, nada indication of his source or of the 10-year span that he's describing. He explains that binding arbitration became law in Connecticut in 1979, which ought to leave almost three decades of data. Why present numbers from only one third of those years? It's curious to note that, in this regard, the elected Republican representative's spin is more egregious than that of NEA Assistant Executive Director Pat Crowley, who at least divulged the years at which he was looking and used a span showing higher increases than Savage describes (my response here).

The lack of citation also makes it impossible to adjust for context. So School Boards won 52% of healthcare-related disputes, but that might mean they won the right to send out plan descriptions in digital form, instead of paper while the unions won the right to continue paying 4% coshares. Who knows?

One thing we can say is that, alone among the various categories that Savage lists, salary increases inherently compound. Health insurance and working conditions can change from year to year; salaries never, never go down in the world of public sector education.

If Savage is truly after a solution — for the benefit of Rhode Island's students — that will resolve contract disputes through "fair and evenhanded legislation," he could advocate for a ban on retroactivity. That would give the unions incentive to reach agreement, rather than to drag out "negotiations" for years on end to ensure that the cost of their labor never recedes.

The most fundamental problem with Savage's position is that he cuts out the consideration of most concern to those whom he ostensibly represents. That the arbitration produces slightly less remunerative results for unions tells us only that it kicks into gear where the terms of contracts are most hotly disputed. In other words, it's a safety switch that unions can hit when taxpayers manage to mount a truly substantive response to their steamroller.

Continue reading "Retired Teacher in Favor of Binding Arbitration. Surprised?"

Teacher-in-Chief

Via Drudge, it seems President Obama is going to address all pre K to 6th grade students on September 8th. Hm. On the one hand, I'm guessing he'll speak a lot of platitudes about working hard, opportunity, reaching for the stars, etc. In and of itself, probably pretty harmless. But the concept of sending out a talking points sheet is a little weird. Here's one of the talking pre-speech discussion points:

Why is it important that we listen to the President and other elected officials, like the mayor, senators, members of congress, or the governor? Why is what they say important?

I wonder if the difference between "listen" as in "do what they say" and "listen" as in "analyze what they say" will be discussed. I doubt it, especially since most kids don't have the critical thinking skills to figure out the difference. Instead, it will simply be an authority figure talking at them. Ahh, the irony that the "question authority" generation has gone here....

This address to our captive school children is all part of the kick-off for the new "Get Schooled: You Have the Right" campaign, which also an appearance by the President on a back-to-school special.

"Get Schooled"?

Really?

Bureaucrats trying to be too cool by half, if you ask me. And it seems to be an extrapolation of urbanity nationwide, where the cultural relevance of "getting schooled" may not be completely grasped in the hinterlands. Setting aside the poor grammar usage exhibited by naming an education initiative after a bit of slang, don't these guys know that once you co-opt slang you remove all of its inherent coolness immediately?

"Sports teach the same lessons to the superstar as the substitute."

ProJo high school sports reporter John Gillooly writes about pay-to-play and gives an example of a young girl who thought she'd give volleyball a try, but paying a sports participation fee was an issue:

She had heard that anyone who felt their family couldn’t afford the participation fee could go to the high school athletic director and make out a hardship waiver form. But that would be embarrassing for both her and her family.

The easier thing to do was just not play.

After all, it’s no big thing that she’s not playing. She’s not some superstar athlete. Her presence on the team wouldn’t be the deciding factor in a drive for a state championship. Other than a few of her friends, nobody will even notice she’s not playing.

So she became one of the Lost Children of Pay-to-Play.

I don’t know “her” name.

I wouldn’t recognize “her” if I saw her.

But after decades of chronicling the activities of high school student/athletes and talking to people in areas where pay-to-play has been a reality for a while, I know “she” and other teenagers like her exist at every high school that has pay-to-play sports.

They are the not the star athletes, not the ones whose names appear on the recruiting lists of college coaches. They are, however, teenagers for whom high school sports participation is important for a variety of reasons that don’t include All-State awards or college scholarship offers.

We have become a society that more and more measures its concept of success by an individual’s celebrity-rating, yet high school sports teach the same lessons to the superstar as the substitute.

There are lessons of commitment, teamwork and healthy lifestyles and they come at a time when young people are beginning to make their own decisions about their life’s direction.

I would argue that being a substitute or an end-of-the-bencher can provide more valuable lessons than when your a superstar (or even just a solid varsity star). You learn about hard work, commitment and being on a team, even if personal glory doesn't redound upon you. That mindset, that sense of self-sacrifice, is one of many skills learned on the field or court that can easily be transferred into everyday life. As I've said, providing our students the opportunity to compete on teams--or play music, or act or paint--free of charge (so to speak) is an important component of a well rounded education. It shouldn't cost extra.

The End of Cultural Literacy

The New York Times article doesn't claim a trend, instead following the efforts of a single teacher, Lorrie McNeill, with a class of gifted students, but one can be sure that the positive article in the publication formerly known as "the newspaper of record" will encourage more teachers to follow her lead. What McNeill has done is to jettison a classroom reading list, instead letting students choose their own books, with a gentle "prodding" to "a higher level."

The deceptive success of the program has been in increased interest in reading and achievement on a standardized test, but one could argue that the uptick highlights nothing so much as the low performance of students previously:

Of her 18 eighth graders, 15 exceeded requirements, scoring in the highest bracket. When the same students had been in her seventh-grade class, only 4 had reached that level. Of her 13 current seventh graders, 8 scored at the top.

If these are gifted students, they ought to be passing these tests handily; one shudders to think how lower-level students are doing. An education system that must dumb down assignments and ignore its mandate to develop a shared literacy in order to achieve positive results in mechanics is failing its students by any definition, and an attempt at finding social redemption strikes me as starry-eyed:

In the method familiar to generations of students, an entire class reads a novel — often a classic — together to draw out the themes and study literary craft. That tradition, proponents say, builds a shared literary culture among students, exposes all readers to works of quality and complexity and is the best way to prepare students for standardized tests.

But fans of the reading workshop say that assigning books leaves many children bored or unable to understand the texts. Letting students choose their own books, they say, can help to build a lifelong love of reading. ...

... literacy specialists also say that instilling a habit is as important as creating a shared canon. "If what we're trying to get to is, everybody has read 'Ethan Frome' and Henry James and Shakespeare, then the challenge for the teacher is how do you make that stuff accessible and interesting enough that kids will stick with it," said Catherine E. Snow, a professor at the Harvard University Graduate School of Education. "But if the goal is, how do you make kids lifelong readers, then it seems to me that there's a lot to be said for the choice approach. As adults, as good readers, we don't all read the same thing, and we revel in our idiosyncrasies as adult readers, so kids should have some of the same freedom."

Will the fact that more students allow themselves to be motivated by choose-your-own-adventure reading assignments mean that they'll choose reading over other candidates for their attention in the future? I'm skeptical. As I argued recently regarding summer lists, books' unique attraction is their evocation of substance, profundity, and achievement. If gifted students already in eighth grade are still not past the point of picking books that are essentially cartoons in sentences, they've precious little time to reach the vista at which one sees the literary canon imparting meaning to life.

And that brings us back to the fact that they'll have little experience plumbing a common meaning conveyed in classics. Frankly, I can't help but think of a lecture from the '80s by former Soviet propagandist Yuri Bezmenov about Communists' strategy of subversion as warfare. Explaining the components of the first stage of subversion, demoralization, Bezmenov touches on education:

Distract them from learning something which is constructive, pragmatic, efficient. Instead of mathematics, physics, foreign languages, chemistry, teach them history of urban warfare, natural food, home economy, your sexuality — anything, as long as it takes you away.

Although Bezmenov doesn't mention it in his brief explanation, cultural literacy is a critical component to social cohesion and a national sense of purpose. Left to their own devices, young Americans will isolate themselves in limited communities o