The Mystery of Good Teaching

Monique has already mentioned the headline revelation of an article reporting statements of the states' two teacher union heads before the Rhode Island Public Expenditure Council (that they've recognized the advantage of regionalization to them), but I'd like to highlight an unrelated statement from Rhode Island Federation of Teachers President Marcia Reback:

"[Education] Commissioner [Deborah] Gist said it earlier," Reback said. "You know good teaching when you see it. You can't test it."

The only way such a statement can be otherwise than total bunk is if we restrict the meaning of "test" to a written document that seeks to quantify without the need for human judgment. Even then, I'd dispute the conclusion, but at least it would be a real matter of debate. Many grades throughout my schooling were based on "tests" that involved a panel reviewing, for example, my piano playing. Many steps and sidelines in my adult employment have been related to managers' judgment of my work. One can test teachers by the success of their students and their contribution to schools, generally.

Of course, such a test has too many variables for some distant test author to incorporate. It is not, however, beyond the capacity of parents and principals, which is why public education is suffering for lack of two qualities:

• Parents' ability to easily move their children from one school to another, with an actual consequence to the losing school when the move is made.
• Principals' ability to manage their teachers as employees rapidly and easily enough to correct problems before they become institutionalized, which also has the effect of reducing the degree to which we can hold those principals accountable for institutional failure.

Some Sacrifice

Sometimes people have to say what they have to say, I suppose, but this comment out of Cumberland really points to the different world in which some Rhode Islanders live:

School Supt. Donna A. Morelle stated that the committee and the administration "are greatly appreciative of the sacrifice made by the teachers."

So what "sacrifice" are the teachers making? Giving up a vacation week or two? Higher health insurance payments? More realistic retirement expectations? Not quite (emphasis added):

Teachers this year will defer half of a 2.5-percent salary increase, half of an increase that comes with a new salary step and half of the payment teachers with credits or degrees beyond a bachelor’s degree receive, according to Roderick McGarry, president of the Cumberland Teachers Association. ...

Also in the agreement, announced Monday after the Cumberland Teachers Association and School Committee approved it Wednesday, is waiving a 2.5-percent salary raise in the academic year that begins September 2011.

The new accord adds another year to the contract, which the union president stated would give teachers additional security through the 2012-2013. Teachers will get a 1-percent salary increase in the first half of that year and an additional 1.5-percent salary increase in the second half, McGarry said.

So payments expected during the coming school year will be deferred until the future (when, the school committee inexplicably assumes, finances will have improved), raises next year will be eliminated (although the teachers will presumably see an actual increase because the deferral will end), and their guaranteed raise in the subsequent year will be less than expected. In effect, the contract uses accounting gimmicks to downplay the fact that union members will be receiving 1.25% raises (on top of step increases and other remunerative opportunities) during an era of crippling government deficits, high unemployment, and general economic malaise.

That, in the public sector, is called "sacrifice."

Regionalization? You May Want to Consider Who is Standing With You

As Andrew highlighted in his signature coverage of the Rhode Island Republican Assembly Endorsement Convention, the campaign platform of Republican gubernatorial candidate Victor Moffitt includes regionalization.

Audience Question: Unions and union contracts are out of control. What can we do to give more autonomy to the communities?

Answer: "I'm actually going to say that I think the problem is the opposite of that. As most of you know, I've been talking about regionalization and consolidation services since 1998....How good would Rhode Island be if we could replace 36 teacher contracts with 4? If we could replace 80 fire contracts with 5? Do you think that would be a little improvement for the state of Rhode Island?"

But OSPRI outlines the pitfalls; inter alia,

When comparing fully regionalized districts to similar size town districts we find that regionalized districts have the highest per pupil costs. One example is the Chariho Regional School District which was put together from three towns to make a school district whose student body is the same size as neighboring Westerly. But, the supposed economies of scale are nowhere on display in Chariho where administration costs per pupil are $825, forty percent more than the $589 spent in Westerly. Indeed, when it comes to administration costs, the supposed venue for obvious savings, they are well above the median in ALL the regionalized districts.

More alarming (... or not, depending upon your perspective), in yesterday's Providence Journal, Linda Borg reports on two other individuals who support regionalization.

The leaders of the state’s two teachers’ unions said that they would not be opposed to consolidating Rhode Island’s 36 school districts into one big district.

Although they cautioned that they were speaking as private citizens, Marcia Reback, president of the Rhode Island Federation of Teachers, and Robert A. Walsh Jr., executive director of the National Education Association, Rhode Island, offered the most radical suggestions about how to fix public education. The two made their remarks at a morning-long forum in Smithfield sponsored by the Rhode Island Public Expenditure Council.

Non-special interest supporters of regionalization like Mr. Moffitt (not to pick on him; he is not the only person to propose regionalization as a way to control costs but is one of the higher profile people to do so recently) presume that the hands into which thirty six contracts would be consolidated will act/negotiate/execute in the fiscal best interest of the taxpayer. Clearly, special interest advocates have determined that, on the contrary, it is they who would benefit from such an arrangement. Especially as it is the paid professionals representing that special interest who have reached this conclusion, I'm inclined to defer to their judgement

Sometimes "Investment" Is Just an Expense

In a recent article, John Kostrzewa describes a study (partially funded by RI's Poverty Institute) by Jeffrey Thompson, Assistant Research Professor at the Political Economy Research Institute at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst. As it happens, circumstances lately have put me in a position to agree with some of the professor's conclusions, particularly those decrying one-company-narrow special deals described as "economic development." But this part is some of the same-old-same-old:

On education, Thompson argues that investing in education attracts business, raises gross state product, increases employment in metropolitan areas and raises personal income. He claims that every million dollars spent by Rhode Islanders on education creates between 26 and 33 jobs for teachers, aids, custodians, nurses, professors, bus drivers and others.

I agree that education is a key to developing the talent, skills and entrepreneurs on which to build a knowledge-based economy and fill the needs of traditional companies. But I shudder at the idea of simply spending more money without controlling or targeting where it's going, and measuring improvement.

The first point to make is that monetary investment isn't proving to be the shortcoming in Rhode Island education and will not translate into any benefits beyond the direct funding of school-related jobs. As Kostrzewa writes:

Already, Rhode Island ranks among the top 10 states nationwide for per capita spending on primary and secondary education. Yet national test scores show Rhode Island stuck in the middle of the pack, and lagging behind its neighboring states in New England. Also, Rhode Island’s dropout rate of about 30 percent is one of the highest in the country.

And all of that money has to come from somewhere, ultimately from consumer spending that creates jobs indirectly and direct business activity, which creates jobs almost by definition. That brings us back to the point that I always make in this context: Even if we succeed in educating the fabled Workforce of the Future, unless we have jobs into which that workforce can move — because education doesn't necessarily mean entrepreneurialism — that workforce will move to another state that does, taking our investment in academics with it.

I'd argue that the key reforms — basically, increasing accountability, refocusing education on students and their parents, and tying revenue to success, rather than government whim — would cost less and improve outcomes. In other words, we could leave money in the economy for investment in job creation and simultaneously improve our children's marketability as employees.

"Rhode Island is a winner!"

That's the subject line of an email from Rhode Island Education Commissioner Deborah Gist announcing that Rhode Island came in fifth in the U.S. Dept. of Education's Race to the Top competition. Frankly, I find the presentation of the entire give-away creepy.

If we begin with the belief that public education is a states' rights matter, what we have here is an unelected federal bureaucrat using billions of our own money to elicit eager willingness of unelected state bureaucrats to give his office authority to judge and shape the education ultimately provided, and largely funded, at the municipal level. As I've opined before, the particulars may sound good, now, but they will dilute and expand until it's just a matter of assumption that the local men and women whom we elect to school committees just have to do whatever the executive branch of the federal government says. And as I've also noted before, quoting Education Policy Director for the American Enterprise Institute Frederick Hess, the selling points of the "reform" are not as prominent in reality as they are in the headlines:

A few of the 19 priorities rewarded states for moving on measures such as charter schooling and merit pay, with states earning 40 points (out of a maximum total of 500) for supporting high-performing charters and 58 points for using student-achievement results to improve teacher and principal effectiveness. But the vast majority of the points are awarded for compliance with often woolly federal criteria: 65 points for articulating an agenda and securing local buy-in, 10 points for prioritizing education funding, 20 points for providing effective support to educators, and so on. If you're not entirely sure what these categories entail, welcome to the club; they reward states for procuring signatures of union support, for spending more on schools, and for adopting impressive-sounding professional schemes.

And again, this is all being done with billions of dollars from an entity that's trillions of dollars into deficit and will either have to pull the financial rug out from under its promises or increase our taxes heavily for us to maintain the privilege of doing what it says.

If Teachers Are Professionals, Their Performance Should Be Measurable

Veronique de Rugy points to an L.A. Times article analyzing students' test scores — against their own prior achievements — to determine the educational value added (or not) by third- through fifth-grade teachers. Here are two findings that give a pretty good flavor (which, overall, Anchor Rising readers will find unsurprising):

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

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

Where the school matters, I'd suggest, is in its ability — and structural motivation — to ensure that teachers succeed in their mission. That means a stronger hand in dealing with employees, on the one side, and a direct and rapid relationship between the school's success and its revenue.

Consider charter schools: Those representatives of the public school establishment who support charters will agree that one of their benefits is as "laboratories for best practices," as the jargon goes, but they clearly aren't controlled experiments. That is, the school doesn't have to explain what practice it intends to test, with the state requiring it to keep all other practices (such as union contracts) intact, and with a plan to transmit successful strategies to the broader education system. Rather, the "laboratories" are meant to sink or swim and, if they swim, to increase the pressure on unions and administrators to reform.

It's a fool's project and a delay, as indicated by the fact that nobody should be surprised that some L.A. teachers are better than others and that the quality of the teacher affects the advancement of the student. That such experiments are a delay to necessary reform is evident, first, in the fact that parents flock to these more-accountable schools when given the opportunity and, second, in the fact, noted by de Rugy, that California teacher union thugs are boycotting the L.A. Times.

Integral Government Strings

Upon reading of the $9.4 million or so in federal money coming to Rhode Island for the purpose of expanding charter schools, I couldn't help but wonder about the strings that must be attached even to such a piddling sum, by current government standards.

Reviewing the U.S. Dept. of Education's onlne materials related to the program, I couldn't find any explicit strings, though. That leaves a cynic like me with general complaints about big government. Charter schools are popular among Americans, and by offering even a little bit of money toward their growth, the feds begin to insinuate themselves into their operation. (Specific office holders may also be interested in purchasing some cover for the billions of dollars that they've been devoting to preventing local school districts' having to reform in ways, during this recession, that might affect unionized labor.)

It's probable that many people involved in such initiatives, right up to Secretary of Education Arne Duncan and the president himself, honestly wish to improve public education and see charter schools as a mechanism for that purpose. Politicians and bureaucrats are no doubt sincere in their good intentions for a great number of big government programs. What they have to learn, though, is that good intentions are only as valuable as the individuals who hold them, and centralizing American life will ultimately give power to people more intent on exploitation.

Let Them Play

So now it's recess. Well, as a former high-energy boy, I'm not sure what I'd done if I had been forced to while away all the hours of the school day in a structured environment. Back in my day, we had a morning and afternoon recess (plus a lunch break!). The promise of those pending breaks are what got me through the hours spent in class. I knew that after math, I'd be back playing kickball or whatever else. And yeah, I'd have to go back into class, but the physical energy spent somehow helped to focus my young mind on the task at hand. Funny how that works.

But now we're told there just isn't enough time in the day to meet all of the requirements demanded by government and, implicitly, parents. So traditional recess of the free-form variety is being done away in favor of a more structured version. Just what our kids need: more structure in their already too-structured play time.

My wife, a member of our school's PTO who is at the school most days, has told me how she watches the kids at recess and that they have no clue how to play by themselves. For instance, soccer games quickly devolve into anything goes free-for-alls where the ball is usually carried (more like rugby). That's why there are programs in some schools that are actually teaching kids how to play. How sad. But at least these programs are aimed at giving the tools and ability to play on their own. A shorter, more structured "recess" will do just the opposite.

The problem is that we've raised--and continue to raise--a generation that thinks it needs adult supervision to play a game. Self-organizing doesn't happen. Kids are over-scheduled in their free time, whether it be dance or sports or karate or whatever. Too often, instead of fostering an interest, these organized forms of recreation end up being the only kind that kids get. Recess is one of the last places where they can just do what kids are supposed to do: play.

A Bubble in the Making

The talk has been growing — especially around the blogosphere — that higher education is the next major bubble. With access to loans and all sorts of civic and cultural incentives to attend college, the actual value of a degree is inflating. Of course, education is different from housing; as far as I know, no derivatives market has grown up around the asset of knowledge (as interesting a proposition as that might be for smart individuals).

On the other hand, education affects the job market, which is what made the topic of boosting college graduation rates sound like a matter of civic urgency — as opposed, say, to industry insiders' strategizing to expand their market — among attendees of a State Higher Education Executive Officers conference last week in Providence:

Without improvements in secondary and post-secondary education, only 21 out of every 100 Rhode Island teenagers about to enter the ninth grade will graduate from a two-year or four-year college in the next 10 years.

But research indicates that about 62 percent of entry-level positions will require at least a bachelor's degree by the end of the decade.

What percentage of those entry-level positions actually "require" a degree because of the skills involved, rather than as a method of easy candidate screening, I won't hazard to guess. Based on personal experience, though, I'd say it's quite substantial. As more young adults enter the job market with degrees, more employers will require them, without reference to the ostensible value of the knowledge that they've gained.

Note, especially the four bulleted suggestions in the article linked above:

• Reorganizing class schedules into blocks of time that allow students to plan jobs and family responsibilities.
• Individualizing remedial work and including it in courses for credit, while limiting separate catch-up classes to the summer before the freshman year.
• Establishing uniform academic requirements from one school to another, so students may more easily build on one- and two-year programs to transfer to four-year institutions.
• Making sure that up-and-coming high school students graduate with college-ready skills.

The emphases here are twofold: getting students to where they are supposed to be at the end of high school, and making it easier for them to fit higher education into their lives. Conspicuously absent is emphasis on the regimen for ensuring that students learn something useful and relevant to their future careers, including strategies for helping them to discern what those careers should be.

Honestly, I think that might be a bit much to expect of college, because it's a bit much to expect people straddling age twenty to figure out the next sixty years of their lives. In other words, if secondary schools can do a better job of getting students where they need to be upon high school graduation, then there is no great need for them to attend college unless (1) they can afford it, (2) their interests are broad and intellectual, and/or (3) they are driven strongly toward a particular, identifiable career. Beginning with that perspective, colleges and universities would be better able to hone their offerings.

I'd suggest that educational and economic benefits would accrue to a system that in some way expanded high school on a case-by-case basis to the duration necessary to adequately educate each individual student. When college degrees become too scarce and the differences between job candidates with and without them become too minute, employers will adjust their expectations.

No Dilemma. An Accurate Accounting.

It looks like the effort has begun, in earnest, to invalidate pending graduation requirements, rather than acknowledge that Rhode Island's current way of doing elementary and secondary education isn't working:

Thousands of incoming high school juniors may be unable to graduate in June 2012 because of tougher graduation requirements, and state education officials are beginning to grapple with the consequences of their new high standards.

Starting with the Class of 2012, high school seniors must have scored at least "partially-proficient" on the state tests in English and math in order to graduate. The tests are administered during their junior year.

If the new diploma system had been in full effect the last two years, nearly half of the state's juniors would have been at risk of not graduating because of poor performance on the math portion of the state tests. Forty-five percent of juniors scored in the lowest possible category, "substantially below proficient."

Let's be clear: These aren't "the consequences of new high standards"; they're the consequences of a failure to meet any standards at all. If the great majority of students were just barely missing adequate performance, then the aggressiveness of the standards might merit some adjustment. That's not the case. Half of Rhode Island's juniors aren't even close. And this explanation only brushes the underlying issue:

State education officials acknowledge that making these changes has been daunting, given the nature of the work and the scarcity of resources.

Scarcity of resources? Rhode Island devotes top-quintile amounts of money to education. The only reason resources for reform can possibly be said to be scarce is that they are locked up in personnel costs for a workforce that is unable or unwilling to perform to expectations. Our entire education structure is built in such a way as to put the compensation and employment satisfaction of adults first on its list of priorities.

As long as Rhode Island tiptoes around the union issue — with all of the legal binds for which unions and other insiders have labored over the decades — our students will continue to suffer. Making it easier for them to graduate will only paper over the problem, exacerbating the harm done to the young adults of Rhode Island.

The Kids'll Respond to Good Points and Respect

One wonders how the side of the culture war that proclaims itself "pro-science" will adjust its thinking in response to this finding (emphasis added):

The participants' mean age was 12.2 years; 53.5% were girls; and 84.4% were still enrolled at 24 months. Abstinence-only intervention reduced sexual initiation (risk ratio [RR], 0.67; 95% confidence interval [CI], 0.48-0.96). The model-estimated probability of ever having sexual intercourse by the 24-month follow-up was 33.5% in the abstinence-only intervention and 48.5% in the control group. Fewer abstinence-only intervention participants (20.6%) than control participants (29.0%) reported having coitus in the previous 3 months during the follow-up period (RR, 0.94; 95% CI, 0.90-0.99). Abstinence-only intervention did not affect condom use. The 8-hour (RR, 0.96; 95% CI, 0.92-1.00) and 12-hour comprehensive (RR, 0.95; 95% CI, 0.91-0.99) interventions reduced reports of having multiple partners compared with the control group. No other differences between interventions and controls were significant.

Having followed this sort of research over the past decade, I'll confirm that this result really isn't surprising. Only a smokescreen of spin and obfuscation makes it seem so. Abstinence-only education teaches children to think of sex in terms that should lead them to have less of it. "Comprehensive" sex education teaches them how to have sex. Moreover, it has nowhere been the case that abstinence represents the sum total of the lessons that children receive.

As Joseph Bottum puts it:

While the study emphasized that the abstinence-only classes "would not be moralistic," there was an underlying assumption in those classes that the children themselves were moral beings—a striking difference between the abstinence-only and safe sex–only interventions. In the abstinence-only program, it was emphasized that "abstinence can foster attainment of future goals." In contrast, the safe sex–only intervention concentrated on education about sexually transmitted diseases and condom use—that is, it focused on the present only. The first program assumed that children look forward, anticipate, and hope. The second assumed that, like the lowest animals, they are aware only of the here and now.

Conservatives — especially religious conservatives — tend to believe that treating children as moral beings who can rise above their lusts is a worthwhile practice, even if it has no measurable effect on their present behavior. That the other side is loath to acknowledge that it does have a measurable effect suggests that they, for some reason, prefer that children learn to indulge their basest instincts, perhaps because it makes them riper for dependency.

Topics Local and International

Last night Monique and Tony Cornetta talked, on the Matt Allen Show, about Iran, teachers' unions, and partisan ethics. Stream by clicking here, or download it.

Warwick School Committee Chooses the Tough Path

Faced with an insurmountable $13 million cut in state and local funding, the Warwick School Committee voted to freeze pay and impose a 20% health care co-pay for all of its employees last night.

Before the vote, School Committee Chairman Chris Friel stressed that these are not actions the district wants to take but it has no choice faced with insufficient funding for its budget of about $161 million for the current fiscal year, which began July 1.

He said the district did not want to cut programs that directly affect students, such as sports, gifted classes, mentoring and all extracurricular activities.

Unions are not happy.

The action is in apparent violation of the School Department's contract with its roughly 1,000 teachers represented by the Warwick Teachers Union, with teachers slated to lose a 2.75 percent raise this year....The leaders of the two unions that represent almost all school employees - the teachers union and the Warwick Independent School Employees union - vowed that they will respond with swift court action.

"I feel stabbed in the back," teachers union president James Ginolfi said, noting that the first he and other union executives heard of the School Committee's plan was less than an hour before it took action in executive session.

"We listened to what they had to say and said we'd get back to you," Ginolfi said, adding that the school board is sending a public message that it has no regard for a legal agreement. "I am shocked," he said.

The union has been playing the "we'd get back to you" game or the "we're willing to listen" game for some time now. The School Committee is obligated to have its budget finalized shortly after the City Council approves the school budget and was already late in doing so. They couldn't wait any longer. The situation called for urgency and the unions seemed to be content with playing the same collective bargaining games that worked in the past (see the "Addendum" in the extended post for a timeline). That isn't working any more. It's apparent that the Warwick School Committee felt like there wasn't much expeditious movement occurring on the other side of the table and felt like the only path left open--a tough one--was to unilaterally make these cuts and changes. That's something that the Warwick City Council backed away from. Whether the solution is viable depends on the next stop in the process: the courthouse.

Continue reading "Warwick School Committee Chooses the Tough Path"

The Tone of the Ad

To be honest, I don't follow help wanted ads for teaching positions closely enough to know whether this is really unique, but something about the wording of this one, printed in last Sunday's Providence Journal, caught my eye:

RI Certified Teachers, to Substitute per diem for growing K-9 public charter school.

The idea of advertising the growth prospects of the school strikes me as somehow refreshing. It gives the sense that something is being built — that effort and perseverance can improve everybody's lot. Of course, it's probable that any school seeking highly educated people for drudgery like substitute teaching would want to convey a probability of advancement. Still, I think public education in general would inspire more confidence among those who fund it were that attitude brought to bear in a systematic way.

Re: Federal Money, Federal Guidelines; and Local Control?

It may be that I'm just more cynical than Marc, but with respect to Race to the Top, I can't help but muse that government reforms always sound good — otherwise, politicians wouldn't try to sell them. Suppose that the goal of education policy, at the national level, is to increase the federal government's role in that critical area of social development, while offering short-term political advantage to those who implement it.

The trick on the latter count would be to persuade those who want substantive reform that the new policy is not just talk — therefore, support for charters and standards for presumed accountability of educators — while comforting those invested in the broken system that they won't be harmed — therefore, the requirement that states' Race to the Top applications garner teacher union support. The trick on the former count would be to build the program in a way that allows the tendencies of growing government to finish the job quietly — as if natural and inevitable. Two points that Marc makes bring that trick into focus:

If something fails, stop doing it. If it looks promising but may need some modifications, tweak it.

The problem is that government (especially large, centralized government) is less inclined toward such modifications than the average group or individual. Somebody with political power is already invested in the something that is failing, and with the long process of accountability in a national bureaucracy, it takes quite a bit for general dissatisfaction with government services to overcome such investments and stop the failure.

However, a Common Core is just that--a "core" of educational standards, not the end-all, be-all. It is the baseline standard that should be met. It's not the ceiling, it's the floor. ...

Federal help only undermines local control if reformers view federal standards as the ultimate goal and not the jumping off point.

In a gradual federal takeover of education, the floor is enough (and too much), to start. It will henceforth be available to the political process to layer in all those "critical" baselines that statists and social engineers find much more interesting than basic math and English. First science enters the field — not just the basic facts of what we know about the interaction of particles and waves and such, but bleeding into the inevitable metaphysical questions. No doubt health and all of the behavioral implications thereof — sexual, dietary, and so on — will come up for application to the core. Perhaps civics and history will be next, with even more opportunity for government spin.

Every government program proposed will have attractive points, because human beings do have the capacity to work together intelligently toward common goals. Individual incentive for corruption is the limiting factor, though, and eroding the government structure that seeks to empower society to work cohesively while protecting it from invidious encroachment by those with tax and police authority will never end where our hopes declare that it might.

Borders, National and Educational

Marc and Matt discussed (independently) immigration and education on last night's Matt Allen Show. Stream by clicking here, or download it.

Federal Money, Federal Guidelines; and Local Control?

So, in the Race to the Top sweepstakes (Round 2), Rhode Island has made the final 19, which is sorta like making the NHL or NBA playoffs where about half of the "regular season" competitors qualify. Some of the key components included in RI's application include recent reforms like the passage of a school funding formula, the raising of the charter school cap, an increase in the teacher exam "cut" score, and the integration of Teach for America teachers into RI schools. Prospective reforms include the development of a new teacher evaluation system and formally adopting the Common Core national standards (Rhode Island has already signed off on the concept). The recent actions taken in Central Falls and Providence (and perhaps East Providence) probably also help make the case that the state is ready to tackle reform head on.

If Rhode Island should "win" the $75 million up for grabs, that money will go towards implementing some reforms and helping the educational infrastructure in the state. In other words, it'll help pay for the development of a teacher evaluation system and a new bunch of state standards based on the national Common Core standards being formulated.

Concerns and debate about the Common Core are bubbling up. As Frederick Hess writes:

Fordham Institute honchos Checker Finn and Mike Petrilli argued last week in a thoughtful National Review Online column that the Bush administration's No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) fueled an explosion of mediocre state standards, undermining accountability and reform. They see the Common Core as a remedy. University of Arkansas professor Jay Greene responded that there's good reason to believe that the Common Core won't deliver on its promises and that it will impose real costs.

That's where it gets tricky, of course. A pile of money that can be used on potential good stuff is different than a pile of money spent on programs that missed the mark or didn't get properly implemented, ie; No Child Left Behind. Hess thinks the points are all valid.

The Common Core standards are superior to those in place in most states, and transparency and market efficiency can benefit dramatically from a clear, rigorous national standard. Uniform standards and performance measures can help us test new educational techniques on a level playing field, so that we can deliver useful tools and techniques to more schools and students. These are all things that conservatives can embrace....But this "state-led" effort has been aggressively driven by the Obama administration, there's a huge chance that it will dramatically boost federal control of K-12 schooling, that teachers' unions and other status quo interests will make their influence felt, and that state and local control will be undermined.

However, a Common Core is just that--a "core" of educational standards, not the end-all, be-all. It is the baseline standard that should be met. It's not the ceiling, it's the floor. Unfortunately, getting people to shoot higher than above the minimum--whether their education bureaucrats or students--is always a challenge. And as Hess explains, while the big picture stuff is easy, it's the all-important small stuff that gets short shrift because, well, it can be boring.

Past experience teaches that the odds aren't great that states, funders, vendors, and the feds will maintain their stride when it comes to making the tedious, small-bore, and potentially costly--but critical--revisions to assessments, accountability, curricula, professional development, teacher education, and instructional materials....the aftermath [of No Child Left Behind] reminded us that grand political projects (conservative or liberal) tend to look best in the early days.

Follow-through and keeping the feedback loop flowing are critical towards implementing reform and maintaining reforms. Nothing is static; things change. If something fails, stop doing it. If it looks promising but may need some modifications, tweak it. If it works, do it more often and in more places. Easy to say, harder to do in today's arthritic and stratified 20th century industrial age education system. But that's the point of reform: to change what we've got into something better.

I have reservations about allowing the Federal government's foot, ankle and possibly knee into the local education door. But I'm hopeful that Race to the Top will be an effective means to implement much needed reform (we can agree reform is "much needed", right?). As Education Secretary Arne Duncan pointed out, just competing for the money has resulted in many states implementing reforms to be more competitive. That's certainly been the case in Rhode Island.

Yet, simply winning the RTTT isn't victory and piecemeal implementation won't work. It will only be a success if the RTTT funds are used wisely in the implementation of systemic changes tailored to Rhode Island's education system. It is possible to use federal money and abide by federal standards while also maintaining local control and setting our own educational priorities. Federal help only undermines local control if reformers view federal standards as the ultimate goal and not the jumping off point. Let's hope Rhode Island's education policy makers keep that in mind. Like I said, I'm hopeful (which is different than optimistic).

Some States Help Residents to Achieve Potential; Some Do Not

Each year, Newsweek publishes a list of "America's Best High Schools." Their criterion is rather limited, having to do with the number of students at public schools who take Advanced Placement, International Baccalaureate, or Cambridge (AICE) tests, but it is a reasonable snapshot of the emphasis that a school places on excelling. The baseline for making the list at all was one test (taken by a junior or senior) per graduate, which includes about 6% of high schools.

I probably shouldn't have been surprised, but was, that Rhode Island can't boast a single school on the list of 1,735 across the United States. In that dubious distinction, we're joined only by Hawaii, North Dakota, and Wyoming. The success of each state (plus the District of Columbia) is represented in the following graph; the greener the state, the more "Best High Schools" a state has per 1,000 of school-age population, the redder, the fewer. (Bright green signifies 0.1 schools per 1,000 students, and bright red signifies 0.)

The top ten states by this measure were:

1. District of Columbia, 0.105
2. Maryland, 0.101
3. Virginia, 0.076
4. New York, 0.054
5. Florida, 0.049
6. Delaware, 0.048
7. California, 0.045
8. New Jersey, 0.044
9. Colorado, 0.039
10. North Carolina, 0.038

The top ten states by actual number of high schools were:

1. California, 302
2. New York, 172
3. Florida, 139
4. Texas, 136
5. Virginia, 99
6. Maryland, 98
7. New Jersey, 66
8. North Carolina, 61
9. Georgia, 61
10. Illinois, 55

The top ten states by the number of schools in the top quartile of list — the best of the best — per 1,000 of the school-age population were:

1. District of Columbia, 0.053
2. Virginia, 0.028
3. Maryland, 0.023
4. Florida, 0.022
5. New York, 0.019
6. North Carolina, 0.014
7. Colorado, 0.013
8. Texas, 0.009
9. California, 0.009
10. Georgia, 0.009

One can infer that states that make this final list, but not the first, have pockets of excellence. One can also infer — and Rhode Islanders can testify — that states that don't make the full list at all are not oriented toward helping people, especially students, to achieve their potential.

It digs a little more deeply than I'm inclined, just now, to tie the bright greenness of the Washington, D.C., area to recent talk about a "ruling class."

ADDENDUM:

On the "ruling class" question, Anchor Rising contributor Marc Comtois followed up with a post noting that the D.C. area is a "boom town" in the midst of recession.

Can Schools Replace Teenagers' Jobs?

Her column is cast in terms of preventing summer "learning loss" among students, but Julia Steiny's subject is really the degree to which schools have conflated "schooling" and "learning" — making children with an aversion to the former avoid activities that are explicitly the latter, whether during the summer or school-year off hours.

... institutions have an evil tendency to become more important than their missions and their clients. Health-care systems can compromise health. Schools can become antithetical to learning.

[Ivan] Illich says, "The pupil is 'schooled' to confuse teaching with learning, grade advancement with education, a diploma with competence. ..." This is sad, but too often true. He further notes that schools "discourage both the motivation and the financing for large-scale planning for nonschooled learning."

It's peculiar, therefore, that she would head in this direction:

Why don't schools teach kids about themselves and their immediate environments? What could be more interesting? Harness kids' narcissism by helping them figure out where and who they are, investigate what their community wants, audit the school's energy use, promote recycling, learn to do minor repairs. These skills need academic support, and kids could use them tomorrow at home. Treat the immediate world as a learning lab, so kids get a big hit of the pleasure of mastery.

At the very least, leveraging schools as the hub connecting children to the world around them risks tainting an even broader swath of activities with the "schooling" feel of imposed work. Indeed, we're back to Robert Whitcomb's suggestion, which I mentioned the other day, that imposed community service in high school might sour students on voluntary service once they claim the freedom of college.

In general, I agree with Steiny that schools could do much to make learning more fun, but part of the reason that young adults are disengaging from civic activity is that, as a society, we allow school to be their one responsibility. "Investigating what their community wants" and pursuing practical skills sounds an awful lot like the role of a summer job. To increase that activity, we'll have to focus on factors that sap the marketplace of such gigs (a slow, business-unfriendly economy) and that direct them away from young adults when available (labor laws and illegal immigration).

Kansas Tries Grouping Kids by Ability, not Age

Seems like an idea worth trying:

Instead of simply moving kids from one grade to the next as they get older, schools are grouping students by ability. Once they master a subject, they move up a level. This practice has been around for decades, but was generally used on a smaller scale, in individual grades, subjects or schools.

Now, in the latest effort to transform the bedraggled Kansas City, Mo. schools, the district is about to become what reform experts say is the largest one to try the approach. Starting this fall officials will begin switching 17,000 students to the new system to turnaround trailing schools and increase abysmal tests scores.

"The current system of public education in this country is not working" said Superintendent John Covington. "It's an outdated, industrial, agrarian kind of model that lends itself to still allowing students to progress through school based on the amount of time they sit in a chair rather than whether or not they have truly mastered the competencies and skills."

Here's how the reform works:

Students — often of varying ages — work at their own pace, meeting with teachers to decide what part of the curriculum to tackle. Teachers still instruct students as a group if it's needed, but often students are working individually or in small groups on projects that are tailored to their skill level.

For instance, in a classroom learning about currency, one group could draw pictures of pennies and nickels. A student who has mastered that skill might use pretend money to practice making change.

Students who progress quickly can finish high school material early and move forward with college coursework. Alternatively, in some districts, high-schoolers who need extra time can stick around for another year.

Advocates say the approach cuts down on discipline problems because advanced students aren't bored and struggling students aren't frustrated.

But backers acknowledge implementation is tricky, and the change is so drastic it can take time to explain to parents, teachers and students.

I don't think it will take time to explain...more like time to accept ("we fear change"--especially in our education system). But this method seems to work:

Education officials in Kansas City, Maine and elsewhere said part of the allure is the success other districts have after making the switch.

Marzano Research Laboratory, an educational research and professional development firm, evaluated 2009 state test data for over 3,500 students from 15 school districts in Alaska, Colorado, and Florida. Researchers found that students who learned through the different approach were 2.5 times more likely to score at a level that shows they have a good grasp of the material on exams for reading, writing, and mathematics.

Greg Johnson, director of curriculum and instruction for the Bering Strait School District in Alaska, recalled that before the switch there were students who had been on honor roll throughout high school then failed a test the state requires for graduation.

Now, he said if students are on pace to pass a class like Algebra I, the likelihood of them passing the state exam covering that material is more than 90 percent. He's proud of that accomplishment and said teachers love it.

"The most die-hard advocates for our system are our teachers because, especially the ones who were back with us before the change, they saw where things were then," he said. "They see where things are now and they don't want to go back."

Like I said, seems like it's worth a shot.

Cutting the Cultural Meat Out of American Education

I wonder how Providence Journal columnist Julia Steiny would feel about the observation that she's moving ever closer to an Anchor Rising point of view. In her column, last week, she drew from her summer reading list to suggest that political correctness is gutting the aspects of American education that made for good, devoted citizens:

[E.D. Hirsch Jr.] observes that in the 1980s, people began to draw away from our commonality and into constituencies — gender, race, religious and national origins. While culturally important, Hirsch calls the era of ROOTS the "neo-tribalism," that eventually grew into the shrill partisanship now dominating modern public discourse. Cynicism grew like mold around the pie-in-the-sky ideal of the common good. ...

By scrubbing the curriculum of anything that does not meet political correctness, we fail to teach our children about the democratic faith. And by doing so, we invite them to take our freedom and heritage for granted. American children need to understand that cultivating the common good allows each of us to thrive as a unique, even eccentric individual.

Using Thanksgiving lessons as an example, Steiny describes how it ceased to be acceptable to certain factions for schools to teach a sunny version of the story of the pilgrims and native Americans to young children and add in the darker side later. Meanwhile, parents didn't want their holidays ruined by "an Indian-oppression story." Given the insinuation of this dynamic across the curriculum, public schools have just become employment-training facilities.

Perhaps after another year of columns, Steiny will move toward agreement with many of us on the right that she's currently providing the sunny version of the politicization of our schools. It's not that political ideals have been scrubbed from public education, but that the ones being taught are often antithetical to the founding principles and culture of the United States.

Warwick Teachers Union Balks at Talks

The Warwick Teachers Union (WTU) leadership continues to look for and (surprise) find reasons to not meet with the Warwick School Committee to help resolve the district's $8.9 million budget deficit. As reported by Russel Moore in the Warwick Beacon, the School Administration had proposed to consolidate and eliminate some department head positions in the City's schools (estimated savings of $300,000), which "infuriated union members." Enter WTU President James Ginolfi:

"We were more than willing to sit down and talk until they took that unilateral action. It's like they want to talk right after they violate our contract," said Ginolfi....[U]nion members...wanted to address the budget deficit through negotiations. Ginolfi said it would be illegal to eliminate the department heads without the union's consent because the positions are contractually protected. The union has since filed a grievance....Meanwhile, the school committee had scheduled a meeting with the union's executive board last Tuesday. The purpose of the meeting was quite open-ended, Ginolfi said.

"[School Committee Chairman Christopher Friel] said that we were going to talk about everything. What does that mean? I wanted to set some parameters before we met," said Ginolfi.

Ginolfi then notified the school committee that unless they rescinded their plans to eliminate department heads — there would be no meeting, at least so far as the union was concerned. No progress was made and neither side would budge. The school department wouldn't rescind the notices and the union didn't show up. Tuesday came and went without a meeting.

Apparently, the WTU leadership isn't able to multi-task. Ahh, that's not really true. It's all about perception and rights and contracts, you see. Gotta save face, show power, get your agida up over being "insulted" or slighted. Ginolfi was also upset that the Administration had publicly stated that all school employees should have a 20% health care co-pay before coming to the WTU. It's not exactly a newsflash that co-pays are on the horizon, whether you've been officially informed or not. Grow up and get in the room and talk. Sheesh.

Meanwhile, there still doesn't seem to be any negotiation movement between the School Deparment and the Warwick Independent School Employees Union (WISE), whose members have been working under the old contract for 4 years, which means no raises but also no health care co-payments. Makes me wonder if the East Greenwich model is being looked at for implementation in Warwick.

Again: Change the Focus to Students and Parents

A subscription is required, but Reihan Salam's recent article in National Review on education is worth a read:

Earlier this year, the University of Arkansas Department of Education Reform published a study assessing Milwaukee's School Choice Demonstration Project. For many voucher enthusiasts, the results were sobering. Students enrolled in choice schools performed no better on reading and math tests than students attending conventional public schools. Critics such as Kevin Carey, a leading center-left education reformer, suggested that the Milwaukee experiment is therefore a failure.

Yet as Frederick Hess of the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) noted, students enrolled in the choice program are educated more cheaply than district-school students. As of the 2008–09 school year, the maximum amount Milwaukee's choice schools received per student was $6,607. In contrast, the Milwaukee public schools spent approximately $14,520 per pupil. While these numbers aren't directly comparable, it certainly seems that the district schools are considerably more expensive than the voucher program. Moreover, parents were more satisfied with the quality of education at choice schools, which suggests that some of the schools' positive aspects were not captured in reading and math scores.

In 2006–07, we spent $562 billion on K–12 public education, or 3.9 percent of GDP. Let's be generous to the education industry and assume that we could trim its costs by only one-fifth. This would save taxpayers over $100 billion.

Salam goes on to suggest retaining that money in education in order to fund:

• Targeted summer programs, because part of the problem that economically and socially disadvantaged students face is that their families habits don't help them maintain their gained knowledge throughout the summer, as wealthier families' habits do.
• Add separate instruction for children who represent discipline problems, to allow teachers to focus on students who are eager to learn.
• Student-centric technology that allows, for example, online courses on and off of school grounds.

The overall theme is one on which I've been focusing increasingly: Public schools' priorities must be adjusted to shift the focus to students and their parents — ensuring that they accomplish what society needs them to accomplish, but putting feedback from them (such as their actual desire to attend a particular school) ahead of the bureaucratic feedback in the form of expenditures of tax dollars and union feedback in the form of labor unrest.

Ever More Money Still Leaving Students Unprepared

A recent article on Rhode Island education and the high-tech sector ends with this discouraging testimony:

Prof. Edward Bozzi, coordinator for the biotechnology manufacturing program at the University of Rhode Island, said high school students need to learn physics, chemistry and biology, in that order.

He also said high-tech business is increasingly international, and that foreign language skills are important.

"I've talked to people who have taken foreign languages in high school here, and they can't speak a sentence," he said.

One notable differentiator between private and public schools in Rhode Island, that I've noticed, is that the former often begin teaching languages in the very earliest classes. Another is that grades are more reliably tied to performance; when children's report cards are exactly the same every quarter, parents should be suspicious that the method of tracking their abilities isn't functioning properly.

So, I'll admit that Education Commissioner Deborah Gist's talk of teaching methods leaves me unconvinced that she's correctly identifying the problem:

"Classrooms with rows of desks, and the teacher says turn to page 138, do the odd-numbered problems, and don't make any noise — that doesn't work anymore," she said. "Kids are living in an interactive world."

Sure, the odd numbered problems ought to be homework, leaving plenty of time for interactivity — which we used to call, simply, "teaching." Schools shouldn't have much trouble identifying teachers who think class time should be used for tasks better suited to the dining room table and encouraging those teachers to rethink their methods. But we've been hearing about the changing educational needs of America's children for decades, and still results do not manifest.

Blanket statements about what does and doesn't work should raise red flags. Rows of desks and rote work are entirely appropriate for some subjects, at some grades, with certain students, and particular teachers. It speaks no disrespect to suggest that Ms. Gist's Providence office is not the most appropriate perch from which to discern when that is and is not the case.

The fundamental problems with Rhode Island education are twofold: First, regulatory and financial incentives from the federal and state governments take the focus off students' individual potential and place them on improvements among below-average students. (It simply isn't possible for large government bureaucracies to address student performance on an individual basis.) Second, labor practices shape decisions to an unhealthy degree.

Basically, if we are to improve our schools, school systems must behave as if satisfying involved parents is the key to success. As it is, curricula are shaped to attract money (or, perhaps more accurately, to avoid loss of money on which districts are already reliant), and policies center on minimizing union unrest. Schools require the leeway to decline money that comes with tripping strings, to increase programs as student need dictates, and to modify employees' practices with sufficient rapidity to address the actual student bodies that arrive at their steps each year.

Portsmouth Institute Conference on Newman: Patrick Reilly

According to its Web site, the Cardinal Newman Society works to "renew and strengthen Catholic identity in Catholic higher education." To that end, the organization's president spoke on "Newman and the Renewal of Catholic Identity in Higher Education" at the Portsmouth Institute's 2010 conference, here introduced by Portsmouth Abbey Headmaster James DeVecchi:

(The remainder of Mr. Reilly's speech is available in the extended entry of this post.)

Reilly began with some statistics from a recent survey showing that students at Catholic universities still tend to drift toward the views of the secular political left on social issues (most prominently abortion and same-sex marriage), although as I recall, religious schools do mitigate the effect somewhat and also preserve the connection to the Church (among its adherents), presumably easing a future return to Catholic ethics. Still, Reilly's argument is sound that Catholic institutions of higher learning have some readjustment to do when it comes to the balance between their religious mission and their educational mission.

Notably, following on Newman's view of the university, Reilly emphasizes the environment. In Newman's conception, the experience of college life was as important as the subject matter, and Reilly points out that many Catholic colleges put aside the Catholicism of faculty and staff in order to improve standing and educational product. As I said, there is an appropriate balance to be struck, but if professors and other institutional leaders are to be advisers and role models, it's hardly reasonable to expect those who do not believe in the Church's teachings to model them.

Reilly suggests that the control of campus life has been reduced to an administrative function that separates the intellectual and moral formation of students from their college experience. In other words, he believes that Newman's view of such institutions as an opportunity for holistic life training has fallen out of fashion. I think he's incorrect, here. The actuality — and the actual complaint that those who share our worldview should make — is that the training has become adverse to Catholic principles, in favor of those of the secular left. There is no void; the gap has just been left to non-Catholic — even anti-Catholic — forces with an interest in college-age adults to fill.

On the matter of education, Reilly argues in line with Newman that universities cannot remove the existence of God from other topics and still present it as something possible. If believers' concept of God is true, then every intellectual pursuit is ultimately a subset of knowledge of the divine. Religion, in other words, cannot be made a secondary elective to fill out students' schedules in a subordinate way to "important" topics like science, math, and art, because the foundations of those subjects necessarily rest in existential questions, and they all continually run into ethical choices that they cannot answer by their own discipline.

This isn't to say that every professor should be required to incorporate religion into the teaching of their courses. Rather, the claim is that a university cannot present its offering as comprehensive education if it dismisses a central topic of existence as unworthy of required research and debate.

An interesting moment came when Professor Paul Griffiths, who remained throughout the conference after his own lecture, ran into some disagreement with Reilly over the degree of concern that active Catholics should have regarding the Catholicity of Catholic schools. The Duke professor suggested, by way of argument, that the Catholic segments of non-Catholic schools are often stronger and more faithful to the Church's teaching.

It's an exchange worth considering in greater detail, but my initial thought was that parents and students should have the option between public and Catholic institutions, but insofar as they desire a Catholic one, it should be fully as advertised. Reilly's premise, it seems to me, points in the direction of emphasizing Catholicity as a differentiation of Catholic universities rather than something to be de-emphasized.

In any case, it mightn't be a bad idea for the Cardinal Newman Society, or some other organization, to rate all Catholic programs in all colleges and universities with respect to their fidelity to Church teaching and the opportunities that they offer for participation in a Catholic campus culture.

Continue reading "Portsmouth Institute Conference on Newman: Patrick Reilly"

Knowing the World

In a brief review of Alasdair MacIntyre's God, Philosophy, Universities: A Selective History of the Catholic Philosophical Tradition (try here without a subscription), Ryan Anderson makes a point that echoes in a Portsmouth Institute speech by Patrick Reilly that I'll be posting tomorrow:

Scholars once sought unified knowledge of all being, in pursuit of which philosophy and theology played central roles, tying together findings from the various disciplines. But the modern university has largely eliminated theology, relegated philosophy to one technical discipline among many, and abandoned the quest for integrated wisdom about the cosmos.

I look back on my academic days bemused that I was both agnostic on matters of religion and impressed by the way underlying concepts seemed to stretch across all subjects that I studied, from physics, to music, to literature, to sociology, and so on. Students can't possibly form a comprehensive understanding of reality — and the major questions that they must answer for themselves — without studying and understanding the thought about God and philosophy that has drawn Western Civilization toward its current position.

To be sure, one can learn all sorts of useful facts and processes simply studying discrete subjects without delving into the meaning of any of them, but then, college is merely a training facility, and frankly, it leaves most students only generally prepared for the work that they'll be doing. If we've decided that young adults oughtn't enter the workforce, into career-type gigs, until they're in their mid-twenties, we'd do better, I think, to graduate them with a stronger concept of the world in which they'll be acting.

Of course, that brings us back to the question of whether college is really necessary or helpful to all of those who incur debt to attend, and from a broad view of reality, I believe that it is not.

What Kind of Choice and Accountability?

Mary McConnell starts off a recent book review with an excellent anecdote. (If you don't subscribe to First Things, try here.)

"Catholic schools reap one benefit from poverty," the high-school principal hiring me commented ruefully (I'd just glimpsed my pay package). "By the time we've scrounged up money for the latest educational innovation, everybody else has figured out it doesn't work."

Only systems in which money is ultimately no object (indeed, in which failure often leads to more money) could tolerate public education's oddly combined tendency to leap on fads and to reform slowly. The factor that makes sense of the paradox is a desire for more public dollars and for less accountability. A new method of teaching math, for example, requires money for training and materials, while also creating the perennial excuse of adjusting to a new system.

This observation is in keeping with the subject of McConnell's review, The Death and Life of the Great American School System, by Diane Ravitch. The title of the review is "Apostasy Sells," because Ravitch is a former advocate of "school choice" and "accountability" who has changed her mind.

Unfortunately, as even occasional followers of the choice and accountability debates should have observed, those who oppose such reforms tend to attack the principle on the basis of a particular policy's results. Consider:

Enter choice. Ravitch contends that voucher programs and public charter schools have failed to demonstrate measurable educational gains. Putting aside the surprising reemergence of test scores as the preferred standard of performance, I wondered what she would say about Catholic schools. The data on charter-school performance is perhaps mixed, but a half century of research proves, as Ravitch acknowledges, that "minority children in Catholic schools are more likely to take advanced courses than their peers in public schools, more likely to go to college, and more likely to continue on to graduate school."

Claiming that she initially supported vouchers to "help Catholic schools," Ravitch now contends that charter schools are forcing Catholic schools to close. A strange complaint. Eight hundred of the 1700 poor children who receive District of Columbia vouchers attend Catholic schools. If, now that Congress has killed the program, their parents flee to charter schools, "choice" will not be the culprit.

The allusion to "the surprising reemergence of test scores" refers to McConnell's prior explanation that "accountability" has become synonymous with "standardized testing," which (whatever its merits), Ravitch finds herself using again and again as necessary evidence for her other arguments.

Those of us who support reforms in the mold of "choice and accountability" can only continue restating that we're not talking about "charters and tests." We're talking about a systematic rethinking wherein families can use at least some portion of the tax money allocated to the education of their children in order to help send them to any school that they would pick were money not an issue (although they'd remain responsible for whatever cost exceeded the program, of course).

Then, school districts need to be reworked to ensure that public schools can hold their own in the ensuing competition, which requires teacher pay and promotion based on individual merit, not seniority, and administrators' reclamation of the authority to make significant decisions and responsibility to accept the consequences when results are negative. You know, sort of like the working world that most of us in the private sector encounter.

Highlander School Gets 3 Year Extension

As reported by ProJo

The public outcry over the fate of popular Highlander Charter School registered with state education officials, who Tuesday reversed an earlier recommendation to close the school next year unless it showed dramatic improvement and instead granted the school a three-year extension.

Highlander supporters said after the meeting that they were relieved the original recommendation was abandoned, but were disappointed the K-8 school was not granted the customary five-year extension permitted under state law.

The arguments made by the school's supporters swayed the Board of Regents and Education Commissioner Deborah Gist.

"We really listened to the feedback that we got, not only from the families but from the leadership of the school and from each of you," Gist said. "I met with the League of Charter Schools and ... with Rose Mary and her board chair and through all of those conversations, really got a better understanding of some of the things people had concerns about in the original recommendations."

I'm glad they extended. Based on Andrew's analysis, it seems like Highlander is getting some things right and deserves more time.

Breaking the Cycle of Expensive Education and Poor Economic Development

The news hook was local, so I posted it over on the Tiverton Citizens for change Web site, but the topic applies to the whole state, so here's the upshot:

... if our investment in education — and let's put aside Rhode Island's and Tiverton's questionable results — leads to policies that drive up the cost of living in the state and the difficulty of doing business, here, it can only be self-defeating. In the first stages of pulling Rhode Island out of the dry well into which it's fallen, our attitude about businesses' importing workers has to be, "so what," followed by, "let's do better from here forward. An active economy will provide the revenue to invest in education without making a disincentive of our town and state cost structures. Moreover, an influx of success-oriented (non-public-sector) residents, many of whom will bring families with them, can only improve voter input to better shape our school system.

Claiming that our inflated costs for education — secondary and above — is a matter of economic development is a union-approved cop-out, and it will remain so until Rhode Island has excess jobs looking for workers... or at least until it's clear that business want to set up shop here but note the lack of skilled employees to be a lone hindrance.

A Formula, but It's Just Numbers

It looks like the General Assembly actually did get around to passing a state aid formula for Rhode Island's schools. As we've been pointing out all along, folks at the local level have seemed to assume that a "fair funding formula" would be one that gives them, specifically, more money, and this legislation does acknowledge some districts as "over funded," therefore reducing their aid.

From a taxpayer perspective, though, this is a critical component:

Besides correcting inequities in state aid distribution, the legislation would help local communities by providing predictability for school district and local budget planners. Without a predictable formula, school districts and municipalities have been forced to guess at the amount they will receive when they are preparing their budgets each spring. Their budgets must be created in time for the start of the fiscal year on July 1, but the amount of state aid they can expect to receive is in flux until the General Assembly passes the state budget, which usually happens in late June.

In Tiverton, for example, the School Committee predicted a low aid number and frightened parents into believing that schools were going to be closed and every program cut. As it turns out, our 8% tax increase could have been almost to the state cap of 4.5% without a change in the practical outcome. Now, ostensibly, school districts will have to find other ways of creating doomsday scenarios to shake down property owners for money to keep up with the promises of inadvisable contracts. In particular, it will be more difficult for districts to compensate for losses in "restricted" — about which they tend to be less vocal — without acknowledging that they are doing so.

There is a reason for concern, though. The current system hasn't been unpredictable because the General Assembly has heard pleas from individual districts and shifted money around on a whim. It's been unpredictable because the state is in perpetual deficit and long-term economic decline, leaving the state government ever in need of places to cut. Although the existence of a big scary formula might make legislators a little more timid about reducing aid to cities and towns, it will hardly prevent them from doing so, whether on a permanent or this-year-only basis.

Socializing the Missing Link

Maybe it's just my sense of the underlying humor of humanity, but I had to chuckle when reading a recent article about an RI Kids Count event. The piece starts out with RI Federation of Teachers and Allied Health Professionals head Marcia Reback advocating for a massive wave of unionized public-sector early-childhood workers. Then it moves through Ed. Commissioner Deborah Gist and others talking about the need for "serious money" devoted to younger children... because (I guess) the serious money that we're allocating for children over five years old hasn't been able to produce the desired results. With all of the pining for taxpayer dollars, the last paragraph seems to come from out of nowhere:

Everyone agreed that parents are the missing link in early childhood education. Community groups need to do a better job of explaining the importance of getting their children to school no matter how nasty the weather. Educators also need to offer literacy-rich summer programs so children do not lose ground between June and September.

Actually, it seems as if everyone agreed that the missing link is more money and more union jobs. The rejoinder, of course, would be that uninvolved parents come first and the need for public resources is a response to that, but the nuance leads in a different direction than the assessment.

That is to say that draining money from the private sector to filter through the government in order to purchase union-inflated child care will weigh down the economy and make it even more difficult for parents to afford time with their children (much less to foster one-income households). Moreover, removing the burden of child care from parents will lower the pay rate that they require before both working makes financial sense, thus expanding the workforce, suppressing wages, and adding yet more difficulty for those who'd like to be more involved with their children.

Of course, the alternative path requires more work to be done, culturally — encouraging marriage and the self-sacrifice of gadgets and modern life's trappings as part of parenthood. Even those who oppose further government intervention in citizens' lives bristle when a conservative, like me, so much as suggests considering whether the Freedom of Perpetual Adolescence oughtn't be reevaluated and adjusted in the social sphere.

Warwick Tea Party Budget Analysis

At the Warwick School Committee meeting last night--in a virtual repeat of Monday night's City Council meeting--residents and students voiced their dismay over the idea of cutting school activities, including sports, to make up looming budget deficits. Perhaps the most insightful, eloquent and forceful defense of sports was given by former Pilgrim standout and Syracuse University football player Emerson Kilgore, who is now an assistant Principle in Providence. All will get another opportunity to let all of the entities hear it at 6 PM on Thursday night, when the City Council, Mayor and School Committee will meet over the school budget.

In anticipation of the meeting, the Warwick Tea Party has provided their analysis of the 2011 Warwick City Budget (Download file). According to their research, since 2004 Warwick taxes have continued to increase with the majority (57%) of the increase going towards city-side (municipal, fire, police, etc.) spending, not schools. In 2011, 91% of Mayor Avedisian's proposed cuts are from the school-side of the budget. Overall, if memory serves, schools account for approximately 63% of the city budget.

That being said, the WTP's analysis also confirms what we all know: most of the area ripe for cutting is in employee salaries and benefits in ALL departments, by far the largest line-item in ANY budget--private or public sector. That doesn't necessarily mean firing anyone, just pay freezes, step freezes and implementing fiscally responsible health care and pension plans NOW, not in 2012.

Is the Highlander School Doing Well Enough to Have its Charter Renewed?

According to Jennifer D. Jordan of the Projo, the Highlander school, a K-8 charter school located in Providence, is in danger of having its charter not renewed by the state's Board of Regents for education...

[State Education Commissioner Deborah Gist] said she is concerned by a weak curriculum and uneven test scores that continue to trail state averages.

"I don't have confidence they are on the right track because their performance declined last year," Gist said in an interview.

However, according to the most recent New England Common Assessment Program (NECAP) data available, Highlander appears to have been on a definitively positive track for a while now. At the most basic level, NECAP results show that over the past two years, more Highlander' 8th-grade students have scored proficient-or-better in both reading and mathematics than did Highlander 5th-grade students from tests taken three years earlier.

An improvement in the number of students proficient has also occurred in the last two classes of Highlander 7th graders, as compared to 4th-grade results from three years prior; and in the last two classes of Highlander 6th graders, as compared to 3rd grade results from three-years prior.

But how does the degree of improvement compare to what is happening elsewhere in Rhode Island?

To begin to answer this question, we can employ a method outlined a few months ago here at Anchor Rising, based on expressing changes in numbers of students in a district who demonstrate proficiency in a subject in terms of...

• The percentage of students who began as less-than-proficient, in cases where the number of students proficient-or-better increases, or
• The percentage of students who began as proficient-or-better, in cases where the number of students proficient-or-better decreases.

This metric is a better means of comparing results between districts (or between schools) than are single-moment-in-time comparisons of proficiency levels, because considering the change over time begins to incorporate the fact that different school districts are working with students who are beginning from different achievement levels, and a school that has 50% of its students proficient now when only 30% were proficient three years ago (28% of less-than-proficient students improved) might be viewed as doing as well or better than a school that has 80% of its students proficient now and had 80% proficient three years ago (0% of less-than-proficient students improved). More of the rationale and some caveats and limitations of this method as applied to NECAP data is discussed here.

Making the usual disclaimer that comparing NECAP results from different years is only an approximation to results describing a true cohort of students, because the publicly distributed NECAP data doesn't contain the information needed to adjust for student mobility in and out of a districts over a multi-year score-comparison period, the change in Highlander's proficiency percentages, as compared to other Rhode Island school districts over the same three-year period, shows that the percentages of students at Highlander who moved to proficiency relative to the number of students who began the three-year stretch as less-than-proficient 1) are significantly higher than the district-average changes in most RI urban communities and 2) are often comparable to results in suburban districts.

The details are displayed in the tables below. 6th, 7th, and 8th grade reading and math results from the NECAP summed over the last two years and compared to results from three-years earlier are included for Highlander, 4 urban districts (Providence, Pawtucket, Central Falls, and Woonsocket), and the two districts which would rank immediately above and immediately below Highlander, according to the metric described above, if Highlander were a district unto itself.

The initial conclusion is that, over the most recent three-year stretch, Highlander and Highlander students seem to have shown an improvement in both reading and math that is comparable to districts not usually considered to be in crisis, at least within the intra-Rhode Island world of education policy (with the results from 3rd-to-6th grade math being on the bubble). But as always, when giant charts of numbers are presented at Anchor Rising, the floor is open for commenters to offer their own analysis and suggestions for refinement...

"The fight is about who is going to run public education"

New Jersey Governor Christie

The fight is about who is going to run public education in New Jersey. The parents and the people they elect or the mindless, faceless union leaders who decide that they're going to be the ones who run it because they have the money and the authority to bully around school boards and local councils. So, listen, I know I don't make myself the most popular guy in the world by having this fight, but [if] we don't win this fight, there's no other fights left. This is the fight we have to fight, this is the fight we have to win for the kids.

Watch the video.

ADDENDUM

Remember 2007 in East Greenwich, RI? Anchor Rising was the first to break the news about a teachers' strike in East Greenwich, beating both the newspapers and TV stations. The NEA was arguing that the teachers were being asked to take a pay cut, using that as a public relations hammer to mislead and manipulate town voters in order to maintain their extreme contract terms. So, I sat down with the school administration's Finance Director to get actual and publicly available information as well as reviewed the contracts, did the analysis, showed the NEA claim was a lie, and visibly posted it all on AR. And then dared the NEA to quit whining about pay cuts and actually prove their claim. Which, of course, they could not do and never did.

Here is a sampling of blog posts from that time -

Excuse me, but this is NOT how to win friends & influence people in East Greenwich

There are more earlier blog post links at the bottom of that post.

Several subsequent ones -

"Pay Cut" Analysis Hostage Day Count: Day 2

NEA "Pay Cut" Analysis Hostage Day Count: Day 9

When Management Acknowledges Its Own Cards

Two factors are obvious in making Rhode Island school committees behave as if authority over the jobs is ultimately a weak card in negotiations: Some members see giving as much money as possible to teachers as one of their rightful objectives (whether they're teachers, themselves, or have some other reason for alliance), and other members are people who see their positions as a matter of community service, and they entered them not expecting to have to stand against organized, bare-knuckle negotiators.

Of course, Rhode Island has also set up a series of implied rules and what one might call "legal insinuations" that have led motivated school committee members to hesitate. That's why it took East Providence's challenging those insinuations — and winning — before its school committee could arrive at this point:

While it seems one-sided, the pact secures teachers' salaries and benefits. The School Committee imposed its 2009 salary and benefit cuts after the previous contact expired.

Read the article for the details, but the point that I wish to highlight, here, is that running the school system is not exactly a powerless position, when it comes to negotiations. It's well past time for Rhode Islanders in positions of authority to stop shirking their responsibility to think and act independently of the deadly, draining illusion drawn for the benefit of the state's public sector unions.

A Freeze Would Preserve Everything

Well, it's certainly not rocket science, but it's nice to know that New Jersey's Governor Chris Christie and I have come to the same conclusion when it comes to schools' supposed funding problems (subscription required):

In the last three years, state and local government-employee compensation grew 9.8 percent, compared with 6.9 percent in the private sector. That’s $1.43 in compensation growth for public employees for every $1.00 in compensation growth for private employees.

Those raises cost money, at a time when state tax revenues have taken a hit because of falling incomes and less consumption. For a time, states were able to close much of the gap with stimulus dollars. In New Jersey, now that the stimulus is running out, teachers' unions are urging the extension of a "temporary" tax increase inflicted last year upon residents making over $150,000 annually, and the elimination of the school-funding cut.

As Christie noted, this tax increase (as well as teacher layoffs and cuts to spending on classroom supplies) can be avoided by means of enacting a pay freeze. An April Rasmussen poll found 65 percent of New Jersey voters support a teacher-pay freeze. But while a handful of local unions agreed to accept one, the vast majority balked at the governor's demand. In return, Christie urged voters to reject proposed school budgets in elections on April 20. (In New Jersey, school budgets must be approved by voters annually.)

It has amazed me that school committees across Rhode Island have been talking school closures and the elimination of extracurricular activities. Requiring public-sector staff to experience even just a small amount of the economic pain makes all the problems go away. Of course, that's assuming that there really are problems. A frequent complaint about school departments is that their budgets are entirely their own concoction, and it's clear whose side school committees and administrations are on, for the most part, when it comes down to it.

The Subtle Tactics of the NEA

In an article about securing union approval of Rhode Island's application for federal Race to the Top education funds:

[NEARI President Larry] Purtill also said he is carefully monitoring the acrimonious situation in East Providence, where the School Committee last year unilaterally cut teachers' wages, forced teachers to pay more of their health insurance costs and recently threatened to cut wages again. East Providence is a NEARI local.

The Rhode Island Federation of Teachers and Health Professionals had their Central Falls problem resolved, and the NEA wants its sweetener, too. Race to the Top is looking more and more like a poison pill.

When the Focus Is on Results, One Way or Another

The title of Julia Steiny's Sunday column, "Test results don't accurately write a school's story," doesn't really reflect the theme of the essay. Sure, she does say that the efforts that Beacon Charter School put forward to improve its reading and writing scores on the New England Common Assessment Program (NECAP) would have been well worthwhile and successful even if the students had not performed as well as they actually did. But what Steiny's really talking about is summed up here:

So the story of Beacon's reading triumph is twofold. On the one hand, it's about how the staff treats the kids generally, as illustrated by the TLC they doled out on the test days. Lots of schools resent the statewide testing program and communicate that resentment to the kids. Beacon nurtures its kids.

Secondly, the triumph reflects what a whole-school collaboration can accomplish in a year when every adult is on task.

The kids were given incentives and perks of the sort that a coach might give a successful athletic team — tools for relaxation, the necessary equipment, candy. And the teachers worked together, often outside of their areas of focus, to come up with a school-wide strategy to attack the target (namely, reading and writing scores). In other words, it was what one might expect in an environment in which the success of the students actually and truly comes first and negotiations and work rules for adults is subsidiary.

That's really the question that our society has to answers: At bottom, are schools meant to educate students or to employ teachers?

A Familiar Drum

I'm keeping up the posting over on the Tiverton Citizens for Change Web site, including the observation that the drum that the Tiverton School Committee beat prior to our financial town meeting are now being played in West Warwick:

Sports programs and part-time employees join the list of recommended cuts school officials hope will compensate for a $1.2-million hole in the School Department’s proposed $47.8-million budget. …

Topping the list of cuts is the closing of the Maisie E. Quinn Elementary School, a move that will save the district $750,000. …

The School Committee is still discussing this budget, Chairwoman Lindagay Palazzo said Thursday. The committee will review the proposal at the June 8 public meeting, and likely will vote to have a budget ready for the Financial Town Meeting, now scheduled for June 22.

How long, do you suppose, until parents and taxpayers learn that there's a template in play, here.

Race to the Cash Crop

I'm not sure one has to be a conspiracy theorist to think that government policies have become little more than a series of scams perpetrated on the American people. Take Secretary of Education Arne Duncan's Race to the Top concoction. Sure, there's some favorable nods in the direction of reform and school choice, but those nods may be easily dispersed when eyes turn away. And even up front, as Frederick Hess points out, they aren't really the meat in the stew:

A few of the 19 priorities rewarded states for moving on measures such as charter schooling and merit pay, with states earning 40 points (out of a maximum total of 500) for supporting high-performing charters and 58 points for using student-achievement results to improve teacher and principal effectiveness. But the vast majority of the points are awarded for compliance with often woolly federal criteria: 65 points for articulating an agenda and securing local buy-in, 10 points for prioritizing education funding, 20 points for providing effective support to educators, and so on. If you're not entirely sure what these categories entail, welcome to the club; they reward states for procuring signatures of union support, for spending more on schools, and for adopting impressive-sounding professional schemes.

Andy Smarick, a Bush Education Department veteran who has painstakingly reported on RTTT, recently observed, "All this talk about revolutionary state change has really been overstated." While RTTT enthusiasts talk of states' lifting caps on charter schooling or removing "firewalls" that prevent student-achievement data from being linked to teachers, he noted that "the full story of states' legislative changes is more complex and less exhilarating." No state that previously prohibited charter schooling has enacted a new charter law to attract RTTT funds, and while Wisconsin technically relaxed its data firewall, it still prohibits student achievement from being used in teacher evaluations. Smarick explained this resistance to major changes as a consequence of union influence: "The problem is how much states had to give up to get that union support and buy-in."

Take away the catchy buzz words meant to disarm natural opponents of schemes implemented by and for big, centralized government and what you've got is a huge bundle of money being used to persuade state and local officials and bureaucrats to seek special-interest buy-in.

Teachers Skeptical Over Race to the Top

As we've learned, the state American Federation of Teachers (AFT) union has decided to support Race to the Top (RTTT). It isn't too much of a leap to see the link between the recent Central Falls agreement and the AFT sign on, but there also can be little doubt that rank-and-file teachers remain skeptical about RTTT, particularly the teacher evaluation component. Education Commissioner Deborah Gist was in Warwick last week to speak about RTTT and it was clear that the prospects of a new evaluation system seems to be causing the most heartburn in the teacher ranks.

What teachers wanted to know Thursday evening was how they would be evaluated and whether such measures would be fair.

Toll Gate English teacher Darlene Netcoh asked if she would be held accountable for the performance of teachers who shaped students since they entered the system in kindergarten?

"What are these hardworking teachers not doing," queried Toll Gate history teacher Kate Rauch.

Netcoh's concerns are valid, which is why any student performance component of a teacher evaluation system has to account for the "raw material" the teacher is starting with. In other words, each student will have a baseline performance score (or something like that), which will be used for comparison at the end of the year to determine progress.

Teachers and union leaders have also complained that there haven't been enough details given out regarding a new teacher evaluation system. As Gist explained, it hasn't been developed because RIDE wants to include teachers in the development process. As she said, if she had developed an evaluation system without teacher input, she would be accused of forcing a system on them. More fundamental is that the reason she hasn't started that process is because she hopes to use RTTT funds to develop that system. However, as she has said, whether or not RI gets RTTT funds, a new statewide teacher evaluation standard will be developed by 2011.

Gist on Central Falls and the Importance of Evaluations

Rick Hess at EdWeek interviewed RI Ed. Commissioner Deborah Gist in light of the recent agreement between Central Falls teachers and Superintendent Frances Gallo. Hess' focus was on the importance of a good evaluation system for making reform work.

Rick Hess: The deal turns critically on the teacher evaluation component that'll be introduced next year (with unsatisfactory teachers targeted for termination). How will we know whether the evaluation is sufficiently tough, or whether it becomes a fig leaf for backing away from more painful measures?

Deborah Gist: There are a couple of ways that we'll know. One is that the administration has the complete authority to put the evaluation into place. The agreement says the evaluation will be put into place solely by the management. And the Board of Regents passed regulations that define what the evaluations have to look like in this state. The guidelines are good and strong, and everything that we're doing is based on those.

RH: Okay, but suppose that, at this time next year, we see that just five or six of the school's 93 teachers are removed. Would observers be right to be skeptical that the process was toothless?

DG: It's not about removing any particular percentage of teachers. It's hard to know what the proper percentage would look like. But I strongly encourage people to be skeptical. We should be skeptical. I want people to take a hard look at us, and I'm going to do the same with the district and with my staff. But it's not about the percentage of teachers we remove. It's about the quality of the evaluation and about performance. I expect there will be turnover, but how much there is remains to be seen....

RH: What do you say to critics who might ask how you can leave the faculty intact for another year at a school that you've identified as profoundly low-performing?

DG: We don't take this decision lightly. We take it very seriously. But there are some great teachers at the high school and, because teacher evaluation is so poor around the country and in the state, we don't have good evidence as to who should stay and who should not. This deal gives us the opportunity to make those decisions in a more informed way and gives folks the opportunity to be a part of the reform movement. There are examples of groups of teachers coming together to turn their schools around in various communities, and there's no reason to assume it can't happen here. We're going to give teachers that chance. Our expectations are high. We'll be watching carefully. If they're not ready to deliver results, we'll act upon that rapidly.

As research conducted by The New Teacher Project (TNTP) has shown (outlined in their report, "The Widget Effect" -- PDF and website), the teacher evaluation process is woefully inept nationwide. The TNTP's "Widget Effect" is largely a by-product of the industrial era/collective-bargaining system whereby school districts and unions have come to view and treat teachers as identical widgets in the educational machinery. The operating assumption is that the vast majority of teachers are all equally effective. In the districts that TNTP studied:

All teachers are rated good or great - In districts that use binary evaluation ratings (generally "satisfactory" or "unsatisfactory"), more than 99 percent of teachers receive the satisfactory rating. Districts that use a broader range of rating options do little better; in these districts, 94 percent of teachers receive one of the top two ratings and less than 1 percent are rated unsatisfactory.

That's simply impossible and unrealistic. While such a flawed system clearly overstates the effectiveness of the average teacher (and being a teacher of "average" effectiveness isn't a net negative, by the way), worse is that they diminish the real effectiveness of those who truly are superior educators. Further, these evaluation systems are not fair to new teachers and teachers who are average or good but still have areas that need improvement.

73 percent of teachers surveyed said their most recent evaluation did not identify any development areas, and only 45 percent of teachers who did have development areas identified said they received useful support to improve....Though it is widely recognized that teachers are least effective in their beginning years, 66 percent of novice teachers received a rating greater than "satisfactory" on their most recent performance evaluation....Despite uniformly positive evaluation ratings, teachers and administrators both recognize ineffective teaching in their schools. In fact, 81 percent of administrators and 58 percent of teachers say there is a tenured teacher in their school who is performing poorly, and 43 percent of teachers say there is a tenured teacher who should be dismissed for poor performance.

But instituting an evaluation system won't be easy thanks to the culture that has developed in which, teachers--even novice teachers--expect to be given the highest rating. And why not? They've never been evaluated any differently (everybody wins)!

Our research reflects that there is a strong and logical expectation among teachers that they will receive outstanding performance ratings. While the vast majority of teachers receive the highest rating, those teachers who do not receive it tend to believe that the higher rating was warranted....Even teachers who are just beginning their careers believe they deserve the highest performance ratings and are dissatisfied if they are rated good, not great. This inflated sense of performance is evident in the self-assessment ratings of novice teachers. In a subset of districts where teachers were asked to assess their own instructional performance on a scale of 1 to 10, 69 percent of novice teachers rated their instructional performance an 8 or higher.

In a system where negative or even less than perfect performance ratings are given only rarely, teachers naturally develop an expectation that they will be among the large majority considered top performers. In this context, teachers perceive low or negative ratings not in terms of what they communicate about performance but as a personally-directed insult or attack. The response is understandable in the context of the current system, where so few teachers get critical feedback of any kind. When their evaluation does include criticism, they feel as though they have been singled out while other examples of poor performance go unaddressed.

This creates a culture in which teachers are strongly resistant to receiving an evaluation rating that suggests their practice needs improvement. Schools then find themselves in a vicious cycle; administrators generally do not accurately evaluate poor performance, leading to an expectation of high performance ratings, which, in turn, cause administrators to face stiff cultural resistance when they do issue even marginally negative evaluations. The result is a dysfunctional school community in which performance problems cannot be openly identified or addressed.

That's why teacher "buy-in" is so important to effect change. Of course, that doesn't mean that change requires that the current teachers buy in, just that you find teachers who will.

There's much more good stuff in "The Widget Effect" report, but the bottom line is that implementing a robust and fair evaluation system is extremely important for moving forward with school reform.

ADDENDUM: Writing elsewhere, Hess is supportive of the Central Falls deal, noting:

The Rhode Island story is a truly encouraging development....this story shows how leaders with backbone can eventually force union leadership to accept a new reality. Yes, Gallo walked back the bold action that won her many education reformers' approval, but good management is about discipline, not bloodlust. The point of school turnarounds is not to count scalps, but to win necessary changes, force out lousy teachers, and reset the board.

Central Falls: Tomorrow's News Today

The press releases are coming out concerning an administration-union deal in Central Falls. First in the emailbox was the union's take:

The Central Falls Teachers Union and the Central Falls School District reached a tentative agreement Saturday to implement a transformation plan for Central Falls High School for the 2010-11 school year in a way that involves all stakeholders—administrators, teachers, students and parents—to create a pathway toward excellence for everyone at the school.

Both the school district and the union agree that while this has been a difficult process for everyone involved, the negotiations resulted in a newfound appreciation for shared responsibility, and a solid commitment to bring lasting solutions that will improve teaching and learning at Central Falls High School.

As part of that agreement, which is pending ratification, the current staff will return to the school without having to reapply for their jobs. Teachers will need to recommit to their jobs and interview with the new principal. The agreed upon plan would also incorporate important changes designed to increase student achievement. These include a longer school day, more after-school tutoring, a new evaluation system designed to inform teaching and learning, and targeted and embedded professional development, among other changes. Details of the agreement will be released following a ratification vote by Central Falls teachers at a meeting Monday. A press conference is scheduled at the high school at 3:30 p.m.

Followed, just now, by two cents from Education Commissioner Deborah Gist:

I am really pleased that the Central Falls School Department, under Dr. Frances Gallo’s leadership, and the Central Falls Teachers Union have come to a tentative agreement about a plan to transform Central Falls High School, and that they will do that work together. The ideal situation is when we can do this important work collaboratively, and that's why this agreement is so promising. ...

From the outset, I have said that my one commitment is to ensure that we provide the best possible education for the students of Central Falls High School. The tentative agreement reached today is evidence that all parties can put aside their differences and work in the best interest of our students. Now it's time to move forward and work together to make Central Falls High School one of the best schools in Rhode Island.

We'll see who got what, but I have to think that the teachers have become increasingly nervous as the applicant pool to replace them has approached the 1,000 mark.

Best Rhode Island Public High Schools

New (Citadel?) media site GoLocalProv has compiled a ranking of the Rhode Island Public High Schools. The top 10 comprise some of the usual suspects and some that may surprise:

1) East Greenwich
2) Block Island
3) Narragansett
4) Barrington
5) South Kingstown
6) Classical
7) Exeter-West Greenwich
8) Lincoln
9) Middletown
10) Mt. Hope

Their methodology:

HOW WE DETERMINED VALUE: Our rankings were computed by a statistical method created at Babson College and utilized by Boston Magazine in its annual rankings of schools. We gathered data on area schools by consulting school officials and Web sites, as well as the Rhode Island Department of Elementary and Secondary Education. With this information, we calculated mean scores for each data category and then ranked schools based on their distance from the averages.

For schools that did not provide figures, the average was used as a placeholder when computing the rankings.

Public Schools Category Weight Breakdown
* Student/Teacher Ratio 15%
* Per Pupil Spending 15%
* NECAP-English 10%
* NECAP-Math 10%
* NECAP-Science 10%
* SAT-Verbal 10%
* SAT-Math 10%
* SAT-Writing 10%
* Graduation Rate 10%

One quibble I have is with their weighting of Per Pupil Spending at 15%: at some point going too far above the state average isn't necessarily a good thing, is it? That could also apply--if less so--to the student/teacher ratio. For example, Narragansett came in third overall, but with the exception of Reading SAT (5th), it is no better than 9th in the other academic categories. But it is fifth in per pupil spending ($17,587) and second in student/teacher ratio (7.5/1), which, thanks to the positive weighting that fewer students, more teachers and more cost GoLocalProv has assigned, put it in the top 3. Is that cost effective or an adequate return on investment?

On the other hand, East Greenwich was middle-of-the-pack in both the student/teacher ratio (a little better than average) and per pupil spending (a little below average) categories, but in the top three in each of the academic categories. Finally, Coventry was the average RI High School--average scores, average student/teacher ratio--though they spend a couple grand less/student than average, which could be viewed as getting more than you paid for, I suppose.

Everything's Negotiable in the Race to the Top

I'm not a fan of saying, "How high?," when the federal government says, "jump," and waves around a bunch of money. It's also detrimental to begin seeing federal dollars as some sort of cost-free windfall.

That said, the Race to the Top matter has brought forward the true face of labor unions and highlighted their strategies and motivation:

Recently, union officials have told Gist they want her to intervene in union-management strife in Central Falls and East Providence. While those two disputes continue, they said, they can't support the aggressive reforms Gist says are needed to fix failing schools. Gist and other state officials have said repeatedly that they cannot intervene. In Central Falls, the union local is fighting plans by Supt. Frances Gallo to terminate the entire teaching staff of the low-performing high school and hire back only 50 percent. In East Providence, the union is outraged the local school committee unilaterally cut teacher salaries and forced teachers to pay more into their health insurance. Both cases are currently in the state's courts.

"You want that $75 million? Well, make these two little problems go away. Make it clear who runs the show around here." (Not an actual quotation, by the way.)

Rhode Island's educational system is failing children and costing residents far too much — to the point that, in combination with other factors, it's strangling the state's economy. The law will decide what local remedies are allowed. To unions, though, that's not good enough. Any chance to extort for the result they want is legitimate, in their eyes.

And that, in case you needed further example, is why it's so dangerous to look toward consolidation and the movement of governing authority to higher tiers of government.

Ed. Commissioner Gist Speaks Directly to Educators

In a video posted today (at the previously-unknown-to-me RIDETV website), RI Education Commissioner Deborah Gist speaks directly to educators regarding Race to the Top (RTTT) and how, regardless of whether or not RI wins this round of RTTT, there will be a new teacher evaluation system implemented.

The system will be used to evaluate all educators--teachers, superintendents, etc. She also explained that specific details were unknown because the current plan is to design the evaluation system with educators from across the spectrum. The state model would be the standard, but other, local districts could exceed that minimum.

As per the Board of regents, the evaluations will be weighted 51% towards student performance and commissioner Gist stressed that there would be multiple aspects that will go into measuring that 51% (in other words, not just NECAP results, for instance). She did say that the 4 ratings would be "highly effective", "effective", "minimally effective" and "ineffective", but expected that "very few" would receive the "ineffective" designation. (I'm sure it's not an accident that three out of the four ratings include the positive connotation of "effective"). The reason that RTTT is important, says Gist, is because that money ($75 million) would be put to good use in developing and implementing the evaluation system (including training of evaluators).

Gist stressed that it was important for districts, school committees and teacher unions to sign onto the RTTT Memorandums of Understanding (MoU). She explained that if they didn't, and RI's bid for RTTT funds was successful, then the non-MoU filers wouldn't be eligible for the funds. Further, regardless of whether or not RTTT funds are awarded, those districts who sit out will not be invited to the table when it comes to developing the evaluation system. Finally, she explained that all of the RTTT initiatives have to be collectively bargained as per RI State Law and the MoU's.

Video embedded after the jump.

Continue reading "Ed. Commissioner Gist Speaks Directly to Educators"

A Framework for School Work

Julia Steiny describes the sort of data that school teachers can use to improve instruction:

Per the data-collection protocol, [Lonsdale Elementary School Principal Jeannine] Magliocco asks the kids at one table what they are learning today. As two girls speak over one another, we learn that this is a math class. They explain that while they need to be correct about the science they're using to determine the space for each habitat, the lesson for right now, they emphasize, is about finding and plotting area and perimeter.

Magliocco scans her check list, finds "learning objectives are evident to the students," and checks "evident." The girls dive back into their work. I mention that the kids seem remarkably on task. Magliocco confirms that their teacher, Mike Maloof, is one of her most skilled.

The data collection process, though, doesn't attempt to create a rigid, objective lever for evaluation. It does what must be done in an organic profession like education (perhaps any profession, ultimately) and creates a framework for subjective analysis of performance. People with knowledge of student-specific factors have to figure out where shortcomings exist and whether they represent failures, given the context in which they appear. (A classroom with significant extra-curricular problems might be doing very well even though another class performing at the same level would be doing poorly. Likewise a teacher with inadequate resources.)

In a final analysis, success will require a level of administrative authority and employee accountability that collective action and longevity — the claim that all measures must be objective and mechanically operable — just do not allow.

Incentive to Unload the Kids

Any strategy that increases the opportunities for families to choose the schools in which their children will be educated is worth a look, and Governor Carcieri's proposal to do so by increasing private donations for scholarships appears to be a good one. The dark lining, though, is that it only emphasizes the perverse incentives that public schools have:

With public schools facing a budget crisis of epic proportions, Governor Carcieri on Wednesday called for the General Assembly to double the state tax credit for businesses that donate scholarship money to private and parochial schools.

Carcieri wants to raise the total amount that businesses can donate from $1 million to $2 million at a time when the state faces a projected $220-million deficit this year and a potential deficit of almost twice that much in the coming fiscal year.

"I'm a huge believer that the ladder up is education," Carcieri told about 200 independent school students, teachers and principals who rallied at the State House on Wednesday. "It's clear to me that the need is enormous."

With Tiverton's financial town meeting scheduled for this coming Saturday and the School Committee's projected budget currently about $1.5 million or more over what the town can legally provide it, without seeking a special waiver to increase taxes into the double digits, the district has been promoting the notion that it will have to close a grade school and eliminate just about everything outside of the regular classroom in order to make ends meet. I know of at least one family that took the threat of their children's school closing as the final warning to shift to private school next year.

One might think that school officials would be discouraged at such news, but it doesn't take much reflection to realize that the incentive is actually for districts to shed students. That alone ought to convince us all that the system is well beyond broken.

ADDENDUM:

With family members having just returned home from out and about, make that at least two families that have interpreted the school district's signals as reasons to flee.

Making Committees Choose Between Funds and Friends

Chris Powell notes a strategy worth considering:

Nominations for Connecticut's mayor of the year should include Wallingford's William W. Dickinson Jr. for proposing, in the town budget he recently submitted to the Town Council, to reduce the school board's budget by exactly the amount the board planned to pay raises to teachers. The mayor thus clarified that school budgets aren't being cut but rather that school systems are being cannibalized by their employees.

The statement could be even more effective in towns that are between contracts — such as Tiverton. Especially in the case of financial town meetings, taxpayers could send a clear message that they've got a preference for certain line items in the district's budget.

When school committees are unwilling to force concessions beyond the point at which their budgets grow 6% (and are failing to achieve even those) during an historic recession and 2% inflation, it seems to me that some undeniable lessons from the people paying the bills are in order.

Labor Peace, Town or State

Julia Steiny makes a reasonable point about the ability of the General Assembly — with limits and mandates for local teacher contracts — to ensure "peace at the local level," but her assessment doesn't go quite far enough:

And this is the point: labor peace must be bought. And nothing is excluded from negotiations. Everything is subject to bargaining rights.

To prevail in negotiation, weak-kneed management has often won what it wanted, extra minutes of instruction or commitments to professional development, by giving away expensive perks such as more generous sick leave. To hide or delay paying for the give-away, perks were often additions to retirement benefits.

The operative clause is that "labor peace must be bought"; if it isn't bought at the local level, it will be bought at the state level. As we've recently seen, AFL-CIO honcho George Nee sneezes, and Providence quakes. If reformers somehow manage to push contractual limits through the General Assembly, it will only happen on the terms of National Education Association Rhode Island Executive Director Bob Walsh. And we can be sure that those aren't terms that we should prefer to what we can secure with labor decisions close at hand in our own communities.

Look. The basic calculation is as follows: If the people of Rhode Island don't care enough to counterbalance the unions when it comes to electing school committee members, and if there aren't three to five residents willing to stand against union aggression as elected officials in each municipality, then the even larger court of the state government is not a place that we want the ball in play.

A Little Consideration During Budget Season

You'll want to keep this in mind as your town wades through budget season:

The current budget dedicates $37 million in these stabilization funds this year, leaving a balance of $32 million to be used next year — the final year of the stimulus package from the American Reinvestment and Recovery Act. ...

School districts are going to have a hard enough time absorbing the 3.8-percent cut proposed for the 2010-2011 school year, she said.

I've emailed Commissioner Gist's office for clarification about the amount of stimulus Tiverton, specifically, should expect and the title under which the ARRA money will be distributed. Our district, for example, received three separate categories of ARRA funds, and it has left all three as zero for the purposes of next year's budget. And somehow they're coming up with a 6% increase of local contributions.

Blog Interview on the Radio

The topic of my call in to the Matt Allen Show, last night, was my interview with Education Commissioner Gist. Stream by clicking here, or download it.

Money Isn't the Problem

Among the encouraging opinions that Education Commissioner Deborah Gist gave during our discussion was that she thinks Rhode Islanders already contribute enough money to their education system to have all of the programs that those of us over thirty enjoyed in public school — sports, gifted/talented, music programs, math clubs, and so on — and to meet baseline education requirements. A just-released study from the Rhode Island Public Expenditure Council supports that conclusion, as far as the dollar amounts go:

Nationally, Rhode Island ranks fifth highest in per-pupil costs, spending $13,453 per student in 2006-2007, significantly above the national average of $9,703.

As for whether Rhode Island can bring its students up to acceptable levels, well, the report suggests that there's still much work to do:

Yet national test scores such as the National Assessment of Educational Progress and the SAT show Rhode Island stuck in the middle of the pack, and lagging behind its higher-achieving neighboring states in New England.

As I've pointed out, before, Rhode Island's private school students do well on the SATs, but the gap down to the scores of public school students is among the highest in the country, which is one of the factors behind my conclusion that public schools should seek to attract high-performing students back into the fold.

I'm afraid, though, that we're going to be too busy fighing budget battles over the next decade to really start down that road. Consider:

The report estimates that even taking into account a declining student population over the next five years, the state's per-pupil costs will continue to rise and could exceed $20,000 a year by 2015, based on an analysis of the increase of education costs over the past decade.

Interview with RI's Education Commissioner

Rhode Island Commissioner of Elementary and Secondary Education Deborah Gist has reworked her office space. The unguided visitor would surely pass her desk by, thinking it that of a secretary — although a secretary to whom it would not be clear, because she has knocked down the wall to the large corner office and transformed it into an inviting conference area. That was the room to which she led me for our interview, yesterday afternoon.

Our conversation touched on obvious topics such as union participation in the Race to the Top application, regionalization, and vouchers, but I also asked about her office's appropriate involvement in communities and the relevance of school department-taxpayer relationships to the state.

I'll have further commentary as my schedule loosens, but here is the unedited video. (Click "continue reading" for segments one and two.)

Continue reading "Interview with RI's Education Commissioner"

Union Comfort Would Be Evidence of Danger

My main argument against looking toward centralized levers — whether in Providence or Washington — to reform education has essentially been that national teachers' unions are better situated to manipulate higher tiers of government than are concerned residents acting through democratic processes. Within the scope of town politics, an active group can have some hope of countering union propaganda, legal, and bullying tactics — not the least by changing the composition of elected bodies. At the state level, the excess funding that the union system creates for activist administration and lobbying will be of greater value.

That's not to deny that voters and a handful of forward-looking government officials could throw an important curve into the game, before the unions adjust their focus to those officials' offices. That possibility is perhaps what evoked union concern about RI Education Commissioner Deborah Gist's application for federal Race to the Top funding, and its absence is what ought to concern voters about the shift in tone for the second round of competition for those dollars. It's now clear that union support was critical for the causes of the two states that won initial funding, and that support will require that unions have an advantage in the centralization process:

During frank discussions, several speakers said fear and a sense of alienation kept most of the state's teachers union locals from supporting the first application. Of particular concern was a pledge to make student test scores and other evidence of student growth count for more than half of a teacher's evaluation. But the application was vague about exactly what factors would be used to assess a teacher's performance.

"There was a tremendous sense of fear," said Mike Crowley, president of the Rhode Island School Committees Association. "There was fear not knowing what this evaluation will look like. I think [teachers] want to come to the table, and we, as school committees and superintendents, also need to understand it, since we will be expected to carry it out."

The only way toward substantial reform is from the bottom up. Town residents must insist on evaluations that take student achievement into consideration, implemented by accountable administrators with the authority to make substantive changes. State and federal strategies that have any hope of winning union support will only tie the hands of local school administrations.

A Dangerous Fine Line in Blending Public/Private Education

There are two factors — arguably in opposing ideological directions — in which this news should raise concerns:

A plan to create what could be the first U.S. public charter schools run by a Roman Catholic archdiocese is meeting resistance from those who worry about whether religious messages and icons will really stay out of the classrooms and hallways.

Mayor Greg Ballard says the plan is an innovative way to keep schools open so they can fill the needs of families in the struggling areas surrounding the schools. Archdiocese officials saw an opportunity to keep the schools open despite a growing budget deficit.

Predictably, the national movement to cut churches out of the public square has pounced on the transformation of the schools, asserting doubts that the wicked religious folks will follow through on their vows to end religious classes and remove religious symbols and literature from the premises. With regard to their activism, I can only opine that such measures should not be a national issue, but a state-by-state issue.

But with regard to their preferred policy, I find myself in general agreement. What's the point of non-Catholic Catholic schools? The Church should be extremely wary of dabbling in waters in which secular tides prove again and again to suffocate the missions of organizations. Religious organizations should be resisting the trend to make them subcontractors to the Great Benevolent Charity and Bureaucracy that the government is becoming.

In the case of schools, they should be advocating for school choice and vouchers that allow students to use money allocated for their educations toward their preferred institutions — regardless of private, public, and religious status. That's how "separation of church and state" ought to function: with the separation being the individual citizen who operates in both spheres.

Undoubtedly She Speaks Geomet and That's What Matters

Over at Rescuing Providence, as is his wont, EMT blogger Michael Morse reports on an interesting rescue call.

Called to the local high school for a female having difficulty breathing. Arrive on scene to find the female lying in the nurses office, on the couch hyperventilating. I learned that she is a Geometry teacher who had an argument then suffered an anxiety attack. Apparently, the principal and the teacher were discussing a language problem. The kids an this district are a mix of Black, Hispanic and white. Some of the kids couldn’t understand what the teacher was trying to teach.

“Well then,” I said under my breath, “How are we supposed to teach kids who can’t speak English?”

We put the teacher on the stretcher and wheeled her to the rescue. She had calmed down by this time but had difficulty answering simple questions.

Overdose? Stroke? Change of Mental Status?

0-3. She didn’t speak English. The Geometry didn’t speak English. THE GEOMETRY TEACHER DIDN’T SPEAK ENGLISH!

I think the world has gone mad.

No, not the world, The United States of America has gone mad.

I think I’m having an anxiety attack. Somebody better call 911.

Gist's State of (RI) Education

Rhode Island Education Commissioner Deborah Gist has released the text of her State of Education speech (PDF)to the RI General Assembly. In it, she charts a course for improving RI's education system via a holistic approach. She also explains where RI needs to improve in its next Race-to-the-top bid:

...we lost points because we don’t have a data system that supports instruction – yet – though we are in the process of building what will be one of the best in the country.

We also lost points because of two serious weaknesses: our policies on public charter schools and on education funding. Because you lifted the cap on public charter schools, we will gain points in the next round of funding. We will gain even more points if we succeed in adopting a predictable and equitable funding formula for aid to education.

We could also gain as much as 15 points once we secure statements of support from all districts and unions. That will surely help us in our race to the top!

Between now and June 1st, we are going to work to improve the quality of our application. I will engage superintendents, school committees, and teachers’ unions to ask for their involvement and support. But everyone has to realize one thing: Delaware and Tennessee won because they had bold reform policies (just as we did) and widespread support. Though I am always open to ideas that can improve our application, we cannot and will not backtrack on our reform policies – or we will be out of the running. We now need the entire state to get behind these reforms!

The Union Does School Administration

It was hard not to give some credit to the union-run New England Laborers/Cranston Public Schools Construction Career Academy when it gave some of its money back to the town to maintain sports programs. Of course, one wondered why it would have extra money — charter schools aren't fully private schools — but the sentiment wasn't without its noble tinge. Well, Cranston School Committee member Stephen Stycos says there's more to the story, and as usual, it begins with an apparent conflict of interest:

I questioned the change and argued that if the Laborers charter school had $193,840 for the union, it should also give $193,840 to the Cranston public schools. [Michael] Traficante, who chairs the charter-school board of directors and the Cranston School Committee, and is an employee of the Laborers union, countered that the former superintendent promised the union would only have to pay for the "construction craft laborers instructors" for the school's first five years.

And here are some of the results:

Mr. Traficante, however, said the Laborers charter school wanted to help with Cranston's financial woes and came forward with a transfer of $187,218. In response to questioning from several School Committee members, we discovered that this "gift" was the state's reimbursement for special-education services already paid by the Cranston public schools. Had the charter school kept the money, it would have been paid twice for the same special-education services — once by its partner, the Cranston Public Schools, and once by the State of Rhode Island. Since Cranston pays for the special-education services, Cranston should automatically receive the money. ...

(The construction craft laborers instructors, however, who are hired by the union, receive a school-year wage and benefit package equal to $97,751, while a comparable technical assistant at Cranston's vocational school earns $45,870 in wages and benefits.)

The Sort of Wildflower That Children Are

I'm a believer in the importance of creativity and honing one's natural talents, seeing it as a critical part of becoming effective at and finding fulfillment in whatever one does. That creativity can be underdeveloped during education, however, does not mean that it's appropriate to make it the sole pillar of a schooling strategy, which is what Julia Steiny implies amidst metaphors of flowers and nature:

What with the glories of spring's awakening the daffodils and scilla, and the stark winter forest suddenly gone, all fuzzy with life quickening on the branches, education had begun to seem a little lifeless. So I indulged myself in a marathon of YouTube lectures on creativity by Sir Ken Robinson. The Queen of England knighted the man for his warrior-like battles against forces that kill imagination, intuition and our innate appetite for solving puzzles. ...

... As humans, "we exploited the earth for certain resources and put the whole operation at risk. Now we're taking bits of children, educating them, but never finding out what they want to be because no one was looking for it." ...

All children will learn when teachers and the public look at them with the same grateful joy we feel when we see new green sprouting out of the winter landscape. Kids are organic. They will bloom and flourish and even ace the silly tests if only we develop nurturing conditions for them.

As a perpetual reminder about priorities in education, this sort of thinking is healthy, but it's easy to take it too far. The thing about creativity is that it's kind of shapeless. Just as trees and bushes need pruning and vines do best with lattice and such, children need a framework within which to allow their creativity to flourish. I couldn't help but think of Steiny as I turned the pages of my Sunday paper and came across this:

A 13-year-old hangs himself in a Johnson County, Texas, barn. An 8-year-old jumps out of a two-story school building in Houston. Nine Massachusetts teenagers face jail time after allegedly harassing a girl so mercilessly that she killed herself. These incidents, all of which took place in one week, reframe the age-old phenomenon of the schoolyard bully.

Students are turning to suicide, experts say, as an escape from taunts that now continue beyond the school day through cyberspace. Such drastic responses, they say, reveal how an action once considered a rite of passage has turned into a public health issue.

I'm not saying that a creative curriculum negates the ability to control bullies, or that all children will be monsters if allowed to grow wild. But every garden has weeds, and even desirable plants can strangle each other if not properly situated and grown.

Metaphors and creativity only take us so far. And at the end of the day, the world doesn't need three million pop stars, and it can't function with only two carpenters. Creativity isn't all, and the right balance is necessary in order to avoid untold misery.

Redirecting Education Reform Toward the Same-Old

Readers know that I'm extremely skeptical — that is, even more skeptical than usual — about efforts to force education reform from the federal government down. Especially with the Obama administration behind the wheel. An article that's been sitting in my queue all week gives some indication that it's not an irrational fear:

The only two states that won in the first round [of Race to the Top], Delaware and Tennessee, both worked with their teacher unions early in the application process. In Delaware, 100 percent of teacher union locals signed off on that state's application; 93 percent of the locals did so in Tennessee. This support, Education Secretary Arne Duncan said during a phone interview with reporters, gave him confidence that the reforms would "reach into every corner" of those states.

Rhode Island, in contrast, gained the endorsement of only two of the state’s 40 or so teacher union locals, Providence and Foster.

Clearly, the administration wants unions to ensure that their authority isn't substantially threatened by reforms, which means (for those of us who see reform mainly as a route toward undoing the damage that teacher unions have done) that the objective is really to co-opt the popular markers of right-leaning reform. When it comes to education, choice has got to mean choice, and accountability has got to mean accountability. Otherwise, new strategies will be set up to fail — and perhaps with the intention of failing.

The Religion of Rhode Island's Public University

Last year, Notre Dame University was the center of national attention, because it had asked abortion-supporting President Obama to give the commencement address and was planning to give him an honorary degree. The problem was, of course, that Notre Dame is explicitly a Catholic organization, and while nobody objected to pro-choice speakers, in general, many thought the honor implicitly being granted to Obama inappropriate.

Approached from the perspective of that debate, controversy over a speaker at the University of Rhode Island really is remarkable:

University of Rhode Island President David M. Dooley's selection of a Christian minister to speak at his inauguration ceremony has triggered a campus-wide discussion about the separation of church and state, tolerance and free speech — precisely the principles Dooley says he hopes will define the URI community.

But not everyone at the state university is comfortable with his decision.

Dooley invited Greg Boyd, a well-known minister from Minnesota, to deliver the keynote address at the April 8 inauguration, a choice that has sparked all sorts of discussions — online, informally and in campus meetings. Some students and faculty say they are concerned that Boyd's views on issues such as same sex-marriage and abortion — he opposes both — and his position as a religious leader make him an inappropriate representative at such a significant public university event.

Let's highlight, first, that this is not a commencement address, but an inauguration ceremony for the new university president and that, according to a profile published yesterday, the event is entirely funded with private money. Apart from such particulars, it can hardly be said that Boyd is a right-wing religious extremist:

Boyd said he no longer describes himself as an evangelical as the word "has gotten so wrapped up with so much that I'm against. Jesus does not want to enforce his morality on others. That's why he attracted prostitutes and tax collectors. Jesus has this encompassing embrace. His love for people outruns his desire to control them."

Inasmuch as President Obama, himself, has stated his opposition to same-sex marriage, and that the speech has no relevance to abortion, it's reasonable to infer that Boyd's being a public Christian was the factor that brought the red flags. And those flags leave a dark mark on the reputation of the university, as far as this alumnus can see.

There doesn't seem to have been any question, among the faculty, about whether it's appropriate of the institution to take the money of Christians, pro-lifers, or marital traditionalists, whether as taxpayers or students. Yet, any potential student with such affiliations who hears of the controversy will surely question whether he or she can expect acceptance.

It's one thing for Communication Studies and Women's Studies Professor Lynne Derbyshire to raise "concerns" about URI's even hinting that Boyd's views might be acceptable. One expects doctrinaire leftism from such quarters. But even Fisheries and Aquaculture Professor Michael Rice thought it fine to express his reservations about the Christian speaker in the Providence Journal. What field of study could the pro-life, pro-marriage, Christian student pursue at the state's largest public university without fearing the barely contained revulsion of his or her professors?

Note that reporter Jennifer Jordan was apparently unable to find a professor whose opinion comes closer to support of Boyd than Resource Economics Professor Stephen Swallow's statement that it's healthy for the university community to "have some speakers who make us uncomfortable" as an exercise in being "tolerant about other points of view." I knew Professor Swallow as an intern in his department, and he personally gave me some nudges and breaks that sent me in beneficial directions that I might not have otherwise pursued, and I know what he's saying, here. But what he can't help but make clear, as well, is that the state's research institution of higher learning has a particular point of view and that anybody who differs will make the faculty uncomfortable.

Once again, we learn that "open-mindedness" is really just another term for a particular ideology with its own restrictions on acceptable beliefs.

RI Misses out on Race to the Top

I jumped the gun a bit last Friday. Now I'm not: RI didn't win in Round 1 of the Race to the Top sweepstakes (and a tweet by EdComm Gist confirms) UPDATE: RI finished 8th:

Delaware and Tennessee won bragging rights Monday as the nation's top education innovators, besting the District and 13 other finalists to claim a share of the $4 billion in President Obama's unprecedented school reform fund.

Education Secretary Arne Duncan picked the winners after a team of judges in the Race to the Top competition unexpectedly gave tiny Delaware the highest ranking, with Tennessee close behind. Delaware won as much as $107 million and Tennessee could be awarded $502 million.

Leaders in both states pledged to establish national models for data-driven reform, tying teacher evaluation to student performance in an all-out effort to close achievement gaps.

Georgia, ranked third in the contest, and Florida, considered a favorite to win, fell just short of a threshold for awards that Duncan set himself. More than $3 billion remains in the fund, and they could win some in a future round.

On to round two.

UPDATE: EdWeek's Rick Hess doesn't like it:

Looking at Delaware and Tennessee leaves me thinking that all the talk about bold reform was window dressing. The states that explicitly set out to blow past conventions, and devil take the hindmost, fell by the wayside. Florida and Louisiana's bold, action-backed plans--which reflected a belief that they could push forward if they did so only with the eager and willing--lost out to states that obtained laughable levels of buy-in from school districts, school boards, and local teachers' unions.

Tennessee boasted that it had obtained signatures of participation from 100% of Local Education Agency (LEA) superintendents, 100% from the presidents of local school boards, and 93% from the local teachers' union leaders. Delaware bragged that it obtained 100% of the signatures in each category. Is this really a good thing? When Louisiana faced board pushback because of the boldness of its proposals, and when Florida endured an FEA boycott over its own proposed measures, the decision to go with Delaware and Tennessee looks like the triumph of process over substance. If anyone believes that Delaware can get 100%--or even 60%--of districts or union leaders to sign on to efforts to dramatically retool K-12 schooling, I've got a couple of handsome monuments in downtown D.C. I'd like to sell them.

Placing this much weight on 'stakeholder support' is going to feed cynicism about the sincerity of Duncan's calls for bold, transformative change. Hard to square this very conventional emphasis on consensus with all his tough talk.

UPDATE II: Rhode Island finished 8th of 15 finalists. Apparently, Ed Sec Arne Duncan has said that there will be 10-15 Race to the Top winners in Round 2. Here are the Final rankings, by points scored in the evaluation (via Politics K-12 twitter):

DE - 454
TN - 444.2
GA - 433.6
FL - 431.4
IL - 423.8
SC - 423.2
PA - 420
RI - 419
KY - 418.8
OH - 418.6
LA - 418.2
NC - 414
MA - 411.4
CO - 409.6
NY - 408.6
DC - 402.4

Commissioner Gist's Non–Rhode Island Perspective

Whatever one thinks of her style and policies — which don't uniformly fold comfortably into any faction of Rhode Island politics — the outside perspective that Education Commissioner Deborah Gist is bringing to the discussion is refreshing. Take this, from a Newport Daily News article on Friday, discussing the effects of the proposed funding formula and regionalization on Aquidneck Island:

Gist explained that, if enacted as proposed, the formula would eliminate the regionalization bonus the state currently offers. Regionalization is supposed to save money, Gist said, so why should the state pay districts extra money when they are reducing their costs?

One thinks of claims that the Portsmouth wind turbine turns a profit, although if state incentive subsidies are removed, the surplus goes away. That local officials around the state appear to believe that the state should reward them for making smart decisions (if you believe that regionalization is smart) illustrates an unhealthy lack of authoritative independence. It's also an indication of how policies become implemented out of taxpayer/voter reach.

Of course, I also find it humorous that everybody thought a "fair funding formula" would benefit their communities. In the fantasy land of Rhode Island lingo, "fair" means everybody gets more.

Transferring Public Responsibility to Public Charity

This is a positive development, for the short-term, but it should be considered a short-term fix before turning around, rather than a short-term transition toward something new in the future:

An $88,241 donation from the New England Laborers'/Cranston Public Schools Construction Career Academy, a public charter school, "will just about restore every program except freshman baseball, basketball and football," said Schools Supt. Peter L. Nero, repeating what has become a familiar theme: to balance its budget, the district was forced to cut the same programs it had vigorously defended in court as part of an unsuccessful lawsuit seeking additional funding from the city.

The donation, which the charter school's board of directors is expected to approve at its next meeting, would come from the school's roughly $372,000 surplus, said School Committee Chairman Michael A.Traficante, who is also chairman of the charter school's board of directors and works for the New England Laborers' union as director of governmental affairs.

"We are buying some time for these nonprofit groups to start raising money," Traficante said.

Generally, I'm for increasing the role of charity and private donations, but if this change in funding for Cranston public school sports becomes a trend, it will simply represent a transfer of the "extras" that once were considered intrinsic parts of public education to voluntary support while the unions' cash cow maintains its mandatory tax-based flow of revenue. It would be different if residents could choose to give cash for sports, books, programs, and so on, while declining to donate to higher remuneration for the adults who staff the facilities. However, the route for achieving that balance will still be the circuitous one of elections and contract negotiations over years.

Moreover, the parents and students who utilize the sports services will continue to receive a relatively good deal in the cost of their activities. They'll therefore be less inclined to join reformers who wish to change the political regime in order to redirect public funds away from lavish remuneration for adults.

Public education in Rhode Island is beginning to look like a bait-and-switch. Over some decades, we've been sold on funding public schools through tax dollars because they build community, ensure well-rounded young citizens, keep kids occupied and off the streets, and so on. Now that the bill has become outrageous, the activities that do those things and offer substantial opportunities to those who cannot afford private school will be foisted back onto communities to fund via other means.

Hey, Don't Worry About Federal Ed. Money

Even if Rhode Island doesn't win federal largess for its education improvement plan, as Marc is suggesting we will not, we still have every reason that we've always had to hold our heads high, such as this one that Julia Steiny mentioned last Sunday:

After the 1960s, many states went back to their labor laws to limit, assertively, the scope of bargaining. Apparently, Rhode Island now has the broadest labor laws in the country. Virtually nothing is off the negotiating table.

Oh, wait...

RI Waits for Doesn't Win Race to the Top decision and doesn't receive School Improvement Grant

The Department of Education has announced* the winners of the first round of Race to the Top School Improvement Grants (SIG) and the Rhode Island didn't make the cut. Indiana, Maryland, New Jersey, Ohio and Washington were the winners. For those who tied the Central Falls firings to RI getting the SIGs, I guess the move hasn't paid off yet. As for the Race to the Top grants, David Scharfenberg at N4N reported earlier that RI Ed. Commish Deborah Gist wasn't optimistic:

Education Commissioner Deborah Gist told a group of civic leaders yesterday at a meeting attended by N4N that it is "highly unlikely" that Rhode Island will win a multi-million dollar infusion from the federal government in the first round of President Obama's Race to the Top grant-making.

The comments, made before community leadership development organization Leadership Rhode Island, marks a significant shift in tone for Gist, who has been relentlessly optimistic about the state's application for more than $100 million in federal aid to push through sweeping reform.

The Department of Education will anounce Race to the Top winners on Monday, March 29th.

*CORRECTED version-thanks commenters- Nothing like multi-tracked grant programs and gov't bureaucracy to confuse the layperson! But most of the blame goes to yours truly for jumpin' the gun.

RI Reading Scores Improve

Now for some good news: according to the National Assessment of Educational Progress, or NAEP test results, RI Reading scores are up, overall. Unfortunately, the way the ProJo reports it is confusing:

In Grade 4, 36 percent of Rhode Island students were reading at grade level, a five-point increase from the previous rate and five points above the national average. In eighth grade, 28 percent scored at grade level, up from 27 percent the previous period, two points below the national average.

A cynic (er...average Rhode Islander) would naturally look at this and think that means that 64% of RI 4th graders and 72% of RI 8th graders are reading below grade level! But that's not the case. The ProJo only gives the "at grade level" number, not those reading above grade level. Oy.

To keep it short and sweet: 69% of 4th graders and 72% of 8th graders are reading at or above grade level.

For her part, Education Commissioner Deborah Gist appears to have the right perspective:

“These improving scores [in Rhode Island] show that we are on the right track, with our emphasis on literacy in all courses and our support for students … who need extra help in reading,” said state education Commissioner Deborah A. Gist. “Despite these improvements, I am very concerned about low achievement rates for some student groups.”

What she's concerned about are the results for low-income students, English-language learners and students with disabilities.

I've done a more complete summary of the RI stats in the extended entry. From it, we can basically conclude (or confirm what we suspected) that, on average--and to take extreme examples:

1) The best 4th grade readers are middle- or upper- class, English speaking white females without disabilities. The best 8th grade readers are middle- or upper- class, English speaking Asian/Pacific Islander females without disabilities.
2) The worst 4th grade readers are poor, non-English speaking Hispanic males with disabilities. The worst 8th grade readers are poor, non-English speaking Black or Hispanic males with disabilities.

My guess is that Title I and school district reading and literacy programs have done much to help increase these scores. Hopefully, we can build on that success and, where feasible, apply that pedagogy to Math and Writing (and eventually, other subject areas).

Continue reading "RI Reading Scores Improve"

Reducing Education to a Benefits System

Native Cranstonite and former Major Leaguer Mike Stenhouse hit his recent op-ed out of the park:

The proposed elimination of varsity athletics programs in the Cranston school district is a direct result of what is wrong with the political system in our entire state. Namely, that state law and city contracts routinely give priority to the special interests, squeezing out taxes and programs from everyone else.

For me, participation in varsity athletics at Cranston East in the mid-'70s was a critical factor in my overall growth as a person. It is an outrage to know that similar opportunities for students are now being stolen from them because of misguided laws and misprioritized budget planning. High-school athletics uniquely develop leadership skills and character in our students beyond that of any other school activity or curriculum item. Athletics are not an expendable frill and are far more worthy of our tax dollars than most other spending. ...

It is unconscionable that we continue to guarantee exorbitant benefits for specially protected groups while sacrificing investment in our students.

It seems as if the first things schools cut are programs that actually open the door for students to excel on their own initiative. Perhaps they do so because it's an easier sell; if it's a choice between programs, the emotional reaction is to protect students who need the most help against those for whom the opportunities are to reach a higher level. Unfortunately, programs that open doors, rather than attempt to carry students through them, are much less expensive, so more must be eliminated to achieve the same budgetary savings.

Where the resources exist for those students to acquire the opportunities on their own, they'll do so. That's why Rhode Island has a high rate of private school attendance.

The reality is, however, that reaching the choice between programs requires making another choice first: between students and employees. That's the point at which voters must begin applying pressure. Any school committee member, district administrator, or state bureaucrat who cuts into these programs is not only backward-looking but also deserving of replacement.

There Are Big Ideas, and There Are Small Implementations

Diane Ravitch offers a wonderful example of a particular strategy for rebuffing education reforms:

As an education historian, I have often warned against the seductive lure of grand ideas to reform education. Our national infatuation with education fads and reforms distracts us from the steady work that must be done.

Our era is no different. We now face a wave of education reforms based on the belief that school choice, test-driven accountability and the resulting competition will dramatically improve student achievement.

Ravitch claims to have been a supporter of choice and accountability for some years, having now adjusted her view based on "empirical evidence." But even as one espousing the concepts, she must not have had a very thorough vision for them.

I make that assertion because her empirical evidence against the broad concept of "choice" is the aggregate performance of charter schools across the countries. As has been readily apparent, in Rhode Island, even just establishing such schools can be an arduous process, and the union hounds are ever at the door. A more fair assessment of school choice would have to include private schools, as well. Indeed, implemented as many of us on the right would like, choice would encompass every accredited school to which parents might want access, including different public schools, because the idea isn't just to give students a way out, but also to give schools a way to compete.

As for Ravitch's argument against test-driven accountability treats the proposition as all or nothing. As I've said before, professional accountability in a field like teaching cannot be handled as if by formujla — assessing the number and quantity of something produced. Rather, educational results must be measured as improvements against difficulties, and for that, subjective measures are required. Standardized tests are a critical component of that process, but accountability must flow up the chain, with administrators examining scores in the context of other circumstances, observations, and institutional objectives and accountable to the people above them for their results. Of course, unions dislike such structures, claiming it lacks protection, while the opposition sees talent and performance as all the protection that professionals ought to require.

The impression that one gets from essays like Ravitch's is that the intention isn't so much to examine an experiment and explain lessons learned as to dismiss ideas that haven't really be tried so that the principles on which they're founded can never be proven successful.

The Dangling President

Let's order things clearly: It was objectionable for a Central Falls high school teacher to dangle an Obama doll upside down with a sign saying "Fire CF Teachers," because it involved the students in a union dispute. Talk of its being a hate crime is utterly outlandish:

To Clifford Montiero, president of the Providence branch of the NAACP, the effigy represents a lynching of a black man, and brings back painful memories of decades of injustices.

"In my mind, this is a hate crime, and the teacher should be charged," Montiero said. "This teacher feels he can demean the president of the United States, an African-American who has overcome all this hatred. It is wrong. And when you take a nonviolent environment like a classroom, and introduce violence and hatred into it, you have crossed the line."

Even calling the thing an "effigy," as the Providence Journal does, goes a bit far. I look at the picture and I think Laugh In, not Mississippi Burning, with the President popping out to offer a one liner.

Responsibility Allocated Across the Education Chain

As I've articulated in the past, education systems ought to have a structure of responsibility — and accountability — that begins in the classroom with comprehensive teacher evaluations performed by administrators with responsibility for broader performance measures answering to the superintendent, who must answer for the performance of the entire district. In a recent letter to the editor Tom Maguire, of North Kingstown, gives an example of the sort of thing I'm talking about:

The late John Hayes, a principal for many years in Johnston and Cranston, was the only administrator to get it right.

Seldom could he be found in his office, because his love for teaching and his awareness of his teachers' daily challenges led him back to the classroom. He saw his role as a resource for teachers. Further, as I learned from him in my first year, to properly assess a teacher's work, the evaluator must assume responsibility for correcting and improving any shortcomings. Surely, this is far more daunting than calling attention to chalkboard displays, teacher attire or room temperature.

My understanding is that, for such behavior to become an expected norm, intrinsic to the profession, forces higher up the chain of command have to relinquish control and school committees have to reassert management rights in union contracts. Administrators would also need tools to correct and reward those below them. Unfortunately, the concept seems anathema to public education that individual effort and achievement should be an enumerated component of the professionals' jobs.

Are We Entering the Re-education Zone?

Perhaps it's too easy to be the naysayer in a place like Rhode Island, but something about this good news:

Legislation approved by the General Assembly on Tuesday and signed by Gov. Donald L. Carcieri later in the day raised the limit on charter schools in Rhode Island from 20 to 35, a key part of the state’s $126.6 million Race to the Top application.

Combined with this show of enthusiasm:

Governor Carcieri, Education Commissioner Deborah A. Gist and Providence Supt. Tom Brady are leading a five-member team that will present the state's Race to the Top application to a panel of judges at 1:30 p.m. Wednesday. ...

Joining the team are a dozen supporters, ranging from mayors to teacher union representatives to Senate President M. Teresa Paiva Weed and House Speaker Gordon D. Fox.

A spirit of cooperation and goodwill between the Democratic-controlled House and Senate and the Republican governor dominated a rally at the State House Tuesday afternoon to see the group off. Just an hour later, lawmakers passed a bill to expand the cap on charter schools from 20 to 35, a boon to the state's application.

Makes me think of this:

Yesterday, I warned of the dangers of federalized standards and textbooks. We also shouldn't let this tidbit escape our notice:

"We're going to have to push for change to S3050 [the state's tax cap legislation]," Gist told hard deadlines, acknowledging that some communities, like Portsmouth, were at cap, had aggressively managed per-pupil costs, and would not be able to sustain the proposed cuts. "It's not just 3050," she said, adding that changes would be needed to the whole funding system. To hear the Commissioner say that RIDE would line up behind changing the tax cap — with the BEP as leverage — was probably the best news that has come out of the last few days of school funding drama.

Many of us have been relieved to see somebody standing up to the teachers' unions, but the fact is that our fundamental problem has been that we're less powerful than they are. With our elected representatives lining up, to a person, to claim federal largess, increasing the number of charter schools, the amount of federal money, and the stringency of standards in key subjects could come at a higher cost than we know.

RI Interscholastic League Denies Cranston Sport Consolidation

Those who read my previous post regarding Cranston's attempt to help relieve their budgetary woes by combining various school sports programs from their two high schools via a waiver application to the Rhode Island Interscholastic League won't be surprised to read that I think the RI Interscholastic League got it right:

The Rhode Island Interscholastic League Principals Committee on Athletics has denied the Cranston School Department's request for an eligibility waiver that would have allowed the consolidation of teams at the city's two high schools.

The committee voted 10-0 Wednesday to deny the request to allowed the city to field co-operative teams in 16 sports. There was one abstention.

As a result, plans to eliminate freshman football, basketball and baseball; girls and boys indoor track and tennis and co-ed golf at Cranston High School East and Cranston High School West will proceed. The School Committee has already voted to eliminate those sports for the 2010-2011 academic year.

Tom Mezzanotte, executive director of the Interscholastic League, said the co-op rule is intended to increase opportunities to participate. In Cranston's case it would limit opportunities, he said.

The committee does not want students "to bear the burden of financial problems" in the community, he added.

Mezzanotte's reasoning is completely correct and Cranston shouldn't have been--and wasn't able--to use the RIIL as an escape hatch for that city's budgetary problems. I expect that some parents and students will step up to try to save their teams. Whether they raise money on their own or take it to the school committee or city council is up to them.

How Centralized Education Could Turn Ugly

Right now, public education is such an expensive catastrophe that top-down imposition of standards and reasonable organizational principles is an attractive option. But there's a very dark side to the impulse, hints of which can be found here:

Governors and education leaders on Wednesday proposed sweeping new school standards that could lead to students across the country using the same math and English textbooks and taking the same tests, replacing a patchwork of state and local systems in an attempt to raise student achievement nationwide. ...

The stakes could be high. President Barack Obama told the nation's governors last month that he wants to make money from Title I - the federal government's biggest school aid program - contingent on adoption of college- and career-ready reading and math standards.

We tend to think of textbooks and standards as sort of pure and objective vessels for knowledge, but they do a lot of cultural work. Perhaps you recall the overt political correctness of word problems in math. In English, the studied texts inherently use the tools of language to construct arguments and convey sensibilities. Controlling textbooks, in other words, brings with it an opportunity to define common understanding, to associate political ideology with "clear thinking," or at least "good writing."

And students of history will surely see the probability that standards will not long be left with the single mandate of educating Americans. A review of the book The Science on Women and Science — which is a collection of essays on the application of Title IX equity rules to scientific education — brings home the point. Title IX has wreaked havoc in athletics and transferred to classroom curricula, the movement could leverage standards in pursuit of equal representation, in a field, as opposed to academic excellence.

As with all consolidations of power, the justifications have their appeal, and the people acquiesce with the understanding that there's consensus about the proper focus and scope of that power's usage. Once it's pooled, though, power attracts a different sort of animal (or allows those present to shed their disguises).

More Re: Committee Wins

Here's the decision from Superior Court Justice Silverstein: PDF.

About halfway through the document, it appears that Silverstein would draw his lines very tightly around his ruling in favor of the school committee:

Under the language of § 16-2-9 a school committee must bargain in good faith with certified public school teachers in accordance with Title 28 and honor current collective bargaining agreements. However, under a narrow set of circumstances, when such collective bargaining negotiations have reached an impasse and there is no longer a valid collective bargaining agreement, a school committee must comply with the mandate in subsection (d) and avoid maintaining a school budget that results in debt.

However, in most of the substantive ways in which Anchor Rising readers might want a little bit of breadth to the ruling, they won't be disappointed. For one, the judge determined that a never-ending contract is not implied by existing laws (citations deleted):

Although the Union contends that the Committee was under a statutory duty to continue to adhere to the terms and conditions of the expired CBA until a successor agreement was realized, the Court disagrees. Title 28 does not contain such a mandate pertaining to school teachers' labor contracts, and in fact under § 28-9.3-4, "no contract shall exceed the term of three (3) years." Further, when previously discussing the effect of an expired contract this Court found it to be no longer valid and cited to Providence Teachers Union v. Providence School Bd., City of Cranston v. Teamsters Local 251, In Providence Teachers, when discussing the effect of a general arbitration clause in an expired contract, the Court stated that "[a]n expired contract has by its own terms released all its parties from their respective contractual obligations, except obligations already fixed under the contract but as yet unsatisfied." Here, the CBA by its terms expired prior to the implementation of the disputed salary and benefits changes. Therefore, the Court finds that the CBA was no longer binding and the Committee did not "abrogate any agreement reached by collective bargaining."

And when a school committee finds itself facing a budgetary shortfall (determined as a measure of its best knowledge on the date that it takes action), and when the contract has expired, employees don't have an overriding claim to district money beyond other line items under the committee's control (citations deleted):

The Union has continually argued that there were other avenues that the Committee could have taken to reduce the FY 09 deficit. However, this Court remains mindful that under § 16-2-9 the Committee is vested with the entire care, control, and management of the interests of the East Providence public schools. Further, under the same provision the Committee has both the power and the duty to adopt a school budget. Accordingly, this Court will not discuss whether the changes to the teachers' salary and benefits were the only or even the best possible way to comply with the balanced budget mandate of § 16-2-9(d). However, this Court does note that the parties stipulated that the teachers' salaries and benefits consumed 63% of the Committee's total revenue from all sources for FY 09. Therefore, given the mandate in § 16-2-9(d) that a school committee "shall be responsible for maintaining a school budget which does not result in a debt" and the evidence before this Court that the Committee was, in fact, facing a debt for FY 09, this Court declares that the Committee acted lawfully under Title 16 by implementing the teachers' salary and benefit changes.

Lastly, Siverstein found that the State Labor Relations Board cannot, in effect, make law to suit its rulings (citations deleted):

The Court is mindful that when deciding such questions, the SLRB is empowered under § 28-7-22 to issue orders and award the relief it deems to be appropriate. However, our Supreme Court has cautioned that "[n]o state official by administrative action can affect the substantive rights of parties as they have been set forth by an affirmative act of the general assembly." Further, as indicated supra, administrative agencies are bound by statutory schemes and a decision or award is invalid if the decision or award contravenes a statutory scheme.

RE: Breaking - Committee Wins

ProJo reports:

A Superior Court judge ruled today that the East Providence School Committee "acted lawfully" when it unilaterally cut teachers' salaries and forced a 20 percent contribution to their health insurance costs last year.

Facing a deficit of more than $4 million, the board made the reductions in January 2009, saying it had to in order to comply with a state law that says school districts can't deficit spend.

The board's lawyers also argued that the committee was able to make the changes without the consent of the local teacher union because there wasn't a contract in effect for the almost 500 teachers. The last agreement expired on Oct. 31, 2008.

"... When the parties have reached an impasse in negotiations and their actions are not governed by a binding collective bargaining agreement, a committee can make unilateral changes when faced with an actual deficit," Judge Michael A. Silverstein said in his written decision.

While this may be a particular circumstance, it could mean a fundamental shift in negotiating tactics going forward. Until now, it was to the unions advantage to delay and stall for a better deal (for instance, waiting for the economy to turn around) while operating under the old contract. This could change that as unions may fear that a School Committee could actually take the opportunity of an impasse to exercise their management rights and make unilateral cuts and adjustments.

School Choice Is the Lasting Solution Only with Local Control

I'm glad to see I'm not the only person with concerns about top-down education reform in Rhode Island. Here's Bill Felkner, executive director of the Ocean State Policy Research Institute:

[Education Commissioner Deborah] Gist is wresting power from the unions and implementing reforms through the state Department of Education, such as the no-bumping rule. In Cumberland, meanwhile, [Mayor Dan] McKee is taking power away from the school committee and enhancing the role of the mayor.

In both instances, the intent is laudable, but what happens if an anti-reform mayor is elected in Cumberland, or a new commissioner takes office at the state level, one less inclined to do battle with the unions?

Either way, control is just being shifted from one governmental entity to another — from the school committees to the mayor, or from public teacher unions to the education commissioner and the superintendents.

The danger is a bit more acute than that. In both cases, power is moving farther from accountability. In the case of a mayor, accountability is still local, but education becomes muddled in with every other issue the town faces. With the mayor running the show, voters no longer have an elected position that's directly and solely responsible for education. That could dilute the opportunities for grassroots action while increasing the opportunity for special interests to stitch together coalitions.

In the case of the commissioner, power has moved not only away from local hands, but also to the hands of an unelected bureaucrat. Should Commissioner Gist be replaced with somebody interested in serving an entirely different constituency (if you know what I mean), voters' recourse is through the governor's office, where education becomes even more diluted as an issue for the grassroots and special interests have the full state tableau of special interests in which to make alliances that are unhealthy for the state. In other words, it's what we have now, but with unions' focus honed in on the more powerful, more centralized focus of power.

This consideration becomes even more significant when one takes into account that Bill's (correct) solution, more broadly, is the parental control inherent in school choice. The power of such freedom diminishes as the controlling authority, for schools, spreads out to a broader array of the choices that parents have. The unions might not mind the idea that parents can send their children anywhere when all of the significant decisions related to taxation and school management are controllable at the state level.

A Baker Qualified to Sew

Add this to the strange insights into the way things work that explain more than the immediate context to which they apply:

While state officials have described problems in the qualifications of teachers at the Rhode Island School for the Deaf, the Web site of the state Department of Education lists most of them as "highly qualified" in accordance with federal law.

State Education Commissioner Deborah A. Gist said the teachers are highly qualified, just not necessarily in their current assignments.

Bet you haven't known, in the past, that when somebody in government told you that some employee or other was "highly qualified" the statement did not inherently include an implied "for the job that she's doing."

La Cosa AFTstra

Columnist Mark Patinkin has been focusing on the teacher dispute in Central Falls for weeks, now, but an essay on teachers who (quietly) disagree with the union's activities brings to the fore a central reason that many of us have a constitutional aversion to unions:

"As a C.F. High School teacher I agree with you," the e-mail said. "The Union blew it. The only mistake you made was writing that we voted it down. This is untrue because we were never given the chance to vote. The Union leadership made the decision for us and many of us are not happy."

Why not express that unhappiness?

"Many fear Union retribution," the letter said. ...

"You have to understand," one wrote, "not only would I be going up against my own teacher's union, I would leave myself open to abuse from every teacher's union in the country and perhaps beyond."

No doubt, some union organizer or other has pointed to Patinkin's column, and will point to this very post, as evidence that breaking ranks and speaking out will only open the union to political attack. One can hardly dispute that "solidarity" is part of what empowers unions to accomplish what they do. That doesn't, of course, mean that members or society at large should want them to accomplish those ends. Indeed, the insidious problem of silence is that it allows union reps to pick their own objectives and limit all internal objections to a controlled, intimidating environment.

Performance-based learning? That makes too much sense...

In a column devoted to a preemptive strike against the guidelines being floated by the impending Common Core State Standard Initiative, Cato's Andrew Coulson points in a different direction.

The whole idea of imposing a single set of age-based standards on all students rests on a false premise: that children are identical widgets capable of being dragged along an instructional conveyor belt at the same pace, benefiting equally from the experience.

But kids are different — not only from one another, but when it comes to their own varying facility across subjects as well. Any single set of age-based standards, no matter how thoughtfully conceived, will necessarily be too slow or too fast for most children....

[Instead], group students based on their level of mastery in each subject, instead of strictly by age, so that each can progress as fast as he or she is able. By doing so, all children are taught the things they are ready to learn at any given time. No one need be bored into a stupor nor left hopelessly behind.

Not only is this approach feasible in theory, it is already in widespread use with millions of students worldwide, in the for-profit tutoring sector. When a child comes to a Sylvan Learning or Kumon center facing difficulty with trigonometry, he is not taught basic arithmetic or advanced calculus. He is taught the specific material in which his deficit lies. He moves on to more advanced material as soon as he has mastered the prerequisite skills, and not before.

This is easily achievable in high school and even in junior high. I'd venture to say it was basically the form that I followed during my years growing up in the 1970's and 80's. My early school years in Massachusetts were spent in a 5 classes/grade system, divided up based on some measure of ability. Upon moving to Maine, to a much smaller town, the classes were smaller, but by Jr. High, a similar model was followed for 6th-8th grade (though only two divisions/class).

But somewhere along the way, we took the noble goal of trying to give all kids the same academic opportunities by not pigeonholing them from an early age and twisted it into a system where "equal" often means equally inadequate (at least in the elementary schools). By putting kids of varying academic proficiency in the same classroom, we've made fast learners bored and slow learners frustrated. And we've made the job of teachers exponentially more difficult as they have to teach at different levels--from highly proficient to multiple individual learning plans--all within the same class room.

The model of yesteryear that I grew up in may not have been perfect, but it seems, looking back, to have been better than what we have now.

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%

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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