Category Archives: Charter schools

The Plot Against Education (Politico October 6, 2014)

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The Plot Against Public Education                                                          (Politico October 6, 2014)

This article is an adapted excerpt from Bob Hebert’s new book Losing Our Way: An Intimate Portrait of a Troubled America (Doubleday), out Oct. 7. 

In the article Bob Herbert provides details on Bill Gates $2 billion, 9-year failed small-school initiative, charter schools leaving behind the most disadvantaged children, the 2000 K12 Incorporated ‘virtual schools’ venture (Goldman Sachs banker Ronald Packard, junk-bond king Michael Milken, Oracle founder-billionaire Larry Ellison, Secretary of Education and Drug Czar William Bennett – results – math, reading, graduation poor; attrition high), Pearson’s enormous influence in Texas politics, and the Bloomberg-Klein failed reforms of the New York City school system.

You can access the full article here.

The two final paragraphs sum up his findings:

“The amount of money in play [in American education] is breathtaking. And the fiascos it has wrought put a spotlight on America’s class divide and the damage that members of the elite, with their money and their power and their often misguided but unshakable belief in their talents and their virtue, are inflicting on the less financially fortunate.

Those who are genuinely interested in improving the quality of education for all American youngsters are faced with two fundamental questions: First, how long can school systems continue to pursue market-based reforms that have failed year after demoralizing year to improve the education of the nation’s most disadvantaged children? And second, why should a small group of America’s richest individuals, families, and foundations be allowed to     exercise such overwhelming—and often such toxic—influence over the ways in which public school students are taught?”

Tom

How Charter Schools and Testing Regimes Have Helped Re-Segregate Our Schools – The Daily Beast

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Worth a read and a thought.

How Charter Schools and Testing Regimes Have Helped Re-Segregate Our Schools – The Daily Beast

Sure, it’s mostly the courts, but as we approach the 60th anniversary of Brown v. Board of Education, charter schools and testing regimes are reinforcing segregation.

Tom

Changing Demographics of Teaching = school-student-society drain

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Thanks to Franklin Schargel for pointing out this new Carnegie Foundation study.

BEGINNERS IN THE CLASSROOM  –  WHAT THE CHANGING DEMOGRAPHICS OF TEACHING MEAN FOR SCHOOLS, STUDENTS, AND SOCIETY

BY SUSAN HEADDEN  –  Carnegie Foundation for the advancement of teaching 2014

This is my attempt to summarize the main points of 28 pages of this important and timely study. Interestingly, much of this tracks very closely with M. Night Shyamalan Foundation’s studies and book: I Got Schooled, which I  summarized earlier in my blog.

Talent Drain – turnover and departures are lowering the average classroom experience level

Why They Leave – mainly because of poor/lacking administrative and professional support

New Generation, New Attitudes – impatience with dysfunctional structures, older teachers didn’t have to put up with all the testing and curriculum changes

Myths About Money – again, solid administrative support seems more important than money, pension back-loading is hard to swallow

The Toll of Teacher Turnover – turnover is very expensive, student relationships suffer, support from veteran teachers is rapidly vanishing

How Much Turnover is Too Much – it turns out that number/quality/costs of turnover is very poorly tracked, principles aren’t getting good teachers to stay and aren’t good at getting bad ones to leave, there are no good ideas what effective turnover targets should be

Supporting a Teacher’s First Years – careful hiring is important, new teachers are not prepared for realities of classroom, there is too little summer training, there is too much late hiring, there is lack of comprehensive induction (useful discussion of benefits of comprehensive induction and various approaches)

Houston Boot Camp – a mentoring program in the face of daunting statistics and politics

Roving Mentors in Iowa  –  mentors working outside of their normal grade levels and subject areas have much to offer to the new teacher, a lot of work gathering data on what was working

Teacher Residencies: Working Into The Job – pre-service apprenticing for up to a full year is producing desirable results in effectiveness and retention

A Matter of Match – problems arise from weak interviewing, little interaction with school personnel, hiring late in the process and after school year starts. turnover destroys continuity and trust for teachers and students

Returns On Investment – high quality induction produces lower turnover and higher retention, poor hiring practices leaks good teachers

Anamosa, Iowa –a detailed example of mentoring support

To read the whole study, click here.

I Got Schooled – Practice #2 – Right Balance of Leadership

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So, here is I Got Schooled practice #2 – Right Balance of Leadership.

Through his MNS Foundation, Shyamalan spent five years studying what is succeeding in closing the education gap that depended only on factors inside the classroom itself and that were scalable. He discovered closing the achievement gap can’t be figured out by examining just any single practice by itself; five things must be implemented together to have any substantive effect.

Shyamalan uncovers five factors present in schools he found were significantly closing the education gap for inner city children and children of color. He provides just tons of example schools, clinical studies, data and statistics, detailing each of these five factors.

These posts are highlights for each of these five factors for folks who might feel they are too busy to read the whole book … and strongly whet your appetite for doing so. The five factors are:

  • Effective teachers – dropping poor, hiring good
  • Right balance of leadership
  • Feedback that is timely and consistent
  • Smaller schools
  • More time in school

A large number of successful schools and programs are covered in the book, including: Knowledge is Power Program (KIPP), Uncommon Schools, Achievement First/Endeavor, FirstLine schools, North Star Academy, Arthur Ashe, Los Angeles Green Dot Public Schools, and more.

Factor #2 – LEADERSHIP, the right balance of

  • School leadership is second only to classroom teaching as an influence on learning
  • “Superman principals” are not scalable
  • There is not a single documented case of a school successfully turning around its achievement trajectory in the absence of strong leadership
  • First, leaders vary in large and consistent ways – the most successful teams work under the most successful bosses (McKinsey & Company study)
  • Second, the boss’s most important job isn’t communicating strategy or even hiring and firing – it is teaching skills that persist
  • Motivating a team of subordinates isn’t nearly as important as improving their skills
  • The difference between a good principal and a mediocre one is nearly as big as that between a great teacher and a poor teacher
  • A principal effects hundreds of students, instead of a few dozen
  • Principals are profoundly important
  • The most effective principals are also the ones engaging in the most “negative teacher selection,” i.e., firing the lemons
  • The most effective principals also improved the instructional success of existing teachers
  • Least effective principals seldom leave the system – they just move to different schools, further widening the achievement gap
  • Existing, thorough application processes do not insure a consistent level of success
  • Principals should be primarily responsible for the instruction of teachers
  • But the typical urban principal spends less that 20 percent of their workday on instruction
  • Principals in the top systems around the world spend 80 percent of the school day on improving instruction in the classroom (McKinsey & Company study)
  • Schools need an Operations Manager to handle food service, discipline, custodians, paperwork, to free principals to help teachers help students learn
  • Such an administrative management model is scalable
  • Brett Peiser founder of Uncommon Schools network, on leaders: “Great leaders know culture eats strategy for lunch.”
  • Culture is everything distinctive to a place; it’s every way you know you are in an uncommon school; it’s rigorous in involving and aligning everything and everyone
  • Culture is beyond advertising brochures, it must have enough force and buy-in to overwhelm its students’ environments outside the school
  • A culture of high expectations seems almost important enough to earn a place as one of the keys to closing the achievement gap
  • Someone has to make certain that all teachers understand and support a uniform school culture in their bones
  • Again, “Culture eats strategy for lunch.”
  • Consistency in students’ experience from class to class and grade to grade;  and quality control of this consistency is really important
  • Both unquestioned authority and humanity are equally important, i.e., caring and respect for students
  • There are techniques and behaviors that produce desirable results consistently, like Lemov’s Taxonomy, Teach Like A Champion, and they should be known and used
  • See also The Wooden Way, the legendary UCLA basketball coach’s system
  • And these practices are scalable

Hoping you are finding these interesting and perhaps useful.

Up next:  Factor #3 – Feedback

Tom

Closing the education gap – new book – “I Got Schooled”

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This summary, borrowed from Amazon:  I Got Schooled, offers a look at America’s educational achievement gap that could only have come from an outsider. 

Famed director M. Night Shyamalan has long had a serious interest in education. The MNS Founda­tion he and his wife started once gave college scholarships to promising inner-city students, but Shyamalan realized that these scholarships did nothing to improve education for all the other students in under-performing schools. When he learned that some schools were succeeding with similar student populations, he traveled across the country to find out how they did this and whether these schools had something in common. He eventually learned that there are five keys to closing America’s achievement gap. But just as we must do several things simultaneously to maintain good health— eat the right foods, exercise regularly, get a good night’s sleep—so too must we use all five keys to turn around our lowest-performing schools.

These five keys are used by all the schools that are succeeding, and no schools are succeeding without them. Before he discovered them, Shyamalan investigated some popular reform ideas that proved to be dead ends, such as smaller class size, truculent unions, and merit pay for teachers.  He found that the biggest obstacle to school reform is cognitive biases: too many would-be reformers have committed themselves to false solutions (*) .

This is a deeply personal book by an unbiased observer determined to find out what works and why, so that we as a nation can fulfill our obliga­tion to give every student an opportunity for a good education.

(*) Not the answer to closing the education gap:

  • small classroom sizes
  • master’s programs and Ph.D.’s for the teachers
  • paying teachers like doctors
  • funding the schools at $20,000 per pupil

Truly a book worth reading … and sharing … widely.

Here is a 58 minute video interview with M. Night Shyamalan that’s worth watching         [click here to watch].

For busy people, I am posting a summary at  tommilesabq.com  of each of the five practices MNS Foundation discovered that “moved the needle” in closing the gap.

 

Time: 10 Questions for Andre Agassi

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The tennis legend turned school founder talks about regrets, crystal meth and German habits

By Belinda Luscombe Monday, Oct. 21, 2013

Some interesting quotes:

“I look at the circumstances of these kids, and without education, I know exactly where we’ll be – we’ll be building prisons instead of schools.”

“I eventually realized, you can make systemic change.”

“The single greatest impediment to the growth of best-in-class charter schools is not the software but the hardware – the actual facilities. We come in with private capital and allow schools time to incubate.”

Read the complete article here.